CHAPTER XIX
By certain scientific thinkers life is held to be but a relative term, and the “definitions” of the ancients have been cast aside into the very dust that they despised as gross and utterly inanimate. Whether radium be “alive” or no, the thing we ordinary mortals know as “life” shows even in its social aspects a significant sympathy with the Spencerian definition. The successful men are those who react and respond most readily, and most selfishly to the externals of existence. Vulgarly, we call it the seizing of opportunities, though the clever merchant may react almost unconsciously and yet instinctively to the market of the public mind. All life is an adjustment of relationships, of husband to wife, of mother to child, of cheat to dupe, of capital to labor.
Thus, in social death, so to speak, a man may be so placed that he is unable to adapt himself to his surroundings. His reputation dies and disintegrates like a body that is incapable of adjusting itself to some blighting change of climate. Or, in the terminology of physics, responsible repute may be likened to an obelisk whose instability increases with its height. A flat stone may remain in respectable and undisturbed equilibrium for centuries. The poised pinnacle is pressed upon by every wind that blows.
The fall of some such pinnacle is a dramatic incident in the experience of the community. The noise thereof is in a hundred ears, and the splintered fragments may be gaped at by the crowd. Thus it had been with James Murchison in Roxton town. Neither doctors nor engine-drivers are permitted to indulge in drink, and in Murchison’s case the downfall had been the more dramatic by his absolute refusal to qualify the disgrace. An inquest, an unflattering finding by the coroner’s jury, a case for damages threatening to be successfully instituted by an outraged widow. Amid such social humiliations the brass plate had disappeared abruptly from the door of the house in Lombard Street. It was as though Murchison’s pride had accepted the tragic climax with all the finality of grim despair. He had even made no attempt to sell the practice, but, like Cain, he had gone forth with his wife and with his children, too sensitive in his humiliation to brave the ordeal of reconquering a lost respect.
Many months had passed since the furniture dealers’ vans had stood in the roadway outside the house in Lombard Street, with bass and straw littering the pavement, and men in green baize aprons going up and down the dirty steps. Frost was in the air, and the winter sun burned vividly upon the western hills. A fog of smoke hung over the straggling town, lying a dark blurr amid the white-misted meadows. Lights were beginning to wink out like sparks on tinder. The dull roar of a passing train came with hoarse strangeness out of the vague windings of the valley.
As the dusk fell, a smart pair of “bays” switched round the northwest corner of St. Antonia’s Square and clattered over the cobbles under the spectral hands of the towering elms. The church clock chimed for the hour as Parker Steel, furred like any Russian, stepped out of the brougham, and, slamming the door sharply after him, ordered the coachman to keep the horses on the move. Dr. Steel’s brougham was not the only carriage under St. Antonia’s sleeping elms. A steady beat of hoofs and a jingling of harness gave a ring of distinction to the quiet square.
Parker Steel glanced at the warm windows of his house as he crossed the pavement, and fumbled for his latch-key in his waistcoat pocket. The sound of music came from within, ceasing as the physician entered the hall, and giving place to the brisk murmur of many voices. A smart parlor-maid emerged from the drawing-room, carrying a number of teacups, blue and gold, on a silver tray. The babble of small talk unmuffled by the open door suggested that Mrs. Betty excelled as a hostess.
Ten minutes elapsed before Parker Steel, spruce and complacent, was bowing himself into his own drawing-room with the easy unction of a man sure of the distinction of his own manners. Quite twenty ladies were ready to receive the physician’s effeminate white fingers. Mrs. Betty had gathered the carriage folk of Roxton round her. The heat of the room seemed to have stimulated the scent of the exotic flowers. The shaded standard lamp, burning in the bay-window beside the piano, shed a brilliant light upon a pink mass of azaleas in bloom. Mrs. Betty herself was still seated upon the music-stool, one hand resting on the key-board as she chatted to Lady Sophia Gillingham, sunk deep in the luxurious cushions of a lounge-chair.
Mrs. Betty, a study in saffron, her pale face warmed by the light of the lamp, caught her husband’s eye as he moved through the crowded room. Sleek, brilliant, pleased as a cat that has been lapping cream, she made a slight gesture that he understood, a gesture that brought him before Lady Gillingham’s chair.
“Parker.”
“Yes, dear.”
“Will you touch the bell for me?—I want to show Mignon to Lady Sophia.”
