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The Old Wives Tale By Arnold Bennett BOOK II
CONSTANCE
CHAPTER I
REVOLUTION
I "Well," said Mr. Povey, rising from the rocking-chair
that in a previous age had been John Baines's, "I've
got to make a start some time, so I may as well begin now!"
And he went from the parlour into the shop. Constance's eye
followed him as far as the door, where their glances met for an
instant in the transient gaze which expresses the tenderness of
people who feel more than they kiss.
It was on the morning of this day that Mrs. Baines, relinquishing
the sovereignty of St. Luke's Square, had gone to live as a
younger sister in the house of Harriet Maddack at Axe. Constance
guessed little of the secret anguish of that departure. She only
knew that it was just like her mother, having perfectly arranged
the entire house for the arrival of the honeymoon couple from
Buxton, to flit early away so as to spare the natural blushing
diffidence of the said couple. It was like her mother's
commonsense and her mother's sympathetic comprehension. Further,
Constance did not pursue her mother's feelings, being far too busy
with her own. She sat there full of new knowledge and new
importance, brimming with experience and strange, unexpected
aspirations, purposes, yes--and cunnings! And yet, though the very
curves of her cheeks seemed to be mysteriously altering, the old
Constance still lingered in that frame, an innocent soul
hesitating to spread its wings and quit for ever the body which
had been its home; you could see the timid thing peeping wistfully
out of the eyes of the married woman.
Constance rang the bell for Maggie to clear the table; and as she
did so she had the illusion that she was not really a married
woman and a house-mistress, but only a kind of counterfeit. She
did most fervently hope that all would go right in the house--at
any rate until she had grown more accustomed to her situation.
The hope was to be disappointed. Maggie's rather silly, obsequious
smile concealed but for a moment the ineffable tragedy that had
lain in wait for unarmed Constance.
"If you please, Mrs. Povey," said Maggie, as she crushed cups
together on the tin tray with her great, red hands, which always
looked like something out of a butcher's shop; then a pause, "Will
you please accept of this?"
Now, before the wedding Maggie had already, with tears of
affection, given Constance a pair of blue glass vases (in order to
purchase which she had been obliged to ask for special permission
to go out), and Constance wondered what was coming now from
Maggie's pocket. A small piece of folded paper came from Maggie's
pocket. Constance accepted of it, and read: "I begs to give one
month's notice to leave. Signed Maggie. June 10, 1867."
"Maggie!" exclaimed the old Constance, terrified by this
incredible occurrence, ere the married woman could strangle her.
"I never give notice before, Mrs. Povey," said Maggie, "so I don't
know as I know how it ought for be done--not rightly. But I hope
as you'll accept of it, Mrs. Povey."
"Oh! of course," said Mrs. Povey, primly, just as if Maggie was
not the central supporting pillar of the house, just as if Maggie
had not assisted at her birth, just as if the end of the world had
not abruptly been announced, just as if St. Luke's Square were not
inconceivable without Maggie. "But why--"
"Well, Mrs. Povey, I've been a-thinking it over in my kitchen, and
I said to myself: 'If there's going to be one change there'd
better be two,' I says. Not but what I wouldn't work my fingers to
the bone for ye, Miss Constance."
Here Maggie began to cry into the tray.
Constance looked at her. Despite the special muslin of that day
she had traces of the slatternliness of which Mrs. Baines had
never been able to cure her. She was over forty, big, gawky. She
had no figure, no charms of any kind. She was what was left of a
woman after twenty-two years in the cave of a philanthropic
family. And in her cave she had actually been thinking things
over! Constance detected for the first time, beneath the
dehumanized drudge, the stirrings of a separate and perhaps
capricious individuality. Maggie's engagements had never been real
to her employers. Within the house she had never been, in
practice, anything but 'Maggie'--an organism. And now she was
permitting herself ideas about changes!
"You'll soon be suited with another, Mrs. Povey," said Maggie.
"There's many a--many a--" She burst into sobs.
"But if you really want to leave, what are you crying for,
Maggie?" asked Mrs. Povey, at her wisest. "Have you told mother?"
"No, miss," Maggie whimpered, absently wiping her wrinkled cheeks
with ineffectual muslin. "I couldn't seem to fancy telling your
mother. And as you're the mistress now, I thought as I'd save it
for you when you come home. I hope you'll excuse me, Mrs. Povey."
"Of course I'm very sorry. You've been a very good servant. And in
these days--"
The child had acquired this turn of speech from her mother. It did
not appear to occur to either of them that they were living in the
sixties.
"Thank ye, miss."
"And what are you thinking of doing, Maggie? You know you won't
get many places like this."
"To tell ye the truth, Mrs. Povey, I'm going to get married
mysen."
"Indeed!" murmured Constance, with the perfunctoriness of habit in
replying to these tidings.
"Oh! but I am, mum," Maggie insisted. "It's all settled. Mr.
Hollins, mum."
"Not Hollins, the fish-hawker!"
"Yes, mum. I seem to fancy him. You don't remember as him and me
was engaged in '48. He was my first, like. I broke it off because
he was in that Chartist lot, and I knew as Mr. Baines would never
stand that. Now he's asked me again. He's been a widower this long
time."
"I'm sure I hope you'll be happy, Maggie. But what about his
habits?"
"He won't have no habits with me, Mrs. Povey."
A woman was definitely emerging from the drudge.
When Maggie, having entirely ceased sobbing, had put the folded
cloth in the table-drawer and departed with the tray, her mistress
became frankly the girl again. No primness about her as she stood
alone there in the parlour; no pretence that Maggie's notice to
leave was an everyday document, to be casually glanced at--as one
glances at an unpaid bill! She would be compelled to find a new
servant, making solemn inquiries into character, and to train the
new servant, and to talk to her from heights from which she had
never addressed Maggie. At that moment she had an illusion that
there were no other available, suitable servants in the whole
world. And the arranged marriage? She felt that this time--the
thirteenth or fourteenth time--the engagement was serious and
would only end at the altar. The vision of Maggie and Hollins at
the altar shocked her. Marriage was a series of phenomena, and a
general state, very holy and wonderful--too sacred, somehow, for
such creatures as Maggie and Hollins. Her vague, instinctive
revolt against such a usage of matrimony centred round the idea of
a strong, eternal smell of fish. However, the projected outrage on
a hallowed institution troubled her much less than the imminent
problem of domestic service.
She ran into the shop--or she would have run if she had not
checked her girlishness betimes--and on her lips, ready to be
whispered importantly into a husband's astounded ear, were the
words, "Maggie has given notice! Yes! Truly!" But Samuel Povey was
engaged. He was leaning over the counter and staring at an
outspread paper upon which a certain Mr. Yardley was making
strokes with a thick pencil. Mr. Yardley, who had a long red
beard, painted houses and rooms. She knew him only by sight. In
her mind she always associated him with the sign over his premises
in Trafalgar Road, "Yardley Bros., Authorised plumbers. Painters.
Decorators. Paper-hangers. Facia writers." For years, in
childhood, she had passed that sign without knowing what sort of
things 'Bros,' and 'Facia' were, and what was the mysterious
similarity between a plumber and a version of the Bible. She could
not interrupt her husband, he was wholly absorbed; nor could she
stay in the shop (which appeared just a little smaller than
usual), for that would have meant an unsuccessful endeavour to
front the young lady-assistants as though nothing in particular
had happened to her. So she went sedately up the showroom stairs
and thus to the bedroom floors of the house--her house! Mrs.
Povey's house! She even climbed to Constance's old bedroom; her
mother had stripped the bed--that was all, except a slight
diminution of this room, corresponding to that of the shop! Then
to the drawing-room. In the recess outside the drawing-room door
the black box of silver plate still lay. She had expected her
mother to take it; but no! Assuredly her mother was one to do
things handsomely--when she did them. In the drawing-room, not a
tassel of an antimacassar touched! Yes, the fire-screen, the
luscious bunch of roses on an expanse of mustard, which Constance
had worked for her mother years ago, was gone! That her mother
should have clung to just that one souvenir, out of all the heavy
opulence of the drawing-room, touched Constance intimately. She
perceived that if she could not talk to her husband she must write
to her mother. And she sat down at the oval table and wrote,
"Darling mother, I am sure you will be very surprised to hear. ...
She means it. ... I think she is making a serious mistake. Ought I
to put an advertisement in the Signal, or will it do if. ...
Please write by return. We are back and have enjoyed ourselves
very much. Sam says he enjoys getting up late. ..." And so on to
the last inch of the fourth scolloped page.
She was obliged to revisit the shop for a stamp, stamps being kept
in Mr. Povey's desk in the corner--a high desk, at which you
stood. Mr. Povey was now in earnest converse with Mr. Yardley at
the door, and twilight, which began a full hour earlier in the
shop than in the Square, had cast faint shadows in corners behind
counters.
"Will you just run out with this to the pillar, Miss Dadd?"
"With pleasure, Mrs. Povey."
"Where are you going to?" Mr. Povey interrupted his conversation
to stop the flying girl.
"She's just going to the post for me," Constance called out from
the region of the till.
"Oh! All right!"
A trifle! A nothing! Yet somehow, in the quiet customerless shop,
the episode, with the scarce perceptible difference in Samuel's
tone at his second remark, was delicious to Constance. Somehow it
was the REAL beginning of her wifehood. (There had been about nine
other real beginnings in the past fortnight.)
Mr. Povey came in to supper, laden with ledgers and similar works
which Constance had never even pretended to understand. It was a
sign from him that the honeymoon was over. He was proprietor now,
and his ardour for ledgers most justifiable. Still, there was the
question of her servant.
"Never!" he exclaimed, when she told him all about the end of the
world. A 'never' which expressed extreme astonishment and the
liveliest concern!
But Constance had anticipated that he would have been just a
little more knocked down, bowled over, staggered, stunned,
flabbergasted. In a swift gleam of insight she saw that she had
been in danger of forgetting her role of experienced, capable
married woman.
"I shall have to set about getting a fresh one," she said hastily,
with an admirable assumption of light and easy casualness.
Mr. Povey seemed to think that Hollins would suit Maggie pretty
well. He made no remark to the betrothed when she answered the
final bell of the night.
He opened his ledgers, whistling.
"I think I shall go up, dear," said Constance. "I've a lot of
things to put away."
"Do," said he. "Call out when you've done."
II
"Sam!" she cried from the top of the crooked stairs.
No answer. The door at the foot was closed.
"Sam!"
"Hello?" Distantly, faintly.
"I've done all I'm going to do to-night."
And she ran back along the corridor, a white figure in the deep
gloom, and hurried into bed, and drew the clothes up to her chin.
In the life of a bride there are some dramatic moments. If she has
married the industrious apprentice, one of those moments occurs
when she first occupies the sacred bed-chamber of her ancestors,
and the bed on which she was born. Her parents' room had always
been to Constance, if not sacred, at least invested with a certain
moral solemnity. She could not enter it as she would enter another
room. The course of nature, with its succession of deaths,
conceptions, and births, slowly makes such a room august with a
mysterious quality which interprets the grandeur of mere existence
and imposes itself on all. Constance had the strangest sensations
in that bed, whose heavy dignity of ornament symbolized a past
age; sensations of sacrilege and trespass, of being a naughty girl
to whom punishment would accrue for this shocking freak. Not since
she was quite tiny had she slept in that bed--one night with her
mother, before her father's seizure, when he had been away. What a
limitless, unfathomable bed it was then! Now it was just a bed--so
she had to tell herself--like any other bed. The tiny child that,
safely touching its mother, had slept in the vast expanse, seemed
to her now a pathetic little thing; its image made her feel
melancholy. And her mind dwelt on sad events: the death of her
father, the flight of darling Sophia; the immense grief, and the
exile, of her mother. She esteemed that she knew what life was,
and that it was grim. And she sighed. But the sigh was an
affectation, meant partly to convince herself that she was grown-
up, and partly to keep her in countenance in the intimidating bed.
