CYRIL
I
Constance stood at the large, many-paned window in the parlour. She was
stouter. Although always plump, her figure had been comely, with a
neat, well-marked waist. But now the shapeliness had gone; the
waist-line no longer existed, and there were no more crinolines to
create it artificially. An observer not under the charm of her face
might have been excused for calling her fat and lumpy. The face, grave,
kind, and expectant, with its radiant, fresh cheeks, and the rounded
softness of its curves, atoned for the figure. She was nearly
twenty-nine years of age.
It was late in October. In Wedgwood Street, next to Boulton Terrace,
all the little brown houses had been pulled down to make room for a
palatial covered market, whose foundations were then being dug. This
destruction exposed a vast area of sky to the north-east. A great dark
cloud with an untidy edge rose massively out of the depths and
curtained off the tender blue of approaching dusk; while in the west,
behind Constance, the sun was setting in calm and gorgeous melancholy
on the Thursday hush of the town. It was one of those afternoons which
gather up all the sadness of the moving earth and transform it into
beauty.
Samuel Povey turned the corner from Wedgwood Street, and crossed King
Street obliquely to the front-door, which Constance opened. He seemed
tired and anxious.
"Well?" demanded Constance, as he entered.
"She's no better. There's no getting away from it, she's worse. I
should have stayed, only I knew you'd be worrying. So I caught the
three-fifty."
"How is that Mrs. Gilchrist shaping as a nurse?"
"She's very good," said Samuel, with conviction. "Very good!"
"What a blessing! I suppose you didn't happen to see the doctor?"
"Yes, I did."
"What did he say to you?"
Samuel gave a deprecating gesture. "Didn't say anything particular.
With dropsy, at that stage, you know ..."
Constance had returned to the window, her expectancy apparently
unappeased.
"I don't like the look of that cloud," she murmured.
"What! Are they out still?" Samuel inquired, taking off his overcoat.
"Here they are!" cried Constance. Her features suddenly transfigured,
she sprang to the door, pulled it open, and descended the steps.
A perambulator was being rapidly pushed up the slope by a breathless
girl.
"Amy," Constance gently protested, "I told you not to venture far."
"I hurried all I could, mum, soon as I seed that cloud," the girl
puffed, with the air of one who is seriously thankful to have escaped a
great disaster.
Constance dived into the recesses of the perambulator and extricated
from its cocoon the centre of the universe, and scrutinized him with
quiet passion, and then rushed with him into the house, though not a
drop of rain had yet fallen.
"Precious!" exclaimed Amy, in ecstasy, her young virginal eyes
following him till he disappeared. Then she wheeled away the
perambulator, which now had no more value nor interest than an
egg-shell. It was necessary to take it right round to the Brougham
Street yard entrance, past the front of the closed shop.
Constance sat down on the horsehair sofa and hugged and kissed her
prize before removing his bonnet.
"Here's Daddy!" she said to him, as if imparting strange and rapturous
tidings. "Here's Daddy come back from hanging up his coat in the
passage! Daddy rubbing his hands!" And then, with a swift transition of
voice and features: "Do look at him, Sam!"
Samuel, preoccupied, stooped forward. "Oh, you little scoundrel! Oh,
you little scoundrel!" he greeted the baby, advancing his finger
towards the baby's nose.
The baby, who had hitherto maintained a passive indifference to
external phenomena, lifted elbows and toes, blew bubbles from his tiny
mouth, and stared at the finger with the most ravishing, roguish smile,
as though saying: "I know that great sticking-out limb, and there is a
joke about it which no one but me can see, and which is my secret joy
that you shall never share."
"Tea ready?" Samuel asked, resuming his gravity and his ordinary pose.
"You must give the girl time to take her things off," said Constance.
"We'll have the table drawn, away from the fire, and baby can lie on
his shawl on the hearthrug while we're having tea." Then to the baby,
in rapture: "And play with his toys; all his nice, nice toys!"
"You know Miss Insull is staying for tea?"
Constance, her head bent over the baby, who formed a white patch on her
comfortable brown frock, nodded without speaking.
Samuel Povey, walking to and fro, began to enter into details of his
hasty journey to Axe. Old Mrs. Baines, having beheld her grandson, was
preparing to quit this world. Never again would she exclaim, in her
brusque tone of genial ruthlessness: 'Fiddlesticks!' The situation was
very difficult and distressing, for Constance could not leave her baby,
and she would not, until the last urgency, run the risks of a journey
with him to Axe. He was being weaned. In any case Constance could not
have undertaken the nursing of her mother. A nurse had to be found. Mr.