Parker Steel’s smile congratulated his wife on her deft handling of the weapons of social diplomacy. He rang the bell, and meeting the servant at the door, desired her to bring Mrs. Betty’s blue Persian and the basket of kittens from before the library fire.
The physician took personal charge of Mignon and her children, and returning between the chairs and skirts, presented the family to Lady Sophia.
Parker Steel had an ecstatic lady at either elbow as he held the basket lined with red silk, the three mouse-colored kittens crawling about within. Mignon, the amber-eyed, had made a leap for Mrs. Betty’s lap.
“The dears!”
“How absolutely sweet!”
“Such tweety pets.”
The two elderly canaries cheeped in chorus while Lady Sophia’s fat and pudgy hand fondled the three kittens. Her red and apathetic face became more human and expressive for the moment, though there was a suggestion of cupidity in her dull blue eyes.
“The dear things!” and she lifted one from the basket into her lap, where it mewed rather peevishly, and caught its claws in Lady Sophia’s lace.
“Mignon is a prize beauty,” and Mrs. Betty caressed the cat, and looked up significantly into her husband’s face.
“Perfectly lovely. There, there, pet, what a fuss to make!” and the dowager’s red-knuckled hand contrasted with the kitten’s slate-gray coat. “I suppose they are all promised, Mrs. Steel?”
“Well, to tell the truth, they have created quite a rage among my friends.”
“No doubt, the dears. You could ask quite a fancy price for such prize kittens.”
Parker Steel had been prompted by an instant flash of his wife’s eyes.
“I am sure if Lady Gillingham would like one of the kittens—”
He appeared to glance questioningly, and for approval, at Mrs. Betty.
“Of course—I shall be delighted.”
“Really?”
“Why, yes.”
“Then—may I buy one?”
Parker Steel elevated his eyebrows, and, with the air of a Leicester, refused to listen to any such proposal.
“Do not mention such a matter. We shall only be too glad.”
“But, my dear Mrs. Steel—”
“I agree wholly with my husband.” And Mrs. Betty stretched out a white hand, and stroked the ball of fluff in Lady Sophia’s lap. “Choose which you like. They can leave the mother in a week or two.”
Lady Gillingham’s plebeian face beamed upon Mrs. Betty.
“This is really too generous.”
“Why, not at all,” and her vivacity was compelling.
“Then I may choose this one?”
“With pleasure.”
“Isn’t it a pet?”
Mignon, purring on Mrs. Betty’s lap, failed to realize in the least how valuable a social asset she had proved. There was a rustling of skirts, a shaking of hands, as the room began to empty of its silks and laces. Lady Sophia struggled up with a fat sigh from the depths of her chair, stroked Mignon’s ears, and held out a very gracious hand to Mrs. Steel.
“Can you dine with us on Monday?”
“Delighted.”
“Sir Gerald Gerson and the Italian ambassador will be with us. I want to show you some choice Dresden that my husband has just bought at Christie’s.”
Mrs. Betty received the favor with the smiling and enthusiastic simplicity of an ingenuous girl.
“How kind of you! I am so fond of china.”
Parker Steel gave his arm to the great lady, and escorted her to her carriage, his deportment a professional triumph in the consummation of such a courtesy.
He found Mrs. Betty alone in the drawing-room when he returned. She was lying back in the chair that Lady Gillingham’s stout majesty had impressed, and had Mignon and a kitten on her lap.
Parker Steel, standing on the hearth-rug, looked round him with the air of a man to whom the flowers in the vases, the lilies and azaleas in bloom, seemed to exhale an incense of success. Social prosperity and an abundance of cash; the expensive arm-chairs appeared to assert the facts loudly.
“A satisfactory party, dear, eh?”
Mrs. Betty, fondling Mignon’s ears, looked up and smiled.
“I think we have conquered Boadicea at last,” she said.
“It appears so.”
“She should be a most excellent advertisement.”
Parker Steel fingered his chin, and looked meditatively at the carpet. A self-satisfied and half-cynical smile hovered about the angles of his clean-cut mouth.
“A year ago, Betty,” he remarked, “Lady Sophia pertained to Catherine Murchison, and showed us the cold shoulder. Well, we have changed all that.”
“We?”
“Well, say the workings of the ‘spirit,’ or the infirmities of the flesh.”
Mrs. Betty held Mignon against her cheek and laughed.
“What a dear, soft, fluffy thing it is!”
“Set a cat to catch a cat, eh? I wonder what our friend Murchison is doing?”