This melancholy was factitious, was less than transient foam on
the deep sea of her joy. Death and sorrow and sin were dim shapes
to her; the ruthless egoism of happiness blew them away with a
puff, and their wistful faces vanished. To see her there in the
bed, framed in mahogany and tassels, lying on her side, with her
young glowing cheeks, and honest but not artless gaze, and the
rich curve of her hip lifting the counterpane, one would have said
that she had never heard of aught but love.
Mr. Povey entered, the bridegroom, quickly, firmly, carrying it
off rather well, but still self-conscious. "After all," his
shoulders were trying to say, "what's the difference between this
bedroom and the bedroom of a boarding-house? Indeed, ought we not
to feel more at home here? Besides, confound it, we've been
married a fortnight!"
"Doesn't it give you a funny feeling, sleeping in this room? It
does me," said Constance. Women, even experienced women, are so
foolishly frank. They have no decency, no self-respect.
"Really?" replied Mr. Povey, with loftiness, as who should say:
"What an extraordinary thing that a reasonable creature can have
such fancies! Now to me this room is exactly like any other room."
And he added aloud, glancing away from the glass, where he was
unfastening his necktie: "It's not a bad room at all." This, with
the judicial air of an auctioneer.
Not for an instant did he deceive Constance, who read his real
sensations with accuracy. But his futile poses did not in the
slightest degree lessen her respect for him. On the contrary, she
admired him the more for them; they were a sort of embroidery on
the solid stuff of his character. At that period he could not do
wrong for her. The basis of her regard for him was, she often
thought, his honesty, his industry, his genuine kindliness of act,
his grasp of the business, his perseverance, his passion for doing
at once that which had to be done. She had the greatest admiration
for his qualities, and he was in her eyes an indivisible whole;
she could not admire one part of him and frown upon another.
Whatever he did was good because he did it. She knew that some
people were apt to smile at certain phases of his individuality;
she knew that far down in her mother's heart was a suspicion that
she had married ever so little beneath her. But this knowledge did
not disturb her. She had no doubt as to the correctness of her own
estimate.
Mr. Povey was an exceedingly methodical person, and he was also
one of those persons who must always be 'beforehand' with time.
Thus at night he would arrange his raiment so that in the morning
it might be reassumed in the minimum of minutes. He was not a man,
for example, to leave the changing of studs from one shirt to
another till the morrow. Had it been practicable, he would have
brushed his hair the night before. Constance already loved to
watch his meticulous preparations. She saw him now go into his old
bedroom and return with a paper collar, which he put on the
dressing-table next to a black necktie. His shop-suit was laid out
on a chair.
"Oh, Sam!" she exclaimed impulsively, "you surely aren't going to
begin wearing those horrid paper collars again!" During the
honeymoon he had worn linen collars.
Her tone was perfectly gentle, but the remark, nevertheless,
showed a lack of tact. It implied that all his life Mr. Povey had
been enveloping his neck in something which was horrid. Like all
persons with a tendency to fall into the ridiculous, Mr. Povey was
exceedingly sensitive to personal criticisms. He flushed darkly.
"I didn't know they were 'horrid,'" he snapped. He was hurt and
angry. Anger had surprised him unawares.
Both of them suddenly saw that they were standing on the edge of a
chasm, and drew back. They had imagined themselves to be wandering
safely in a flowered meadow, and here was this bottomless chasm!
It was most disconcerting.
Mr. Povey's hand hovered undecided over the collar. "However--" he
muttered.
She could feel that he was trying with all his might to be gentle
and pacific. And she was aghast at her own stupid clumsiness, she
so experienced!
"Just as you like, dear," she said quickly. "Please!"
"Oh no!" And he did his best to smile, and went off gawkily with
the collar and came back with a linen one.
Her passion for him burned stronger than ever. She knew then that
she did not love him for his good qualities, but for something
boyish and naive that there was about him, an indescribable
something that occasionally, when his face was close to hers, made
her dizzy.
The chasm had disappeared. In such moments, when each must pretend
not to have seen or even suspected the chasm, small-talk is
essential.
"Wasn't that Mr. Yardley in the shop to-night?" began Constance.
"Yes."
"What did he want?"
"I'd sent for him. He's going to paint us a signboard."
Useless for Samuel to make-believe that nothing in this world is
more ordinary than a signboard.
"Oh!" murmured Constance. She said no more, the episode of the
paper collar having weakened her self-confidence.
But a signboard!
What with servants, chasms, and signboards, Constance considered
that her life as a married woman would not be deficient in
excitement. Long afterwards, she fell asleep, thinking of Sophia.
III
A few days later Constance was arranging the more precious of her
wedding presents in the parlour; some had to be wrapped in tissue
and in brown paper and then tied with string and labelled; others
had special cases of their own, leather without and velvet within.
Among the latter was the resplendent egg-stand holding twelve
silver-gilt egg-cups and twelve chased spoons to match, presented
by Aunt Harriet. In the Five Towns' phrase, 'it must have cost
money.' Even if Mr. and Mrs. Povey had ten guests or ten children,
and all the twelve of them were simultaneously gripped by a desire
to eat eggs at breakfast or tea--even in this remote contingency
Aunt Harriet would have been pained to see the egg-stand in use;
such treasures are not designed for use. The presents, few in
number, were mainly of this character, because, owing to her
mother's heroic cession of the entire interior, Constance already
possessed every necessary. The fewness of the presents was
accounted for by the fact that the wedding had been strictly
private and had taken place at Axe. There is nothing like secrecy
in marriage for discouraging the generous impulses of one's
friends. It was Mrs. Baines, abetted by both the chief parties,
who had decided that the wedding should be private and secluded.
Sophia's wedding had been altogether too private and secluded; but
the casting of a veil over Constance's (whose union was
irreproachable) somehow justified, after the event, the
circumstances of Sophia's, indicating as it did that Mrs. Baines
believed in secret weddings on principle. In such matters Mrs.
Baines was capable of extraordinary subtlety.
And while Constance was thus taking her wedding presents with due
seriousness, Maggie was cleaning the steps that led from the
pavement of King Street to the side-door, and the door was ajar.
It was a fine June morning.
Suddenly, over the sound of scouring, Constance heard a dog's low
growl and then the hoarse voice of a man:
"Mester in, ***?"
"Happen he is, happen he isn't," came Maggie's answer. She had no
fancy for being called ***.
Constance went to the door, not merely from curiosity, but from a
feeling that her authority and her responsibilities as house-
mistress extended to the pavement surrounding the house.
The famous James Boon, of Buck Row, the greatest dog-fancier in
the Five Towns, stood at the bottom of the steps: a tall, fat man,
clad in stiff, stained brown and smoking a black clay pipe less
than three inches long. Behind him attended two bull-dogs.
"Morning, missis!" cried Boon, cheerfully. "I've heerd tell as th'
mister is looking out for a dog, as you might say."
"I don't stay here with them animals a-sniffing at me--no, that I
don't!" observed Maggie, picking herself up.
"Is he?" Constance hesitated. She knew that Samuel had vaguely
referred to dogs; she had not, however, imagined that he regarded
a dog as aught but a beautiful dream. No dog had ever put paw into
that house, and it seemed impossible that one should ever do so.
As for those beasts of prey on the pavement ...!
"Ay!" said James Boon, calmly.
"I'll tell him you're here," said Constance. "But I don't know if
he's at liberty. He seldom is at this time of day. Maggie, you'd
better come in."
She went slowly to the shop, full of fear for the future.
"Sam," she whispered to her husband, who was writing at his desk,
"here's a man come to see you about a dog."
Assuredly he was taken aback. Still, he behaved with much presence
of mind.
"Oh, about a dog! Who is it?"
"It's that Jim Boon. He says he's heard you want one."
The renowned name of Jim Boon gave him pause; but he had to go
through with the affair, and he went through with it, though
nervously. Constance followed his agitated footsteps to the side-
door.
"Morning, Boon."
"Morning, master."
They began to talk dogs, Mr. Povey, for his part, with due caution.
"Now, there's a dog!" said Boon, pointing to one of the bull-dogs,
a miracle of splendid ugliness.
"Yes," responded Mr. Povey, insincerely. "He is a beauty. What's
it worth now, at a venture?"
"I'll tak' a hundred and twenty sovereigns for her," said Boon.
"Th' other's a bit cheaper--a hundred."
"Oh, Sam!" gasped Constance.
And even Mr. Povey nearly lost his nerve. "That's more than I want
to give," said he timidly.
"But look at her!" Boon persisted, roughly snatching up the more
expensive animal, and displaying her cannibal teeth.
Mr. Povey shook his head. Constance glanced away.
"That's not quite the sort of dog I want," said Mr. Povey.
"Fox-terrier?"
"Yes, that's more like," Mr. Povey agreed eagerly.
"What'll ye run to?"
"Oh," said Mr. Povey, largely, "I don't know."
"Will ye run to a tenner?"
"I thought of something cheaper."
"Well, hoo much? Out wi' it, mester."
"Not more than two pounds," said Mr. Povey. He would have said one
pound had he dared. The prices of dogs amazed him.
"I thowt it was a dog as ye wanted!" said Boon. "Look 'ere,
mester. Come up to my yard and see what I've got."
"I will," said Mr. Povey.
"And bring missis along too. Now, what about a cat for th' missis?
Or a gold-fish?"
The end of the episode was that a young lady aged some twelve
months entered the Povey household on trial. Her exiguous legs
twinkled all over the parlour, and she had the oddest appearance
in the parlour. But she was so confiding, so affectionate, so
timorous, and her black nose was so icy in that hot weather, that
Constance loved her violently within an hour. Mr. Povey made rules
for her. He explained to her that she must never, never go into
the shop. But she went, and he whipped her to the squealing point,
and Constance cried an instant, while admiring her husband's
firmness.
The dog was not all.
On another day Constance, prying into the least details of the
parlour, discovered a box of cigars inside the lid of the
harmonium, on the keyboard. She was so unaccustomed to cigars that
at first she did not realize what the object was. Her father had
never smoked, nor drunk intoxicants; nor had Mr. Critchlow. Nobody
had ever smoked in that house, where tobacco had always been
regarded as equally licentious with cards, 'the devil's
playthings.' Certainly Samuel had never smoked in the house,
though the sight of the cigar-box reminded Constance of an
occasion when her mother had announced an incredulous suspicion
that Mr. Povey, fresh from an excursion into the world on a
Thursday evening, 'smelt of smoke.'
She closed the harmonium and kept silence.
That very night, coming suddenly into the parlour, she caught
Samuel at the harmonium. The lid went down with a resonant ***
that awoke sympathetic vibrations in every corner of the room.
"What is it?" Constance inquired, jumping.
"Oh, nothing!" replied Mr. Povey, carelessly. Each was deceiving
the other: Mr. Povey hid his crime, and Constance hid her
knowledge of his crime. False, false! But this is what marriage
is.
And the next day Constance had a visit in the shop from a possible
new servant, recommended to her by Mr. Holl, the grocer.
"Will you please step this way?" said Constance, with affable
primness, steeped in the novel sense of what it is to be the sole
responsible mistress of a vast household. She preceded the girl to
the parlour, and as they passed the open door of Mr. Povey's
cutting-out room, Constance had the clear vision and titillating
odour of her husband smoking a cigar. He was in his shirt-sleeves,
calmly cutting out, and Fan (the lady companion), at watch on the
bench, yapped at the possible new servant.
