active and reliable head of the firm of Goldenough Brothers, the famous
plumbers, whose plumbing had accompanied the flag and made the remotest
and most tropical countries sanitatious to their conquerors.
The Goldenough plumbing had won medals at every exhibition since the
Great Exhibition of 1851, when a diploma signed by the Prince Consort
had been awarded to the head of the firm. Miniature products of the
firm adorned the famous Doll’s House, minutely constructed by the
experts and artists of the British Empire, and delighted Royalty,
young and old, by their realistic efficiency. It was the boast of John
Goldenough’s father that the sun never set on Goldenough plumbing. Be
that as it may, John Goldenough was a very jealous man.
Commercially he was jealous. It was not only domestically that he
cherished this cancer. Otherwise he was unimaginative. With an assured
competence of means he devoted himself to the comfort of himself and
his family. He was not yet forty, and he was the head of Goldenough
Brothers. Pitt was Prime Minister at twenty-five. John Goldenough was
the flower of British bourgeoisie, and he might be said to incarnate
the Nonconformist Conscience. There was nothing against him at Bank or
Chapel, unless in the arcana of his heart he possibly kept something
against himself. He was a jealous man, that was all. But human society
understood and appreciated his jealousy, for, if it constrained him to
narrow ideas, it led to impeccable business honesty. He was jealous to
a farthing in the accounts of his firm or of himself.
But he was also jealous of family affections, though this the world
considered rather creditable, touching almost. He could not allow
himself to be supplanted in the home circle for a moment even by
another member of the same family. In fact there was a dark page to
his record which only his subconscious memory reflected from the
darkened mirror of the past. As the first-born he had been adored by
his mother until his nerves became restive if they were not basking in
the sunlight of her maternal hyperpossession. He felt ill if she was
not worrying or fussing herself over him. He expected and required not
only her attention but her continued and foolish infatuation. When her
second son was born he became furiously jealous.
During these long ante-natal months she had shown herself less and less
absorbed in him, and he had become conscious of some impending rival.
Uneasily he sensed that her adoration was being drained elsewhere, and
the moment his baby brother arrived, he knew that he must take second
place. Jealousy ran like secret poison into his every tissue and vein,
though he was too young to know or understand what and why he felt.
Possibly he was no more responsible for his jealousy than for having
the measles. Anyhow, he bided his opportunity perhaps unconsciously,
but sullen and pertinacious. He watched his baby brother being soothed
and swaddled, pampered and christened. It was a little more he felt
than he could stand. Months passed, and the new baby occupied more and
more of the nursery space and more and more of his mother’s affection.
After six months the baby was introduced into the night nursery as
well. A nurse slept between the two brothers while a nightlight floated
in a basin of water in the middle of the room. One night John found
himself wandering round the room in a state of horror. Nightmare was
upon him. He felt he was being cramped and suffocated by the new baby.
Fear mingled with jealousy and self-preservation shot the speckled
spectrum of his hatred. In a violent effort to be rid of the besetting
menace he picked the nightlight out of its watery cage, and threw it
upon the barely moving heap of down. A light flame flickered into the
air, but John had skipped back into bed before the baby cried, and
the nurse awoke too late to put out the flames. In vain was the alarm
given. By the time the household had quenched the fire, baby was singed
and suffocated to death, partly by the smoke and partly by the efforts
made to extinguish the last spark. Through the house rang one piercing
cry--the cry of Rachel mourning, the cry that from the beginning to
the end of the world can never be appeased, the inconsolable cry of a
mother wailing for her child.