“Murchison! I never trouble to think.”
Parker Steel studied his boots.
“Poor devil, he made a pretty mess of a first-class practice. They were hard up, too, I imagine. Damages and costs must have cleared out most of Murchison’s investments, and their furniture sold dirt cheap. I can’t tell why the ass did not try to sell the practice.”
“Pride, I suppose.”
“It meant making me a present of most of his best patients.”
“My dear Parker, never complain.”
“Hardly, when we should be booking between two and three thousand a year—at least. Well, I must turn out again before dinner.”
The physician returned to his fur coat and his brougham, leaving Mrs. Betty fondling Mignon and her kittens.
CHAPTER XX
A hundred rows of mud-colored brick “boxes,” set face to face and back to back. Scores of cobbled streets, a gray band of stone, and two gray bands of slate. Interminable brown doors and dingy windows; interminable black and sour back yards, festoons of sodden underclothing, moping chickens caged up in corners, rubbish, broken boxes, cinder heaps, and smoke.
Hardness in every outline, in the dirty, yellow-walled houses, in the faces of the women, and in the crude straightness of every street. An atmosphere of granite, brick, cast-iron, and slate. No softness of contour, no flow of curves, no joy in the sweep of land or sky. The color scheme a smirch of gray, yellow, and dingy red. Scarcely a streak of green in the monotonous streets. The sky itself, at best a dusty blue, sliced up into lengths by slate roofs and cast-iron gutters.
To the south of this wilderness of brick and stone rose the chimneys and cage wheels of the Wilton collieries. Here the sketch had been worked in charcoal, black wharves beside a black canal, hillocks of coal, black smoke, black faces. The whirr of wheels, the grinding of shovels, the banging of trucks being shunted to and fro along the sidings. The eternal spinning of the cage wheels, the panting and screaming of engines, the toil and travail of a civilization that disembowels the very earth.
In Wilton High Street, where electric trams sounded their gongs all day, and cheap shops ogled the cheap crowd, there was a broad window that had been colored red and topped by a line of gold some eight feet above the pavement. On this sanguinary window ran an inscription in big, black letters:
Dr. Tugler, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.Consulting hours, 8 to 10 and 6 to 9Consultations one shilling. Medicines included.
Dr. Tugler, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.
Consulting hours, 8 to 10 and 6 to 9
Consultations one shilling. Medicines included.
Those be-shawled ladies who carried their rickety infants into Dr. Tugler’s shop, might find the doctor and one of his two professional assistants seated in the two cheap, cane-bottomed arm-chairs before two baize-topped tables. There were wooden benches round the room, a glass-fronted cabinet in one corner, medical almanacs on the walls, a placard over the mantel-piece instructing patients “To bring their own bottles.” An inner door with ground glass panels led to a dingy surgery, a white sink in one corner, and a dresser littered with instrument cases, packages of lint, reels of plaster, and boxes of bandages. A third door opened from the surgery into the dispensary, a veritable bower of bottles, lit by a skylight, a ledger desk under the gas-jet in one corner, medicine glasses standing on the sloppy drug-stained dresser, a spirituous reek filling the little room. Oil-cloth, worn patternless, covered all the floors. The gas-jet in the surgery flared perpetually through all the winter months, for the sky-light was too small and dirty to gather much light from the December skies.
It was Saturday night at Wilton, and hucksters were shouting up their wares in High Street, despite the fine and almost impalpable rain that wrapped everything in a dismal mist. The gongs of the tram-cars clanged impatiently past Dr. Tugler’s surgery, where a row of stalls ranged beside the pavement gathered a crowd of marketers under their naphtha lamps. Trade had been busy behind the red window that Saturday evening. Piles of shillings and sixpences lay in the drawer of Dr. Tugler’s consulting-table, small change left by anæmic, work-worn women, who needed food and rest more than Dr. Tugler’s cheap and not very effectual mixtures. The room had been full of the bronchitic coughing of old men, the whining of children, the scent of wet, warm, dirty clothes.
The front room had emptied itself at last, an old woman with a cancerous lip being the last to go. Dr. Tugler was sitting at the table nearest to the red window, counting up the miscellaneous and greasy pile of small coins, and packing them pound by pound into a black hand-bag that lay across his knees. He was a vulgar little man with a cheerful, blustering manner, and a kind of plump and smiling self-assurance that was never at a loss for the most dogmatic of opinions.
