Those three--Darius, Maggie, and Edwin--sat down to tea in silence. The
window was open, and the weather very warm and gay. During the previous
twelve months they had sat down to hundreds of such meals. Save for a
few brief periods of cheerfulness, Darius had steadily grown more
taciturn, heavy and melancholy. In the winter he had of course
abandoned his attempts to divert himself by gardening--attempts at the
best half-hearted and feeble--and he had not resumed them in the spring.
Less than half a year previously he had often walked across the fields
to Hillport and back, or up the gradual slopes to the height of Toft
End--he never went townwards, had not once visited the Conservative
Club. But now he could not even be persuaded to leave the garden. An
old wicker arm-chair had been placed at the end of the garden, and he
would set out for that arm-chair as upon a journey, and, having reached
it, would sink into it with a huge sigh, and repose before bracing
himself to the effort of return.
And now it seemed marvellous that he had ever had the legs to get to
Hillport and to Toft End. He existed in a stupor of dull reflection,
from pride pretending to read and not reading, or pretending to listen
and not listening, and occasionally making a remark which was inapposite
but which had to be humoured. And as the weeks passed his children's
manner of humouring him became increasingly perfunctory, and their
movements in putting right the negligence of his attire increasingly
brusque. Vainly they tried to remember in time that he was a victim and
not a criminal; they would remember after the careless remark and after
the curt gesture, when it was too late. His malady obsessed them: it
was in the air of the house, omnipresent; it weighed upon them,
corroding the nerve and exasperating the spirit. Now and then, when
Darius had vented a burst of irrational anger, they would say to each
other with casual bitterness that really he was too annoying. Once,
when his demeanour towards the new servant had strongly suggested that
he thought her name was Bathsheba, Mrs Nixon herself had `flown out' at
him, and there had been a scene which the doctor had soothed by discreet
professional explanations. Maggie's difficulty was that he was always
there, always on the spot. To be free of him she must leave the house;
and Maggie was not fond of leaving the house.
Edwin meant to inform him briefly of his intention to go to London, but
such was the power of habit that he hesitated; he could not bring
himself to announce directly this audacious and unprecedented act of
freedom, though he knew that his father was as helpless as a child in
his hands. Instead, he began to talk about the renewal of the lease of
the premises in Duck Square, as to which it would be necessary to give
notice to the landlord at the end of the month.
"I've been thinking I'll have it made out in my own name," he said.
"It'll save you signing, and so on." This in itself was a proposal
sufficiently startling, and he would not have been surprised at a
violent instinctive protest from Darius; but Darius seemed not to heed.
Then both Edwin and Maggie noticed that he was trying to hold a sausage
firm on his plate with his knife, and to cut it with his fork.
"No, no, father!" said Maggie gently. "Not like that!"
He looked up, puzzled, and then bent himself again to the plate. The
whole of his faculties seemed to be absorbed in a great effort to
resolve the complicated problem of the plate, the sausage, the knife and
the fork.
"You've got your knife in the wrong hand," said Edwin impatiently, as to
a wilful child.
Darius stared at the knife and at the fork, and he then sighed, and his
sigh meant, "This business is beyond me!" Then he endeavoured to
substitute the knife for the fork, but he could not.
"See," said Edwin, leaning over. "Like this!" He took the knife, but
Darius would not loose it. "No, leave go!" he ordered. "Leave go! How
can I show you if you don't leave go?"
Darius dropped both knife and fork with a clatter. Edwin put the knife
into his right hand, and the fork into his left; but in a moment they
were wrong again. At first Edwin could not believe that his father was
not indulging deliberately in naughtiness.
"Shall I cut it up for you, father?" Maggie asked, in a mild,
persuasive tone.
Darius pushed the plate towards her.