John was only six at the time of the tragedy, but from that moment his
restlessness disappeared. He was no longer troubled by nightmare, and
continued on his former course like a normal and well-behaved little
boy. Of necessity his mother renewed and redoubled the old affection
for her only son. Years began to pass, untroubled and undimmed for
either. The pathetic and beautiful mother idealised and idolised her
son. He repaid her with an adoration that was partly a reflected
adoration of himself. There was no rival. He had no brother, and she
had no lover, and each thought the other perfect. She never dared marry
one of the very many suitable suitors who appeared on the scene after
her husband’s death. John’s jealousy was always enough to scare her. He
always slept beside her, and she would not face or contemplate the days
and nights when she must relegate him to the attic. She liked to be
near him in case he stirred or cried in the dark. She was not content
with being his night nurse. She became his governess and would let no
one teach him except herself. They became more intimately involved in
each other’s lives than they had been before his birth. They had been
the same body. Now they were the same soul and mind, and he was the
dominant. It seemed forgotten that there had ever been a baby brother.
It was true even in her case that the mother can never forget the child
she has borne, but she saw both the boys in the survivor. Without the
least suspicion of the distant crime she innocently loved the slayer
and the slain with one passionate and abiding love. The plasticity of
boyhood wiped all trace from his memory. He was not conscious of his
one awful act of infantile incendiarism. But in the lower levels of
his nature it still lay memorified like one of those buried fossils by
which the gentle earth remembers her past monsters. And close to the
hushed record under the running surface stream of daily life lay the
dismal dragon of Jealousy, but no fossil. It was always there, though
it was given no inducement or provocation to break forth. It had lain
there waiting while Master John became a schoolboy, and a successful
one. He had gained too many prizes and enjoyed too many successes to
feel the least dislike or envy or disgust of others at school. He
took a successful course at the University, and after coming of age
he took over his deceased father’s business. He was a born plumber,
a Master-plumber, and in fact he proved the Empire’s Super-plumber.
Tubs, piping, lavabos, taps, sinks and shower-baths were his sphere. He
applied not merely intelligence but genius to the problems of Imperial
Sanitation. He received an Indian decoration and a testimonial from an
Australian Premier. He prolonged the lives of the Royal Family more
than all the prayers in the Prayer Book on their behalf.
Respectability demanded only one thing further. He must marry. His
mother had long dreaded the day when she would be supplanted herself.
She had kept herself free for him. It was more than she could expect
that he should keep himself eternally free for her. As she had been
nurse, governess and playmate, sister and mother to him, she would
doubtless, had they lived in a Ptolemaic civilisation, been ready to
sacrifice herself yet further. But happily the Nonconformist Conscience
takes a rather sturdy stand. So when John Goldenough married the
daughter of the chief clerk in his own firm, his mother was glad
enough to be allowed to remain as their housekeeper.
John Goldenough’s wife was more than pretty. The daughter of an
employee who had risen with the years in the Goldenough employ, without
pretence of blood or breeding, she appreciated the social honour which
had been paid her, and was loyally prepared to merge her personality
and prospects in the Lord of Sanitation, who had fallen in love as
much with her love for him as with her pretty little face. Unwittingly
he had transferred to her the whole accumulated sleeping powers of
jealousy, with which as a child he had surrounded his mother. As little
witting, she mistook the jealous symptoms for an excess of love for
herself. His mother slowly sank into a second place that was lower than
servile. She never murmured when he took her rings and gave them to his
sweetheart. It was no theft, for he slipped them from her fingers while
she sat sadly watching and mutely wondering. She realised that he was
sloughing the old love for the new, and she felt the prick of sacrifice
when she saw the stones glitter on the wife’s fingers the following
night. She knew that she had been replaced utterly and for ever. Then
it was that she began to mourn that she had never dared have other
children because she had been terrified by her son’s queer jealousies.
But she had had the pleasure of spoiling him. It was spoiled goods
in a way that she was passing on to another, if that could be any
satisfaction to her.
John Goldenough’s love for his wife passed by the path of passion into
jealousy, his underlying and besetting mood. Jealousy is as delicious a
sauce as can flick the palate of a woman, who is in love with the man
who exercises jealousy on her behalf. But when her love has been worn
to boredom and only a stump of convention marks the spot where once
grew the fairy tree of their romance, jealousy thrives like poison-ivy
round the dead wood. During the first ten years of their marriage John
Goldenough had forbidden his wife to bear him children, partly out of a
sense of economy and partly, though this he never admitted, because he
wished to keep his wife’s love concentrated upon himself.
