HOME, SWEET HOME.
Fashion, amidst the innumerable changes which she has insisted on,
seems to have dealt lightly with Great Walpole-street. It may be that
she has purposely left it untouched to remain an example of the heavy,
solemn, solid style of a hundred years ago; a striking contrast to the
"gardens," "crescents," "mansions," all stucco, plate-glass, and huge
portico, of modern days; or it may be that finding it intractable,
unalterable, unassailable, she has looked upon it as a relic of
barbarism, and determined altogether to ignore its existence. However
that may be, the street is little changed since the days of its
erection; it still remains a long, and, to those gazing down it from
either end, apparently interminable line of large, substantial,
three-storied, dull-coloured brick houses, stretching from
Chandos-square in the south to Guelph Park in the north, so long, so
uniform, so unspeakably dreary, as to give colour to the assertion of
a celebrated wit, who, on his death-bed moaning forth that "there is
an end to all things," added feebly, "except Great Walpole-street."
In its precincts gravity and decorum have set up their head-quarters;
on many of its door-plates the passers-by may read the names of
distinguished members of the faculty, old in age and high in renown,
pupils of Abernethy and Astley Cooper, who with the first few hundreds
which they could scrape together after their degrees were obtained,
hired, and furnished, as a first step to professional status, the
houses in which they still reside, and in which they have since
inspected so many thousand tongues, and passed the verdict of life or
death upon so many thousand patients. Youth must be resident here and
there in Great Walpole-street, as in other places, but if so, it is
never seen. No nursemaids with heads obstinately turned the other way
drive the pleasant perambulator against the legs of elderly people
airing themselves in the modified sunlight which occasionally visits
the locality; no merry children troop along its pavement; from the
long drawing-room windows, hung with curtains of velvet and muslin,
issues no sound of piano or human voice. Although there is no beadle
to keep inviolate its sanctity, the street-boy as he approaches its
confines stops his shrill whistling, and puts his tip-cat into his
pocket; the "patterers" of the second editions pass it by, conscious
that the rumours of war, or of the assassinations of eminent
personages, will fall flat upon the ears of the inhabitants; while
even the fragmentary announcement, "Elopement--young lady--noble
markis," will fail in extracting the pence from the pockets of the
denizens of the lower regions in this respectable quarter.
It is essentially a carriage neighbourhood, with ranges of mews
branching out of and running parallel to it; and the vehicles are
quite in keeping with the street and with their owners. Besides the
doctors' broughams, high swinging chariots, now scarcely ever seen
save on drawing-room days or in carriage bazaars, with huge
hammercloths and vast emblazoned panels, are there common enough.
Roomy landaus, broad barouches, with fat-horses, the leather of whose
harness is almost invisible beneath the heavy silver plating, coachmen
in curly white bob-wigs, and giant footmen gorgeous in hair-powder;
all these are to be found in Great Walpole-street.
Money, money, money! it all seems to say. We have money, and we will
take care that you shall know it. We will not pay enormous rents for
poky tenements in Mayfair, or straggling caravanserais in Tyburnia; we
do not expend our substance in park-phaetons or Victorias, any more
than in giving "drums" or "at homes." We have, during the season,
several dinner-parties, at which the wine set before you does not come
from the grocer's or the publican's, but has been in our cellars for
years; several musical evenings, and one or two balls. We go to the
Opera three or four times during the season, occasionally to the
theatre, frequently to a classical concert, or an oratorio; but we
would as soon think of attending a prize-fight as a pigeon-match, or
of prohibiting our womankind from going to church, as of taking them
to listen to comic songs in a supper-room. We are rich, which you may
be; but we are respectable, which you are not! Vaunt your fashion as
much as you please, but the home of moneyed decency and decorum is
Great Walpole-street.