Povey had discovered one in the person of Mrs. Gilchrist, the second
wife of a farmer at Malpas in Cheshire, whose first wife had been a
sister of the late John Baines. All the credit of Mrs. Gilchrist was
due to Samuel Povey. Mrs. Baines fretted seriously about Sophia, who
had given no sign of life for a very long time. Mr. Povey went to
Manchester and ascertained definitely from the relatives of Scales that
nothing was known of the pair. He did not go to Manchester especially
on this errand. About once in three weeks, on Tuesdays, he had to visit
the Manchester warehouses; but the tracking of Scales's relative cost
him so much trouble and time that, curiously, he came to believe that
he had gone to Manchester one Tuesday for no other end. Although he was
very busy indeed in the shop, he flew over to Axe and back whenever he
possibly could, to the neglect of his affairs. He was glad to do all
that was in his power; even if he had not done it graciously his
sensitive, tyrannic conscience would have forced him to do it. But
nevertheless he felt rather virtuous, and worry and fatigue and loss of
sleep intensified this sense of virtue.
"So that if there is any sudden change they will telegraph," he
finished, to Constance.
She raised her head. The words, clinching what had led up to them, drew
her from her dream and she saw, for a moment, her mother in an agony.
"But you don't surely mean--?" she began, trying to disperse the
painful vision as unjustified by the facts.
"My dear girl," said Samuel, with head singing, and hot eyes, and a
consciousness of high tension in every nerve of his body, "I simply
mean that if there's any sudden change they will telegraph."
While they had tea, Samuel sitting opposite to his wife, and Miss
Insull nearly against the wall (owing to the moving of the table), the
baby rolled about on the hearthrug, which had been covered with a large
soft woollen shawl, originally the property of his great-grandmother.
He had no cares, no responsibilities. The shawl was so vast that he
could not clearly distinguish objects beyond its confines. On it lay an
indiarubber ball, an indiarubber doll, a rattle, and fan. He vaguely
recollected all four items, with their respective properties. The fire
also was an old friend. He had occasionally tried to touch it, but a
high bright fence always came in between. For ten months he had never
spent a day without making experiments on this shifting universe in
which he alone remained firm and stationary. The experiments were
chiefly conducted out of idle amusement, but he was serious on the
subject of food. Lately the behaviour of the universe in regard to his
food had somewhat perplexed him, had indeed annoyed him. However, he
was of a forgetful, happy disposition, and so long as the universe
continued to fulfil its sole end as a machinery for the satisfaction,
somehow, of his imperious desires, he was not inclined to remonstrate.
He gazed at the flames and laughed, and laughed because he had laughed.
He pushed the ball away and wriggled after it, and captured it with the
assurance of practice. He tried to swallow the doll, and it was not
until he had tried several times to swallow it that he remembered the
failure of previous efforts and philosophically desisted. He rolled
with a fearful shock, arms and legs in air, against the mountainous
flank of that mammoth Fan, and clutched at Fan's ear. The whole mass of
Fan upheaved and vanished from his view, and was instantly forgotten by
him. He seized the doll and tried to swallow it, and repeated the
exhibition of his skill with the ball. Then he saw the fire again and
laughed. And so he existed for centuries: no responsibilities, no
appetites; and the shawl was vast. Terrific operations went on over his
head. Giants moved to and fro. Great vessels were carried off and great
books were brought and deep voices rumbled regularly in the spaces
beyond the shawl. But he remained oblivious. At last he became aware
that a face was looking down at his. He recognized it, and immediately
an uncomfortable sensation in his stomach disturbed him; he tolerated
it for fifty years or so, and then he gave a little cry. Life had
resumed its seriousness.
"Black alpaca. B quality. Width 20, t.a. 22 yards," Miss Insull read
out of a great book. She and Mr. Povey were checking stock.
And Mr. Povey responded, "Black alpaca B quality. Width 20, t.a. 22
yards. It wants ten minutes yet." He had glanced at the clock.
"Does it?" said Constance, well knowing that it wanted ten minutes.
The baby did not guess that a high invisible god named Samuel Povey,
whom nothing escaped, and who could do everything at once, was
controlling his universe from an inconceivable distance. On the
contrary, the baby was crying to himself, There is no God.