Himself an only son, he intended to have an only son towards the end
of his married life, and thought it perfectly appropriate and proper
to keep his issue within this drastic limitation. He liked to feel
her sentimental as well as her material dependence upon him. This
dependence he thought could be prolonged while she was childless. That
she should entertain an admirer had hardly crossed his imagination. As
it was, he could not bear other men to sit beside her at table, and
the politest and most constrained givers of compliments to his wife
were thrown into terrified exit. In the end neither his friends nor
hers cared to call, esteeming themselves fortunate if he showed himself
merely nervous and not in some way objectionable. He had been jealous
at different times of her mother-in-law and even of her maidservant.
She was compelled to shed them both. If his love had become jealousy,
hers had become fear.
Despairing of finding some anchor for the desire she still had to
love something, she let a child live and quicken under her heart. It
was some time before she let her husband know what was coming. When
he realised it, all his queerness came to the surface. Though he
hung around her still like a hawk around a chicken coop, he showed no
gentler shade of feeling toward her. His eyes seemed to pass through
her and to strike into the oblique future. However interesting she
might have become, he was no longer interested in her personally. His
mind and soul were concentrated on the coming child, of whom he quickly
became jealous to the exclusion even of the poor all-including mother.
The sense of paternal possession proved stronger than any marital
pride. As father of the coming child he demanded some sympathy and
praise, and finally took to his bed in expectation of visits, gifts,
and finally congratulations.
John Goldenough’s thoughts carried him afar. The occasion was solemn
enough in all conscience. It was possible that a future head of
Goldenough Brothers was shortly approaching the earth. If the child
were male, what a vista opened before the heir and successor of
himself! In political circles a Plumbing Peerage had already been
mooted, and if Plumbing, like Beer, Shipyards and tintacks, was to
produce a Peerage, who could be more suitable than John Goldenough?
To the man in the street the plumbing age was synchronous with the
rise and fame of the great firm. And each time that John Goldenough’s
name was mentioned, the pulse of every plumber in the Empire beat
higher. It was an heir to his future Peerage that he imagined. He
could not sufficiently impress upon his wife the care, the thought,
and the isolation which must surround her in a prospect of such
importance. Dull and listless, she awaited the days of dreariness;
the weeks of weariness, which prelude motherhood. He had caused her
to occupy a room at the end of the passage, in which he himself lay
camped, intercepting her presents and friends, and taking up more of
the doctor’s time than the patient herself. He felt a new importance,
and demanded the same reverence in the home that he received in the
plumbing world. He resented every attention she received, all of which
in some oblique process of thought he wished to be applied to himself.
The child was his, and he felt an uncontrollable sense of possession
welling under his sense of pompous pride. He grudged every moment
that the child remained part of its mother. He longed for the speedy
dissolution of their company, when he could take the child into his
arms and show the world that it was his and his only.
The moment came unexpectedly, for neither the doctor nor nurse was
under the roof when John Goldenough was awakened from sleep by the
premature groans of his wife. He roused himself and hurried into the
room in which she was confined. He stumbled twice and switched on the
light with delay. To his horror he saw that he was late. The child had
been born! He rushed to the bell to ring the alarm and to bring medical
aid. Then he hesitated, rushed to the bedside and lifted the baby into
the awaiting cot and blanket. It was a boy, and a fierce burst of pride
and satisfaction outweighed any anxiety rising in his mind for the
mother, who lay quietly breathing in the exhaustion of accomplished
pain. It was a boy! That was the great thing. Goldenough Brothers would
be perpetuated through the ages!
Vistas of cosmic thought swept through his brain during those seconds.
He looked back unto the foundation of Goldenough Brothers if not as far
as the beginning of the world, and he looked ahead and saw the firm
majestically installed around the world. Where the name of Goldenough
was not known was simply not civilisation; that was all. If he had
had imagination, his mind might have visualised the firm in Biblical
guise contracting for the water-pipes of Babel. But his social and
personal pride was sufficient to inspire him to mutter, “John, second
Lord Goldenough,” as he lifted and laid down the infant. He covered him
with the blanket and returned to the bell. With his finger upon the
knob again he hesitated. He heard an arresting groan from his wife.