Six o'clock on an October evening, with a chill damp wind howling at
intervals through the funnel made by the opposing lines of houses, is
not the time in which this locality looks its best. If it is dreary in
the spring brightness, in the summer sunshine, it is doubly dreary in
the autumn decadence, when the leaves torn from the trees in Guelph
Park mix with the dust and bits of straw and scraps of paper which
gather together in swerving eddies in every possible corner, and when
in most of the houses the shutters are still closed, and the blinds
have not shed the newspaper coverings in which they have been
enwrapped during the absence of the inhabitants. In one of the largest
houses of the street, on one particular October evening, no such signs
of absenteeism were visible; the whiteness of the broad door-step was
unsullied, the plate-glass windows were free from speck or spot, the
dwarf wire-blinds in the dining-room stood rigidly defiant of all
criticism, and the muslin curtains in the drawing-room seemed to have
lost all the softness and pliancy of their nature, and hung stiff, and
white, and rigid, as the gaunt and bony hands which from time to time
pushed them on one side, as the blank and colourless face which from
time to time peered through them into the street. These hands and that
face belonged to Mrs. Calverley, the mistress of the mansion. A thin,
spare woman of fifty years of age, with a figure in which were angles
where there should have been roundness, and straightness of outline
where there should have been fulness. Her silk dress was of an
undecided fawn-colour, and in place of any relieving white collar, she
wore a wisp of black net round her throat. Her face was long, with a
large straight-nose, prominent eyes of steely blue, and a long upper
lip, between which and its thin pallid companion there gleamed a row
of strong white teeth. Her thin scanty iron-gray hair was taken off
from her forehead above the temples and gathered into a small knot at
the back. Such an expanse of colourless flesh, such a dull level waste
of human features unrelieved by the slightest scintilla of interest or
sympathy!
In her prim, flat-soled creaking shoes, Mrs. Calverley walked to the
window, pushed back the curtains, and looked out down the silent
street; then, with a sound which was something between a sigh of
despair and a snort of defiance, she returned to the low prie-dieu
chair worked in wool, but covered with a shiny, crackling, yellow
substance; and arranging her scanty drapery around her, interwove her
bony fingers in her lap and sat bolt upright, staring rigidly before
her. All the furniture in the room which was capable of being covered
up was clad in a uniform of brown holland; the chairs were dressed in
pinafores, the big broad sofa had a loosely cut greatcoat of the same
material; even the chandeliers had on holland bags. There was no light
in the room, but the gas lamps in the street were reflected from the
bare shining rosewood table, from the long grand pianoforte, from the
huge ormolu clock ticking gravely on the mantelpiece, from the glass
shades enshrining wax flowers and fruit, which, made such a poor
pretence of being real, and from the old-fashioned handsomely-cut
girandoles. By the chair in which Mrs. Calverley was seated stood a
frame of Berlin work; in the middle of the hearth-rug before the
fireplace--fireless now, and filled with a grim pattern of cut
coloured paper--lay a stuffed white-haired dog, intently regarding his
tail through his glass eyes, and apparently wondering what he had done
in life to be consigned to such a degraded position.
A quarter-past six, half-past, a quarter to seven, ring out from the
neighbouring church, and at each sound of the chimes Mrs. Calverley
rises to her feet, creaks across to the window, looks forth, creaks
back again, and resumes her stony position. At length there comes a
half-timid ring of the bell, which she recognises at once, straightens
her back, and settles herself more rigidly than ever. A few minutes
after, the drawing-room door opens, and a voice, the owner of which
cannot be seen, is heard saying, "Dear me, all in darkness, Jane?"
Mrs. Calverley makes no reply, but rings the bell, and when the
servant appears, says to him in a thin acid voice, "You can light the
gas, James; and now that your master has come home at last, dinner can
be served."
Upon this remark Mr. Calverley's only comment is a repetition of "Dear
me!" He is a middle-sized, pleasant-looking man, with fair hair
slightly sprinkled with gray, gray whiskers, light-blue eyes,
and marvellous pink-and-white complexion like a doll: a
gentlemanly-looking man in his plain black frock-coat and waistcoat,
gray trousers, black-silk cravat and pearl pin, and neat buttoned
boots. He looks rather nervously to his wife, and edges his way
towards her round the table. When he is within a few feet of her he
produces a newspaper from his pocket, and makes a feeble tender of it,
saying, "The evening paper, my dear; I thought you would like to
see--"
"I should like to see you attempt to relieve the monotony of my life,
Mr. Calverley, and not to leave me here alone, while you were
doubtless enjoying yourself."
"My dear, I assure you I have come straight home."
"Did business detain you until after six o'clock in Mincing-lane?"
"No, my dear, of course not till six o'clock; I walked home, and on my
way I just looked in at the club, and--"
"At the club!" That was all Mrs. Calverley said, but the manner in
which she said it had its due effect. Mr. Calverley opened the leaves
of a photograph album, with every portrait in which he was thoroughly
familiar, and began to be extremely interested in its contents.
"Dinner will be ready directly," said Mrs. Calverley; "had you not
better wash your hands?"
"Thank you, my dear," said the disconsolate man; "but I washed them at
the cl--"
He pulled himself up just in time; the obnoxious word had very nearly
slipped out, but the servant announcing dinner at the moment, and Mrs.