His weaning had reached the stage at which a baby really does not know
what will happen next. The annoyance had begun exactly three months
after his first tooth, such being the rule of the gods, and it had
grown more and more disconcerting. No sooner did he accustom himself to
a new phenomenon than it mysteriously ceased, and an old one took its
place which he had utterly forgotten. This afternoon his mother nursed
him, but not until she had foolishly attempted to divert him from the
seriousness of life by means of gewgaws of which he was sick. Still;
once at her rich breast, he forgave and forgot all. He preferred her
simple natural breast to more modern inventions. And he had no shame,
no modesty. Nor had his mother. It was an indecent carouse at which his
father and Miss Insull had to assist. But his father had shame. His
father would have preferred that, as Miss Insull had kindly offered to
stop and work on Thursday afternoon, and as the shop was chilly, the
due rotation should have brought the bottle round at half-past five
o'clock, and not the mother's breast. He was a self-conscious parent,
rather apologetic to the world, rather apt to stand off and pretend
that he had nothing to do with the affair; and he genuinely disliked
that anybody should witness the intimate scene of HIS wife feeding HIS
baby. Especially Miss Insull, that prim, dark, moustached spinster! He
would not have called it an outrage on Miss Insull, to force her to
witness the scene, but his idea approached within sight of the word.
Constance blandly offered herself to the child, with the unconscious
primitive savagery of a young mother, and as the baby fed, thoughts of
her own mother flitted to and fro ceaselessly like vague shapes over
the deep sea of content which filled her mind. This illness of her
mother's was abnormal, and the baby was now, for the first time
perhaps, entirely normal in her consciousness. The baby was something
which could be disturbed, not something which did disturb. What a
change! What a change that had seemed impossible until its full
accomplishment!
For months before the birth, she had glimpsed at nights and in other
silent hours the tremendous upset. She had not allowed herself to be
silly in advance; by temperament she was too sagacious, too well
balanced for that; but she had had fitful instants of terror, when
solid ground seemed to sink away from her, and imagination shook at
what faced her. Instants only! Usually she could play the comedy of
sensible calmness to almost perfection. Then the appointed time drew
nigh. And still she smiled, and Samuel smiled. But the preparations,
meticulous, intricate, revolutionary, belied their smiles. The intense
resolve to keep Mrs. Baines, by methods scrupulous or unscrupulous,
away from Bursley until all was over, belied their smiles. And then the
first pains, sharp, shocking, cruel, heralds of torture! But when they
had withdrawn, she smiled, again, palely. Then she was in bed, full of
the sensation that the whole house was inverted and disorganized,
hopelessly. And the doctor came into the room. She smiled at the doctor
apologetically, foolishly, as if saying: "We all come to it. Here I
am." She was calm without. Oh, but what a prey of abject fear within!
"I am at the edge of the precipice," her thought ran; "in a moment I
shall be over." And then the pains--not the heralds but the shattering
army, endless, increasing in terror as they thundered across her. Yet
she could think, quite clearly: "Now I'm in the middle of it. This is
it, the horror that I have not dared to look at. My life's in the
balance. I may never get up again. All has at last come to pass. It
seemed as if it would never come, as if this thing could not happen to
me. But at last it has come to pass!"
Ah! Some one put the twisted end of a towel into her hand again--she
had loosed it; and she pulled, pulled, enough to break cables. And then
she shrieked. It was for pity. It was for some one to help her, at any
rate to take notice of her. She was dying. Her soul was leaving her.
And she was alone, panic-stricken, in the midst of a cataclysm a
thousand times surpassing all that she had imagined of sickening
horror. "I cannot endure this," she thought passionately. "It is
impossible that I should be asked to endure this!" And then she wept;
beaten, terrorized, smashed and riven. No commonsense now! No wise
calmness now! No self-respect now! Why, not even a woman now! Nothing
but a kind of animalized victim! And then the supreme endless spasm,
during which she gave up the ghost and bade good-bye to her very self.
She was lying quite comfortable in the soft bed; idle, silly: happiness
forming like a thin crust over the lava of her anguish and her fright.
And by her side was the soul that had fought its way out of her,
ruthlessly; the secret disturber revealed to the light of morning.
Curious to look at! Not like any baby that she had ever seen; red,
creased, brutish! But--for some reason that she did not examine--she
folded it in an immense tenderness.
Sam was by the bed, away from her eyes. She was so comfortable and
silly that she could not move her head nor even ask him to come round
to her eyes. She had to wait till he came.
In the afternoon the doctor returned, and astounded her by saying that
hers had been an ideal confinement. She was too weary to rebuke him for
a senseless, blind, callous old man. But she knew what she knew. "No
one will ever guess," she thought, "no one ever can guess, what I've
been through! Talk as you like. I KNOW, now."
Gradually she had resumed cognizance of her household, perceiving that
it was demoralized from top to bottom, and that when the time came to
begin upon it she would not be able to settle where to begin, even
supposing that the baby were not there to monopolize her attention. The
task appalled her. Then she wanted to get up. Then she got up. What a
blow to self-confidence! She went back to bed like a little scared
rabbit to its hole, glad, glad to be on the soft pillows again. She
said: "Yet the time must come when I shall be downstairs, and walking
about and meeting people, and cooking and superintending the
millinery." Well, it did come--except that she had to renounce the
millinery to Miss Insull--but it was not the same. No, different! The
baby pushed everything else on to another plane. He was a terrific
intruder; not one minute of her old daily life was left; he made no
compromise whatever. If she turned away her gaze from him he might pop
off into eternity and leave her.