It was the first notice he had taken of her. Once more his thought
flashed ahead murkily, and he foresaw her recovery, her maternal
triumph, her possession of his boy, perhaps as intimate and absorbing
as his mother’s devotion to himself. And he shuddered with jealousy.
It was his boy and he wanted no mother’s tender care to soften the
strong abiding bond between father and son. He glanced at the child’s
cot. In the far past of buried deeds and dead thoughts he recalled a
child’s cot similar to this one. It gave him a dreamy sensation of some
previous existence, some underground occurrences, but very far back. He
could not recollect the circumstance, but the sight of the baby in the
cot filled him with a vivid and fierce desire to be rid of something.
Flaming jealousy demanded blood. His eye fell full on his wife, and
a passion of murderous envy coloured the very retina of his eye. He
could not bear to think that the success, the joy and the satisfaction
of the boy’s birth would redound to her. He would have liked to kill
her, and to throw the nightlight upon the sheets if he could be certain
that they would have risen in solid, enveloping, destroying flame.
His finger still hovered on the unpressed bell. The alarm had not been
given, and it crossed the cunning of his frantic mind that, if he
waited a while, perhaps she would die of her own exhaustion. She had
not recovered consciousness. Perhaps she never would.
He stood feeling the bell knob. She gave another deep groan, and moved
as though in helpless signal for aid. He guessed that she was slowly
expiring of hæmorrhage. The baby was quiet, and he needed only to
stand there waiting and watching till the right moment came to sound
the bell. He would be found there striving to save her by her bedside,
the perfect type of the mourning, maladroit husband. It was a question
of timing the doctor’s arrival in order that it might appear that
everything had been done, but that the Hand of God had been lifted
against good Brother Goldenough, so prosperous and happy in all other
affairs of life. In his mind he was already dictating the notices which
would appear in the local Press in edifying eulogy of his dead wife and
in considerate sympathy for himself. His finger trembled on the bell.
Still he waited. A rattle of breath had begun to sound in her uncovered
throat. Her broken body began to heave like a rudderless ship. Then she
fell quiet and seemed to sink like a corpse under the debris of the
bed. With a calm finger John Goldenough deliberately rang the electric
bell.
The house was roused, but it was half an hour before the doctor arrived
in a terrible state of anxiety. He had confidently prophesied the
birth for the following week. Meantime hysterical maids had chafed his
wife’s hands and poured brandy into her icy mouth. The doctor felt her
pulse and turned aside to the baby, which he lifted and examined with
continued anxiety. John Goldenough had retired, leaving the medical
profession to clear his work.
Returning to his room he waited for the first bulletin. Nurses arrived
and the doctor’s colleagues were summoned. Apparently she was making a
fight of it yet. An hour passed.
The doctor, with a ghastly face, presented himself at John Goldenough’s
door. “I am sorry to have to bring such bad news.”
John Goldenough looked up with assumed despair. “My poor wife, my poor
wife!” he said, and buried his face with much fantastic sobbing in his
hands.
The doctor laid his hand on his shoulder and said: “Your wife, I am
happy to say, will live, though she has had a narrow escape.”
John Goldenough stood upright. “What is your bad news, then?” he asked
feebly.
“The boy is dead. He must have been born an hour before my arrival. His
umbilical cord was never fastened, and he bled to death. If I could
have arrived only half an hour sooner!” And he passed out.
THE DRUMMER OF GORDONMUIR
Two years before the war broke out, I became trustee to Allan Gordon,
of Gordonmuir, in the county of Argyle and kingdom of Scotland. He
was not more than a fledged schoolboy when he inherited his uncle’s
property and the nominal chieftainship of the clan. My connection was
distant, but I was persuaded by his aunt to supervise his affairs. A
week later, I found myself sitting in the “Flying Scotchman” with an
old lawyer for colleague, who confided to me that he did not expect the
estate to bear our travelling expenses.
