by A. J. Cronin
For Mrs Brodie the emotional influence of the occasion had provided a strong stimulus, as though she felt at last able to identify herself in a situation worthy of a leading character in one of her beloved novels. Like a Roman matron renouncing her son to the State with a spartan fortitude, or, more sensibly, a Christian mother sending out a second Livingstone on a mission of hope and glory, she forsook her meek despondency and bearing up nobly, packed; repacked, devised, succoured, comforted, encouraged, and exhorted, and sprinkled her conversation with text and prayer.
Brodie had not missed the change in her, gauging with a sardonic eye the explanation of the transient phase. ‘You’re makin’ a bonny exhibition o’ yourself, my woman,’ he had sneered at her, ‘wi’ your posing and posturin’, and your runnin’ after that big gowk o’ yours, and your cups o’ tea and snashters at a’ hours. Ye would think ye were Queen Victoria to look at ye. Is it a general ye’re sendin’ out to the war or what? that you’re blowin’ yerself out like a pig’s bladder. I know well what will happen. Whenever he’s away ye’ll collapse, and we’ll have ye back on our hands more o’ a dreich empty bag than ever. Faugh! Let some sense in that silly skull o’ yours, for God’s sake.’
She had felt him cold, unfeeling, even callous, as she feebly expostulated: ‘But, father, we maun give the boy his start. There’s a great future in front o’ him’; and though, thereafter, concealing her endeavours from her husband, she had redoubled, with an outraged, conscious rectitude, these spirited efforts on behalf of her young, potentially illustrious pioneer.
Now, having adjusted her gloves to a smooth, though nodose, perfection, she remarked:? ‘Are you ready, Matt dear?’ in a tone of such forced cheerfulness that it chilled Matthew’s very blood. ‘We are going down, Mary, to the chemist’s,’ she continued in a chatty manner. ‘The Rev. Mr Scott told Agnes the other day that the best remedy for malaria was quinine – a wonderful cure he said, so we’re off to get a few powders made up.’ Matthew said nothing, but visions of himself lying, fever-racked, in a crocodile-infested swamp rushed through his mind, and considering glumly that a few scanty powders seemed a paltry protection against such an evil, in his mind he sullenly repudiated the reverend gentleman’s suggestion. ‘What does he know about it, anyway? He’s never been there. It’s all very fine for him to talk,’ he thought indignantly, as Mrs Brodie took his arm and led him, an unwilling victim, from the room.
When they had gone Mary filled the kettle and put it on the hob. She seemed listless and melancholy, due, no doubt, to the thought of losing her brother, and for a week had moved in a spirit of extreme dejection which might reasonably have been entirely attributed to sisterly solicitude. Curiously, though, it was just one week since she had been with Denis at the fair, and though she longed for him, she had not seen him since. That had been an impossibility, as she knew him to be in the North travelling on business, from a letter posted in Perth which, startlingly, she had received from him. It was an event for her at any time to receive a letter (which, on such rare occasions, was inevitably perused by the entire household), but fortunately she had been first down that morning and so no other had seen it, or the sudden throbbing gladness of her face, and she had thus avoided detection, interrogation, and certain discovery.
What felicity it had been to hear from Denis! She realised with an inward thrill that he must have held this paper in his own hands, the hands which had touched her so caressingly, brushed fee envelope with those lips which had sealed themselves upon hers, and, as she read the letter behind the locked door of her room, she flushed even in this privacy, at the impetuous, endearing, words he wrote. It became evident to her that he desired to marry her and, without considering the obstacles which might be between them, took for granted apparently that she had accepted him.
Now, seated alone in the kitchen, she took the letter from her bodice and re-read it for the hundredth time. Yes! He wrote fervently that he was pining for her, that he could not exist without her, that life to him was now an endless waiting until he should see her, be near to her, be with her always. She sighed, ardently, yet sadly. She, too, was pining for him. Only ten days since that night by the river’s brink, and each day more piteous, more dolorous than the one before!
