“Then do it when you have taken the tray,” said Meg. “You don’t open this window,” said George churlishly. “It’s cold enough as it is.”
“You should put a coat on then if you’re starved,” replied Meg contemptuously. “It’s warm enough for those that have got any life in their blood. You do not find it cold, do you, Cyril?”
“It is fresh this morning,” I replied.
“Of course it is, not cold at all. And I’m sure this room needs airing.”
The maid, however, folded the cloth and went out without approaching the windows.
Meg had grown stouter, and there was a certain immovable confidence in her. She was authoritative, amiable, calm. She wore a handsome dress of dark green, and a toque with opulent ostrich feathers. As she moved about the room she seemed to dominate everything, particularly her husband, who sat ruffled and dejected, his waistcoat hanging loose over his shirt.
A girl entered. She was proud and mincing in her deportment. Her face was handsome, but too haughty for a child. She wore a white coat, with ermine tippet, muff, and hat. Her long brown hair hung twining down her back.
“Has Dad only just had his breakfast?” she exclaimed in high censorious tones as she came in.
“He has!” replied Meg.
The girl looked at her father in calm, childish censure.
“And we have been to church, and come home to dinner,” she said, as she drew off her little white gloves. George watched her with ironical amusement.
“Hello!” said Meg, glancing at the opened letter which lay near his elbow. “Who is that from?”
He glanced round, having forgotten it. He took the envelope, doubled it and pushed it in his waistcoat pocket.
“It’s from William Housley,” he replied.
“Oh! And what has he to say?” she asked.
George turned his dark eyes at her.
“Nothing!” he said.
“Hm-Hm!” sneered Meg. “Funny letter, about nothing!”
“I suppose,” said the child, with her insolent, high-pitched superiority, “it’s some money that he doesn’t want us to know about.”
“That’s about it!” said Meg, giving a small laugh at the child’s perspicuity.
“So’s he can keep it for himself, that’s what it is,” continued the child, nodding her head in rebuke at him.
“I’ve no right to any money, have I?” asked the father sarcastically.
“No, you haven’t,” the child nodded her head at him dictatorially, “you haven’t, because you only put it in the fire.”
“You’ve got it wrong,” he sneered. “You mean it’s like giving a child fire to play with.”
“Um! — and it is, isn’t it, Mam?” — the small woman turned to her mother for corroboration. Meg had flushed at his sneer, when he quoted for the child its mother’s dictum.
“And you’re very naughty!” preached Gertie, turning her back disdainfully on her father.
“Is that what the parson’s been telling you?” he asked, a grain of amusement still in his bitterness.
“No, it isn’t!” retorted the youngster. “If you want to know you should go and listen for yourself. Everybody that goes to church looks nice — ” she glanced at her mother and at herself, pruning herself proudly, “ — and God loves them,” she added. She assumed a sanctified expression, and continued after a little thought, “Because they look nice and are meek.”
“What!” exclaimed Meg, laughing, glancing with secret pride at me.
“Because they’re meek!” repeated Gertie, with a superior little smile of knowledge.
“You’re off the mark this time,” said George.
“No, I’m not, am I, Mam? Isn’t it right, Mam? ‘The meek shall inevit the erf’?”
Meg was too much amused to answer.
“The meek shall have herrings on earth,” mocked the father, also amused. His daughter looked dubiously at him. She smelled impropriety.
“It’s not, Mam, is it?” she asked, turning to her mother. Meg laughed.
“The meek shall have herrings on earth,” repeated George with soft banter.
“No, it’s 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 VIII
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 lad, Wilfred. The kid was white as death, and squealing ‘Mam! Mam!’ I thought it was a bit rotten of Georgie trying to teach the kid to jockey. The race-horse, Bonny-Boy — Boney Boy, I call him — came bouncing round like a spiral egg-whish. Then I saw our Georgie rush up screaming, nearly spitting the moustache off his face, and fetch the horse a cut with the whip. It went off like a flame along hot paraffin. The kid shrieked and clung. Georgie went rushing after him, running staggery, and swearing, fairly screaming — awful — ’a lily-livered little swine!’ The high lanky race-horse went larroping round as if it was going mad. I was dazed. Then Meg came rushing, and the other two lads, all screaming. She went for George, but he lifted his whip like the devil. She daren’t go near him — she rushed at him, and stopped, rushed at him, and stopped, striking at him with her two fists. He waved his whip and kept her off, and the race-horse kept tearing along. Meg flew to stop it, he ran with his drunken totter-step, brandishing his whip. I flew as well. I hit him with my basket. The kid fell off, and Mag rushed to him. Some men came running. George stood fairly shuddering. You would never have known his face, Cyril. He was mad, demoniacal. I feel sometimes as if I should burst and shatter to bits like a sky-rocket when I think of it. I’ve got such a weal on my arm.