And now she was calmly and sensibly giving him suck in presence of Miss
Insull. She was used to his importance, to the fragility of his
organism, to waking twice every night, to being fat. She was strong
again. The convulsive twitching that for six months had worried her
repose, had quite disappeared. The state of being a mother was normal,
and the baby was so normal that she could not conceive the house
without him.
All in ten months!
When the baby was installed in his cot for the night, she came
downstairs and found Miss Insull and Samuel still working, and harder
than ever, but at addition sums now. She sat down, leaving the door
open at the foot of the stairs. She had embroidery in hand: a cap. And
while Miss Insull and Samuel combined pounds, shillings, and pence,
whispering at great speed, she bent over the delicate, intimate,
wasteful handiwork, drawing the needle with slow exactitude. Then she
would raise her head and listen.
"Excuse me," said Miss Insull, "I think I hear baby crying."
"And two are eight and three are eleven. He must cry," said Mr. Povey,
rapidly, without looking up.
The baby's parents did not make a practice of discussing their domestic
existence even with Miss Insull; but Constance had to justify herself
as a mother.
"I've made perfectly sure he's comfortable," said Constance. "He's only
crying because he fancies he's neglected. And we think he can't begin
too early to learn."
"How right you are!" said Miss Insull. "Two and carry three."
That distant, feeble, querulous, pitiful cry continued obstinately. It
continued for thirty minutes. Constance could not proceed with her
work. The cry disintegrated her will, dissolved her hard sagacity.
Without a word she crept upstairs, having carefully deposed the cap on
her rocking-chair.
Mr. Povey hesitated a moment and then bounded up after her, startling
Fan. He shut the door on Miss Insull, but Fan was too quick for him. He
saw Constance with her hand on the bedroom door.
"My dear girl," he protested, holding himself in. "Now what ARE you
going to do?"
"I'm just listening," said Constance.
"Do be reasonable and come downstairs."
He spoke in a low voice, scarcely masking his nervous irritation, and
tiptoed along the corridor towards her and up the two steps past the
gas-burner. Fan followed, wagging her tail expectant.
"Suppose he's not well?" Constance suggested.
"Pshaw!" Mr. Povey exclaimed contemptuously. "You remember what
happened last night and what you said!"
They argued, subduing their tones to the false semblance of good-will,
there in the closeness of the corridor. Fan, deceived, ceased to wag
her tail and then trotted away. The baby's cry, behind the door, rose
to a mysterious despairing howl, which had such an effect on
Constance's heart that she could have walked through fire to reach the
baby. But Mr. Povey's will held her. And she rebelled, angry, hurt,
resentful. Commonsense, the ideal of mutual forbearance, had winged
away from that excited pair. It would have assuredly ended in a
quarrel, with Samuel glaring at her in black fury from the other side
of a bottomless chasm, had not Miss Insull most surprisingly burst up
the stairs.
Mr. Povey turned to face her, swallowing his emotion.
"A telegram!" said Miss Insull. "The postmaster brought it down
himself--"
"What? Mr. Derry?" asked Samuel, opening the telegram with an
affectation of majesty.
"Yes. He said it was too late for delivery by rights. But as it seemed
very important ..."
Samuel scanned it and nodded gravely; then gave it to his wife. Tears
came into her eyes.
"I'll get Cousin Daniel to drive me over at once," said Samuel, master
of himself and of the situation.
"Wouldn't it be better to hire?" Constance suggested. She had a
prejudice against Daniel.
Mr. Povey shook his head. "He offered," he replied. "I can't refuse his
offer."
"Put your thick overcoat on, dear," said Constance, in a dream,
descending with him.
"I hope it isn't--" Miss Insull stopped.
"Yes it is, Miss Insull," said Samuel, deliberately.
In less than a minute he was gone.
Constance ran upstairs. But the cry had ceased. She turned the
door-knob softly, slowly, and crept into the chamber. A night-light
made large shadows among the heavy mahogany and the crimson, tasselled
rep in the close-curtained room. And between the bed and the ottoman
(on which lay Samuel's newly-bought family Bible) the cot loomed in the
shadows. She picked up the night-light and stole round the bed. Yes, he
had decided to fall asleep. The hazard of death afar off had just
defeated his devilish obstinacy. Fate had bested him. How marvellously
soft and delicate that tear-stained cheek! How frail that tiny, tiny
clenched hand! In Constance grief and joy were mystically united.