"I think I shall try that girl," said she to Samuel at tea. She
said nothing as to the cigar; nor did he.
On the following evening, after supper, Mr. Povey burst out:
"I think I'll have a weed! You didn't know I smoked, did you?"
Thus Mr. Povey came out in his true colours as a blood, a blade,
and a gay spark.
But dogs and cigars, disconcerting enough in their degree, were to
the signboard, when the signboard at last came, as skim milk is to
hot brandy. It was the signboard that, more startlingly than
anything else, marked the dawn of a new era in St. Luke's Square.
Four men spent a day and a half in fixing it; they had ladders,
ropes, and pulleys, and two of them dined on the flat lead roof of
the projecting shop-windows. The signboard was thirty-five feet
long and two feet in depth; over its centre was a semicircle about
three feet in radius; this semicircle bore the legend, judiciously
disposed, "S. Povey. Late." All the sign-board proper was devoted
to the words, "John Baines," in gold letters a foot and a half
high, on a green ground.
The Square watched and wondered; and murmured: "Well, bless us!
What next?"
It was agreed that in giving paramount importance to the name of
his late father-in-law, Mr. Povey had displayed a very nice
feeling.
Some asked with glee: "What'll the old lady have to say?"
Constance asked herself this, but not with glee. When Constance
walked down the Square homewards, she could scarcely bear to look
at the sign; the thought of what her mother might say frightened
her. Her mother's first visit of state was imminent, and Aunt
Harriet was to accompany her. Constance felt almost sick as the
day approached. When she faintly hinted her apprehensions to
Samuel, he demanded, as if surprised--
"Haven't you mentioned it in one of your letters?"
"Oh NO!"
"If that's all," said he, with bravado, "I'll write and tell her
myself."
IV
So that Mrs. Baines was duly apprised of the signboard before her
arrival. The letter written by her to Constance after receiving
Samuel's letter, which was merely the amiable epistle of a son-in-
law anxious to be a little more than correct, contained no
reference to the signboard. This silence, however, did not in the
least allay Constance's apprehensions as to what might occur when
her mother and Samuel met beneath the signboard itself. It was
therefore with a fearful as well as an eager, loving heart that
Constance opened her side-door and ran down the steps when the
waggonette stopped in King Street on the Thursday morning of the
great visit of the sisters. But a surprise awaited her. Aunt
Harriet had not come. Mrs. Baines explained, as she soundly kissed
her daughter, that at the last moment Aunt Harriet had not felt
well enough to undertake the journey. She sent her fondest love,
and cake. Her pains had recurred. It was these mysterious pains
which had prevented the sisters from coming to Bursley earlier.
The word "cancer"--the continual terror of stout women--had been
on their lips, without having been actually uttered; then there
was a surcease, and each was glad that she had refrained from the
dread syllables. In view of the recurrence, it was not unnatural
that Mrs. Baines's vigorous cheerfulness should be somewhat
forced.
"What is it, do you think?" Constance inquired.
Mrs. Baines pushed her lips out and raised her eyebrows--a gesture
which meant that the pains might mean God knew what.
"I hope she'll be all right alone," observed Constance. "Of
course," said Mrs. Baines, quickly. "But you don't suppose I was
going to disappoint you, do you?" she added, looking round as if
to defy the fates in general.
This speech, and its tone, gave intense pleasure to Constance;
and, laden with parcels, they mounted the stairs together, very
content with each other, very happy in the discovery that they
were still mother and daughter, very intimate in an inarticulate
way.
Constance had imagined long, detailed, absorbing, and highly novel
conversations between herself and her mother upon this their first
meeting after her marriage. But alone in the bedroom, and with a
clear half-hour to dinner, they neither of them seemed to have a
great deal to impart.
Mrs. Baines slowly removed her light mantle and laid it with
precautions on the white damask counterpane. Then, fingering her
weeds, she glanced about the chamber. Nothing was changed. Though
Constance had, previous to her marriage, envisaged certain
alterations, she had determined to postpone them, feeling that one
revolutionist in a house was enough.
"Well, my chick, you all right?" said Mrs. Baines, with hearty and
direct energy, gazing straight into her daughter's eyes.
Constance perceived that the question was universal in its
comprehensiveness, the one unique expression that the mother would
give to her maternal concern and curiosity, and that it condensed
into six words as much interest as would have overflowed into a
whole day of the chatter of some mothers. She met the candid
glance, flushing.
"Oh YES!" she answered with ecstatic fervour. "Perfectly!"
And Mrs. Baines nodded, as if dismissing THAT. "You're stouter,"
said she, curtly. "If you aren't careful you'll be as big as any
of us."
"Oh, mother!"
The interview fell to a lower plane of emotion. It even fell as
far as Maggie. What chiefly preoccupied Constance was a subtle
change in her mother. She found her mother fussy in trifles. Her
manner of laying down her mantle, of smoothing out her gloves, and
her anxiety that her bonnet should not come to harm, were rather
trying, were perhaps, in the very slightest degree, pitiable. It
was nothing; it was barely perceptible, and yet it was enough to
alter Constance's mental attitude to her mother. "Poor dear!"
thought Constance. "I'm afraid she's not what she was." Incredible
that her mother could have age in less than six weeks! Constance
did not allow for the chemistry that had been going on in herself.
The encounter between Mrs. Baines and her son-in-law was of the
most satisfactory nature. He was waiting in the parlour for her to
descend. He made himself exceedingly agreeable, kissing her, and
flattering her by his evidently sincere desire to please. He
explained that he had kept an eye open for the waggonette, but had
been called away. His "Dear me!" on learning about Aunt Harriet
lacked nothing in conviction, though both women knew that his
affection for Aunt Harriet would never get the better of his
reason. To Constance, her husband's behaviour was marvellously
perfect. She had not suspected him to be such a man of the world.
And her eyes said to her mother, quite unconsciously: "You see,
after all, you didn't rate Sam as high as you ought to have done.
Now you see your mistake."
As they sat waiting for dinner, Constance and Mrs. Baines on the
sofa, and Samuel on the edge of the nearest rocking-chair, a small
scuffling noise was heard outside the door which gave on the
kitchen steps, the door yielded to pressure, and Fan rushed
importantly in, deranging mats. Fan's nose had been hinting to her
that she was behind the times, not up-to-date in the affairs of
the household, and she had hurried from the kitchen to make
inquiries. It occurred to her en route that she had been washed
that morning. The spectacle of Mrs. Baines stopped her. She stood,
with her legs slightly out-stretched, her nose lifted, her ears
raking forward, her bright eyes blinking, and her tail undecided.
"I was sure I'd never smelt anything like that before," she was
saying to herself, as she stared at Mrs. Baines.
And Mrs. Baines, staring at Fan, had a similar though not the same
sentiment. The silence was terrible. Constance took on the mien of
a culprit, and Sam had obviously lost his easy bearing of a man of
the world. Mrs. Baines was merely thunderstruck.
A dog!
Suddenly Fan's tail began to wag more quickly; and then, having
looked in vain for encouragement to her master and mistress, she
gave one mighty spring and alighted in Mrs. Baines's lap. It was
an aim she could not have missed. Constance emitted an "Oh, FAN!"
of shocked terror, and Samuel betrayed his nervous tension by an
involuntary movement. But Fan had settled down into that titanic
lap as into heaven. It was a greater flattery than Mr. Povey's.
"So your name's Fan!" murmured Mrs. Baines, stroking the animal.
"You are a dear!"
"Yes, isn't she?" said Constance, with inconceivable rapidity.
The danger was past. Thus, without any explanation, Fan became an
accepted fact.
The next moment Maggie served the Yorkshire pudding.
"Well, Maggie," said Mrs. Baines. "So you are going to get married
this time? When is it?"
"Sunday, ma'am."
"And you leave here on Saturday?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Well, I must have a talk with you before I go."
During the dinner, not a word as to the signboard! Several times
the conversation curved towards that signboard in the most
alarming fashion, but invariably it curved away again, like a
train from another train when two trains are simultaneously
leaving a station. Constance had frights, so serious as to destroy
her anxiety about the cookery. In the end she comprehended that
her mother had adopted a silently disapproving attitude. Fan was
socially very useful throughout the repast.
After dinner Constance was on pins lest Samuel should light a
cigar. She had not requested him not to do so, for though she was
entirely sure of his affection, she had already learned that a
husband is possessed by a demon of contrariety which often forces
him to violate his higher feelings. However, Samuel did not light
a cigar. He went off to superintend the shutting-up of the shop,
while Mrs. Baines chatted with Maggie and gave her L5 for a
wedding present. Then Mr. Critchlow called to offer his
salutations.
A little before tea Mrs. Baines announced that she would go out
for a short walk by herself.
"Where has she gone to?" smiled Samuel, superiorly, as with
Constance at the window he watched her turn down King Street
towards the church.
"I expect she has gone to look at father's grave," said Constance.
"Oh!" muttered Samuel, apologetically.
Constance was mistaken. Before reaching the church, Mrs. Baines
deviated to the right, got into Brougham Street and thence, by
Acre Lane, into Oldcastle Street, whose steep she climbed. Now,
Oldcastle Street ends at the top of St. Luke's Square, and from
the corner Mrs. Baines had an excellent view of the signboard. It
being Thursday afternoon, scarce a soul was about. She returned to
her daughter's by the same extraordinary route, and said not a
word on entering. But she was markedly cheerful.
The waggonette came after tea, and Mrs. Baines made her final
preparations to depart. The visit had proved a wonderful success;
it would have been utterly perfect if Samuel had not marred it at
the very door of the waggonette. Somehow, he contrived to be
talking of Christmas. Only a person of Samuel's native clumsiness
would have mentioned Christmas in July.
"You know you'll spend Christmas with us!" said he into the
waggonette.
"Indeed I shan't!" replied Mrs. Baines. "Aunt Harriet and I will
expect you at Axe. We've already settled that."
Mr. Povey bridled. "Oh no!" he protested, hurt by this
summariness.
Having had no relatives, except his cousin the confectioner, for
many years, he had dreamt of at last establishing a family
Christmas under his own roof, and the dream was dear to him.
Mrs. Baines said nothing. "We couldn't possibly leave the shop,"
said Mr. Povey.
"Nonsense!" Mrs. Baines retorted, putting her lips together.
"Christmas Day is on a Monday."
The waggonette in starting *** her head towards the door and
set all her curls shaking. No white in those curls yet, scarcely a
touch of grey!
"I shall take good care we don't go there anyway," Mr. Povey
mumbled, in his heat, half to himself and half to Constance.
He had stained the brightness of the day.
CHAPTER II
CHRISTMAS AND THE FUTURE
I
Mr. Povey was playing a hymn tune on the harmonium, it having been
decided that no one should go to chapel. Constance, in mourning,
with a white apron over her dress, sat on a hassock in front of
the fire; and near her, in a rocking-chair, Mrs. Baines swayed
very gently to and fro. The weather was extremely cold. Mr.
Povey's mittened hands were blue and red; but, like many
shopkeepers, he had apparently grown almost insensible to vagaries
of temperature. Although the fire was immense and furious, its
influence, owing to the fact that the mediaeval grate was designed
to heat the flue rather than the room, seemed to die away at the
borders of the fender. Constance could not have been much closer
to it without being a salamander. The era of good old-fashioned
Christmases, so agreeably picturesque for the poor, was not yet at
an end.
Yes, Samuel Povey had won the battle concerning the locus of the
family Christmas. But he had received the help of a formidable
ally, death. Mrs. Harriet Maddack had passed away, after an
operation, leaving her house and her money to her sister. The
solemn rite of her interment had deeply affected all the
respectability of the town of Axe, where the late Mr. Maddack had
been a figure of consequence; it had even shut up the shop in St.
