“Ay, a lot of good that’ll do,” said Mrs Bostock. “It’s like him though. He’ll pull the house down if the chimney smokes.”
“When are you leaving?” said Patty.
“This week-end.”
“Can you believe it!” said Mrs Bostock.
Patty mused for a time.
“Well,” she said, “I must say, your husband has caused a marvellous lot of mischief, Mrs Bostock. He’s fouled his own nest, indeed he has; done a lot of damage to others and no good to himself.”
“No, it’s just like him — but there you are. Those that won’t be ruled can’t be schooled.”
“What is Emmie going to do then?” Gilbert asked.
“Don’t ask me, Mr Noon. She’ll come back when she’s better, I should think: silly thing she is, going off like it.”
“What is her address?”
“Were you thinking of going over on your motor-bike? Well, I’ll back she’ll be pleased. Care of Mrs Harold Wagstaff, School House, Eakrast. He’s one of the schoolmasters, you know, Fanny’s husband. A clever young fellow, come out first class at college. I’m sure you’d get on with him. It’s the fourth house down the lane after the church — house and school combined. You can’t miss it. But it’s a very quiet place, you know. I bet they’re not sorry for a bit of company.”
Gilbert looked down his nose rather, for Mrs Bostock continually glanced sideways at him, approvingly, and he knew she was quite comfortable, assuming in him a prospective, or at least a possible son-in-law. Not that she was making any efforts herself towards the status of mother-in-law. But there was never any knowing what the young people would do, and she was quite willing, whichever way it was. She was quite ready to be agreeable, whichever way things went.
And this was almost as disconcerting to Mr Gilbert as the old man’s tantrum of hostility had been. Moreover that neuralgia of the stomach was worrying him. How easily it might mean an incipient Noon — or, since it is a wise father that knows his own child — an incipient little Emmie, an Emmeling. The thought of this potential Emmeling was rather seriously disconcerting to our friend. He had certain standards of his own, one of them being a sort of feeling that if you put your foot in it, you must clean your own shoe, and not expect someone else to do it. At the same time he was determined to clear out of the whole show.
Mrs Bostock rose, and must be hurrying back to her home. Gilbert rose too.
“Oh but you’ll stay and have a cup of tea,” Patty cried. “You’re sure you can’t stay, Mrs Bostock?”
“I can’t, thank you. I s’ll have our master home at half-past five, and the children’s teas to get, besides our Elsie. Thank you all the same, I’m sure. I’m sure you and Mr Goddard has been very kind to our Emmie. I’m sure I don’t know what she’d have done without Mr Goddard.”
“Oh he’s a friend in need,” said Patty, with a curl of the lip.
“He is, bless him.”
And the mother of the Bostocks took her leave.
Patty rang at once for tea, and sat herself down by the fire in the twilight. Gilbert had remained. It was too late to get to Eakrast that night.
“Well,” said Patty, setding her skirts over her knees in a way she had: “you’ve had quite an adventure.” And she smiled her wrinkled smile. She reminded Gilbert for a moment of one of those wrinkle-faced ivory demons from China. But that was because he was in a temper, and rather in a funk.
“If you look on it as an adventure,” he said.
“Well — how else? Not as a tragedy, I hope. And not altogether a comedy. Too many people have had to smart. I guess Emmie Bostock feels anything but comic at this moment.” This in an admonitory tone.
“Why?” said Gilbert.
“Why!” replied Patty, curling her lip in some scorn of such a question. “I should have thought it was very obvious. A poor girl lying ill — ”
“What of?”
“Well — neuralgia of the stomach, they say. I expect it’s some sort of gastritis — ”
“You don’t think it’s a baby — ”
Even Patty started at the bluntness of the question.
“No. I can’t say. I’ve had no suggestion of such a thing. I hope not, indeed. That would be a calamity. Did you say you were going over?”
“Yes. I’m going to ask her.”
“Yes. So you should. And if it were so — would you marry her?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. What do you fee?”
“Me? Nothing very pleasant.”