II
The drawing-room was full of visitors, in frocks of ceremony. The old
drawing-room, but newly and massively arranged with the finest
Victorian furniture from dead Aunt Harriet's house at Axe; two
"Canterburys," a large bookcase, a splendid scintillant table solid
beyond lifting, intricately tortured chairs and armchairs! The original
furniture of the drawing-room was now down in the parlour, making it
grand. All the house breathed opulence; it was gorged with quiet,
restrained expensiveness; the least considerable objects, in the most
modest corners, were what Mrs. Baines would have termed 'good.'
Constance and Samuel had half of all Aunt Harriet's money and half of
Mrs. Baines's; the other half was accumulating for a hypothetical
Sophia, Mr. Critchlow being the trustee. The business continued to
flourish. People knew that Samuel Povey was buying houses. Yet Samuel
and Constance had not made friends; they had not, in the Five Towns
phrase, 'branched out socially,' though they had very meetly branched
out on subscription lists. They kept themselves to themselves
(emphasizing the preposition). These guests were not their guests; they
were the guests of Cyril.
He had been named Samuel because Constance would have him named after
his father, and Cyril because his father secretly despised the name of
Samuel; and he was called Cyril; 'Master Cyril,' by Amy, definite
successor to Maggie. His mother's thoughts were on Cyril as long as she
was awake. His father, when not planning Cyril's welfare, was earning
money whose unique object could be nothing but Cyril's welfare. Cyril
was the pivot of the house; every desire ended somewhere in Cyril. The
shop existed now solely for him. And those houses that Samuel bought by
private treaty, or with a shamefaced air at auctions--somehow they were
aimed at Cyril. Samuel and Constance had ceased to be self-justifying
beings; they never thought of themselves save as the parents of Cyril.
They realized this by no means fully. Had they been accused of
monomania they would have smiled the smile of people confident in their
commonsense and their mental balance. Nevertheless, they were
monomaniacs. Instinctively they concealed the fact as much as possible;
They never admitted it even to themselves. Samuel, indeed, would often
say: "That child is not everybody. That child must be kept in his
place." Constance was always teaching him consideration for his father
as the most important person in the household. Samuel was always
teaching him consideration for his mother as the most important person
in the household. Nothing was left undone to convince him that he was a
cipher, a nonentity, who ought to be very glad to be alive. But he knew
all about his importance. He knew that the entire town was his. He knew
that his parents were deceiving themselves. Even when he was punished
he well knew that it was because he was so important. He never imparted
any portion of this knowledge to his parents; a primeval wisdom
prompted him to retain it strictly in his own bosom.
He was four and a half years old, dark, like his father; handsome like
his aunt, and tall for his age; not one of his features resembled a
feature of his mother's, but sometimes he 'had her look.' From the
capricious production of inarticulate sounds, and then a few
monosyllables that described concrete things and obvious desires, he
had gradually acquired an astonishing idiomatic command over the most
difficult of Teutonic languages; there was nothing that he could not
say. He could walk and run, was full of exact knowledge about God, and
entertained no doubt concerning the special partiality of a minor deity
called Jesus towards himself.
Now, this party was his mother's invention and scheme. His father,
after flouting it, had said that if it was to be done at all, it should
be done well, and had brought to the doing all his organizing skill.
Cyril had accepted it at first--merely accepted it; but, as the day
approached and the preparations increased in magnitude, he had come to
look on it with favour, then with enthusiasm. His father having taken
him to Daniel Povey's opposite, to choose cakes, he had shown, by his
solemn and fastidious waverings, how seriously he regarded the affair.
Of course it had to occur on a Thursday afternoon. The season was
summer, suitable for pale and fragile toilettes. And the eight children
who sat round Aunt Harriet's great table glittered like the sun. Not
Constance's specially provided napkins could hide that wealth and
profusion of white lace and stitchery. Never in after-life are the
genteel children of the Five Towns so richly clad as at the age of four
or five years. Weeks of labour, thousands of cubic feet of gas, whole
nights stolen from repose, eyesight, and general health, will disappear
into the manufacture of a single frock that accidental jam may ruin in
ten seconds. Thus it was in those old days; and thus it is to-day.
Cyril's guests ranged in years from four to six; they were chiefly
older than their host; this was a pity, it impaired his importance; but
up to four years a child's sense of propriety, even of common decency,
is altogether too unreliable for a respectable party.
Round about the outskirts of the table were the elders, ladies the
majority; they also in their best, for they had to meet each other.