Calverley laying the tips of her bony fingers in the hollow of her
husband's arm, the happy pair proceeded to the banquet.
It was a good dinner, handsomely served, but Mr. Calverley can
scarcely be said to have enjoyed it. At first he audibly asked for
wine, but after he had been helped three or four times, he glanced
hurriedly across the long table, at the other end of which his wife
was seated, and furtively motioned to the butler by touching his
glass. This pantomime and its results were soon noticed by Mrs.
Calverley, who, after glaring at her husband for a moment, gave a
little shiver, and said:
"It is of no use paying Doctor Chipchase his fees if his advice is to
be scouted in this manner; you know what he said about your drinking
wine."
"My dear, I only--"
"You only fly in the face of Providence, Mr. Calverley, and behave
unjustly to the office in which your life is insured. You only add
another to the long catalogue of weaknesses and moral cowardices, by
the constant display of which you render my life a burden to me. I am
sick of talking to you myself; I shall write and ask Martin to come
and stay with us for a few weeks, and see what effect his influence
will have upon you."
"I am sure I shall be very glad to see Martin, my dear," said Mr.
Calverley, after standing up reverently to say grace on the removal of
the cloth; "he is a very good fellow, and--"
"Don't talk of a clergyman of the Church of England in that way, Mr.
Calverley, if you please. 'Good fellow,' indeed! My son Martin is a
good man, and an ornament to his calling."
"Yes, my dear, of course he is; preaches an excellent sermon, does
Martin, and intones quite musically. I should like to see him a little
more cheerful, I mean a little less ascetic, you know; take his wine
more freely, and not look quite so much as if he was fed upon parched
peas and filtered water."
"You are profane, as usual," said his wife. "Whenever you touch upon
any member of my family, your temper gets the better of you, and your
uncontrollable tendency to scoffing and scepticism breaks forth.
Perhaps you will not think it too much trouble to pass me the
biscuits."
"My dear Jane!" murmured the wretched man; and after handing the
silver biscuit-barrel to his wife, he sat by, not daring to help
himself to another glass of wine from the well-filled decanters before
him, while the mere fact of seeing her munching away at the hard
farinaceous food nearly drove him mad with thirst.
When Mrs. Calverley had concluded this succulent repast, she rose from
her seat, and, without taking any notice of her husband, creaked
stiffly out of the room. John Calverley, lover of ease and
tranquillity as he was, scarcely regretted this little conjugal
dispute, inasmuch as that if Mrs. Calverley had not, in consequence of
the words that had passed between them, been on her dignified
behaviour, she would have remained to lock up the wine. Whereas John
managed to swallow two glasses of his favourite Madeira before he
joined her in the drawing-room.
It was not very cheerful in the drawing-room. The gas had been turned
low down, and the principal light in the room, much softened and
shaded, came from a reading-lamp placed immediately above the
work-frame at which Mrs. Calverley's bony fingers were busily engaged
depicting the story of Jael, with a very rugged profile, and Sisera,
the death-glare in whose eyes was represented by a couple of steel
beads. John Calverley, furtively wiping his lips after the Madeira,
shambled awkwardly into the room, and could scarcely repress a groan
at the ghastliness of its appearance. But the generous wine which he
had drunk helped to cheer him a little; and after wandering to and fro
in a purposeless manner, he approached his wife, and said:
"Won't you play something, dear?"
"No, thank you," replied Mrs. Calverley; "I wish to finish this work."
"It is rather a nice thing," said John, bending over the production,
and criticising it in a connoisseur-like manner; "what is it all
about?"
"It is well that no one is here to hear this lamentable display of
ignorance," said Mrs. Calverley, with a snort. "It is a scriptural
story, Mr. Calverley, and is intended as a footstool for the Church of
St. Beowulph."
"O yes," said John, nodding his head; "I know--Bewsher's place."
"It would be more decent, as well as more correct, to speak of it as
the church in which Mr. Bewsher is officiating minister, I think,"
said Mrs. Calverley with another snort.
"To be sure, my dear; quite correct," said peace-loving John. "By the
way, talking about officiating ministers, perhaps you had better not
ask Martin to come to us just yet; I have got to go down to that place
in the North next week."
"What place in the North?" said Mrs. Calverley, looking up.
"What place? Why, my dear, Swartmoor, of course--the foundry, you
know; that's the only place I go to in the North."
"I don't know what place you do or do not go to in the North, or
anywhere else, Mr. Calverley," said his wife, sticking her needle into
the canvas, and interlacing her bony fingers and sitting bolt upright,
as she glared straight at him; "I only know this, that I am determined
not to stand this state of things much longer."