Luke's Square for a whole day. It was such a funeral as Aunt
Harriet herself would have approved, a tremendous ceremonial which
left on the crushed mind an ineffaceable, intricate impression of
shiny cloth, crape, horses with arching necks and long manes, the
drawl of parsons, cake, port, sighs, and Christian submission to
the inscrutable decrees of Providence. Mrs. Baines had borne
herself with unnatural calmness until the funeral was over: and
then Constance perceived that the remembered mother of her
girlhood existed no longer. For the majority of human souls it
would have been easier to love a virtuous principle, or a
mountain, than to love Aunt Harriet, who was assuredly less a
woman than an institution. But Mrs. Baines had loved her, and she
had been the one person to whom Mrs. Baines looked for support and
guidance. When she died, Mrs. Baines paid the tribute of respect
with the last hoarded remains of her proud fortitude, and
weepingly confessed that the unconquerable had been conquered, the
inexhaustible exhausted; and became old with whitening hair.
She had persisted in her refusal to spend Christmas in Bursley,
but both Constance and Samuel knew that the resistance was only
formal. She soon yielded. When Constance's second new servant took
it into her head to leave a week before Christmas, Mrs. Baines
might have pointed out the finger of Providence at work again, and
this time in her favour. But no! With amazing pliancy she
suggested that she should bring one of her own servants to 'tide
Constance over' Christmas. She was met with all the forms of
loving solicitude, and she found that her daughter and son-in-law
had 'turned out of' the state bedroom in her favour. Intensely
flattered by this attention (which was Mr. Povey's magnanimous
idea), she nevertheless protested strongly. Indeed she 'would not
hear of it.'
"Now, mother, don't be silly," Constance had said firmly. "You
don't expect us to be at all the trouble of moving back again, do
you?" And Mrs. Baines had surrendered in tears.
Thus had come Christmas. Perhaps it was fortunate that, the Axe
servant being not quite the ordinary servant, but a benefactor
where a benefactor was needed, both Constance and her mother
thought it well to occupy themselves in household work, 'sparing'
the benefactor as much as possible. Hence Constance's white
apron.
"There he is!" said Mr. Povey, still playing, but with his eye on
the street.
Constance sprang up eagerly. Then there was a knock on the door.
Constance opened, and an icy blast swept into the room. The
postman stood on the steps, his instrument for knocking (like a
drumstick) in one hand, a large bundle of letters in the other,
and a yawning bag across the pit of his stomach.
"Merry Christmas, ma'am!" cried the postman, trying to keep warm
by cheerfulness.
Constance, taking the letters, responded, while Mr. Povey, playing
the harmonium with his right hand, drew half a crown from his
pocket with the left.
"Here you are!" he said, giving it to Constance, who gave it to
the postman.
Fan, who had been keeping her muzzle warm with the extremity of
her tail on the sofa, jumped down to superintend the transaction.
"Brrr!" vibrated Mr. Povey as Constance shut the door.
"What lots!" Constance exclaimed, rushing to the fire. "Here,
mother! Here, Sam!"
The girl had resumed possession of the woman's body.
Though the Baines family had few friends (sustained hospitality
being little practised in those days) they had, of course, many
acquaintances, and, like other families, they counted their
Christmas cards as an Indian counts scalps. The tale was
satisfactory. There were between thirty and forty envelopes.
Constance extracted Christmas cards rapidly, reading their
contents aloud, and then propping them up on the mantelpiece. Mrs.
Baines assisted. Fan dealt with the envelopes on the floor. Mr.
Povey, to prove that his soul was above toys and gewgaws,
continued to play the harmonium.
"Oh, mother!" Constance murmured in a startled, hesitant voice,
holding an envelope.
"What is it, my chuck?"
"It's----"
The envelope was addressed to "Mrs. and Miss Baines" in large,
perpendicular, dashing characters which Constance instantly
recognised as Sophia's. The stamps were strange, the postmark
'Paris.' Mrs. Baines leaned forward and looked.
"Open it, child," she said.
The envelope contained an English Christmas card of a common type,
a spray of holly with greetings, and on it was written, "I do hope
this will reach you on Christmas morning. Fondest love." No
signature, nor address.
Mrs. Baines took it with a trembling hand, and adjusted her
spectacles. She gazed at it a long time.
"And it has done!" she said, and wept.
She tried to speak again, but not being able to command herself,
held forth the card to Constance and *** her head in the
direction of Mr. Povey. Constance rose and put the card on the
keyboard of the harmonium.
"Sophia!" she whispered.
Mr. Povey stopped playing. "Dear, dear!" he muttered.
Fan, perceiving that nobody was interested in her feats, suddenly
stood still.
Mrs. Baines tried once more to speak, but could not. Then, her
ringlets shaking beneath the band of her weeds, she found her
feet, stepped to the harmonium, and, with a movement almost
convulsive, snatched the card from Mr. Povey, and returned to her
chair.
Mr. Povey abruptly left the room, followed by Fan. Both the women
were in tears, and he was tremendously surprised to discover a
dangerous lump in his own throat. The beautiful and imperious
vision of Sophia, Sophia as she had left them, innocent, wayward,
had swiftly risen up before him and made even him a woman too! Yet
he had never liked Sophia. The awful secret wound in the family
pride revealed itself to him as never before, and he felt
intensely the mother's tragedy, which she carried in her breast as
Aunt Harriet had carried a cancer.
At dinner he said suddenly to Mrs. Baines, who still wept: "Now,
mother, you must cheer up, you know."
"Yes, I must," she said quickly. And she did do.
Neither Samuel nor Constance saw the card again. Little was said.
There was nothing to say. As Sophia had given no address she must
be still ashamed of her situation. But she had thought of her
mother and sister. She ... she did not even know that Constance
was married ... What sort of a place was Paris? To Bursley, Paris
was nothing but the site of a great exhibition which had recently
closed.
Through the influence of Mrs. Baines a new servant was found for
Constance in a village near Axe, a raw, comely girl who had never
been in a 'place.' And through the post it was arranged that this
innocent should come to the cave on the thirty-first of December.
In obedience to the safe rule that servants should never be
allowed to meet for the interchange of opinions, Mrs. Baines
decided to leave with her own servant on the thirtieth. She would
not be persuaded to spend the New Year in the Square. On the
twenty-ninth poor Aunt Maria died all of a sudden in her cottage
in Brougham Street. Everybody was duly distressed, and in
particular Mrs. Baines's demeanour under this affliction showed
the perfection of correctness. But she caused it to be understood
that she should not remain for the funeral. Her nerves would be
unequal to the ordeal; and, moreover, her servant must not stay to
corrupt the new girl, nor could Mrs. Baines think of sending her
servant to Axe in advance, to spend several days in idle gossip
with her colleague.
This decision took the backbone out of Aunt Maria's funeral, which
touched the extreme of modesty: a hearse and a one-horse coach.
Mr. Povey was glad, because he happened to be very busy. An hour
before his mother-in-law's departure he came into the parlour with
the proof of a poster.
"What is that, Samuel?" asked Mrs. Baines, not dreaming of the
blow that awaited her.
"It's for my first Annual Sale," replied Mr. Povey with false
tranquillity.
Mrs. Baines merely tossed her head. Constance, happily for
Constance, was not present at this final defeat of the old order.
Had she been there, she would certainly not have known where to
look.
II
"Forty next birthday!" Mr. Povey exclaimed one day, with an
expression and in a tone that were at once mock-serious and
serious. This was on his thirty-ninth birthday.
Constance was startled. She had, of course, been aware that they
were getting older, but she had never realized the phenomenon.
Though customers occasionally remarked that Mr. Povey was stouter,
and though when she helped him to measure himself for a new suit
of clothes the tape proved the fact, he had not changed for her.
She knew that she too had become somewhat stouter; but for
herself, she remained exactly the same Constance. Only by
recalling dates and by calculations could she really grasp that
she had been married a little over six years and not a little over
six months. She had to admit that, if Samuel would be forty next
birthday, she would be twenty-seven next birthday. But it would
not be a real twenty-seven; nor would Sam's forty be a real forty,
like other people's twenty-sevens and forties. Not long since she
had been in the habit of regarding a man of forty as senile, as
practically in his grave.
She reflected, and the more she reflected the more clearly she saw
that after all the almanacs had not lied. Look at Fan! Yes, it
must be five years since the memorable morning when doubt first
crossed the minds of Samuel and Constance as to Fan's moral
principles. Samuel's enthusiasm for dogs was equalled by his
ignorance of the dangers to which a young female of temperament
may be exposed, and he was much disturbed as doubt developed into
certainty. Fan, indeed, was the one being who did not suffer from
shock and who had no fears as to the results. The animal, having a
pure mind, was bereft of modesty. Sundry enormities had she
committed, but none to rank with this one! The result was four
quadrupeds recognizable as fox-terriers. Mr. Povey breathed again.
Fan had had more luck than she deserved, for the result might have
been simply anything. Her owners forgave her and disposed of these
fruits of iniquity, and then married her lawfully to a husband who
was so high up in the world that he could demand a dowry. And now
Fan was a grandmother, with fixed ideas and habits, and a son in
the house, and various grandchildren scattered over the town. Fan
was a sedate and disillusioned dog. She knew the world as it was,
and in learning it she had taught her owners above a bit.
Then there was Maggie Hollins. Constance could still vividly
recall the self-consciousness with which she had one day received
Maggie and the heir of the Hollinses; but it was a long time ago.
After staggering half the town by the production of this infant
(of which she nearly died) Maggie allowed the angels to waft it
away to heaven, and everybody said that she ought to be very
thankful--at her age. Old women dug up out of their minds
forgotten histories of the eccentricities of the goddess Lucina.
Mrs. Baines was most curiously interested; she talked freely to
Constance, and Constance began to see what an incredible town
Bursley had always been--and she never suspected it! Maggie was
now mother of other children, and the draggled, lame mistress of a
drunken home, and looked sixty. Despite her prophecy, her husband
had conserved his 'habits.' The Poveys ate all the fish they
could, and sometimes more than they enjoyed, because on his sober
days Hollins invariably started his round at the shop, and
Constance had to buy for Maggie's sake. The worst of the worthless
husband was that he seldom failed to be cheery and polite. He
never missed asking after the health of Mrs. Baines. And when
Constance replied that her mother was 'pretty well considering,'
but that she would not come over to Bursley again until the Axe
railway was opened, as she could not stand the drive, he would
shake his grey head and be sympathetically gloomy for an instant.
All these changes in six years! The almanacs were in the right of
it.
But nothing had happened to her. Gradually she had obtained a sure
ascendency over her mother, yet without seeking it, merely as the
outcome of time's influences on her and on her mother
respectively. Gradually she had gained skill and use in the
management of her household and of her share of the shop, so that
these machines ran smoothly and effectively and a sudden
contretemps no longer frightened her. Gradually she had
constructed a chart of Samuel's individuality, with the submerged
rocks and perilous currents all carefully marked, so that she
could now voyage unalarmed in those seas. But nothing happened.
Unless their visits to Buxton could be called happenings!
Decidedly the visit to Buxton was the one little hill that rose
out of the level plain of the year. They had formed the annual
habit of going to Buxton for ten days. They had a way of saying:
"Yes, we always go to Buxton. We went there for our honeymoon, you
know." They had become confirmed Buxtonites, with views concerning
St. Anne's Terrace, the Broad Walk and Peel's Cavern. They could
not dream of deserting their Buxton. It was the sole possible
resort. Was it not the highest town in England? Well, then! They
always stayed at the same lodgings, and grew to be special
favourites of the landlady, who whispered of them to all her other
guests as having come to her house for their honeymoon, and as
never missing a year, and as being most respectable, superior
people in quite a large way of business. Each year they walked out
of Buxton station behind their luggage on a truck, full of joy and
pride because they knew all the landmarks, and the lie of all the
streets, and which were the best shops.
