Gaslight

by William Drummond

  To her surprise, Jack raised no objection. “I wouldn’t like a boy of mine to be born anything but British,” he said. “Anyway it is time for us to be getting back to the old country. I’ll write off at once.”

  This mysterious “writing off” was to a Mr. Jameson of the city of York, with whom Jack had struck up an acquaintance in Rio the year before. Mr. Jameson had been there without his wife and Jack had taken him on several evenings to “see the city.” From these excursions her husband returned in the early hours the worse for liquor. Bella secretly regarded Mr. Jameson as “an evil influence”; but she was prepared to accept him as the price of their return to England. She did not want to go to London until she had something to show for her marriage apart from the assortment of curios, including a shrunken Indian skull, which Jack had acquired in their travels.

  They arrived in Liverpool on Midsummer Day. The sky hung like plum curtains loaded with water, which burst on their landing. It was a dark presage of pregnant disillusion.

  Mr. Jameson had found for them a small house not far from the Minster. He was different in his own city, more sober but no more attractive, a sandy padded sofa of a man, clean-shaven apart from a column of hairs which marched like sandy insects down the bridge of his nose. “I’m a self-made man, Mrs. Manningham, and proud of it,” he announced that first day in York and told the story of his interminably long rise from working at the age of seven for a penny a day, in the same words that he had used in another continent and hemisphere. Only his spouse was new to Bella, and not so new at that.

  Mrs. Jameson was a little, bent woman in the marble-white cage of whose face could be seen two blue-birds of eyes, looking hopefully this way and that for something or other. She was barren and never spoke of her husband except as “Mr. Jameson” or “Mr. J.” as if he were a stranger; which it seemed, from his manner, he was. She asked Bella if she could be the coming baby’s Godmother. “I have been blessed with many Godchildren,” she said.

  What Jack was up to with Mr. Jameson, or with other cronies he collected, Bella did not know or care. Curiosity killed the cat, but it was not going to kill the baby. Bella withdrew into a private world of gestation. It seemed to her that life was a penitentiary, with many wings and different cells, beginning with the womb and ending in the tomb. Each new imprisonment, or rather transfer, appeared at first to be a delivery and ended as a new confinement. “One is only free,” she thought, “if one doesn’t try to escape.”

  Yet of course people always did. Mrs. Jameson, whose name she confided was Araminta, “but my friends call me Minty,” tried to escape in all her Godchildren, but especially in Bella’s baby to come. Bella herself thought of the baby almost like a rocket to be shot from her womb, the stick of which, if she could grasp it, would carry her beyond the boundaries of her present penitentiary into another, perhaps better, surely different.

  She and Mrs. Jameson lived closely together during the pregnancy, seldom discussing Mr. Jameson and never Mr. Manningham, as Bella began to call and even regard Jack. The baby had already quickened before Bella landed at Liverpool. Now remained the preparation (such as knitting of garments, both pink and blue!) and the waiting to greet face to face the infant whose lively progress Bella described to Mrs. Jameson as “a tapping on the door.”

  Mr. Manningham was either working or drinking very hard. He would look in at her bedroom in the mornings. “Well, how’s my girl? And how’s my boy?” (His blind assumption that he must sire a son frightened Bella, but she trusted that when the baby was born, even a daughter would win his heart. With their combined looks, the child should be a beauty.)

  Once he felt the stirring through the muscular wall and he looked up at her, his bleary eyes suddenly shining. “I touched him, Bella, I touched him!” For a moment he looked at her with a tenderness that he had never shown in all the years of their marriage. Then he pulled down the nightgown and drew up the bedclothes and knelt down by the bed with his hands touching her womb and his head bent. “Oh, God!” he said. “Oh, dear God!”

  He did not believe in God. But Bella felt transfigured that the child in her womb had provoked Jack to call on the Deity. When he began to weep, she pressed one hand upon his head and the other on his hands over her womb. The tears started in her own eyes as she thought how cheap and tawdry their life had been until it was sanctified by the miracle of this conception. It had been her fault as much as his that she had shrunk from the seminal act which produced this wonderful harvest.

