Tod’s chief recollection of those first days in Tom Lavender’s house was
the badness of Millie’s cooking. The very execrableness of it was a
protest against the economies he had planned for her, and though Tod
tried to smile over some of her unsavoury messes, his interior refused
to retain one particular meal. Millie had had trouble with her
saucepans, or to be more correct she had not troubled about them at all,
and Tod was most gloriously sick.
“I told you I couldn’t cook,” she said stubbornly, when he reproached
her with the queer taste of that particularly poisonous and dirty hash,
“and that woman makes things as awkward as she can.”
“What, Mrs. Jelf? I thought——”
“She’s an old cat.”
“I’m sorry,” said Tod.
But Mrs. Jelf was equally emphatic in her opinion of Millie. Tom
Lavender hauled Tod into his little study, and with an air of disquieted
shyness, proceeded to make a suggestion.
“Mrs. Jelf wants to do your cooking. She says she can manage it better.”
“Very good of her,” said Tod; “the fact is—my wife——”
Tom Lavender nodded.
“She hasn’t got the hands for it. Supposing——”
“I’ll pay Mrs. Jelf so much a week, Tom. Besides—I was a bit doubtful
about interfering in your kitchen.”
“That’s all right, old chap. But that old lady is a born cook; she loves
it.”
So it was arranged that Mrs. Jelf should cook for the Westerns, and
Millie dispossessed herself of that piece of feminine responsibility.
But Tom Lavender could not tell Tod what Mrs. Jelf had said of his wife,
that she had called her “a dirty, lazy, stuck-up slut with silk
stockings and no conscience.”
The larger part of Tod’s life was running in smoother and more pleasant
fashion. He was back at Caroline Crescent, sitting in the familiar room
and working with enthusiasm, and continuing to ignore the impertinences
of Frederick Cragg. Father and son had had a skirmish over the return of
Tod; Fred’s opposition had roused the older man’s obstinacy and had made
Tod’s return more sure, yet Western did not suspect that a woman had
stretched out a hand to help him, and that Bertha had armed the father
against the son’s sneers. As to Western’s Garage, it had passed into the
power of Pumpelly and Britt, but Tod’s lawyers had salved a portion of
their client’s capital, and Tod found that he was the owner of about
three hundred pounds. He invested the money in New Zealand Government
stock. Moreover he was living in the same house as Tom Lavender. They
smoked their pipes together at night, sitting out under the laburnums
and lilacs, talking about life and books and birds. Tod was to go out
tramping with Tom on alternate Sundays; the other days he gave to
Millie.
Tod was trying very hard to understand his wife. The innate chivalry
that Nancy Western had given to her boy refused to let itself be seduced
into accepting a purely cynical and materialistic view of marriage. Tod
was affectionate, and he felt responsible, and he tried to put that
memory of Maurice Goldstein out of his head. There was always the
thought that he had been to blame, that he had let himself get absorbed
in the business, and that he had forgotten that his wife was a woman.
For Tod was cursed or blessed with ideals, and very sturdy ideals, and
poor Kitty’s death had opened a vein of deep tenderness in him. He
treated Millie as he would have treated a sick woman or a hurt child,
taking her out to occasional concerts, trying to persuade her to like
boyish adventures in the country, buying her chocolates once a week. He
had very happy memories of those Pentworth picnics, and how sweet those
simple country days had seemed to his father and mother. Nancy Western
was living in her son, shedding a soft radiance over him, inspiring him
to try and reach that wife of his to use the ways of a freer youth, but
Tod’s wife did not wish for wings, the innocent, unsmirched wings he
sought to give her.
She seemed apathetic, casual, bored.
She had not forgiven him for his failure to make money. She would never
forgive him for having blundered in upon her affair with Maurice
Goldstein, and Tod did not realise the elemental antipathy the incident
had roused in her. Tod had ceased to be sexually attractive to his wife.
She resented this stuffy life in a couple of rooms; she resented Tod’s
kindness. He was trying to fasten his ideals upon her and they galled
her like a girdle of thorns. Tod’s wife was no saint.
Admiration, colour, thrills, movement, pretty frocks! How could a young
man working in an estate office give her these? Tod was dull; and so
disgustingly kind and good tempered when she was ripe and almost
yearning for a row. She was a fierce young animal in her sex cravings,
and there was no fierceness about Tod. He kissed her as though he were
kissing his mother.
“It’s beastly!” was her favourite expression, uttered in the monotony of
her long silence.
And so it was, beastly for both of them, though a second blindness had
fallen upon Tod. His thoughts were set upon being kind to his wife, and
she detested him for it, and longed to use her claws. His good temper
threw her back upon a negative sulkiness, and smothered her when her
inclination was to scream.
A man who is trying to save a drowning girl is conscious of but few
things: the nearness of the shore, the sea, her struggles, her wet hair,
his efforts to calm her, perhaps the deadly weakening of his own
strength. Watchers on the cliff above have a more complete and a more
pregnant view of the struggle, and so it was in Tod’s blind effort to
pull his marriage out of the sea. Even casual spectators saw more than
he did.
Mrs. Jelf saw as much as anybody. She had her glimpses of Millie, the
Millie who put on her clothes and went out, “Just to show off,” as Mrs.
Jelf expressed it, “while her young man’s working.” And such clothes
too! “Pink stockings and white shoes, and an ’at for every day in the
week.” She knew, too, that Tod’s wife scuffled home in time to change
these clothes and lay the table for her husband. When Millie was out
Mrs. Jelf would make a tour of inspection, and her woman’s eyes saw all
the slackness of Tod’s home, the frowsy bed left unaired and unmade, the
slops not cleared, dirt everywhere.