Constance displayed a new dress, of crimson silk; after having mourned
for her mother she had definitely abandoned the black which, by reason
of her duties in the shop, she had constantly worn from the age of
sixteen to within a few months of Cyril's birth; she never went into
the shop now, except casually, on brief visits of inspection. She was
still fat; the destroyer of her figure sat at the head of the table.
Samuel kept close to her; he was the only male, until Mr. Critchlow
astonishingly arrived; among the company Mr. Critchlow had a
grand-niece. Samuel, if not in his best, was certainly not in his
everyday suit. With his large frilled shirt-front, and small black tie,
and his little black beard and dark face over that, he looked very
nervous and self-conscious. He had not the habit of entertaining. Nor
had Constance; but her benevolence ever bubbling up to the calm surface
of her personality made self-consciousness impossible for her. Miss
Insull was also present, in shop-black, 'to help.' Lastly there was
Amy, now as the years passed slowly assuming the character of a
faithful retainer, though she was only twenty-three. An ugly, abrupt,
downright girl, with convenient notions of pleasure! For she would rise
early and retire late in order to contrive an hour to go out with
Master Cyril; and to be allowed to put Master Cyril to bed was, really,
her highest bliss.
All these elders were continually inserting arms into the fringe of
fluffy children that surrounded the heaped table; removing dangerous
spoons out of cups into saucers, replacing plates, passing cakes,
spreading jam, whispering consolations, explanations, and sage counsel.
Mr. Critchlow, snow-white now but unbent, remarked that there was 'a
pretty cackle,' and he sniffed. Although the window was slightly open,
the air was heavy with the natural human odour which young children
transpire. More than one mother, pressing her nose into a lacy mass, to
whisper, inhaled that pleasant perfume with a voluptuous thrill.
Cyril, while attending steadily to the demands of his body, was in a
mood which approached the ideal. Proud and radiant, he combined
urbanity with a certain fine condescension. His bright eyes, and his
manner of scraping up jam with a spoon, said: "I am the king of this
party. This party is solely in my honour. I know that. We all know it.
Still, I will pretend that we are equals, you and I." He talked about
his picture-books to a young woman on his right named Jennie, aged
four, pale, pretty, the belle in fact, and Mr. Critchlow's grand-niece.
The boy's attractiveness was indisputable; he could put on quite an
aristocratic air. It was the most delicious sight to see them, Cyril
and Jennie, so soft and delicate, so infantile on their piles of
cushions and books, with their white socks and black shoes dangling far
distant from the carpet; and yet so old, so self-contained! And they
were merely an epitome of the whole table. The whole table was bathed
in the charm and mystery of young years, of helpless fragility, gentle
forms, timid elegance, unshamed instincts, and waking souls. Constance
and Samuel were very satisfied; full of praise for other people's
children, but with the reserve that of course Cyril was hors concours.
They both really did believe, at that moment, that Cyril was, in some
subtle way which they felt but could not define, superior to all other
infants.
Some one, some officious relative of a visitor, began to pass a certain
cake which had brown walls, a roof of cocoa-nut icing, and a yellow
body studded with crimson globules. Not a conspicuously gorgeous cake,
not a cake to which a catholic child would be likely to attach
particular importance; a good, average cake! Who could have guessed
that it stood, in Cyril's esteem, as the cake of cakes? He had insisted
on his father buying it at Cousin Daniel's, and perhaps Samuel ought to
have divined that for Cyril that cake was the gleam that an ardent
spirit would follow through the wilderness. Samuel, however, was not a
careful observer, and seriously lacked imagination. Constance knew only
that Cyril had mentioned the cake once or twice. Now by the hazard of
destiny that cake found much favour, helped into popularity as it was
by the blundering officious relative who, not dreaming what volcano she
was treading on, urged its merits with simpering enthusiasm. One boy
took two slices, a slice in each hand; he happened to be the visitor of
whom the cake-distributor was a relative, and she protested; she
expressed the shock she suffered. Whereupon both Constance and Samuel
sprang forward and swore with angelic smiles that nothing could be more
perfect than the propriety of that dear little fellow taking two slices
of that cake. It was this hullaballoo that drew Cyril's attention to
the evanescence of the cake of cakes. His face at once changed from
calm pride to a dreadful anxiety. His eyes bulged out. His tiny mouth
grew and grew, like a mouth in a nightmare. He was no longer human; he
was a cake-eating tiger being balked of his prey. Nobody noticed him.
The officious fool of a woman persuaded Jennie to take the last slice
of the cake, which was quite a thin slice.