On the first of the seven she had felt ill physically, while the realisation of her boldness, her disobedience of her father, the defiance of every canon of her upbringing struck her in one concentrated blow; but as time passed and the second day merged into the third and she still did not see Denis, the sense of iniquity was swamped by the sense of deprivation, and she forgot the enormity of her conduct in a straining feeling of his necessity to her. On the fourth day, in her sad bewilderment, when she had essayed so constantly to penetrate the unknown and unrealised depths of her experience that it began to appear to her like a strange, painful unreality, his letter had come, raising her at once to a pinnacle of ecstatic relief. He did, then, love her after all, and everything became obliterated in the joy of that one dazzling fact; but on the succeeding days she had gradually slipped from the heights, and now she sat realising the hopelessness of ever obtaining sanction to see Denis, asking herself how she could live without him, wondering what would become of her.
As she pondered, carelessly holding the letter in her hand, old Grandma Brodie entered unobserved.
‘What’s that you’re reading?’ she demanded suddenly, peering at Mary.
‘Nothing, Grandma, nothing at all,’ Mary blurted out with a start, stuffing the crushed paper into her pocket.
‘It looked to me gey like a letter, and ye seemed in a big hurry to hide it. You’re always mopin’ and moonin’ over something now. I wish I had my specs. I would soon get to the bottom o’it.’ She paused, marking the result of her observation malevolently on the tables of her memory. ‘Tell me,’ she resumed, ‘Where’s that glaikit brother o’yours?’
‘Gone to get quinine at the chemist’s with Mamma.’
‘Pah! what he needs is gumption – not quinine. He would need a bucket o’ that to stiffen him up. Forbye, some strained castor oil and a drop of good spirits would be more useful to him outbye there. I’ve no time for sich a palaver that has been goin’ on. Everything’s upset in the house with the fiddle faddle of it a’. Tell me, is tea earlier to-night?’ She clicked her teeth hopefully, scenting like a harpy the nearness of sustenance.
‘I don’t know, Grandma,’ replied Mary. Usually the old woman’s unbashful eagerness for food left her indifferent, but tonight, in her own troubled perplexity, it nauseated her, without further speech she got up and, feeling that she must be alone and in a less congested atmosphere, went out into the back garden. As she paced back and forwards across the small green she felt it strangely cruel that life should, continue to move heedlessly around her in the face of all her sadness and confusion, that Grandma Brodie should still crave greedily for her tea, and the progress of Matt’s departure march indifferently along. The current of her thoughts had never flowed so respondently as, with restless movements, she seemed dimly to perceive that the circumstances of her life were conspiring to entrap her. Through the back window she saw Matthew and her mother return, saw Mamma bustle to prepare the table, observed Matthew sit down and begin to eat. What did they care that her brain throbbed with perplexity behind a burning forehead, that she wished one word of compassionate advice but knew not where to seek it? The barren drabness of this back garden, the ridiculous rear view of the outlines of her home, enraged her, and she desired with bitter vehemence to have been born into a family less isolated, less exacting, less inhuman, or better, not to have been born at all. She envisaged the figure of her father bestriding, like a formidable colossus, the destiny of the Brodies, and directing her life tyrannically – with an ever watchful, relentless eye. His word it was which had withdrawn her at the age of twelve from school, which she loved to assist in the duties of the household; he had terminated her budding friendships with other girls because this one was beneath her, or that one li
ved in a mean house, or another’s father had incensed him; his mandate had forbidden her to attend the delightful winter concerts in the Mechanics’ Hall on the grounds that she demeaned herself by going; and now he would destroy the sole happiness that life now held for her.
A torrent of rebellion swirled through her; as she felt the injustice of such unnatural restraint, such unconditional limitation of her freedom, she stared defiantly at the meek currant shoots which grew half-heartedly in the hard soil around the garden walls. It was easier, alas, to put them out of countenance than Brodie, as though they, too, infected by the tyranny of their environment, had lost the courage to hold their slender tendrils erect.