  He heard her crying and looked up. “Oh, darling! darling! Bella, mother!” He struggled up from his attitude of prayer and bent down and kissed her on the moist eyelids. “I have been a bad, bad, bad husband. I will try, I promise, to be a good father.”

  Bella took Jack’s head in her hands and pressed it so that his mouth was on hers. His breath reeked of whiskey. She pushed away with an involuntary repulsion.

  The floor was covered with linoleum, over which was laid a mat by the bed. The mat slipped and Jack lay on his back.

  He picked himself up and went out of the room without a word. It was ironic that the tenderest moment in their married life should be on the one occasion she had seen Jack tipsy before breakfast.

  Five months later on January 25th, 1887, Bella after a long and painful labor bore a daughter into the world.

  The baby was beautiful, but blind. Three hours later she was dead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When they told her what the vile disease was that killed the baby, Bella went mad. Minty Jameson said the doctors wanted to certify her and Mr. Manningham was so desperate that he was prepared to agree. But she had pleaded that Bella should come to stay with her and be nursed back to health. “When the doctors agreed,” Mrs. Jameson said, meaningfully, “your husband could not but say the same.” Mrs. Jameson was a Christian of some non-Conformist sect, with very rigid principles of marriage but a more flexible interpretation of neighborly love.

  “I never want to see him again,” Bella said.

  “He has gone to London,” Mrs. Jameson said, “where he has prospects. Of course you should join him, but not until you are better.”

  “I won’t. I won’t. He’s the Devil Incarnate. I tell you, I won’t.”

  The doctor told her, “It is a disease which can be caught in the most innocent manner sometimes. It is difficult to tell. Surely the benefit of a doubt . . .”

  “I know that man,” she said, “he’s been living on the benefit of doubts all his life. I won’t go back to that beast. I tell you, I won’t.”

  Mr. Jameson came and sat by her bed. Bella noticed that, as well as on his nose, he had hair growing in his ears, like the webs of spiders. “I can sympathize with you about your husband, Mrs. Manningham,” he said. “He is a very charming and plausible man but he is not honest. As I know to my cost. Indeed, to coin a phrase, I would call him a crooked customer.”

  “I always suspected it,” Bella said.

  “But he is your husband,” Mr. Jameson said. “You are joined to him for worse as well as for better.”

  “No! No! No!” Bella thought of the spirochetes killing her child, poisoning her own placenta, the very center of her lifegiving. “NO!”

  “Whom God hath joined . . .”

  “No man can put asunder. He can. He has!”

  The battle went on for weeks, step by step with the treatment.

  “Don’t you honor him too much by calling him the Devil Incarnate?” Minty asked. “You have to respect the Devil.”

  Bella laughed for the first time since she had lost the child. “Jack’s a little boy. A very nasty little boy.”

  They worked on her in relays. “Even a very nasty little boy,” suggested Mr. Jameson, “has an immortal soul capable of atonement with God through Jesus Christ.”

  The doctor said, “This is most unprofessional, but I must read you passages from this letter from my colleague Dr. Frost, in London.” He produced a letter.

  “Mr. Manningham is not an easy patie
nt. When you passed him to me, he was filled with remorse at the death of the baby and at the possible effects it had and may continue to have on Mrs. Manningham, towards whom he feels the deepest devotion, despite whatever may have been his conduct. He is meticulous in presenting himself for treatment. But I suspect that he combines with strength of personality weakness of will. I fear what may happen to him if left to the devices of the Metropolis without the sobering influence of his wife.”

  “We each have our Cross to bear,” explained Mrs. Jameson. “When Mr. Jameson contracted mumps on our honeymoon, no woman could have blasphemed the good God more than I, but perhaps I have become a better Godmother.”