At the beginning, the notion of leaving the shop to hired custody
had seemed almost fantastic, and the preparations for absence had
been very complicated. Then it was that Miss Insull had detached
herself from the other young lady assistants as a creature who
could be absolutely trusted. Miss Insull was older than Constance;
she had a bad complexion, and she was not clever, but she was one
of your reliable ones. The six years had witnessed the slow,
steady rise of Miss Insull. Her employers said 'Miss Insull' in a
tone quite different from that in which they said 'Miss Hawkins,'
or 'Miss Dadd.' 'Miss Insull' meant the end of a discussion.
'Better tell Miss Insull.' 'Miss Insull will see to that.' 'I
shall ask Miss Insull.' Miss Insull slept in the house ten nights
every year. Miss Insull had been called into consultation when it
was decided to engage a fourth hand in the shape of an apprentice.
Trade had improved in the point of excellence. It was now admitted
to be good--a rare honour for trade! The coal-mining boom was at
its height, and colliers, in addition to getting drunk, were
buying American organs and expensive bull-terriers. Often they
would come to the shop to purchase cloth for coats for their dogs.
And they would have good cloth. Mr. Povey did not like this. One
day a butty chose for his dog the best cloth of Mr. Povey's shop--
at 12s. a yard. "Will ye make it up? I've gotten th'
measurements," asked the collier. "No, I won't!" said Mr. Povey,
hotly. "And what's more, I won't sell you the cloth either! Cloth
at 12s. a yard on a dog's back indeed! I'll thank you to get out
of my shop!" The incident became historic, in the Square. It
finally established that Mr. Povey was a worthy son-in-law and a
solid and successful man. It vindicated the old pre-eminence of
"Baines's." Some surprise was expressed that Mr. Povey showed no
desire nor tendency towards entering the public life of the town.
But he never would, though a keen satirical critic of the Local
Board in private. And at the chapel he remained a simple private
worshipper, refusing stewardships and trusteeships.
III
Was Constance happy? Of course there was always something on her
mind, something that had to be dealt with, either in the shop or
in the house, something to employ all the skill and experience
which she had acquired. Her life had much in it of laborious
tedium--tedium never-ending and monotonous. And both she and
Samuel worked consistently hard, rising early, 'pushing forward,'
as the phrase ran, and going to bed early from sheer fatigue; week
after week and month after month as season changed imperceptibly
into season. In June and July it would happen to them occasionally
to retire before the last silver of dusk was out of the sky. They
would lie in bed and talk placidly of their daily affairs. There
would be a noise in the street below. "Vaults closing!" Samuel
would say, and yawn. "Yes, it's quite late," Constance would say.
And the Swiss clock would rapidly strike eleven on its coil of
resonant wire. And then, just before she went to sleep, Constance
might reflect upon her destiny, as even the busiest and smoothest
women do, and she would decide that it was kind. Her mother's
gradual decline and lonely life at Axe saddened her. The cards
which came now and then at extremely long intervals from Sophia
had been the cause of more sorrow than joy. The naive ecstasies of
her girlhood had long since departed--the price paid for
experience and self-possession and a true vision of things. The
vast inherent melancholy of the universe did not exempt her. But
as she went to sleep she would be conscious of a vague
contentment. The basis of this contentment was the fact that she
and Samuel comprehended and esteemed each other, and made
allowances for each other. Their characters had been tested and
had stood the test. Affection, love, was not to them a salient
phenomenon in their relations. Habit had inevitably dulled its
glitter. It was like a flavouring, scarce remarked; but had it
been absent, how they would have turned from that dish!
Samuel never, or hardly ever, set himself to meditate upon the
problem whether or not life had come up to his expectations. But
he had, at times, strange sensations which he did not analyze, and
which approached nearer to ecstasy than any feeling of
Constance's. Thus, when he was in one of his dark furies, molten
within and black without, the sudden thought of his wife's
unalterable benignant calm, which nothing could overthrow, might
strike him into a wondering cold. For him she was astoundingly
feminine. She would put flowers on the mantelpiece, and then,
hours afterwards, in the middle of a meal, ask him unexpectedly
what he thought of her 'garden;' and he gradually divined that a
perfunctory reply left her unsatisfied; she wanted a genuine
opinion; a genuine opinion mattered to her. Fancy calling flowers
on a mantelpiece a 'garden'! How charming, how childlike! Then she
had a way, on Sunday mornings, when she descended to the parlour
all ready for chapel, of shutting the door at the foot of the
stairs with a little ***, shaking herself, and turning round
swiftly as if for his inspection, as if saying: "Well, what about
this? Will this do?" A phenomenon always associated in his mind
with the smell of kid gloves! Invariably she asked him about the
colours and cut of her dresses. Would he prefer this, or that? He
could not take such questions seriously until one day he happened
to hint, merely hint, that he was not a thorough-going admirer of
a certain new dress--it was her first new dress after the definite
abandonment of crinolines. She never wore it again. He thought she
was not serious at first, and remonstrated against a joke being
carried too far. She said: "It's not a bit of use you talking, I
shan't wear it again." And then he so far appreciated her
seriousness as to refrain, by discretion, from any comment. The
incident affected him for days. It flattered him; it thrilled him;
but it baffled him. Strange that a woman subject to such caprices
should be so sagacious, capable, and utterly reliable as Constance
was! For the practical and commonsense side of her eternally
compelled his admiration. The very first example of it--her
insistence that the simultaneous absence of both of them from the
shop for half an hour or an hour twice a day would not mean the
immediate downfall of the business--had remained in his mind ever
since. Had she not been obstinate--in her benevolent way--against
the old superstition which he had acquired from his employers,
they might have been eating separately to that day. Then her
handling of her mother during the months of the siege of Paris,
when Mrs. Baines was convinced that her sinful daughter was in
hourly danger of death, had been extraordinarily fine, he
considered. And the sequel, a card for Constance's birthday, had
completely justified her attitude.
Sometimes some blundering fool would jovially exclaim to them:
"What about that baby?"
Or a woman would remark quietly: "I often feel sorry you've no
children."
And they would answer that really they did not know what they
would do if there was a baby. What with the shop and one thing or
another ...! And they were quite sincere.
IV
It is remarkable what a little thing will draw even the most
regular and serious people from the deep groove of their habits.
One morning in March, a boneshaker, an affair on two equal wooden
wheels joined by a bar of iron, in the middle of which was a
wooden saddle, disturbed the gravity of St. Luke's Square. True,
it was probably the first boneshaker that had ever attacked the
gravity of St. Luke's Square. It came out of the shop of Daniel
Povey, the confectioner and baker, and Samuel Povey's celebrated
cousin, in Boulton Terrace. Boulton Terrace formed nearly a right
angle with the Baines premises, and at the corner of the angle
Wedgwood Street and King Street left the Square. The boneshaker
was brought forth by *** Povey, the only son of Daniel, now aged
eleven years, under the superintendence of his father, and the
Square soon perceived that *** had a natural talent for breaking-
in an untrained boneshaker. After a few attempts he could remain
on the back of the machine for at least ten yards, and his feats
had the effect of endowing St. Luke's Square with the
attractiveness of a circus. Samuel Povey watched with candid
interest from the ambush of his door, while the unfortunate young
lady assistants, though aware of the performance that was going
on, dared not stir from the stove. Samuel was tremendously tempted
to sally out boldly, and chat with his cousin about the toy; he
had surely a better right to do so than any other tradesman in the
Square, since he was of the family; but his diffidence prevented
him from moving. Presently Daniel Povey and *** went to the top
of the Square with the machine, opposite Holl's, and ***, being
carefully installed in the saddle, essayed to descend the gentle
paven slopes of the Square. He failed time after time; the machine
had an astonishing way of turning round, running uphill, and then
lying calmly on its side. At this point of ***'s life-history
every shop-door in the Square was occupied by an audience. At last
the boneshaker displayed less unwillingness to obey, and lo! in a
moment *** was riding down the Square, and the spectators held
their breath as if he had been Blondin crossing Niagara. Every
second he ought to have fallen off, but he contrived to keep
upright. Already he had accomplished twenty yards--thirty yards!
It was a miracle that he was performing! The transit continued,
and seemed to occupy hours. And then a faint hope rose in the
breast of the watchers that the prodigy might arrive at the bottom
of the Square. His speed was increasing with his 'nack.' But the
Square was enormous, boundless. Samuel Povey gazed at the
approaching phenomenon, as a bird at a serpent, with bulging,
beady eyes. The child's speed went on increasing and his path grew
straighter. Yes, he would arrive; he would do it! Samuel Povey
involuntarily lifted one leg in his nervous tension. And now the
hope that *** would arrive became a fear, as his pace grew still
more rapid. Everybody lifted one leg, and gaped. And the intrepid
child surged on, and, finally victorious, crashed into the
pavement in front of Samuel at the rate of quite six miles an
hour.
Samuel picked him up, unscathed. And somehow this picking up of
*** invested Samuel with importance, gave him a share in the
glory of the feat itself.
Daniel Povey same running and joyous. "Not so bad for a start,
eh?" exclaimed the great Daniel. Though by no means a simple man,
his pride in his offspring sometimes made him a little naive.
Father and son explained the machine to Samuel, *** incessantly
repeating the exceedingly strange truth that if you felt you were
falling to your right you must turn to your right and vice versa.
Samuel found himself suddenly admitted, as it were, to the inner
fellowship of the boneshaker, exalted above the rest of the
Square. In another adventure more thrilling events occurred. The
fair-haired *** was one of those dangerous, frenzied madcaps who
are born without fear. The secret of the machine had been revealed
to him in his recent transit, and he was silently determining to
surpass himself. Precariously balanced, he descended the Square
again, frowning hard, his teeth set, and actually managed to
swerve into King Street. Constance, in the parlour, saw an
incomprehensible winged thing fly past the window. The cousins
Povey sounded an alarm and protest and ran in pursuit; for the
gradient of King Street is, in the strict sense, steep. Half-way
down King Street *** was travelling at twenty miles an hour, and
heading straight for the church, as though he meant to
disestablish it and perish. The main gate of the churchyard was
open, and that affrighting child, with a lunatic's luck, whizzed
safely through the portals into God's acre. The cousins Povey
discovered him lying on a green grave, clothed in pride. His first
words were: "Dad, did you pick my cap up?" The symbolism of the
amazing ride did not escape the Square; indeed, it was much
discussed.
This incident led to a friendship between the cousins. They formed
a habit of meeting in the Square for a chat. The meetings were the
subject of comment, for Samuel's relations with the greater Daniel
had always been of the most distant. It was understood that Samuel
disapproved of Mrs. Daniel Povey even, more than the majority of
people disapproved of her. Mrs. Daniel Povey, however, was away
from home; probably, had she not been, Samuel would not even have
gone to the length of joining Daniel on the neutral ground of the
open Square. But having once broken the ice, Samuel was glad to be
on terms of growing intimacy with his cousin. The friendship
flattered him, for Daniel, despite his wife, was a figure in a
world larger than Samuel's; moreover, it consecrated his position
as the equal of no matter what tradesman (apprentice though he had
been), and also he genuinely liked and admired Daniel, rather to
his own astonishment.
Every one liked Daniel Povey; he was a favourite among all ranks.