“I lost Percival Charles’s ninepence and my nice white cloth out of the basket, and everything, besides having black looks on Thursday because it was mutton-chops, which he hates. Oh, Cyril, ‘I wish I was a cassowary, on the banks of the Timbuctoo.’ When I saw Meg sobbing over that lad — thank goodness he wasn’t hurt! — I wished our Georgie was dead; I do now, also; I wish we only had to remember him. I haven’t been to see them lately — can’t stand Meg’s ikeyness. I wonder how it all will end.
“There’s P. C. bidding ‘Good night and God bless You’ to Brother Jakes, and no supper ready — ”
As soon as I could, after reading Alice’s letter, I went down to Eberwich to see how things were. Memories of the old days came over me again till my heart hungered for its old people.
They told me at the Hollies that, after a bad attack of delirium tremens, George had been sent to Papplewick in the lonely country to stay with Emily. I borrowed a bicycle to ride the nine miles. The summer had been wet, and everything was late. At the end of September the foliage was heavy green, and the wheat stood dejectedly in stook. I rode through the still sweetness of an autumn morning. The mist was folded blue along the hedges; the elm trees loomed up along the dim walls of the morning, the horse-chestnut trees at hand flickered with a few yellow leaves like bright blossoms. As I rode through the tree tunnel by the church where, on his last night, the keeper had told me his story, I smelled the cold rotting of the leaves of the cloudy summer.
I passed silently through the lanes, where the chill grass was weighed down with grey-blue seed-pearls of dew in the shadow, where the wet woollen spider-cloths of autumn were spread as on a loom. Brown birds rustled in flocks like driven leaves before me. I heard the far-off hooting of the “loose-all” at the pits, telling me it was half-past eleven, that the men and boys would be sitting in the narrow darkness of the mines eating their “snap”, while shadowy mice darted for the crumbs, and the boys laughed with red mouths rimmed with grime, as the bold little creatures peeped at them in the dim light of the lamps. The dogwood berries stood jauntily scarlet on the hedge-tops, the bunched scarlet and green berries of the convolvulus and bryony hung amid golden trails, the blackberries dropped ungathered. I rode slowly on, the plants dying around me, the berries leaning their heavy ruddy mouths, and languishing for the birds, the men imprisoned underground below me, the brown birds dashing in haste along the hedges.
Swineshed Farm, where the Renshaws lived, stood quite alone among its fields, hidden from the highway and from everything. The lane leading up to it was deep and unsunned. On my right, I caught glimpses through the hedge of the cornfields, where the shocks of wheat stood like small yellow-sailed ships in a widespread flotilla. The upper part of the field was cleared. I heard the clank of a wagon and the voices of men, and I saw the high load o
f sheaves go lurching, rocking up the incline to the stack-yard.
The lane debouched into a close-bitten field, and out of this empty land the farm rose up with its buildings like a huddle of old, painted vessels floating in still water. White fowls went stepping discreetly through the mild sunshine and the shadow. I leaned my bicycle against the grey, silken doors of the old coach-house. The place was breathing with silence. I hesitated to knock at the open door. Emily came. She was rich as always with her large beauty, and stately now with the stateliness of a strong woman six months gone with child.
She exclaimed with surprise, and I followed her into the kitchen, catching a glimpse of the glistening pans and the white wood baths as I passed through the scullery. The kitchen was a good-sized, low room that through long course of years had become absolutely a home. The great beams of the ceiling bowed easily, the chimney-seat had a bit of dark-green curtain, and under the high mantel-piece was another low shelf that the men could reach with their hands as they sat in the inglenook. There the pipes lay. Many generations of peaceful men and fruitful women had passed through the room, and not one but had added a new small comfort; a chair in the right place, a hook, a stool, a cushion, a certain pleasing cloth for the sofa covers, a shelf of books. The room, that looked so quiet and crude, was a home evolved through generations to fit the large bodies of the men who dwelled in it, and the placid fancy of the women. At last, it had an individuality. It was the home of the Renshaws, warm, lovable, serene. Emily was in perfect accord with its brownness, its shadows, its ease. I, as I sat on the sofa under the window, felt rejected by the kind room. I was distressed with a sense of ephemerality, of pale, erratic fragility.
Emily, in her full-blooded beauty, was at home. It is rare now to feel a kinship between a room and the one who inhabits it, a close bond of blood relation. Emily had at last found her place, and had escaped from the torture of strange, complex modern life. She was making a pie, and the flour was white on her brown arms. She pushed the tickling hair from her face with her arm, and looked at me with tranquil pleasure, as she worked the paste in the yellow bowl. I was quiet, subdued before her.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 38