“No — so I should imagine, so I should imagine. You’ve got yourself into a nasty position — ”
“Not I. If a lot of fools make a lot of fuss, why should I blame myself for something that’s only natural, anyhow.”
“Natural — yes — maybe. But if Emmie Bostock is going to become a mother, and you’re not going to marry her — or perhaps you are — ”
“No I’m not.”
“No, you’re not! Well then!”
“I can’t help it,” said Gilbert.
“That is no solution of her problem,” said Patty.
“I didn’t invent the problem,” said Gilbert.
“Who did then?”
“Her father, society, and fools.”
“You had no hand in it, then. You had no finger in the pie?”
“Be hanged to fingers,” said Gilbert.
“Well then!” said Patty, starting and looking round as the woman came in with the tray.
“Do you mind lighting up, Mrs Prince!”
Then, changing the subject slightly, she spoke of Lewie and his doings, until the woman went out of the room.
“Mind,” said Patty, pouring out the tea. “I’m not so foolish as to think that you ought to marry the girl, if she is in trouble — ”
“Thank you,” said Gilbert, taking his cup.
“No. I think that would be throwing good money after bad, so to speak. But surely some of the responsibility is yours. The woman isn’t going to be left to suffer everything.”
“What a damned lot of fool’s rot it is,” said Gilbert, becoming angry as he felt the crown of fatherhood being pressed rather prickly on his brow.
“Yes, it is! It is! There should be a provision for the woman in these matters. There should be a State Endowment of Motherhood, there should be a removal of the disgraceful stigma on bastardy. There should be. But there isn’t. And so what are you going to do?”
“Find out first,” said Gilbert, rising and buttoning his coat.
“Oh, but finish your tea,” said Patty.
“I’ve done, thank you.”
“But you can’t ride to Eakrast tonight.”
“Yes I can.”
“Dear me. But leave it till tomorrow — do. Wait till Lewie comes.”
“No thanks. I’ll go and make sure, anyhow.”
As a matter of fact, State Endowment of Motherhood and the stigma on bastardy had done for him. The wind had gone all out of his sails as completely as if Patty had put two cannon-balls through him, and the ship of his conversation could make no more headway on the ruffled waters of her tea-table. Was he to lie there like a water-logged hulk? Was he to sit in that smothering arm-chair with his cup on his knee and a scone in his fingers, sinking deeper and deeper through the springs of the chair like a leaky wreck foundering? Thank Goodness his legs had taken the matter into their own hands — pardon the Irishism — and had jerked him on to his feet.
Chapter IX.
Emmie at Eakrast.
Emmie, we had forgotten to say, was engaged to Walter George all the time she was carrying-on with Mr Noon. The fact so easily slipped her memory that it slipped ours. We ought to have mentioned it sooner, for the sake of Alfred Bostock even.
To be sure, Emmie had been engaged several times. She got engaged in peace-time as easily as other women do in war-time. On every possible occasion she accepted a ring: varying in value from ten shillings to three pounds. Almost every time she sent t
he ring back when the affair was over. Twice the young men had generously said she could keep it. Hence the three ornaments which decked her fingers, and of which she was justly proud.
One she wore ostentatiously on her engagement finger. It was one of those re-made rubies, quite red and nice, and Emmie felt she could honesdy say it was a real stone. It tied her to Walter George quite closely. She had shown it with pleasure to Gilbert, and told him its history. And he had wondered if he was bound by the laws of Emmie-gallantry to offer himself as an engagee. There wouldn’t be much harm in it. And Emmie would so lightly commit pre-wedding bigamy, and there is safety in numbers.
But he hadn’t gone so far, and Emmie had no ring of his. These rings, she loved them, they were her trophies and her romances, her scalp-fringe and her forget-me-not wreaths, her dried roses pressed into sound £. s. d.