The leading confectioner, a member of the Local Board, and a
sidesman at St. Luke's, he was, and had been for twenty-five
years, very prominent in the town. He was a tall, handsome man,
with a trimmed, greying beard, a jolly smile, and a flashing, dark
eye. His good humour seemed to be permanent. He had dignity
without the slightest stiffness; he was welcomed by his equals and
frankly adored by his inferiors. He ought to have been Chief
Bailiff, for he was rich enough; but there intervened a mysterious
obstacle between Daniel Povey and the supreme honour, a scarcely
tangible impediment which could not be definitely stated. He was
capable, honest, industrious, successful, and an excellent
speaker; and if he did not belong to the austerer section of
society, if, for example, he thought nothing of dropping into the
Tiger for a glass of beer, or of using an oath occasionally, or of
telling a facetious story--well, in a busy, broad-minded town of
thirty thousand inhabitants, such proclivities are no bar whatever
to perfect esteem. But--how is one to phrase it without wronging
Daniel Povey? He was entirely moral; his views were
unexceptionable. The truth is that, for the ruling classes of
Bursley, Daniel Povey was just a little too fanatical a worshipper
of the god Pan. He was one of the remnant who had kept alive the
great Pan tradition from the days of the Regency through the vast,
arid Victorian expanse of years. The flighty character of his wife
was regarded by many as a judgment upon him for the robust
Rabelaisianism of his more private conversation, for his frank
interest in, his eternal preoccupation with, aspects of life and
human activity which, though essential to the divine purpose, are
not openly recognized as such--even by Daniel Poveys. It was not a
question of his conduct; it was a question of the cast of his
mind. If it did not explain his friendship with the rector of St.
Luke's, it explained his departure from the Primitive Methodist
connexion, to which the Poveys as a family had belonged since
Primitive Methodism was created in Turnhill in 1807.
Daniel Povey had a way of assuming that every male was boiling
over with interest in the sacred cult of Pan. The assumption,
though sometimes causing inconvenience at first, usually conquered
by virtue of its inherent truthfulness. Thus it fell out with
Samuel. Samuel had not suspected that Pan had silken cords to draw
him. He had always averted his eyes from the god--that is to say,
within reason. Yet now Daniel, on perhaps a couple of fine
mornings a week, in full Square, with Fan sitting behind on the
cold stones, and Mr. Critchlow ironic at his door in a long white
apron, would entertain Samuel Povey for half an hour with Pan's
most intimate lore, and Samuel Povey would not blench. He would,
on the contrary, stand up to Daniel like a little man, and pretend
with all his might to be, potentially, a perfect arch-priest of
the god. Daniel taught him a lot; turned over the page of life for
him, as it were, and, showing the reverse side, seemed to say:
"You were missing all that." Samuel gazed upwards at the handsome
long nose and rich lips of his elder cousin, so experienced, so
agreeable, so renowned, so esteemed, so philosophic, and admitted
to himself that he had lived to the age of forty in a state of
comparative boobyism. And then he would gaze downwards at the
faint patch of flour on Daniel's right leg, and conceive that life
was, and must be, life.
Not many weeks after his initiation into the cult he was startled
by Constance's preoccupied face one evening. Now, a husband of six
years' standing, to whom it has not happened to become a father,
is not easily startled by such a face as Constance wore. Years ago
he had frequently been startled, had frequently lived in suspense
for a few days. But he had long since grown impervious to these
alarms. And now he was startled again--but as a man may be
startled who is not altogether surprised at being startled. And
seven endless days passed, and Samuel and Constance glanced at
each other like guilty things, whose secret refuses to be kept.
Then three more days passed, and another three. Then Samuel Povey
remarked in a firm, masculine, fact-fronting tone:
"Oh, there's no doubt about it!"
And they glanced at each other like conspirators who have lighted
a fuse and cannot take refuge in flight. Their eyes said
continually, with a delicious, an enchanting mixture of ingenuous
modesty and fearful joy:
"Well, we've gone and done it!"
There it was, the incredible, incomprehensible future--coming!
Samuel had never correctly imagined the manner of its heralding.
He had imagined in his early simplicity that one day Constance,
blushing, might put her mouth to his ear and whisper--something
positive. It had not occurred in the least like that. But things
are so obstinately, so incurably unsentimental.
"I think we ought to drive over and tell mother, on Sunday," said
Constance.
His impulse was to reply, in his grand, offhand style: "Oh, a
letter will do!"
But he checked himself and said, with careful deference: "You
think that will be better than writing?"
All was changed. He braced every fibre to meet destiny, and to
help Constance to meet it.
The weather threatened on Sunday. He went to Axe without
Constance. His cousin drove him there in a dog-cart, and he
announced that he should walk home, as the exercise would do him
good. During the drive Daniel, in whom he had not confided,
chattered as usual, and Samuel pretended to listen with the same
attitude as usual; but secretly he despised Daniel for a man who
has got something not of the first importance on the brain. His
perspective was truer than Daniel's.
He walked home, as he had decided, over the wavy moorland of the
county dreaming in the heart of England. Night fell on him in mid-
career, and he was tired. But the earth, as it whirled through
naked space, whirled up the moon for him, and he pressed on at a
good speed. A wind from Arabia wandering cooled his face. And at
last, over the brow of Toft End, he saw suddenly the Five Towns a-
twinkle on their little hills down in the vast amphitheatre. And
one of those lamps was Constance's lamp--one, somewhere. He lived,
then. He entered into the shadow of nature. The mysteries made him
solemn. What! A boneshaker, his cousin, and then this!
"Well, I'm damned! Well, I'm damned!" he kept repeating, he who
never swore.
CHAPTER III
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
Larder 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-*** 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 ***.
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 *** 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.
CHAPTER IV
CRIME
I
"Now, Master Cyril," Amy protested, "will you leave that fire
alone? It's not you that can mend my fires."
A boy of nine, great and heavy for his years, with a full face and
very short hair, bent over the smoking grate. It was about five
minutes to eight on a chilly morning after Easter. Amy, hastily
clad in blue, with a rough brown apron, was setting the breakfast
table. The boy turned his head, still bending.
"Shut up, Ame," he replied, smiling. Life being short, he usually
called her Ame when they were alone together. "Or I'll catch you
one in the eye with the poker."
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," said Amy. "And you know
your mother told you to wash your feet this morning, and you
haven't done. Fine clothes is all very well, but--"
"Who says I haven't washed my feet?" asked Cyril, guiltily.
Amy's mention of fine clothes referred to the fact that he was
that morning wearing his Sunday suit for the first time on a week-
day.
"I say you haven't," said Amy.
She was more than three times his age still, but they had been
treating each other as intellectual equals for years.
"And how do you know?" asked Cyril, tired of the fire.
"I know," said Amy.
"Well, you just don't, then!" said Cyril. "And what about YOUR
feet? I should be sorry to see your feet, Ame."
Amy was excusably annoyed. She tossed her head. "My feet are as
clean as yours any day," she said. "And I shall tell your mother."
But he would not leave her feet alone, and there ensued one of
those endless monotonous altercations on a single theme which
occur so often between intellectual equals when one is a young son
of the house and the other an established servant who adores him.
Refined minds would have found the talk disgusting, but the
sentiment of disgust seemed to be unknown to either of the
wranglers. At last, when Amy by superior tactics had cornered him,
Cyril said suddenly:
"Oh, go to hell!"
Amy banged down the spoon for the bacon gravy. "Now I shall tell
your mother. Mark my words, this time I SHALL tell your mother."
Cyril felt that in truth he had gone rather far. He was perfectly
sure that Amy would not tell his mother. And yet, supposing that
by some freak of her nature she did! The consequences would be
unutterable; the consequences would more than extinguish his
private glory in the use of such a dashing word. So he laughed, a
rather silly, giggling laugh, to reassure himself.
"You daren't," he said.
"Daren't I?" she said grimly. "You'll see. _I_ don't know where
you learn! It fair beats me. But it isn't Amy Bates as is going to
be sworn at. As soon as ever your mother comes into this room!"
The door at the foot of the stairs creaked and Constance came into
the room. She was wearing a dress of majenta merino, and a gold
chain descended from her neck over her rich ***. She had
scarcely aged in five years. It would have been surprising if she
had altered much, for the years had passed over her head at an
incredible rate. To her it appeared only a few months since
Cyril's first and last party.
"Are you all ready, my pet? Let me look at you." Constance greeted
the boy with her usual bright, soft energy.
Cyril glanced at Amy, who averted her head, putting spoons into
three saucers.
"Yes, mother," he replied in a new voice.
"Did you do what I told you?"
"Yes, mother," he said simply.
"That's right."
Amy made a faint noise with her lips, and departed.
He was saved once more. He said to himself that never again would
he permit his soul to be disturbed by any threat of old Ame's.
Constance's hand descended into her pocket and drew out a hard
paper packet, which she clapped on to her son's head.
"Oh, mother!" He pretended that she had hurt him, and then he
opened the packet. It contained Congleton butterscotch, reputed a
harmless sweetmeat.
"Good!" he cried, "good! Oh! Thanks, mother."
"Now don't begin eating them at once."
"Just one, mother."
"No! And how often have I told you to keep your feet off that
fender. See how it's bent. And it's nobody but you."
"Sorry."
"It's no use being sorry if you persist in doing it."
"Oh, mother, I had such a funny dream!"
They chatted until Amy came up the stairs with tea and bacon. The
fire had developed from black to clear red.
"Run and tell father that breakfast is ready."
After a little delay a spectacled man of fifty, short and
stoutish, with grey hair and a small beard half grey and half
black, entered from the shop. Samuel had certainly very much aged,
especially in his gestures, which, however, were still quick. He
sat down at once--his wife and son were already seated--and served
the bacon with the rapid assurance of one who needs not to inquire
about tastes and appetites. Not a word was said, except a brief
grace by Samuel. But there was no restraint. Samuel had a mild,
benignant air. Constance's eyes were a fountain of cheerfulness.
The boy sat between them and ate steadily.
Mysterious creature, this child, mysteriously growing and growing
in the house! To his mother he was a delicious joy at all times
save when he disobeyed his father. But now for quite a
considerable period there had been no serious collision. The boy
seemed to be acquiring virtue as well as sense. And really he was
charming. So big, truly enormous (every one remarked on it), and
yet graceful, lithe, with a smile that could ravish. And he was
distinguished in his bearing. Without depreciating Samuel in her
faithful heart, Constance saw plainly the singular differences
between Samuel and the boy. Save that he was dark, and that his
father's 'dangerous look' came into those childish eyes
occasionally, Cyril had now scarcely any obvious resemblance to
his father. He was a Baines. This naturally deepened Constance's
family pride. Yes, he was mysterious to Constance, though probably
not more so than any other boy to any other parent. He was equally
mysterious to Samuel, but otherwise Mr. Povey had learned to
regard him in the light of a parcel which he was always attempting
to wrap up in a piece of paper imperceptibly too small. When he
successfully covered the parcel at one corner it burst out at
another, and this went on for ever, and he could never get the
string on. Nevertheless, Mr. Povey had unabated confidence in his
skill as a parcel-wrapper. The boy was strangely subtle at times,
but then at times he was astoundingly ingenuous, and then his
dodges would not deceive the dullest. Mr. Povey knew himself more
than a match for his son. He was proud of him because he regarded
him as not an ordinary boy; he took it as a matter of course that
his boy should not be an ordinary boy. He never, or very rarely,
praised Cyril. Cyril thought of his father as a man who, in
response to any request, always began by answering with a
thoughtful, serious 'No, I'm afraid not.'
"So you haven't lost your appetite!" his mother commented.