  Bella left her bed after ten days, but she remained with the Jamesons as many weeks. Her father would have liked them. They were neither clever nor cultivated; but she discovered they had a moral discrimination. They saw the world as a battleground between Good and Evil. It was a war fought with different strategies from those Bella had taken from the Greeks; but it found a place for Jack.

  Though Bella could not admit the arguments of Christian forbearance, she recognized that life with Jack, however tempestuous, was at least better than the suspended animation of Holly Place. She let it be known that she would be prepared to consider returning to her husband, provided that she received a proper letter of apology.

  The first letter which arrived she rejected because it was too high and mighty, the second because too groveling.

  “Why not come to York to explain yourself in person? You do not seem happy wielding a pen,” she wrote.

  Mr. Jameson shook his head when she showed it to him. “You could express yourself more judiciously.”

  “But I don’t see why, under the circumstances, I should. I have money in my own right. I do not have to depend upon Mr. Manningham for anything.”

  Mr. Jameson took Bella to see his solicitor, a portly gentleman named Beanes. On hearing the date of her marriage, he sighed deeply.

  “You have, my dear madam,” said Mr. Beanes, “committed the folly of premature marriage.” He paused to allow the little bomb of bewilderment to spread. “Supposing that you had had the foresight to anticipate the passing of the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882, you would have been well-advised to postpone matrimony until after that date. As it is, your husband, during his lifetime, has an absolute power of disposing your personal property and chattels real, no act of yours being of any force to affect or transfer that which by intermarriage you have assigned to him. Whereas in a court of equity it might be possible to plead the doctrine of separate estate so that you would be allowed to deal with your property as a feme sole, such a case would be costly to pursue and uncertain of success in view of the fact that you have been married for seven years without apparently objecting to your husband’s conduct of your affairs, or I should be legally more correct in saying his affair.”

  Bella threw up her hands. “I declare, Mr. Beanes, that unless you speak plain language, I cannot understand.”

  “Briefly, not to say, bluntly, Mrs. Manningham, you haven’t a chance unless you can produce some cogent argument why affairs have changed between you and Mr. Manningham so that you can no longer trust his administration. Have you any such reason?”

  Bella felt the blush suffuse her face and neck. She nodded. “But it is of such a delicacy that I would rather die than produce it in a court of law.”

  The interview with the lawyer somehow made it irrelevant what sort of apology she had from her husband. “I will return to you,” she wrote, “upon two conditions: firstly that you will strictly continue treatment for the loathsome disease with which you infected me and killed our child. Dr. Patrick tells me that many patients abandon treatment on the disappearance of symptoms, beguiling themselves without foundation in the belief that the disease is cured. The second condition is that you will not at any subsequent time demand what you are pleased to call your ‘conjugal rights.’ ”

  There was no reply for a week. She began to think that she had gone too far. He was a stiff-necked man. But his letter, when at last it came, was more generous in tone than hers.

  My dear girl,

  I am so glad that you now feel well enough to rejoin me. You will see from my address that I am still at the hotel, but against your coming, I have taken a lease on a house on Angel Street. It is Number 13 (which I am superstitious enough to believe is my lucky number) and shall be moving in to get it ready to welcome you. It is a largish house, perhaps not so smart as it was in the 1860’s, furnished well, if not in the contemporary fashion. The rooms are large, with graciously high molded ceilings; and, you will be pleased to hear, it is modernly equipped with gas, its previous owner or tenant, I understand, having been connected with the City of London and Great Central companies. Not merely are there gas lights, but also a gas stove for cooking and even a gas bath!

  I know that you would have preferred to choose the servants for yourself, had you been here. But in your absence I went to Mrs. Weston’s Agency on Kensington Church Street and engaged two persons, both with excellent references, who will make ready the place for your welcome. The cook is named Elizabeth, a widow woman of what is known as “uncertain age.” To her, we must pay £12 p.a., and all found. This may appear to us outrageously expensive, but it is, from inquiries I have made, reasonable by London standards. The undermaid is in her late teens. Nancy, I think her name is, but am not sure. She was started well in a Lady Somebody’s house in Bath and comes for £5 p.a., all found.