Walter George was a quite nice boy: we are going to make his acquaintance. He was a clerk, and quite a gendeman. Let us say it softly, for fear of offending a more-than-sacred institution, he was a bank-clerk. He had walked out with Emmie all the time he was in Woodhouse, and she had hardly found an opportunity for a stroll with anyone else. Cruel authority, however, had moved him to the newly-opened branch of the London and Provincial bank in Warsop. He departed, deeply regretting the soft and cuddly Emmie, who made love an easy and simple path for him. For the ease and simplicity of his paths of love he was wise enough to be thankful. Therefore, when rumour whispered poison-gas in his ear, he looked at other maidens, and imagined himself cuddling with them in a dark entry, and wiped his ears. Emmie was Emmie. So far, she belonged to herself. His nature, being easy like hers, though less flighty, comprehended her sufficiently to realise that she was sipping all the flowers of love in her singleness in order to store the honey-jars of connubial felicity for him. The honey might be no more than golden syrup, but he would never know the difference. And therefore, so long as Emmie had the decency not to offend him too openly, he had the sense not to peep round the corner after her when she left him.
Some men want the path of love to run pleasantly between allotment gardens stocked with cabbages and potatoes and an occasional sweet-william: some men want rose-avenues and trickling streams, and so scratch themselves and get gnat- bitten: some want to scale unheard-of heights, roped to some extraordinary female of their fancy — chacun a son gout. Walter George was born in the era of allotment gardens, and thus Providence had provided for his marital Saturday afternoons. Which is saying a good deal. He was a bank-clerk too, and wanted to have an easy conscience and a dressy spouse. Church parade every Sunday morning was an institution to him. And he had quite a lot of cuddly lovey-doveyness. If anyone can mention to me a better recipe for a husband, I shall be glad to write it down.
Emmie took him seriously. Roses and rapture were good fun, but the cauliflower was the abiding blossom. Co-op. entries might have their thrill, but she was not one of those whose fanatic idealism insists on spending a life-time in such places. No, she would rather forfeit her chances of heaven than her chance of a home of her own where she could keep warm like a cat, and eat her cauliflower of a Sunday dinner.
In short, Emmie was au fond, very sensible, much more sensible than her father. She knew even better than he that the cauliflower is the flower of human happiness, and that rose-leaves act like senna. All very well to purge off the follies of youth with red, or better still with pink roses. And she was sooner purged than her father. If only he had understood, he would have slept better in his bed. But, seeing his own more frenzied colics revived in the vagaries of his Emmie, he reacted more violently than he need have done, and that largely from fear. Once his daughter had run away he began to realise this.
Having thus apologised for our characters, and demonstrated that they have a bed-rock of common-sense; having revealed their acquaintance with the fact that rose-leaves bring belly-aches, and that cauliflowers are delicious, and that Sunday dinner is the key-stone of the domestic arch, on which repeated arches all society rests; having proved, in short, that the Bostocks are of the bulldog breed, full of sound British sense; let us go on with our story with more self- satisfaction than heretofore.
Emmie arrived at her sister Fanny’s with real pains rending her. She knew it was rose-leaves, but blamed her father. In fact she was in a state of subdued hysteria. So she took to her bed, and decided to turn over a new leaf. No, not a rose-leaf. She decided, if possible, to open the last long chapter of a woman’s life, headed Marriage. She intended it to be a long and quite banal chapter, cauliflower and lovey-doves. Having at the moment a variety of pains in her inside, dubbed neuralgia of the stomach, she developed some of her own father’s reactionary hatred against the immortal rose. And though her hatred would lose its violence as the pains passed off: though it would decline into mere indifference, like her mother’s, except she would retain a little crisp flirtiness of manner, to show she kept her end up: still, this sound and sensible emotion, this fundamental detestation of rose-leaves because she knew what rose-leaves were (just like her father: a piece of impudent assurance too); this dislike of the immortal rose, and a consequent exaltation of the solid cauliflower would henceforth be the directing force of her life.
Warsop — and with this word the story gets on its feet again — lies but ten miles from Eakrast, across the forest. After two days of temper, hysteria, neuralgia of the stomach, after-effect of rose-leaves, or whatever it may have been, Emmie began to recover her common-sense. She had eaten the rose, and would make an ass of herself no more. So she lay and plotted for settling down in life.