“Dear me, what a fine lady we are!” said Lavender’s housekeeper. “Too
fine to be the poor boy’s wife.”
The ubiquitous Bob Twine saw Tod’s wife as the deckchair girl, sunning
herself on the parade and collecting the homage of casual males. Twine
wondered whether Tod knew of it. One man could not tell another man that
his wife was little better than a woman of pleasure, but he did attack
Millie one Wednesday afternoon, planting himself on the chair next to
her.
“Same old game, madam!”
“You shut up,” said the girl.
“Suppose Tod knows? I guess not! Why don’t you play the game by the kid?
He’s the best little sportsman you’ll ever meet.”
“He’s too good,” said the girl viciously; “he’s so good that he’s dull.
It’s no use you snarling at me, Bob; I never ought to have married him.”
Twine softened to her at this flash of sincerity.
“True enough. But, hang it all, why not have a shot at making him happy?
I never told him, you know.”
“You can tell him—if you like. I’m so sick of it, I don’t care.”
“Good lord!” said Twine, “is it as bad as that! I tried to tell him
once, and couldn’t. I’m not going to now.”
“Well, what are you fussing about? If you are afraid to tell him you had
better leave me alone.”
“I will,” said Twine. “Good day,” and he got up and left her.
Tod was making desperate struggles to get beauty and a sense of goodness
of things back into his life. He felt that he wanted to remain a boy,
the boy he had remembered at Pentworth, for Tod knew that he had changed
and that the soul of him had grown worried and wrinkled. Also there was
less of the smile of the shrewd and happy boxer. There were times when
Tod had a scowl, and he knew it, and there were times when he lost his
temper. Little things irritated him most absurdly. He could remember
smashing the little green-topped card-table that never would stand
squarely on four legs.
Millie had looked up at him quite hopefully.
“Oh, temper!”
“Sorry,” said Tod, contrite and flabby.
He had spent the rest of the evening trying to mend that table and even
Millie could have told him that some things are better broken, unhappy
marriages as well as rickety tables.
He talked to old Lavender on one of the Sunday rambles, but he was loyal
and said nothing about his wife.
“Do you remember a time, Tom, when it began to hurt you to live?”
Lavender lied.
“I remember it quite well,” he said.
Tod smiled.
“You have a queer, sore feeling inside you, and the things outside you
seem to take pleasure in going wrong. You are always knocking your
soul’s shins against something.”
“You’ll get over it,” said Lavender gravely, “you are bound to get over
it. Don’t fret. Work, work like the devil, and set your teeth when the
storm comes.”
“What storm?” Tod asked.
But Lavender hid himself in symbolical excuses. He knew that Tod’s
marriage was all wrong, and that the woman was hurting the soul of him.
And Lavender prayed that she would go off with some other man, some fine
Assyrian bull, and leave Tod holding the hand of his own youth.
Early in July Tod had a second vivid glimpse into the heart of his wife.
There was a new little bungalow town squatting beyond West Shaston like
a flock of geese on a village green, and to get to it you walked along
the sea wall with the shingle on one side of you and dyked meadows on
the other. Tod had the keys of two of the new bungalows, and he was to
make a list of the fixtures.
The blue sweep of the sky, the breadth of the sea and the meadowland,
and the curve of the white foam along the shingle, brought back a memory
to Tod’s heart. He could remember walking with his father in some such
place on a breezy day in the spring of the year, and his father had gone
along waving his hat and shouting the words of some song. Tod remembered
how they had thrown stones at an old tin can that his father had set
afloat, and Tod had sunk it. And suddenly the spirit of fatherhood
entered Tod. He wanted a boy, a boy of his own, something to play with,
something to work for, something that mattered.
A girl in a white dress and a cerise-coloured jersey was sitting on the
beach, reading. She looked up as Tod came along the seawall, and Tod
recognized his wife. Surely this was a God-given coincidence, the secret
key for the opening of a woman’s heart, the prattler’s gate leading into
the great playground!
Tod sprang down, forgetting all about the bungalows. His wife looked
with quick eyes at his suddenly radiant face. She had been expecting a
man, another man, not Tod.
“I say, dear, I’m coming to sit down for ten minutes. Isn’t it gorgeous
out here, so clean and big.”
“It’s quite nice,” said the wife, wondering why he had turned up, and
whether he suspected.
“Bungalow Town can wait for half an hour.”
“Oh, you are going there?”
“Making lists of fixtures. Oh, hang business! Millie—I want something;
it has just come to me; perhaps you have been wanting it too.”
He leant over towards her with bright eyes.
“What is it?” she asked him.
“Millie, I want a child, a kid, just what I may have been to my dad.
Perhaps all this time—you have been wanting one—too.”
Her face hardened. What a fool he was!
“Rot!” she said. “What are you getting sentimental about children for?”
“It’s a sort of hunger,” he began.
“We can’t afford that sort of hunger.” She sneered at him: “Fancy having
a kid and living in two rooms. We haven’t got the money. Be sensible.”
“But other people have children, with less money than we have.”
“Well, I’m not going to be one of them. Very nice of you, I dare say,
but who has all the pain and all the work, and the economising? I’m not
having babies on eighty pounds a year, thank you.”
Tod left her and went on his way, and all the joy had gone out of the
morning. Money, always money, and a woman who had to be bribed!