Cyril grinned. "Did you expect me to, mother?"
"Let me see," said Samuel, as if vaguely recalling an unimportant
fact. "It's to-day you begin to go to school, isn't it?"
"I wish father wouldn't be such a chump!" Cyril reflected. And,
considering that this commencement of school (real school, not a
girls' school, as once) had been the chief topic in the house for
days, weeks; considering that it now occupied and filled all
hearts, Cyril's reflection was excusable.
"Now, there's one thing you must always remember, my boy," said
Mr. Povey. "Promptness. Never be late either in going to school or
in coming home. And in order that you may have no excuse"--Mr.
Povey pressed on the word 'excuse' as though condemning Cyril in
advance--"here's something for you!" He said the last words
quickly, with a sort of modest shame.
It was a silver watch and chain.
Cyril was staggered. So also was Constance, for Mr. Povey could
keep his own counsel. At long intervals he would prove, thus, that
he was a mighty soul, capable of sublime deeds. The watch was the
unique flowering of Mr. Povey's profound but harsh affection. It
lay on the table like a miracle. This day was a great day, a
supremely exciting day in Cyril's history, and not less so in the
history of his parents.
The watch killed its owner's appetite dead.
Routine was ignored that morning. Father did not go back into the
shop. At length the moment came when father put on his hat and
overcoat to take Cyril, and Cyril's watch and satchel, to the
Endowed School, which had quarters in the Wedgwood Institution
close by. A solemn departure, and Cyril could not pretend by his
demeanour that it was not! Constance desired to kiss him, but
refrained. He would not have liked it. She watched them from the
window. Cyril was nearly as tall as his father; that is to say,
not nearly as tall, but creeping up his father's shoulder. She
felt that the eyes of the town must be on the pair. She was very
happy, and nervous.
At dinner-time a triumph seemed probable, and at tea-time, when
Cyril came home under a mortar-board hat and with a satchel full
of new books and a head full of new ideas, the triumph was
actually and definitely achieved. He had been put into the third
form, and he announced that he should soon be at the top of it. He
was enchanted with the life of school; he liked the other boys,
and it appeared that the other boys liked him. The fact was that,
with a new silver watch and a packet of sweets, he had begun his
new career in the most advantageous circumstances. Moreover, he
possessed qualities which ensure success at school. He was big,
and easy, with a captivating smile and a marked aptitude to learn
those things which boys insist on teaching to their new comrades.
He had muscle, a brave demeanour, and no conceit.
During tea the parlour began, to accustom itself to a new
vocabulary, containing such words as 'fellows,' 'kept in,'m'
lines,' 'rot,' 'recess,' 'jolly.' To some of these words the
parents, especially Mr. Povey, had an instinct to object, but they
could not object, somehow they did not seem to get an opportunity
to object; they were carried away on the torrent, and after all,
their excitement and pleasure in the exceeding romantic novelty of
existence were just as intense and nearly as ingenuous as their
son's.
He demonstrated that unless he was allowed to stay up later than
aforetime he would not be able to do his home-work, and hence
would not keep that place in the school to which his talents
entitled him. Mr. Povey suggested, but only with half a heart,
that he should get up earlier in the morning. The proposal fell
flat. Everybody knew and admitted that nothing save the scorpions
of absolute necessity, or a tremendous occasion such as that
particular morning's, would drive Cyril from his bed until the
smell of bacon rose to him from the kitchen. The parlour table was
consecrated to his lessons. It became generally known that 'Cyril
was doing his lessons.' His father scanned the new text-books
while Cyril condescendingly explained to him that all others were
superseded and worthless. His father contrived to maintain an air
of preserving his mental equilibrium, but not his mother; she gave
it up, she who till that day had under his father's direction
taught him nearly all that he knew, and Cyril passed above her
into regions of knowledge where she made no pretence of being able
to follow him.
When the lessons were done, and Cyril had wiped his fingers on
bits of blotting-paper, and his father had expressed qualified
approval and had gone into the shop, Cyril said to his mother,
with that delicious hesitation which overtook him sometimes:
"Mother."
"Well, my pet."
"I want you to do something for me."
"Well, what is it?"
"No, you must promise."
"I'll do it if I can."
"But you CAN. It isn't doing. It's NOT doing."
"Come, Cyril, out with it."
"I don't want you to come in and look at me after I'm asleep any
more."
"But, you silly boy, what difference can it make to you if you're
asleep?"
"I don't want you to. It's like as if I was a baby. You'll have to
stop doing it some day, and so you may as well stop now."
It was thus that he meant to turn his back on his youth.
She smiled. She was incomprehensibly happy. She continued to
smile.
"Now you'll promise, won't you, mother?"
She rapped him on the head with her thimble, lovingly. He took the
gesture for consent.
"You are a baby," she murmured.
"Now I shall trust you," he said, ignoring this. "Say 'honour
bright.'"
"Honour bright."
With what a long caress her eyes followed him, as he went up to
bed on his great sturdy legs! She was thankful that school had not
contaminated her adorable innocent. If she could have been Ame for
twenty-four hours, she perhaps would not have hesitated to put
butter into his mouth lest it should melt.
Mr. Povey and Constance talked late and low that night. They could
neither of them sleep; they had little desire to sleep.
Constance's face said to her husband: "I've always stuck up for
that boy, in spite of your severities, and you see how right I
was!" And Mr. Povey's face said: "You see now the brilliant
success of my system. You see how my educational theories have
justified themselves. Never been to a school before, except that
wretched little dame's school, and he goes practically straight to
the top of the third form--at nine years of age!" They discussed
his future. There could be no sign of lunacy in discussing his
future up to a certain point, but each felt that to discuss the
ultimate career of a child nine years old would not be the act of
a sensible parent; only foolish parents would be so fond. Yet each
was dying to discuss his ultimate career. Constance yielded first
to the temptation, as became her. Mr. Povey scoffed, and then, to
humour Constance, yielded also. The matter was soon fairly on the
carpet. Constance was relieved to find that Mr. Povey had no
thought whatever of putting Cyril in the shop. No; Mr. Povey did
not desire to chop wood with a razor. Their son must and would
ascend. Doctor! Solicitor! Barrister! Not barrister--barrister was
fantastic. When they had argued for about half an hour Mr. Povey
intimated suddenly that the conversation was unworthy of their
practical commonsense, and went to sleep.
II
Nobody really thought that this almost ideal condition of things
would persist: an enterprise commenced in such glory must surely
traverse periods of difficulty and even of temporary disaster. But
no! Cyril seemed to be made specially for school. Before Mr. Povey
and Constance had quite accustomed themselves to being the parents
of 'a great lad,' before Cyril had broken the glass of his
miraculous watch more than once, the summer term had come to a end
and there arrived the excitations of the prize-giving, as it was
called; for at that epoch the smaller schools had not found the
effrontery to dub the breaking-up ceremony a 'speech-day.' This
prize-giving furnished a particular joy to Mr. and Mrs. Povey.
Although the prizes were notoriously few in number--partly to add
to their significance, and partly to diminish their cost (the
foundation was poor)--Cyril won a prize, a box of geometrical
instruments of precision; also he reached the top of his form, and
was marked for promotion to the formidable Fourth. Samuel and
Constance were bidden to the large hall of the Wedgwood
Institution of a summer afternoon, and they saw the whole Board of
Governors raised on a rostrum, and in the middle, in front of what
he referred to, in his aristocratic London accent, as 'a beggarly
array of rewards,' the aged and celebrated Sir Thomas Wilbraham
Wilbraham, ex-M.P., last respectable member of his ancient line.
And Sir Thomas gave the box of instruments to Cyril, and shook
hands with him. And everybody was very well dressed. Samuel, who
had never attended anything but a National School, recalled the
simple rigours of his own boyhood, and swelled. For certainly, of
all the parents present, he was among the richest. When, in the
informal promiscuities which followed the prize distribution,
Cyril joined his father and mother, sheepishly, they duly did
their best to make light of his achievements, and failed. The
walls of the hall were covered with specimens of the pupils'
skill, and the headmaster was observed to direct the attention of
the mighty to a map done by Cyril. Of course it was a map of
Ireland, Ireland being the map chosen by every map-drawing
schoolboy who is free to choose. For a third-form boy it was
considered a masterpiece. In the shading of mountains Cyril was
already a prodigy. Never, it was said, had the Macgillycuddy Reeks
been indicated by a member of that school with a more amazing
subtle refinement than by the young Povey. From a proper pride in
themselves, from a proper fear lest they should be secretly
accused of ostentation by other parents, Samuel and Constance did
not go near that map. For the rest, they had lived with it for
weeks, and Samuel (who, after all, was determined not to be dirt
under his son's feet) had scratched a blot from it with a
completeness that defied inquisitive examination.
The fame of this map, added to the box of compasses and Cyril's
own desire, pointed to an artistic career. Cyril had always drawn
and daubed, and the drawing-master of the Endowed School, who was
also headmaster of the Art School, had suggested that the youth
should attend the Art School one night a week. Samuel, however,
would not listen to the idea; Cyril was too young. It is true that
Cyril was too young, but Samuel's real objection was to Cyril's
going out alone in the evening. On that he was adamant.
The Governors had recently made the discovery that a sports
department was necessary to a good school, and had rented a field
for cricket, football, and rounders up at Bleakridge, an
innovation which demonstrated that the town was moving with the
rapid times. In June this field was open after school hours till
eight p.m. as well as on Saturdays. The Squire learnt that Cyril
had a talent for cricket, and Cyril wished to practise in the
evenings, and was quite ready to bind himself with Bible oaths to
rise at no matter what hour in the morning for the purpose of home
lessons. He scarcely expected his father to say 'Yes' as his
father never did say 'Yes,' but he was obliged to ask. Samuel
nonplussed him by replying that on fine evenings, when he could
spare time from the shop, he would go up to Bleakridge with his
son. Cyril did not like this in the least. Still, it might be
tried. One evening they went, actually, in the new steam-car which
had superseded the old horse-cars, and which travelled all the way
to Longshaw, a place that Cyril had only heard of. Samuel talked
of the games played in the Five Towns in his day, of the Titanic
sport of prison-bars, when the team of one 'bank' went forth to
the challenge of another 'bank,' preceded by a drum-and-fife band,
and when, in the heat of the chase, a man might jump into the
canal to escape his pursuer; Samuel had never played at cricket.
Samuel, with a very young grandson of Fan (deceased), sat in
dignity on the grass and watched his cricketer for an hour and a
half (while Constance kept an eye on the shop and superintended
its closing). Samuel then conducted Cyril home again. Two days
later the father of his own accord offered to repeat the
experience. Cyril refused. Disagreeable insinuations that he was a
baby in arms had been made at school in the meantime.
Nevertheless, in other directions Cyril sometimes surprisingly
conquered. For instance, he came home one day with the information
that a dog that was not a bull-terrier was not worth calling a
dog. Fan's grandson had been carried off in earliest prime by a
chicken-bone that had pierced his vitals, and Cyril did indeed
persuade his father to buy a bull-terrier. The animal was a
superlative of forbidding ugliness, but father and son vied with
each other in stern critical praise of his surpassing beauty, and
Constance, from good nature, joined in the pretence. He was called
Lion, and the shop, after one or two untoward episodes, was
absolutely closed to him.
But the most striking of Cyril's successes had to do with the
question of the annual holiday. He spoke of the sea soon after
becoming a schoolboy. It appeared that his complete ignorance of
the sea prejudicially affected him at school. Further, he had
always loved the sea; he had drawn hundreds of three-masted ships
with studding-sails set, and knew the difference between a brig
and a brigantine. When he first said: "I say, mother, why can't we
go to Llandudno instead of Buxton this year?" his mother thought
he was out of his senses. For the idea of going to any place other
than Buxton was inconceivable! Had they not always been to Buxton?