The school and school-house were one building. In the front, the long school-room faced the road: at the back, the house-premises and garden looked to the fields and the distant forest.
Fanny, Emmie’s sister, was a dark, rather big-nosed girl, very good-natured. She had been married for a year, and had a baby. She received Emmie without too much surprise or consternation. In Fanny’s sky the weather always blew over.
“Don’t bother. It’ll blow over,” she said to Emmie as she said all her life to herself.
She put her sister on the sofa, covered her up, and gave her a hot cup of tea; then she waited for Harold to come in. Emmie could hear Harold, on the other side of the wall, talking away at the scholars.
“Now then, Salt, what river comes next? Witham Welland Nene and Great Ouse — what comes after that? Don’t you know? Do you know what your own name is? What? Oh, you do, do you. What is it? What? Salt! And if the Salt hath lost its savour? You don’t know, do you. No, you wouldn’t. Tell him what river comes next, Poole.”
Emmie guessed it was Geography: therefore probably near the end of the afternoon. Listening, she could occasionally hear a shrill word from the assistant teacher, a girl, who was apparendy taking sewing. There were only about forty-five scholars in the whole school.
The itch came over the rose-leaf-griped girl, to be down in the school-room taking a lesson. She longed to begin with a “Now then — .” Fanny had been a teacher, and had helped Harold till the advent of the baby. When the baby was a bit older, she would get a servant and go into the school again with Harold. It was so handy. You could just pop in and turn the pudding while the children were doing their drawing. You could pop in and put the kettle on at half-past three, and at four o’clock you would find it singing nicely.
Emmie envied Fanny her little school and school-house. As for Harold, he was all right. He was very respectable and a bit of a mardy, perhaps — but he was all right.
“Hello Emmie. We weren’t expecting you,” he said when he came in from school and found her at tea with Fanny and the baby. He talked in the rather mouthing fashion which teachers often have in the Midlands. “Have you got holidays at Woodhouse then?” he continued, his first thought of course, being school.
“No, I’ve come away from our Dad for a bit.”
“Oh! I thought perhaps you’d closed for measles. We’ve twelve absent this afternoon. — What’s amiss then.�
�
“Oh, same old song. Our Dad nagging the life out of me till I can’t put up with it. I thought I’d come here a bit if you’d have me.”
“Yes, you’re welcome. But won’t your Dad be more wild than ever? What about school?”
“I’ve sent to tell them I’m bad. And I am an’ all. I’m feeling damn bad, Harold!”
“Are you, why what’s wrong?”
“I’ve got a cramp in my inside till I don’t know what to do with myself. I had to sit down about six times coming from the station.”
“And she’s not eaten a thing,” said Fanny.
“Looks to me as if she’d better go to bed,” said the sympathetic Harold. “I’ve had a sore throat for this last week. I’ve been thinking, Fanny — have you got that linseed in th’ oven?”
Fanny had.
“You’d better look at it an’ see it’s not too dry. I sent Bendey for a stick of Spanish juice. You’d perhaps have some of that Emmie. I know it’s an old-fashioned remedy, but it does me more good than these modern preparations like aspirin and camphorated chlorodyne and such.”
Fanny meanwhile was at the oven looking into a steamy stew-jar, from which came a strange odour of flax-seeds. She stirred the brown, pulpy, porridgy mass, and Harold came to look.
“It would do with a drop more water, dear, don’t you think it would?” he said to Fanny, putting his arm round her neck as they both stared into the stew-jar, she crouching on the hearth-rug.
“Just a drop,” said Fanny. “Take it from the kettle.”
And between them they concocted the mess.
On the other side of the tall range which prevented, or which was to prevent the baby from walking into the fire, in future days, the bedding was airing.
“Should you like to go to bed now, Emmie?” asked Harold in concern.
“Oh, I can wait,” said Emmie.
“You needn’t wait,” said Harold, disturbed to see her sitting there mute with a pinched-up face, doubling herself over as twinges caught her.
“I’ll make your bed directly I’ve fed baby,” said Fanny, picking up the infant that was crying crossly for food.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 275