A touch on her shoulder startled her, she who had just dared to show fight. It was, however, merely Matthew, who had come to speak to her for a moment before leaving to visit Miss Moir.
‘I’ll be home early to-night, Mary,’ he said, ‘ so don’t worry about – you know, staying up. And,’ he added hastily, ‘now that I’m going abroad I know you’ll never mention it to a soul – I would never like it to be known – and thank you a lot for what you’ve done for me.’
This unexpected gratitude from her brother, although its origin lay in a premature wave of nostalgia, and was fostered by the cautious instinct to safeguard his memory against his absence, touched Mary.
‘That was nothing to do for you,’ she replied. ‘ I was only too pleased, Matt. You’ll forget all about that worry out there.’
‘I’ll have other things to bother about, I suppose.’ She had never seen him so subdued, as less self-complacent, and a glow of affection for him warmed her, as she said, ‘ You’ll be off to see Agnes now. I’ll walk to the gate with you.’
As she accompanied him round the side of the house taking his arm in hers, she sensed the change from the modish young man about town of a fortnight ago to this uncertain timorous youth now by her side. ‘You’ll need to cheer up a bit, Matt,’ she remarked kindly.
‘I don’t feel like going now it’s come to the bit,’ he ventured casually.
‘You should be glad to get out of here,’ she replied. ‘I know I would gladly go. This house seems like a trap to me. I feel I’ll never get away from it, as if I might wish to but could not.’ She paused a moment, then added, ‘ But then you’re leaving Agnes behind! That’s bound to make all the difference. That’s what’s making you sad and upsetting you.’
‘Of course,’ agreed Matthew. The idea had not occurred to him before in this particular light, but as he turned it over in his mind it was distinctly comforting, and, to his vacillating self-esteem, profoundly reassuring.
‘What does father think of Agnes and you?’ Mary asked suddenly.
He gazed at her with astonished eyes before he replied, indignantly:
‘What do you mean, Mary? Miss Moir is a most estimable girl. No one could think a word against her. She’s a remarkably fine girl! What made you ask that?’
‘Oh! nothing in particular, Matt,’ she replied vaguely, refusing to liberate the absurd conception which had arisen in her mind. Agnes Moir, worthy and admirable in every other way, was simply the daughter of a small and completely undistinguished confectioner in the town, and as Brodie himself, in theory at least, kept a shop, he could not repudiate Agnes on that score. But it was he who had obtained this position for Matthew, had insisted upon his going; and Matthew would be absent five years in India. She remembered like a flash the grim, sardonic humour in her father’s eyes when he had first announced to his shrinking wife and his startled son, his intention of sending the latter abroad, and for the first time a faint glimmering dawned upon her of her father’s mentality. She had always feared and respected him, but now, at the sudden turn of her thoughts, she began almost to hate him.
‘I’m off, then, Mary,’ Matthew was saying. ‘Ta-ta just now.’
Her lips opened to speak, but even as her mind grappled dimly with her suspicions, her eyes fell upon his weak, daunted countenance, striving ineffectually against discouragement, and she let him go without a word.
When he left Mary, Matthew tramped along more confidently, warming his enervated self-assurance at the glow she had unconsciously kindled within him. To be sure he was afraid of leaving Agnes! He felt that at last he had the reason for his dejection, that stronger men than he would have wavered for a slighter cause, that his despondency did him credit as a noble-hearted lover. He began to feel more like Livingstone again and less like the raw recruit, whistled aloud a few bars of ‘Juanita,’ recollected his mandolin, thought, rather inconsistently, of the ladies on the Irrawaddy, or possibly in Calcutta, and felt altogether better. He had regained a faint shadow of his normal dash by the time he reached the Moir domicile and he positively leaped up the stairs to the door, for, as, unhappily, the Moirs were compelled to live above their shop, there were many stairs, and, worse, an entry by a close. He had, indeed, so far recovered that he used the knocker with considerable decision, and his manner had the appearance of repudiating the slightly inferior aspect of his surroundings as unworthy of a man whose name might one day shine in the annals of the Empire. He gazed, too, with a superior air, at the small girl who helped in the shop and who, now lightly disguised as a maid, admitted him and ushered him into the parlour where Agnes, released from the bondage of the counter – although business hours were not yet over – sat awaiting her Matt; to-morrow she could not be spared from her post of duty, and would be unable to accompany him to Glasgow, but to-night she had him for her own.
