THE Marshall family included Marshall and his wife. He was rather a
small man, with blackish hair, small lips, and with a nose just a little
turned up at the tip. As we have been informed, he was a cabinet-maker.
He worked for very good shops, and earned about two pounds a week. He
read books, but he did not know their value, and often fancied he had
made a great discovery on a bookstall of an author long ago superseded
and worthless. He belonged to a mechanic’s institute, and was fond of
animal physiology; heard courses of lectures on it at the institute, and
had studied two or three elementary handbooks. He found in a second-hand
dealer’s shop a model, which could be taken to pieces, of the inside of
the human body. He had also bought a diagram of a man, showing the
circulation, and this he had hung in his bedroom, his mother-in-law
objecting most strongly on the ground that its effect on his wife was
injurious. He had a notion that the world might be regenerated if men
and women were properly instructed in physiological science, and if
before marriage they would study their own physical peculiarities, and
those of their intended partners. The crossing of peculiarities
nevertheless presented difficulties. A man with long legs surely ought
to choose a woman with short legs, but if a man who was mathematical
married a woman who was mathematical, the result might be a mathematical
prodigy. On the other hand the parents of the prodigy might each have
corresponding qualities, which, mixed with the mathematical tendency,
would completely nullify it. The path of duty therefore was by no means
plain. However, Marshall was sure that great cities dwarfed their
inhabitants, and as he himself was not so tall as his father, and,
moreover, suffered from bad digestion, and had a tendency to ‘run to
head,’ he determined to select as his wife a ‘daughter of the soil,’ to
use his own phrase, above the average height, with a vigorous
constitution and plenty of common sense. She need not be bookish, ‘he
could supply all that himself.’ Accordingly, he married Sarah Caffyn.
His mother and Mrs Caffyn had been early friends. He was not mistaken in
Sarah. She was certainly robust; she was a shrewd housekeeper, and she
never read anything, except now and then a paragraph or two in the weekly
newspaper, notwithstanding (for there were no children), time hung rather
heavily on her hands. One child had been born, but to Marshall’s
surprise and disappointment it was a poor, rickety thing, and died before
it was a twelvemonth old.
Mrs Marshall was not a very happy woman. Marshall was a great politician
and spent many of his evenings away from home at political meetings. He
never informed her what he had been doing, and if he had told her, she
would neither have understood nor cared anything about it. At Great
Oakhurst she heard everything and took an interest in it, and she often
wished with all her heart that the subject which occupied Marshall’s
thoughts was not Chartism but the draining of that heavy, rush-grown bit
of rough pasture that lay at the bottom of the village. He was very good
and kind to her, and she never imagined, before marriage, that he ought
to be more. She was sure that at Great Oakhurst she would have been
quite comfortable with him but somehow, in London, it was different. ‘I
don’t know how it is,’ she said one day, ‘the sort of husband as does for
the country doesn’t do for London.’
At Great Oakhurst, where the doors were always open into the yard and the
garden, where every house was merely a covered bit of the open space,
where people were always in and out, and women never sat down, except to
their meals, or to do a little stitching or sewing, it was really not
necessary, as Mrs Caffyn observed, that husband and wife should ‘hit it
so fine.’ Mrs Marshall hated all the conveniences of London. She
abominated particularly the taps, and longed to be obliged in all
weathers to go out to the well and wind up the bucket. She abominated
also the dust-bin, for it was a pleasure to be compelled—so at least she
thought it now—to walk down to the muck-heap and throw on it what the pig
could not eat. Nay, she even missed that corner of the garden against
the elder-tree, where the pig-stye was, for ‘you could smell the
elder-flowers there in the spring-time, and the pig-stye wasn’t as bad as
the stuffy back room in Great Ormond Street when three or four men were
in it.’ She did all she could to spend her energy on her cooking and
cleaning, but ‘there was no satisfaction in it,’ and she became much
depressed, especially after the child died. This was the main reason why
Mrs Caffyn determined to live with her. Marshall was glad she resolved
to come. His wife had her full share of the common sense he desired, but
the experiment had not altogether succeeded. He knew she was lonely, and
he was sorry for her, although he did not see how he could mend matters.
He reflected carefully, nothing had happened which was a surprise to him,
the relationship was what he had supposed it would be, excepting that the
child did not live and its mother was a little miserable. There was
nothing he would not do for her, but he really had nothing more to offer
her.
Although Mrs Marshall had made up her mind that husbands and wives could
not be as contented with one another in the big city as they would be in
a village, a suspicion crossed her mind one day that, even in London, the
relationship might be different from her own. She was returning from
Great Oakhurst after a visit to her mother. She had stayed there for
about a month after her child’s death, and she travelled back to town
with a Letherhead woman, who had married a journeyman tanner, who
formerly worked in the Letherhead tan-yard, and had now moved to
Bermondsey, a horrid hole, worse than Great Ormond Street. Both Marshall
and the tanner were at the ‘Swan with Two Necks’ to meet the covered van,
and the tanner’s wife jumped out first.
‘Hullo, old gal, here you are,’ cried the tanner, and clasped her in his
brown, bark-stained arms, giving her, nothing loth, two or three hearty
kisses. They were so much excited at meeting one another, that they
forgot their friends, and marched off without bidding them good-bye. Mrs
Marshall was welcomed in quieter fashion.
‘Ah!’ she thought to herself. ‘Red Tom,’ as the tanner was called, ‘is
not used to London ways. They are, perhaps, correct for London, but
Marshall might now and then remember that I have not been brought up to
them.’
To return, however, to the Hopgoods. Before the afternoon they were in
their new quarters, happily for them, for Mrs Hopgood became worse. On
the morrow she was seriously ill, inflammation of the lungs appeared, and
in a week she was dead. What Clara and Madge suffered cannot be told
here. Whenever anybody whom we love dies, we discover that although
death is commonplace it is terribly original. We may have thought about
it all our lives, but if it comes close to us, it is quite a new, strange
thing to us, for which we are entirely unprepared. It may, perhaps, not
be the bare loss so much as the strength of the bond which is broken that
is the surprise, and we are debtors in a way to death for revealing
something in us which ordinary life disguises. Long after the first
madness of their grief had passed, Clara and Madge were astonished to
find how dependent they had been on their mother. They were grown-up
women accustomed to act for themselves, but they felt unsteady, and as if
deprived of customary support. The reference to her had been constant,
although it was often silent, and they were not conscious of it. A
defence from the outside waste desert had been broken down, their mother
had always seemed to intervene between them and the world, and now they
were exposed and shelterless.
Three parts of Mrs Hopgood’s little income was mainly an annuity, and
Clara and Madge found that between them they had but seventy-five pounds
a year.