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not, Mam, is it?” cried the child in real distress.
“Tell your father he’s always teaching you something wrong,” answered Meg.
Then I said I must go. They pressed me to stay.
“Oh yes — do stop to dinner,” suddenly pleaded the child, smoothing her wild ravels of curls after having drawn off her hat. She asked me again and again, with much earnestness.
“But why?” I asked.
“So’s you can talk to us this afternoon — an’ so’s Dad won’t be so dis’greeable,” she replied plaintively, poking the black spots on her muff.
Meg moved nearer to her daughter with a little gesture of compassion.
“But,” said I, “I promised a lady I would be back for lunch, so I must. You have some more visitors, you know.”
“Oh, well!” she complained. “They go in another room, and Dad doesn’t care about them.”
“But come!” said I.
“Well, he’s just as dis’greeable when Auntie Emily’s here — he is with her an’ all.”
“You are having your character given away,” said Meg brutally, turning to him.
I bade him good-bye. He did me the honour of coming with me to the door. We could neither of us find a word to say, though we were both moved. When at last I held his hand and was looking at him as I said “Good-bye”, he looked back at me for the first time during our meeting. His eyes were heavy, and as he lifted them to me, seemed to recoil in an agony of shame.
Chapter 8
A Prospect Among the Marshes of Lethe
George steadily declined from this time. I went to see him two years later. He was not at home. Meg wept to me as she told me of him, how he let the business slip, how he drank, what a brute he was in drink, and how unbearable afterwards. He was ruining his constitution, he was ruining her life and the children’s. I felt very sorry for her as she sat, large and ruddy, brimming over with bitter tears. She asked me if I did not think I might influence him. He was, she said, at the Ram. When he had an extra bad bout on he went up there, and stayed sometimes for a week at a time, with Oswald, coming back to the Hollies when he had recovered —“though,” said Meg, “he’s sick every morning and almost after every meal.”
All the time Meg was telling me this, sat curled up in a large chair their youngest boy, a pale, sensitive, rather spoiled lad of seven or eight years, with a petulant mouth and nervous dark eyes. He sat watching his mother as she told her tale, heaving his shoulders and settling himself in a new position when his feelings were nearly too much for him. He was full of wild, childish pity for his mother, and furious, childish hate of his father, the author of all their trouble. I called at the Ram and saw George. He was half drunk.
I went up to Highclose with a heavy heart. Lettie’s last child had been born, much to the surprise of everybody, some few months before I came down. There was a space of seven years between her youngest girl and this baby. Lettie was much absorbed in motherhood.
When I went up to talk to her about George, I found her in the bedroom nursing the baby, who was very good and quiet on her knee. She listened to me sadly, but her attention was caught away by each movement made by the child. As I was telling her of the attitude of George’s children towards their father and mother, she glanced from the baby to me, and exclaimed:
“See how he watches the light flash across your spectacles when you turn suddenly — Look!”
But I was weary of babies. My friends had all grown up and married and inflicted them on me. There were storms of babies. I longed for a place where they would be obsolete, and young, arrogant, impervious mothers might be a forgotten tradition. Lettie’s heart would quicken in answer to only one pulse, the easy, light ticking of the baby’s blood.
I remembered, one day as I sat in the train hastening to Charing Cross on my way from France, that that was George’s birthday. I had the feeling of him upon me, heavily, and I could not rid myself of the depression. I put it down to travel fatigue, and tried to dismiss it. As I watched the evening sun glitter along the new corn-stubble in the fields we passed, trying to describe the effect to myself, I found myself asking, “But — what’s the matter? I’ve not had bad news, have I, to make my chest feel so weighted?”
I was surprised when I reached my lodging in New Malden to find no letters for me, save one fat budget from Alice. I knew her squat, saturnine handwriting on the envelope, and I thought I knew what contents to expect from the letter.
She had married an old acquaintance who had been her particular aversion. This young man had got himself into trouble, so that the condemnations of the righteous pursued him like clouds of gnats on a summer evening. Alice immediately rose to sting back his vulgar enemies, and having rendered him a service, felt she could only wipe out the score by marrying him. They were fairly comfortable. Occasionally, as she said, there were displays of small fireworks in the back yard. He worked in the offices of some iron foundries just over the Erewash in Derbyshire. Alice lived in a dirty little place in the valley a mile and a half from Eberwich, not far from his work. She had no children, and practically no friends; a few young matrons for acquaintances. As wife of a superior clerk, she had to preserve her dignity among the work-people. So all her little crackling fires were sodded down with the sods of British respectability. Occasionally she smouldered a fierce smoke that made one’s eyes water. Occasionally, perhaps once a year, she wrote me a whole venomous budget, much to my amusement.
I was not in any haste to open this fat letter until, after supper, I turned to it as a resource from my depression.
“Oh dear, Cyril, I’m in a bubbling state, I want to yell, not write. Oh, Cyril, why didn’t you marry me, or why didn’t our Georgie Saxton, or somebody. I’m deadly sick. Percival Charles is enough to stop a clock. Oh, Cyril, he lives in an eternal Sunday suit, holy broadcloth and righteous three inches of cuffs! He goes to bed in it. Nay, he wallows in Bibles when he goes to bed. I can feel the brass covers of all his family Bibles sticking in my ribs as I lie by his side. I could weep with wrath, yet I put on my black hat and trot to chapel with him like a lamb.
“Oh, Cyril, nothing’s happened. Nothing has happened to me all these years. I shall die of it. When I see Percival Charles at dinner, after having asked a blessing, I feel as if I should never touch a bit at his table again. In about an hour I shall hear him hurrying up the entry — prayers always make him hungry — and his first look will be on the table. But I’m not fair to him — he’s really a good fellow — I only wish he wasn’t.
“It’s George Saxton who’s put this Seidlitz powder in my marital cup of cocoa. Cyril, I must a tale unfold. It is fifteen years since our George married Meg. When I count up, and think of the future, it nearly makes me scream. But my tale, my tale!
“Can you remember his faithful-dog, wounded-stag, gentle-gazelle eyes? Cyril, you can see the whisky or the brandy combusting in them. He’s got d.t.‘s, blue-devils — and I’ve seen him, and I’m swarming myself with little red devils after it. I went up to Eberwich on Wednesday afternoon for a pound of fry for Percival Charles’ Thursday dinner. I walked by that little path which you know goes round the back of the Hollies — it’s as near as any way for me. I thought I heard a row in the paddock at the back of the stables, so I said I might as well see the fun. I went to the gate, basket in one hand, ninepence in coppers in the other, a demure deacon’s wife. I didn’t take in the scene at first.
“There was our Georgie, in leggings and breeches as of yore, and a whip. He was flourishing, and striding, and yelling. ‘Go it, old boy,’ I said, ‘you’ll want your stocking round your throat tonight.’ But, Cyril, I had spoken too soon. Oh, lum! There came raking up the croft that long, wire-springy racehorse of his, ears flat, and, clinging to its neck, the pale-faced