Among the Wilton colliery folk he was known distinctively as “the doctor.” A man of finer fibre might have been wasted amid such surroundings. Dr. Tugler, florid, bumptious, ever ready with a semi-decent joke, and boasting an aggressive yet generous aplomb, contrived to impress his uncultured clients with a sense of sufficiency and of rough-and-ready power. But for his frock-coat, and for the binoral stethoscope that dangled from the top button of his fancy waistcoat, he might have been taken for a prosperous publican, a bookmaker, or a butcher.
Dr. Tugler swept the remaining small change into his bag, locked it, and jumped up with the air of a man eminently satisfied with the day’s trade. The assistant at the other table was pencilling a few notes into a pocket-book, and humming the tune of a popular, music-hall song. The surgery door opened as Dr. Tugler deposited the black bag on the mantel-shelf, and a swarthy collier, with one hand bandaged, came slouching out, swinging an old cap.
“Good-night, doctor.”
Dr. Tugler faced round with his hands stuffed into his trousers pockets.
“Hallo, Smith, find the knife sharp, eh?”
The man grinned, and glanced at his bandaged hand.
“There was a tidy lot of muck in it,” he said.
“Good thing we’ve saved the finger. Paid your bob, eh? Right. Keep off the booze, and go straight home to the missus.”
Tugler turned down the gas-jets, and entered the surgery. A big man in a white cotton coat was bending over the sink and washing a porcelain tray under the hot-water tap. Blood-stained swabs of wool lay in an old paper basket under the sink. A couple of scalpels, a pair of dressing forceps and scissors, a roll of lint, dental forceps still clutching a decayed tooth, an excised cyst floating in a bowl of blood-stained water, such were the details that completed the picture of a general surgeon at work.
Dr. Tugler cast a quick and observant glance round the room, turned down the gas a little, and counted the bandages in a card-board box on the dresser.
“Feel fagged, Murchison, eh?”
The big man turned, his lined and powerful face wearing a look of patient self-restraint.
“No—thanks.”
“Be easy on the bandages,” and Dr. Tugler gave a frowning wink; “we can’t do the beggars à la West End on a bob a time.”
The big man nodded, and began to clean his knives.
“A message has just come round from Cinder Lane, No. 10. Primip. Glad if you’d see to it. I feel dead fagged myself.”
An almost imperceptible sigh and a slight deepening of the lines about Murchison’s mouth escaped Dr. Tugler’s notice.
“I will start as soon as I have cleaned these instruments. No. 10, is it?”
“Yes. Here’s the week’s cash.”
Dr. Tugler rapped down three sovereigns and three shillings on the dresser, and turning into the dispensary, busied himself by inspecting the contents of the bottles with the critical eye of a man who realizes that details decide the difference between profit and loss.
In ten minutes Murchison had taken off his white cotton coat, pocketed his money, put on a blue serge jacket and overcoat, and taken a rather shabby bowler from the peg on the surgery door. He picked up an obstetric bag from under the dresser, and crossing the outer room with a curt “good-night” to his fellow-assistant, plunged into the glare and drizzle of Wilton High Street.
Despite the rain, the sidewalks were crowded with Saturday-night bargainers who loitered round the stalls under the flaring naphtha lamps. The strident voices of the salesmen mingled with the clangor of the passing teams and the plaintive whining of the overhead wires. Here and there the glare from a public-house streamed across the pavement, and through the swing-doors, Murchison, as he passed, had a glimpse of the gaudy fittings, the glittering glasses, the rows of bottles set out like lures to catch the eye. The bars were crowded with men and women, the discordant hubbub of their voices striking out like the waters of a mill-race into the more even murmur of the streets.
The man with the bag shuddered as he passed these glittering dens, and felt the hot breath of the “drink beast” on his face. His eyes seemed to fling back the glare of the lights with a fierceness that was not far from fanatical disgust. Possibly there was an element of mockery for him in the coarse chattering and the braying laughter. His fingers contracted about the handle of his bag. He seemed to hurry with the air of some grim wayfarer in thePilgrim’s Progress, escaping from sights and sounds poignant with the prophecies of despair.
In Cinder Lane, Murchison found the door of No. 10 half open, and a man sitting reading in his shirt-sleeves in the little front parlor. A significant whimpering came from the room above, the first faint crying of a new-born child. A flash of relief passed across Murchison’s face. The sound reprieved him from a possible night-watch in the stuffy heat of a room that smelled of paraffin, stale beer, and unwashed clothes.