Late that night, after a ten miles’ drive from the station in the
drenching embrace of a Scotch mist, we reached Gordonmuir. I was
chilled to the heart when I first viewed the mixture of Indian bungalow
and mediæval dungeon that made up Allan’s mansion. In the centre was
a stone keep, ivy-clad, crumbling, and crenellated. On either wing
in the inclosure, where they used to herd the stolen cattle, was a
modern shooting box attached with the minimum of architectural art. My
companion shivered in the gaunt doorway like one of his old parchments
crackling in a draught. But Allan ran out, as cheery and cock-a-hoop as
the chieftain’s feather in his bonnet. He seemed the one representative
of joy and life within that grisly precinct.
We passed the whole of the next day discussing wills and mortgages
in the dead jargon of Scots law. My colleague wished to pay off the
mortgages and the annuity due to Allan’s aunt, but there was equally
the question of Allan’s allowance at the university to be considered,
and I plumped for as much as the rickety estate would allow. I felt
that college life comes but once, and not to everybody, and that three
hundred pounds was necessary to uphold the dignity of a young laird
thrown among Jews and Saxons.
The lawyer insisted on cutting it down to fifty, to preserve what he
called a “feenancial aspeect.” But Allan was satisfied; and so was I,
when I found that his gratitude took the form of free trout-fishing
for life. Trustees are not generally rewarded; in fact, as my gloomy
colleague reiterated, they are oftener liable to terms of imprisonment
for inadvertently touching trust money with other than the legal end of
the poker. So I left the rest of the business to his care and started
out to test Allan’s trout--in my opinion the most valuable stock he
possessed.
The old lawyer remained perfectly content wheezing snuff to blow away
the damp that rose out of the old parchments, while Allan and I were
whipping the neighbouring lakes with iron-bodied flies twisting at the
end of silver gut. After a week’s work, the lawyer left us to ourselves
for good.
“There are grand sheepskins in your chest,” he told Allan, on
departing, “and specimens of Scotch law in all its manifold
application. And there’s much of interest concerning your family, much
of good report and some of ill--and one tale among the papers that I
reserve for your ears alone, though your gillie, Murdoch, whom I have
been questioning, can serve you the popular version.”
When the lawyer had gone, I never cared to ask Allan what this might
be; and reticence is to be encouraged in youth. It was not for two
years that I was to learn.
Meantime, I had taken vacations regularly at Gordonmuir. Every autumn
I travelled north with a skein of trout lines and feather flies in my
lap. It is the one perfect occupation in a train. It plies the heart
with reminiscence and expectation by turns. It soothes away more hours
of motion than reading or talking, and it leaves the mind active and
the fingers nimble at the end of the journey. Often have I thought of
patenting it as a railway amusement, but then the true and complete
anglers whom it would occupy are diminished to few in the land.
I used to arrive at Gordonmuir with my cap and pockets bristling
with silk flies and lengths of gut every autumn. And Gordonmuir in
autumn!--when the skies have settled into their summer sheen and the
red heath is running to dull purple; when the long, billowy hills lie
reflected on the waters that float above their foundations in the
Hebridean sea, hills that change their marine flora a few yards above
the rocky tide belt for all the sweeter weeds of earth--sea pinks for
mountain heather and the long yellow tide ribbons for the crisp bracken
and harts-tongue ferns. Hills of transformation and wonder! At their
feet the heavy, opaque water of the sea lounges over rocks studded
with green limpets and suckstones, while in their hollows, under the
clouds above, the bubbling springs run into fresh streams and lakes.
But the best contrast of all is furnished by the coarse, lubberly
fish that basks under the shadow of the rocks, fit only for the seine
net and the spear of the poacher; a fish without a soul. But a good
Providence replaces him in the higher, dew-fed waters with the merry
brook trout--as gamy a jester, in his motley of red spot and yellow, as
ever tumbled at one end of a fifty-foot line.