Then every one simultaneously noticed Cyril, for he gave a yell. It was
not the cry of a despairing soul who sees his beautiful iridescent
dream shattered at his feet; it was the cry of the strong, masterful
spirit, furious. He turned upon Jennie, sobbing, and snatched at her
cake. Unaccustomed to such behaviour from hosts, and being besides a
haughty put-you-in-your-place beauty of the future, Jennie defended her
cake. After all, it was not she who had taken two slices at once. Cyril
hit her in the eye, and then crammed most of the slice of cake into his
enormous mouth. He could not swallow it, nor even masticate it, for his
throat was rigid and tight. So the cake projected from his red lips,
and big tears watered it. The most awful mess you can conceive! Jennie
wept loudly, and one or two others joined her in sympathy, but the rest
went on eating tranquilly, unmoved by the horror which transfixed their
elders.
A host to snatch food from a guest! A host to strike a guest! A
gentleman to strike a lady!
Constance whipped up Cyril from his chair and flew with him to his own
room (once Samuel's), where she smacked him on the arm and told him he
was a very, very naughty boy and that she didn't know what his father
would say. She took the food out of his disgusting mouth--or as much of
it as she could get at--and then she left him, on the bed. Miss Jennie
was still in tears when, blushing scarlet and trying to smile,
Constance returned to the drawing-room. Jennie would not be appeased.
Happily Jennie's mother (being about to present Jennie with a little
brother--she hoped) was not present. Miss Insull had promised to see
Jennie home, and it was decided that she should go. Mr. Critchlow, in
high sardonic spirits, said that he would go too; the three departed
together, heavily charged with Constance's love and apologies. Then all
pretended, and said loudly, that what had happened was naught, that
such things were always happening at children's parties. And visitors'
relatives asseverated that Cyril was a perfect darling and that really
Mrs. Povey must not ...
But the attempt to keep up appearance was a failure.
The Methuselah of visitors, a gaping girl of nearly eight years, walked
across the room to where Constance was standing, and said in a loud,
confidential, fatuous voice:
"Cyril HAS been a rude boy, hasn't he, Mrs. Povey?"
The clumsiness of children is sometimes tragic.
Later, there was a trickling stream of fluffy bundles down the crooked
stairs and through the parlour and so out into King Street. And
Constance received many compliments and sundry appeals that darling
Cyril should be forgiven.
"I thought you said that boy was in his bedroom," said Samuel to
Constance, coming into the parlour when the last guest had gone. Each
avoided the other's eyes.
"Yes, isn't he?"
"No."
"The little jockey!" ("Jockey," an essay in the playful, towards making
light of the jockey's sin!) "I expect he's been in search of Amy."
She went to the top of the kitchen stairs and called out: "Amy, is
Master Cyril down there?"
"Master Cyril? No, mum. But he was in the parlour a bit ago, after the
first and second lot had gone. I told him to go upstairs and be a good
boy."
Not for a few moments did the suspicion enter the minds of Samuel and
Constance that Cyril might be missing, that the house might not contain
Cyril. But having once entered, the suspicion became a certainty. Amy,
cross-examined, burst into sudden tears, admitting that the side-door
might have been open when, having sped 'the second lot,' she criminally
left Cyril alone in the parlour in order to descend for an instant to
her kitchen. Dusk was gathering. Amy saw the defenceless innocent
wandering about all night in the deserted streets of a great city. A
similar vision with precise details of canals, tramcar-wheels, and
cellar-flaps, disturbed Constance. Samuel said that anyhow he could not
have got far, that some one was bound to remark and recognize him, and
restore him. "Yes, of course," thought sensible Constance. "But
supposing--"
They all three searched the entire house again. Then, in the
drawing-room (which was in a sad condition of anticlimax) Amy exclaimed:
"Eh, master! There's town-crier crossing the Square. Hadn't ye better
have him cried?"
"Run out and stop him," Constance commanded.
And Amy flew.
Samuel and the aged town-crier parleyed at the side door, the women in
the background.
"I canna' cry him without my bell," drawled the crier, stroking his
shabby uniform. "My bell's at wum (home). I mun go and fetch my bell.
Yo' write it down on a bit o' paper for me so as I can read it, and
I'll foot off for my bell. Folk wouldna' listen to me if I hadna'
gotten my bell."
Thus was Cyril cried.
"Amy," said Constance, when she and the girl were alone, "there's no
use in you standing blubbering there. Get to work and clear up that
drawing-room, do! The child is sure to be found soon. Your master's
gone out, too."
Brave words! Constance aided in the drawing-room and kitchen. Theirs
was the woman's lot in a great crisis. Plates have always to be washed.
Very shortly afterwards, Samuel Povey came into the kitchen by the
underground passage which led past the two cellars to the yard and to
Brougham Street. He was carrying in his arms an obscene black mass.
This mass was Cyril, once white.
Constance screamed. She was at liberty to give way to her feelings,
because Amy happened to be upstairs.