"But, my dear--"
"Don't 'my dear' me, if you please, but listen to what I have to say.
When I married you, Mr. Calverley, to my sorrow, now some ten years
ago, you were nothing more than the head clerk in the house of
Lorraine Brothers, which my grandfather had founded, which my father
and uncles had established, and in which my late husband, Mr. Gurwood,
had been a sleeping partner."
"I must say that--"
"Silence, if you please; I will not be interrupted. I took you from
that inferior position, and made you my husband. I made you master of
this house and my fortune. I raised you, Mr. Calverley. I tell you, I
raised you, sir, from obscurity to position, from comparative penury
to wealth; and what is my reward? Day after day you are absent from
home at your counting-house in Mincing-lane. I don't object to that; I
suppose it is necessary; but I know--yes, I know, Mr. Calverley--this
is not my first experience of men of business; I have been a
grand-daughter, a daughter, and a sister of the firm, and though
latterly Mr. Gurwood was not quite regular in his attendance, at least
at one time he was an excellent man of business--so that I may say
also the wife of the firm, and I know that business hours are over at
five, and that my sainted father used then to come straight home to
Clapham by the omnibus."
"I--"
"You must allow me to speak, if you please; I will not be interrupted.
Instead of which, I find you going to your club and dawdling there to
the latest minute, often keeping my dinner waiting; and when you
return home, your conversation is frivolous, your manner light and
flighty, and wanting in repose; your tastes and habits evidently
unsuitable to a person in the position of my husband. I have borne all
this without complaint; I know that all of us mortals--sinful
mortals--have a cross to bear, and that you have been bestowed upon me
in that capacity. But, be a lone deserted woman when I have a husband
whose legitimate business it is to stay at home and take care of me, I
will not. These Swartmoor works are all very well, I daresay, and I
know you declare that they bring in a vast deal of profit; but there
was profit enough in my father's time without any of your iron works;
and if you intend to continue paying them a visit every fortnight, and
staying several days away, as you have done lately, they shall be
given up, Mr. Calverley--they shall be given up, I say. I may be of no
more concern to you than a chair or a table, but I will not be a
deserted woman, and these iron works shall be given up."
Those who had seen but little of the pleasant-faced John Calverley,
would scarcely have recognised him in the darkly-frowning man who now
strode forward, and crossing his arms on the back of a chair
immediately in front of his wife, said in a very quiet but very
determined voice:
"They shall not be given up. Understand that once for all--they shall
not be given up. You may say what you like, but I am master in my
business, if not in my home, and they shall not be given up. And now,
Jane, you must listen to me; must listen to words which I never
intended to have said, if the speech you have just made had not
rendered it necessary. You have told me what you have pleased to call
facts; now I will give you my version of them. When I married you ten
years ago--and God knows you cannot deplore that marriage more
heartily than I do--I was, as you say, the head clerk of the firm
which your father had established. But in his latter days he had been
ill and inattentive to business; and after his death your uncles, to
whom the concern was left, proved themselves utterly inadequate to its
guidance; and if it had not been for me, the firm of Lorraine and
Company would have been in the Gazette. You know this well enough; you
know that I, as head clerk, took the whole affair on my shoulders,
reorganised it, opened out new avenues for its commerce, and finally
succeeded in making it what it was when you first saw me. You taunt me
with having been raised by you from penury to position; but you know
that the whole of your fortune was embarked in the business, and that
if it had not been for my clear head and hard work, you would have
lost every penny of it. You accuse me of being light and frivolous and
unsuited to you, of being away from my home; though, except on these
business expeditions, not an evening do I pass out of your society. In
return, I ask you what sort of a home you make for me? what sign of
interest, of comfort, of anything like womanly grace and feeling is
there about it? What reception do I meet with on my return from
business? what communion, what reciprocity is there between us? Every
word I say, every remark I make, you either sneer or snap at. You are
a hard, intolerant Pharisee, Jane Calverley. By your hardness and
intolerance, by your perpetually nagging and worrying at him, you
tried to break the spirit of your former husband, George Gurwood, one
of the kindest fellows that ever lived. But you failed in that; you
only drove him to drink and to death. Now I have said my say, have
said what I never intended should pass my lips, what never would have
passed them, if it had not been for your provocation. I wish you
good-night--I am now going to the club."
So saying, John Calverley bowed his head and passed from the room,
leaving his wife no longer rigid and defiant, but swaying herself to
and fro, and moaning helplessly.