“All over, I think.”
The man with the paper rose, removed his clay pipe, jerked back his chair, and grinned.
“Jus’ so, doctor.”
“So much the better for every one.”
“Lord love you, doctor, I feel as though I’d bin sittin’ on ’ot coals for ten mortal hours.”
Murchison swung his overcoat over a chair, and climbed the stairs, a half open door showing a band of light blotted by the shadow of a woman’s head. The proud father returned to his pipe and to his paper and the mug of beer on the table at his elbow. He looked a mere lad, sickly, beardless, hatchet-faced, with high shoulders and no chest. Coal-dust seemed to have been grimed into the pores of his greasy and wax-white skin.
The lad’s smirk was a quaint mixture of pride and sheepishness when Murchison came down the stairs half an hour later and congratulated him on the possession of a son.
“Glad it’s over, doctor. ’Ave a drop?” and he reached for a clean glass.
Murchison’s face hardened.
“No, thanks very much. Your wife has come through it very well.”
The man put his paper down and held Murchison’s overcoat for him.
“Well, it’s a mercy, doctor, that it ain’t twins.”
“Not a double responsibility, eh?”
The lad winked.
“Why, there’s a cove bin writin’ in this paper as ’ow every man ought t’ have a woppin’ fam’ly. I sh’ld like to ask ’im, ‘’ow about the bread and cheese?’”
“And the beer, perhaps?”
“Ther, doctor, only two bob a week—reg’lar. That ain’t ruination. It’s a bit sweaty down in the coal-’ole. I give the missus most of the money.”
“So do I,” and Murchison smiled at the lad with something fatherly in his eyes.
“You do that, doctor?”
“I do.”
“Well, there ain’t much mistake in makin’ the missus yer banker when she’s clean and tidy, and looks to a man’s buttons.”
Murchison turned out again into the drizzling rain, and swung along a dozen dreary streets that resembled each other much as one curbstone resembles another. A church clock was striking eleven as he reached a row of little, red brick villas on the outskirts of the town, with a dirty piece of waste-land in front and the black canal behind. He stopped before a gate that bore, as though in irony, the name “Clovelly.” There was no blue, boundless Atlantic within glimpse of Wilton town, no flashing up of golden coast-lines in the sunlight, no towering cliffs piling green foam towards a sapphire sky.
The front door opened at the click of the garden gate, if ten square feet of garden and a gravel-path could be flattered with the name of a garden. A woman’s figure stood outlined by the lamp burning in the hall. She was dressed in a cheap cotton blouse, and skirt of dark-blue serge, but the clothes looked well on her, better than silks on the body of another.
Her husband’s face drew out of the darkness into the light. Catherine’s eyes had rested half-questioningly on it for a moment, the eyes of a woman whose love is ever on the watch.
“I am late, dear,” and he went in with a feeling of tired relief.
They kissed.
“Come, your supper is ready. Dear me, what a long day you have had!” and she glanced at the bag, understanding at once what had kept him to such an hour.
“How are the youngsters?”
“Asleep since nine.”
Catherine took his coat and hat, and put her arm through his as they went into the little front room together. A coke fire glowed in the diminutive grate, a saucepan full of soup stood steaming on the trivet. Murchison sat down at the table that was half covered by a white cloth. At the other end lay his wife’s work-basket, with a dozen pairs of socks and stockings. Her eyes had been tired before the opening of the garden gate. Now they were bright and vital, for love had wiped all weariness away—that heroic, quiet love that conquers a thousand sordid trifles.
“Saturday is always busy.”
“I know,” and she smiled as she poured him out his soup.
“I think we had nearly a hundred people to-night. Thanks, dear, thanks,” and he touched her hand.
Catherine sat down on the sofa, and took up her stockings, seeing that he was tired, too tired to care to talk. Her woman’s instinct was rarely at a loss, and a tired man appreciates restfulness in a wife.
When he had finished, she rose and drew the solitary arm-chair before the fire, and brought him his pipe and his tobacco. Murchison’s face softened. He never lost the consciousness of all she had forgiven.
He drew out the week’s money when they had talked for a while, and handed the three sovereigns to her, keeping only the three shillings for himself. Catherine wore the key of their cash-box tied to a piece of ribbon round her neck. It was Murchison who had insisted on this precaution. Every week he gave the money to her, and saw her lock it in the cash-box on her desk.
“Shall I still keep the key, dear?”
“Keep it.”