"Stand away!" cried Mr. Povey. "He isn't fit to touch."
And Mr. Povey made as if to pass directly onward, ignoring the mother.
"Wherever did you find him?"
"I found him in the far cellar," said Mr. Povey, compelled to stop,
after all. "He was down there with me yesterday, and it just occurred
to me that he might have gone there again."
"What! All in the dark?"
"He'd lighted a candle, if you please! I'd left a candle-stick and a
box of matches handy because I hadn't finished that shelving."
"Well!" Constance murmured. "I can't think how ever he dared go there
all alone!"
"Can't you?" said Mr. Povey, cynically. "I can. He simply did it to
frighten us."
"Oh, Cyril!" Constance admonished the child. "Cyril!"
The child showed no emotion. His face was an enigma. It might have
hidden sullenness or mere callous indifference, or a perfect
unconsciousness of sin.
"Give him to me," said Constance.
"I'll look after him this evening," said Samuel, grimly.
"But you can't wash him," said Constance, her relief yielding to
apprehension.
"Why not?" demanded Mr. Povey. And he moved off.
"But Sam--"
"I'll look after him, I tell you!" Mr. Povey repeated, threateningly.
"But what are you going to do?" Constance asked with fear.
"Well," said Mr. Povey, "has this sort of thing got to be dealt with,
or hasn't it?" He departed upstairs.
Constance overtook him at the door of Cyril's bedroom.
Mr. Povey did not wait for her to speak. His eyes were blazing.
"See here!" he admonished her cruelly. "You get away downstairs,
mother!"
And he disappeared into the bedroom with his vile and helpless victim.
A moment later he popped his head out of the door. Constance was
disobeying him. He stepped into the passage and shut the door so that
Cyril should not hear.
"Now please do as I tell you," he hissed at his wife. "Don't let's have
a scene, please."
She descended, slowly, weeping. And Mr. Povey retired again to the
place of execution.
Amy nearly fell on the top of Constance with a final tray of things
from the drawing-room. And Constance had to tell the girl that Cyril
was found. Somehow she could not resist the instinct to tell her also
that the master had the affair in hand. Amy then wept.
After about an hour Mr. Povey at last reappeared. Constance was trying
to count silver teaspoons in the parlour.
"He's in bed now," said Mr. Povey, with a magnificent attempt to be
nonchalant. "You mustn't go near him."
"But have you washed him?" Constance whimpered.
"I've washed him," replied the astonishing Mr. Povey.
"What have you done to him?"
"I've punished him, of course," said Mr. Povey, like a god who is above
human weaknesses. "What did you expect me to do? Someone had to do it."
Constance wiped her eyes with the edge of the white apron which she was
wearing over her new silk dress. She surrendered; she accepted the
situation; she made the best of it. And all the evening was spent in
dismally and horribly pretending that their hearts were beating as one.
Mr. Povey's elaborate, cheery kindliness was extremely painful.
They went to bed, and in their bedroom Constance, as she stood close to
Samuel, suddenly dropped the pretence, and with eyes and voice of
anguish said:
"You must let me look at him."
They faced each other. For a brief instant Cyril did not exist for
Constance. Samuel alone obsessed her, and yet Samuel seemed a strange,
unknown man. It was in Constance's life one of those crises when the
human soul seems to be on the very brink of mysterious and
disconcerting cognitions, and then, the wave recedes as inexplicably as
it surged up.
"Why, of course!" said Mr. Povey, turning away lightly, as though to
imply that she was making tragedies out of nothing.
She gave an involuntary gesture of almost childish relief.
Cyril slept calmly. It was a triumph for Mr. Povey.
Constance could not sleep. As she lay darkly awake by her husband, her
secret being seemed to be a-quiver with emotion. Not exactly sorrow;
not exactly joy; an emotion more elemental than these! A sensation of
the intensity of her life in that hour; troubling, anxious, yet not
sad! She said that Samuel was quite right, quite right. And then she
said that the poor little thing wasn't yet five years old, and that it
was monstrous. The two had to be reconciled. And they never could be
reconciled. Always she would be between them, to reconcile them, and to
be crushed by their impact. Always she would have to bear the burden of
both of them. There could be no ease for her, no surcease from a
tremendous preoccupation and responsibility. She could not change
Samuel; besides, he was right! And though Cyril was not yet five, she
felt that she could not change Cyril either. He was just as
unchangeable as a growing plant. The thought of her mother and Sophia
did not present itself to her; she felt, however, somewhat as Mrs.
Baines had felt on historic occasions; but, being more softly kind,
younger, and less chafed by destiny, she was conscious of no
bitterness, conscious rather of a solemn blessedness.