The parlour was cold, damp, unused, and formal, with large mahogany furniture whose intricate design lost itself in a voluptuous mystery of curves, with antimacassars veiling the sheen of horsehair, and waxcloth on the floor that glittered like a wet street. From the walls Highland cattle, ominous in oils, looked down dispiritedly upon the piano, that hall-mark of gentility, which bore upon its narrow, crowded surface three stuffed birds of an unknown species, perched mutely under a glass case amidst a forest of photographs. Agnes as an infant, as a baby, as a child, as a girl, as a young woman. Agnes in a group at the bakers’ and confectioners’ annual trip, at the Band of Hope social, at the church workers’ outing – all were there!
Here, too, was Agnes in the flesh; literally, for although short in stature she was already inclined, like the furnishings of the room, to a redundancy of curves, which swelled particularly around her hips and bosom, that were full, with the promise of greater amplitude to come. She was dark, with doe eyes under sable eyebrows, with olive cheeks and red almost thick lips, and upon her upper lip was a smooth umber shadow that lay softly, but with a dark, threatening menace of the future.
She kissed him with great warmth. She was five years older than Matthew, and she treasured him accordingly, and now, taking his hand, she led him forward and sat down with him upon the unsympathetic sofa which, like the parlour, was sanctified to their courtship.
‘And this is the very last night,’ she mourned.
‘Oh! don’t say that, Agnes,’ he replied. ‘We can always think of each other! We’ll be with each other in spirit’
Ardent church worker though she was, Agnes, from her appearance, had potentialities for a closer communion than this. She was, of course, unaware of it and would have repudiated it hotly, but her sigh was heavy, as she said: ‘ I wish you were nearer than India!’ and came closer to him now.
‘The time will fly, Agnes. In no time I’ll be back with plenty of rupees.’ He was proud of his knowledge of the foreign currency and added: ‘A rupee is about one shilling and fourpence.’
‘Never mind the rupees just now, Matt; tell me you love me.’
‘I do love you, that’s why I’m so upset at going away. I haven’t been myself at all these last few days – quite off colour!’ He felt truly noble to have laid the burden of his suffering at her feet.
‘You won’t even speak to any of these foreign ladies, will you, Matt? I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could see them – a pretty face may cover a wicked he
art. You’ll remember that, won’t you, dear?’
‘Certainly, Agnes.’
‘You see, dear, there must be great temptations for a handsome young man out in those hot countries. Women will go to such lengths to get hold of a man once they get their eye on him, especially if he’s a good young man – that excites them all the more, and your little Agnes won’t be there to watch over you, Matt. I want you to promise to be careful for my sake.’
It was delightful for him to feel that he was so ardently desired, that already she was jealous of him to desperation, and, with one eye fixed already upon his future conquests abroad, he murmured solemnly: ‘Yes, Agnes, I see the truth of what you say. The way may be hard for me, but I’ll let no one spoil me for you. It’ll not be my fault if anything comes between us.’
‘Oh! Matt, dear,’ she whispered, ‘don’t even speak of that. I’ll hardly be able to sleep for thinking of all the hussies that might be after you. Of course I am not unreasonable, dear. I would like you to meet good, earnest women, perhaps lady missionaries or workers in the Christian field out there. A few motherly women out there would be nice for you to know. They would take good care of you, perhaps darn your socks for you. If you were to let me know I could write to them.’
‘Of course, Agnes,’ he replied, unattracted by her suggestion and with a strong conviction that such elderly ladies as she had just described would not constitute the society of his election. ‘ Of course, I can’t say I’ll meet anyone like that I’ll have to see how things are first.’