“Yes,” and she colored like a girl, “you know that I trust you.”
“I know it, but I have sworn to myself, dear, to risk nothing.”
She rose slowly and put the money away, glad in her heart of his quiet and determined strength.
“I understand—”
“That I mean to crush this curse now—once—and forever.”
Murchison finished his pipe, and Catherine put her work away. The front door was locked, the gas turned out. Husband and wife went up the stairs together, Catherine carrying the lighted candle. She opened a door leading from the narrow landing, and they went in, hand in hand, to look at their two children who were asleep.
A wistful smile hovered about Murchison’s mouth.
“Poor little beggars, they don’t see much of me!”
He was thinking of the past and of the future. Indeed, he thought the same thoughts nightly as he looked at the two heads upon the pillows.
“Gwen is looking better again.”
“Is she?” and he sighed.
“We had quite a long walk to-day before it began to rain.”
They spoke in undertones, Murchison leaning over Gwen’s little bed. He looked at her very lovingly, as though wishing to feel her small arms about his neck.
“Good-night, little one. Good-night, Mischief Jack,” and he turned to his wife with the air of a man repeating a solemn and nightly prayer.
CHAPTER XXI
Failure is bitter enough in itself to a man of energy and strength of purpose, but more bitter still are the humiliations and the sufferings that failure may impose on those he loves.
Reputation, resources, his very home, had been swallowed up, but in Murchison there was that dogged northern spirit, that stubborn uplift against odds, that is at its strongest when confronted with defeat. Like a man brought to the edge of a black cliff at night, he had looked down grimly into the depths, depths that waited not for him alone, but for the innocent children who held his hands.
As a cheap assistant in a colliery town, James Murchison had joined issue with his own unfitness for the ordeal of life. A tight-mouthed and rather silent man, he had entered upon the rebuilding of his self-respect with the dogged patience of a Titan. The little, red brick villa, with the dirty piece of waste land in front and the black canal behind, might have suggested no stage for heroic drama to the casual eyes of Murchison’s neighbors. The big, brown-faced man stalked to and fro to work, quiet and unobtrusive, a figure that was soon familiar to most of the middle-class people who lived on either side. He seemed one of those many mortals who move through life without a history, an ant in an ant world, busy, monotonously busy, earning his paltry pounds a week, without glamour, and without fame.
Man suffers most in seeing those dear to him in suffering, and the tragic tones of life are caught from the lips of those he loves. The wounds of a wife or of a child are open in the heart of the husband or father. Remorse or self-accusation, if there be cause for such a feeling, is as the vinegar on the sponge to the man crucified by his own sin. One has but to come in contact with the material side of civilization to discover how desperately sordid this twentieth-century life can be. How great the contrast was between Roxton lying amid its woods and meadows, and the dismal colliery town, Murchison, as a father, realized too soon. The one smelled of the fresh earth, primal and invigorating; the other of soap-works, soot, cabbage-water, and rancid oil. In Roxton the mortality was low; in the colliery town hundreds of infants died yearly before they were four weeks old.
Such realism, the vivid heritage of thousands, might well make a man go grimly through life, the burden of care very heavy on his shoulders.
To watch a wife’s face fade, despite her courage, poverty and sorrow bringing weariness to the serenest eyes.
To know that drudgery burdens the dear life of the home.
To watch the lapsing of a child from sheer health into sickness, the beautiful aliveness vanishing, the bloom marred like the bloom on handled fruit.
The consciousness of dependence and obligation, the receiving of brusque instructions from a man of cheap and vulgar fibre.
Sordid surroundings, sordid neighbors, an utter dearth of friends.
Work, eternal work, day in, day out; no Sabbath rest, no time for home life, no money to give joy to those most dear.
A vivid ghost past following, like a shadow.
A dim and unflattering future before the eyes, a future darkened by the prophetic dread of leaving wife and children alone in a selfish world.
Such were the realities that filled James Murchison’s sphere of consciousness, realities that were responsible for many a sleepless night.
It was the afternoon of a February day when Murchison stopped before the theatre in Wilton High Street, for the colliery town delighted in melodrama, and pulling out a pigskin purse, examined the contents with critical consideration. He had saved a few shillings by stinting himself in tobacco, and in his daily lunch at a cheap eating-house near Dr. Tugler’s surgery. The pantomime “Puss in Boots” was still running at the theatre, and at the box-office Murchison bought four tickets for the upper circle.