  Your affectionate husband,

  Jack Manningham.

  P.S. I am not the sort of patient to which Dr. Patrick refers. I would never desist from a course of treatment until recommended to do so by my medical practitioner. I have a very good man here in Prince’s Square, to whom I have confided the whole tragic story. You do me a grave injustice to think that I could knowingly pass on this terrible disease to you and our babe. Dr. Patrick must have told you that unclean sexual traffic is not the only way in which the disease can be transmitted. I have been wracking my brains to think where you or I contracted it. When we were in La Paz, do you remember that I cut my lip on a chipped wine glass and there developed what we dismissed as a cold sore, but might have been what they call a ‘chancre.’ Or there was that time, was it before or afterwards? I forget, when you had that sort of rash on your legs which we put down to perspiration and thought no more of it when it went away.

  When we meet again, can it be on the basis of “no recriminations?” We neither of us can be certain which of us contracted it. All that we know is that we both have it now and are being treated. It was a tragedy that it should have infected our first-born, but it will not be a meaningless tragedy if this common suffering deepens our understanding and tolerance of each other in the future, dear girl.

  I found your remark about “conjugal rights” hard to understand. Our “conjugal duty” is to have nothing to do with one another in that way until we have both been given a clean bill of health. But when that day comes, can we not hope to have the child or children which is after all the purpose of matrimony?

  I promise you that I will not press you against your will. But the form in which you post your “condition” makes me fear that you have not yet completely regained the balance of mind shaken by the tragedy. I remember your telling me how long it took you to recover from the shock of your father’s death. Is it fanciful to think, so strange is the working of the human soul, that what you have been suffering from is in some way a repetition of that earlier incident?

  It seems that I have made the postscript longer than the letter. Forgive me for this, as for all the faults, which I shall try to remedy, dear girl, when you join me in our gaslit abode.

  J. M.

  Bella read and re-read the letter. It was an astonishing document to have come from her husband. She showed the medical passage to Dr. Patrick. “When I was a medical student at Guy’s,” he remarked, “we were told, cynically, that only clergymen of the Church of En
gland could catch this disease from lavatory seats. But one does read of remarkable cases, for example, of a boxer cutting his fist on the teeth of a diseased opponent and developing the disease. Medically, what your husband suggests is perfectly possible.”

  “You mean I can’t blame him? It might be me?”

  He nodded. “Equally, as I told you at the very outset, he might have quite innocently contracted the disease. From what you know of your husband, Mrs. Manningham, do you conceive it as possible that he would deliberately get you with child, if I may express myself so bluntly, knowing that he was suffering from such a disease?”

  “No,” she said instantly. “I am quite certain of that. And he really did want me to have a child—not a girl, of course, but a son.”

  Dr. Patrick shook her by the hand. “Isn’t this your answer, Mrs. Manningham?”

  But of course, thought Bella, walking in the Minster Close, it was an answer as enigmatic as the Delphic Oracle’s. The Jack Manningham that she knew, or thought she knew, was an irresponsible boy, dressing up in different clothes, never more himself than when he was being a creature of his fancy; Manningham, the Ishmaelite; Manningham, the diplomat; Manningham, the connoisseur of wine; Manningham, the judge of horseflesh; Manningham, the entrepreneur; Manningham, the lover; Manningham, the father. These roles conflicted in reality. Manningham the father was determined to get a son; and got a daughter, dead.

  She showed the letter to The Jamesons. “I think it is beautiful, my dear,” said Minty. “It shows a true spirit of husbandly affection. I think that you have misjudged him.”

  “And what do you think, Mr. Jameson?”

  Mr. Jameson bit his lip and scratched his head. “It’s a good letter. No doubt about that. Would you like me to be able to write a letter like that, Minty?”

  Mrs. Jameson patted the back of his hand. “You may not say so much; but I can read between the lines.”