Edwin re-entered his home with a feeling of dismayed resignation. There
was then no escape, and never could be any escape, from the existence to
which he was accustomed; even after his father's death, his existence
would still be essentially the same--incomplete and sterile. He
accepted the destiny, but he was daunted by it.
He quietly shut the front door, which had been ajar, and as he did so he
heard voices in the drawing-room.
"I tell ye I'm going to grow mushrooms," Darius was saying. "Can't I
grow mushrooms in my own cellar?" Then a snort.
"I don't think it'll be a good thing," was Maggie's calm reply.
"Ye've said that afore. Why won't it be a good thing? And what's it
got to do with you?" The voice of Darius, ordinarily weak and languid,
was rising and becoming strong.
"Well, you'd be falling up and down the cellar steps. You know how dark
they are. Supposing you hurt yourself?"
"Ye'd only be too glad if I killed mysen!" said Darius, with a touch of
his ancient grimness.
There was a pause.
"And it seems they want a lot of attention, mushrooms do," Maggie went
on with unperturbed placidity. "You'd never be able to do it."
"Jane could help me," said Darius, in the tone of one who is rather
pleased with an ingenious suggestion.
"Oh no, she couldn't!" Maggie exclaimed, with a peculiar humorous
dryness which she employed only on the rarest occasions. Jane was the
desired Bathsheba.
"And I say she could!" the old man shouted with surprising vigour. "Her
does nothing! What does Mrs Nixon do? What do you do? Three great
strapping women in the house and doing nought! I say she shall!" The
voice dropped and snarled. "Who's master here? Is it me, or is it the
cat? D'ye think as I can't turn ye all out of it neck and crop, if I've
a mind? You and Edwin, and the lot of ye! And to-night too! Give me
some money now, and quicker than that! I've got nought but sovereigns
and notes. I'll go down and get the spawn myself--ay! and order the
earth too! I'll make it my business to show my childer--But I mun have
some change for my car fares." He breathed heavily.
"I'm sure Edwin won't like it," Maggie murmured.
"Edwin! Hast told Edwin?" Darius also murmured, but it was a murmur of
rage.
"No, I haven't. Edwin's got quite enough on his hands as it is, without
any other worries."
There was the noise of a sudden movement, and of a chair falling.
"Bugger you all!" Darius burst out with a fury whose restraint showed
that he had unsuspected reserves of strength. And then he began to
swear. Edwin, like many timid men, often used forbidden words with much
ferocity in private. Once he had had a long philosophic argument with
Tom Orgreave on the subject of profanity. They had discussed all
aspects of it, from its religious origin to its psychological results,
and Edwin's theory had been that it was only improper by a purely
superstitious convention, and that no man of sense could possibly be
offended, in himself, by the mere sound of words that had been deprived
of meaning. He might be offended on behalf of an unreasoning
fellow-listener, such as a woman, but not personally. Edwin now
discovered that his theory did not hold. He was offended. He was
almost horrified. He had never in his life till that moment heard
Darius swear. He heard him now. He considered himself to be a fairly
first-class authority on swearing; he thought that he was familiar with
all the sacred words and with all the combinations of them. He was
mistaken. His father's profanity was a brilliant and appalling
revelation. It comprised words which were strange to him, and strange
perversions that renewed the vigour of decrepit words. For Edwin, it
was a whole series of fresh formulae, brutal and shameless beyond his
experience, full of images and similes of the most startling candour,
and drawing its inspiration always from the sickening bases of life.
Darius had remembered with ease the vocabulary to which he was hourly
accustomed when he began life as a man of seven. For more than fifty
years he had carried within himself these vestiges of a barbarism which
his children had never even conceived, and now he threw them out in all
their crudity at his daughter. And when she did not blench, he began to
accuse her as men were used to accuse their daughters in the bright days
of the Sailor King. He invented enormities which she had committed, and
there would have been no obscene infamy of which Maggie was not guilty,
if Edwin--more by instinct than by volition--had not pushed open the
door and entered the drawing-room.
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