In the old days the children had gone up yearly to Drury Lane, and Master Jack had been making many allusions to the gaudy “posters” covering a hoarding near the row of red brick villas. More than once the boy’s thoughtless words had hurt the father’s heart. It was chiefly of Gwen that Murchison thought as he thrust the envelope with its yellow slips into his breast-pocket.
At Clovelly, Catherine, her sleeves turned up, stood in the little back kitchen making a suet-pudding. The Murchisons had dispensed with a servant because of the expense, for their income had practically no margin, and money had to be scraped together to pay the yearly dividend on the husband’s life-insurance. Catherine’s mother, a somewhat stern, pious, and bedridden old lady, living in a respectable south-coast town, allowed her daughter a small sum each year. Mrs. Pentherby was the possessor of a comfortable income, but suffered from a meanness of mind and a severity of prejudice that had made her rather merciless to Murchison in the hour of his misfortune. Such money as she sent was to be spent “solely on the children.” Catherine’s face had often reddened over the contents of her mother’s drastic and didactic letters. Her love and her loyalty were hurt by the old lady’s blunt and Puritanical advice. As for James Murchison, he had too much pride to ever dream of touching Mrs. Pentherby’s “ear-marked” donations to his children.
On several occasions a five-pound note had reached Clovelly anonymously from another quarter. Murchison had suspected Porteus Carmagee of this noiseless generosity, but he had been unable to discover whence the money came. The little lawyer of Lombard Street alone knew how the phenomenal damages accorded to Mrs. Baxter by a sentimental jury had swept away all Murchison’s savings, and even the money realized by the sale of his furniture and his car. Yet these five-pound notes were always placed in Catherine’s hands, to be deposited in the post-office savings-bank in Gwendolen Murchison’s name. At Christmas a huge hamper had reached them from Roxton, a hamper whose bulk had symbolized the abundant kindness of Miss Carmagee’s virgin heart. Friends in adversity are friends worthy of honor, and Miss Carmagee, good woman, had packed the hamper with her own fat and generous hands.
Catherine, her fore-arms white with flour, stood in the little back kitchen, tying a piece of cloth over the pudding-bowl before sinking it in the steaming saucepan on the fire. The winter day was drawing towards twilight. Mists hung over the black canal. Through the windows could be seen the zinc roofs of a number of storage sheds attached to the buildings of a steam-mill.
In the front parlor the horse-hair sofa had been drawn beneath the window, and Gwen, her golden head on a faded blue cushion, lay, trying a new frock on a great wax doll. The child’s eyes looked big and strange in her pale face, and the blue veins showed through the pearly skin. Apathy in a child is pathetic in its unnaturalness, the more so when the sparkle of health has but lately left the eager eyes. Gwen had whitened like a plant deprived of life. Her black-socked legs were no longer brown and chubby. She had the unanimated and drooping look of a child languid under the spell of some insidious disease.
The garden gate closed with a clash as Master Jack came crunching up the gravel-path, swinging his ragged school-books at the end of a strap. He grimaced at Gwen, and rang the bell with the cheerful verve of youth, for John Murchison was a sturdy ragamuffin, capable of adapting himself to changed surroundings. The young male is a creature of mental resilience and resource. Toys were fewer, puddings plainer, parties unknown. But a boy can find treasures in a rubbish heap and mystery in the dirty waters of a canal.
Master Jack’s return from school was usually a noisy incident. He appeared loud and emphatic, an infallible autocrat of eight.
“I say—I’m hungry.”
Bang went the books into a corner of the hall. For the hundredth time Catherine reproved her son, and insisted on Master Jack’s “primers” being put in order on the proper shelf. The boy, much under compulsion, stooped for those battered symbols of civilization, disclosing in the act a disastrous rent in his blue serge knickers.
“Jack, dear, what have you been doing to your clothes?”
“What clothes, mother?”
The boy’s innocent yet subtle obtuseness did not save him from further catechisation.
“I only mended your knickers yesterday, Jack, and they were new last month.”
“My knickers, mother!”
“What have you been doing?”
Master Jack passed a hypocritical hand over a certain region.
“Lor!”
“Don’t say ‘lor,’ dear.”
“Well, I never! I was only climbin’ with Bert Smith.”
“You don’t think, Jack, that clothes cost money.”
It was perfectly plain that no such thought ever entered Jack Murchison’s head. Children are serenely insensible to the worries of their elders, and, moreover, Master Jack had at the moment a grievance of his own.