What would their landlady say? How could they ever look her in the
face again? Besides ... well ...! They went to Llandudno, rather
scared, and hardly knowing how the change had come about. But they
went. And it was the force of Cyril's will, Cyril the theoretic
cypher, that took them.
III
The removal of the Endowed School to more commodious premises in
the shape of Shawport Hall, an ancient mansion with fifty rooms
and five acres of land round about it, was not a change that quite
pleased Samuel or Constance. They admitted the hygienic
advantages, but Shawport Hall was three-quarters of a mile distant
from St. Luke's Square--in the hollow that separates Bursley from
its suburb of Hillport; whereas the Wedgwood Institution was
scarcely a minute away. It was as if Cyril, when he set off to
Shawport Hall of a morning, passed out of their sphere of
influence. He was leagues off, doing they knew not what. Further,
his dinner-hour was cut short by the extra time needed for the
journey to and fro, and he arrived late for tea; it may be said
that he often arrived very late for tea; the whole machinery of
the meal was disturbed. These matters seemed to Samuel and
Constance to be of tremendous import, seemed to threaten the very
foundations of existence. Then they grew accustomed to the new
order, and wondered sometimes, when they passed the Wedgwood
Institution and the insalubrious *** Yard--once sole playground
of the boys--that the school could ever have 'managed' in the
narrow quarters once allotted to it.
Cyril, though constantly successful at school, a rising man, an
infallible bringer-home of excellent reports, and a regular taker
of prizes, became gradually less satisfactory in the house. He was
'kept in' occasionally, and although his father pretended to hold
that to be kept in was to slur the honour of a spotless family,
Cyril continued to be kept in; a hardened sinner, lost to shame.
But this was not the worst. The worst undoubtedly was that Cyril
was 'getting rough.' No definite accusation could be laid against
him; the offence was general, vague, everlasting; it was in all he
did and said, in every gesture and movement. He shouted, whistled,
sang, stamped, stumbled, lunged. He omitted such empty rites as
saying 'Yes' or 'Please,' and wiping his nose. He replied gruffly
and nonchalantly to polite questions, or he didn't reply until the
questions were repeated, and even then with a 'lost' air that was
not genuine. His shoelaces were a sad sight, and his finger-nails
no sight at all for a decent woman; his hair was as rough as his
conduct; hardly at the pistol's point could he be forced to put
oil on it. In brief, he was no longer the nice boy that he used to
be. He had unmistakably deteriorated. Grievous! But what can you
expect when YOUR boy is obliged, month after month and year after
year, to associate with other boys? After all, he was a GOOD boy,
said Constance, often to herself and now and then to Samuel. For
Constance, his charm was eternally renewed. His smile, his
frequent ingenuousness, his funny self-conscious gesture when he
wanted to 'get round' her--these characteristics remained; and his
pure heart remained; she could read that in his eyes. Samuel was
inimical to his tastes for sports and his triumphs therein. But
Constance had pride in all that. She liked to feel him and to gaze
at him, and to smell that faint, uncleanly odour of sweat that
hung in his clothes.
In this condition he reached the advanced age of thirteen. And his
parents, who despite their notion of themselves as wide-awake
parents were a simple pair, never suspected that his heart,
conceived to be still pure, had become a crawling, horrible mass
of corruption.
One day the head-master called at the shop. Now, to see a head-
master walking about the town during school-hours is a startling
spectacle, and is apt to give you the same uncanny sensation as
when, alone in a room, you think you see something move which
ought not to move. Mr. Povey was startled. Mr. Povey had a
thumping within his breast as he rubbed his hands and drew the
head-master to the private corner where his desk was. "What can I
do for you to-day?" he almost said to the head-master. But he did
not say it. The boot was emphatically not on that leg. The head-
master talked to Mr. Povey, in tones carefully low, for about a
quarter of an hour, and then he closed the interview. Mr. Povey
escorted him across the shop, and the head-master said with
ordinary loudness: "Of course it's nothing. But my experience is
that it's just as well to be on the safe side, and I thought I'd
tell you. Forewarned is forearmed. I have other parents to see."
They shook hands at the door. Then Mr. Povey stepped out on to the
pavement and, in front of the whole Square, detained an unwilling
head-master for quite another minute.
His face was deeply flushed as he returned into the shop. The
assistants bent closer over their work. He did not instantly rush
into the parlour and communicate with Constance. He had dropped
into a way of conducting many operations by his own unaided brain.
His confidence in his skill had increased with years. Further, at
the back of his mind, there had established itself a vision of Mr.
Povey as the seat of government and of Constance and Cyril as a
sort of permanent opposition. He would not have admitted that he
saw such a vision, for he was utterly loyal to his wife; but it
was there. This unconfessed vision was one of several causes which
had contributed to intensify his inherent tendency towards
Machiavellianism and secretiveness. He said nothing to Constance,
nothing to Cyril; but, happening to encounter Amy in the showroom,
he was inspired to interrogate her sharply. The result was that
they descended to the cellar together, Amy weeping. Amy was
commanded to hold her tongue. And as she went in mortal fear of
Mr. Povey she did hold her tongue.
Nothing occurred for several days. And then one morning--it was
Constance's birthday: children are nearly always horribly unlucky
in their choice of days for sin--Mr. Povey, having executed
mysterious movements in the shop after Cyril's departure to
school, jammed his hat on his head and ran forth in pursuit of
Cyril, whom he intercepted with two other boys, at the corner of
Oldcastle Street and Acre Passage.
Cyril stood as if turned into salt. "Come back home!" said Mr.
Povey, grimly; and for the sake of the other boys: "Please."
"But I shall be late for school, father," Cyril weakly urged.
"Never mind."
They passed through the shop together, causing a terrific
concealed emotion, and then they did violence to Constance by
appearing in the parlour. Constance was engaged in cutting straws
and ribbons to make a straw-frame for a water-colour drawing of a
moss-rose which her pure-hearted son had given her as a birthday
present.
"Why--what--?" she exclaimed. She said no more at the moment
because she was sure, from the faces of her men, that the time was
big with fearful events.
"Take your satchel off," Mr. Povey ordered coldly. "And your
mortar-board," he added with a peculiar intonation, as if glad
thus to prove that Cyril was one of those rude boys who have to be
told to take their hats off in a room.
"Whatever's amiss?" Constance murmured under her breath, as Cyril
obeyed the command. "Whatever's amiss?"
Mr. Povey made no immediate answer. He was in charge of these
proceedings, and was very anxious to conduct them with dignity and
with complete effectiveness. Little fat man over fifty, with a
wizened face, grey-haired and grey-bearded, he was as nervous as a
youth. His heart beat furiously. And Constance, the portly matron
who would never see forty again, was just as nervous as a girl.
Cyril had gone very white. All three felt physically sick.
"What money have you got in your pockets?" Mr. Povey demanded, as
a commencement.
Cyril, who had had no opportunity to prepare his case, offered no
reply.
"You heard what I said," Mr. Povey thundered.
"I've got three-halfpence," Cyril murmured glumly, looking down at
the floor. His lower lip seemed to hang precariously away from his
gums.
"Where did you get that from?"
"It's part of what mother gave me," said the boy.
"I did give him a threepenny bit last week," Constance put in
guiltily. "It was a long time since he had had any money."
"If you gave it him, that's enough," said Mr. Povey, quickly, and
to the boy: "That's all you've got?"
"Yes, father," said the boy.
"You're sure?"
"Yes, father."
Cyril was playing a hazardous game for the highest stakes, and
under grave disadvantages; and he acted for the best. He guarded
his own interests as well as he could.
Mr. Povey found himself obliged to take a serious risk. "Empty
your pockets, then."
Cyril, perceiving that he had lost that particular game, emptied
his pockets.
"Cyril," said Constance, "how often have I told you to change your
handkerchiefs oftener! Just look at this!"
Astonishing creature! She was in the seventh hell of sick
apprehension, and yet she said that!
After the handkerchief emerged the common schoolboy stock of
articles useful and magic, and then, last, a silver florin!
Mr. Povey felt relief.
"Oh, Cyril!" whimpered Constance.
"Give it your mother," said Mr. Povey.
The boy stepped forward awkwardly, and Constance, weeping, took
the coin.
"Please look at it, mother," said Mr. Povey. "And tell me if
there's a cross marked on it."
Constance's tears blurred the coin. She had to wipe her eyes.
"Yes," she whispered faintly. "There's something on it."
"I thought so," said Mr. Povey. "Where did you steal it from?" he
demanded.
"Out of the till," answered Cyril.
"Have you ever stolen anything out of the till before?"
"Yes."
"Yes, what."
"Yes, father."
"Take your hands out of your pockets and stand up straight, if you
can. How often?"
"I--I don't know, father."
"I blame myself," said Mr. Povey, frankly. "I blame myself. The
till ought always to be locked. All tills ought always to be
locked. But we felt we could trust the assistants. If anybody had
told me that I ought not to trust you, if anybody had told me that
my own son would be the thief, I should have--well, I don't know
what I should have said!"
Mr. Povey was quite justified in blaming himself. The fact was
that the functioning of that till was a patriarchal survival,
which he ought to have revolutionized, but which it had never
occurred to him to revolutionize, so accustomed to it was he. In
the time of John Baines, the till, with its three bowls, two for
silver and one for copper (gold had never been put into it), was
invariably unlocked. The person in charge of the shop took change
from it for the assistants, or temporarily authorized an assistant
to do so. Gold was kept in a small linen bag in a locked drawer of
the desk. The contents of the till were never checked by any
system of book-keeping, as there was no system of book-keeping;
when all transactions, whether in payment or receipt, are in cash
--the Baineses never owed a penny save the quarterly wholesale
accounts, which were discharged instantly to the travellers--a
system of book-keeping is not indispensable. The till was situate
immediately at the entrance to the shop from the house; it was in
the darkest part of the shop, and the unfortunate Cyril had to
pass it every day on his way to school. The thing was a perfect
device for the manufacture of young criminals.
"And how have you been spending this money?" Mr. Povey inquired.
Cyril's hands slipped into his pockets again. Then, noticing the
lapse, he dragged them out.
"Sweets," said he.
"Anything else?"
"Sweets and things."
"Oh!" said Mr. Povey. "Well, now you can go down into the cinder-
cellar and bring up here all the things there are in that little
box in the corner. Off you go!"
And off went Cyril. He had to swagger through the kitchen.
"What did I tell you, Master Cyril?" Amy unwisely asked of him.
"You've copped it finely this time."
'Copped' was a word which she had learned from Cyril.
"Go on, you old ***!" Cyril growled.
As he returned from the cellar, Amy said angrily:
"I told you I should tell your father the next time you called me
that, and I shall. You mark my words."
"Cant! cant!" he retorted. "Do you think I don't know who's been
canting? Cant! cant!"
Upstairs in the parlour Samuel was explaining the matter to his
wife. There had been a perfect epidemic of smoking in the school.
The head-master had discovered it and, he hoped, stamped it out.
What had disturbed the head-master far more than the smoking was
the fact that a few boys had been found to possess somewhat costly
pipes, cigar-holders, or cigarette-holders. The head-master, wily,
had not confiscated these articles; he had merely informed the
parents concerned. In his opinion the articles came from one
single source, a generous thief; he left the parents to ascertain
which of them had brought a thief into the world.
Further information Mr. Povey had culled from Amy, and there could
remain no doubt that Cyril had been providing his chums with the
utensils of smoking, the till supplying the means. He had told Amy
slept.