“Bert Smith’s going to the pantomime,” and he pushed past his mother into the front room; swinging his books.
“Jack, be careful!”
“Why don’t we go to the pantomime? It’s a beastly shame!”
Catherine’s lips quivered almost imperceptibly. The blatant self-assertiveness of boyhood hurt her, as the thoughtless grumblings of a child must often hurt a mother.
“Put those books down, dear, and go and change your knickers.”
Jack obeyed, if swinging the books into a corner could be called obedience. Catherine restrained a gesture of impatience. Gwen, lying on the sofa, winced at the clatter as though morbidly sensitive to sounds.
“You are silly, Jack!”
“Shut up.”
“Muvver’s tired.”
Reproof from a supposed inferior is never particularly welcome. Jack made a clutch at his sister’s doll, landed it by one leg, and proceeded to dangle it head downward before the fire.
“Jack—Jack—don’t!”
The boy chuckled like a tyrant as Gwen, peevish and hypersensitive, burst into a flood of tears. Catherine, who had turned back into the kitchen, reappeared in time to rescue the doll from being melted.
“Jack, I am ashamed of you.”
She took the doll from him, and went to the window to comfort Gwen. John Murchison, conscious of humiliation, adopted an attitude of aggressive scorn.
“Silly old doll.”
“Jack, go up to the nursery.”
“Sha’n’t.”
His courage melted rather abruptly, however, before the look upon his mother’s face. He retreated at his leisure, climbed the stairs slowly, whistling as he went, and kicking the banisters with the toes of his boots.
A grieved voice reached Catherine from the half-dark landing.
“Mother?”
“Yes.”
“Why can’t we go to the pantomime?”
“Go into the nursery, dear, and don’t grumble.”
“Bert Smith’s going. I call it a beastly shame.”
“Jack, if you say another word I shall send you to bed.”
Five minutes had hardly elapsed before Catherine heard her husband’s footsteps on the path, and the rattle of his latch-key in the lock. In the front room he found poor Gwen still sobbing spasmodically in her mother’s arms.
The sight damped the glow on Murchison’s face.
“Hallo, what’s the matter?” and the anxious lines came back in his forehead.
“Nothing, dear, nothing.”
“Why, little one, what is it?”
Catherine surrendered her place to him. Murchison’s arms went round the child. Gwen, though struggling to be brave, broke out again into uncontrollable and helpless weeping.
“I—I’s tired, father.”
“Tired! there, there! You must not cry like this,” and the big man’s face was a study in troubled tenderness.
“What has upset her, Kate?”
He looked at his wife.
“Jack has been teasing her.”
“The young scoundrel.”
“The boy’s in one of his trying moods.” And she could find no more to say against her son.
Gwen grew comforted in her father’s arms. Yet to this man who had learned to watch the faces of the sick, there was something ominous in the child’s half-fretful eyes, in the way she flushed, and in the hurrying of her heart. He felt her hands; they were hot and feverish.
Husband and wife looked at each other.
“Tired, little one, eh?”
“Yes, very tired.”
She lay with her head on her father’s shoulder, looking with large, languid eyes up into his face.
“By-bye time for little girls who are going to see ‘Puss in Boots’ to-morrow.”
Gwen’s eyes brightened a little; her hands held the lappets of her father’s coat-collar.
“Oh—daddy!”
Murchison felt in his pocket and drew out the envelope with the yellow tickets.
“So you would like to see ‘Puss in Boots’?”
“Yes, oh yes.”
“Little girls who go to pantomimes must go to bed early. Shall daddy carry you up-stairs?”
A tired but ecstatic sigh accepted the condition. Murchison lifted the child, kissed her, and smiled sadly at his wife.
“What about your unregenerate son?”
Catherine turned, and called to Jack, who was listening at the nursery door.
“Jack, dear, you may come down.”
A clatter of feet pounded down the stairs.
“Quiet, dear, quiet.”
“Daddy, Bert Smith’s going to the pantomime.”
“He is, is he? Well, so are we.”
“To ‘Puss in Boots’?”
“Yes, if a certain young gentleman is good.”
Jack gave a shout of triumph, kissed Gwen, and skipped round the room as Murchison went out with his daughter in his arms.
The boy ran to Catherine, and jumped up to her embrace.
“I’m sorry, mother,” and his bright face vanquished her.
“Sorry, Jack?”
“I tore my knickers.”
And Catherine took the confession in the spirit that it was given.