CHAPTER IV
MARRIED LIFE
So, Caleb Fuller married Letizia Oriano and tamed her body, as without doubt he would have succeeded in taming the body of any woman of whom he had lawfully gained possession.
Madame Oriano did not long survive the marriage. The effort she made in imposing her will upon her daughter was too much for a frame so greatly weakened. Once she had had her way, the desire to live slowly evaporated. Yet she was granted a last pleasure from this world before she forsook it for ever. This was the satisfaction of beholding with her own eyes that her son-in-law’s discovery of the value of chlorate of potash as a colour intensifier was all that he claimed for it. That it was likely to prove excessively dangerous when mixed with sulphur compounds did not concern this pyrotechnist of the old school. The prodigious depth and brilliant clarity of those new colours would be well worth the sacrifice of a few lives through spontaneous ignition in the course of manufacturing them.
The first public demonstration that Caleb gave was on the evening of the Fifth of November in a Clerkenwell tea-garden. It is unlikely that Madame Oriano ever fully comprehended the significance of these annual celebrations. If she ever did wonder who Guy Fawkes was, she probably supposed him to be some local English saint whose martyrdom deserved to be commemorated by an abundance of rockets. As for Caleb, he justified to himself some of the pleasure that his fireworks gave to so many people by the fact that the chief festival at whichthey were employed was held in detestation of a Papist conspirator.
On this particular Fifth of November the legless old lady was carried in an invalid’s chair through the press of spectators to a favourable spot from which she could judge the worth of the improved fireworks. A few of the rabble jumped to the conclusion that she was a representation of Guy Fawkes himself, and set up the ancient chorus:
Please to remember the Fifth of NovemberGunpowder treason and plot;We know no reason why gunpowder treasonShould ever be forgot!A stick and a stake for King George’s sake,A stick and a stump for Guy Fawkes’s rumpHolla, boys! holla, boys! huzza-a-a!
Please to remember the Fifth of NovemberGunpowder treason and plot;We know no reason why gunpowder treasonShould ever be forgot!A stick and a stake for King George’s sake,A stick and a stump for Guy Fawkes’s rumpHolla, boys! holla, boys! huzza-a-a!
Please to remember the Fifth of NovemberGunpowder treason and plot;We know no reason why gunpowder treasonShould ever be forgot!A stick and a stake for King George’s sake,A stick and a stump for Guy Fawkes’s rumpHolla, boys! holla, boys! huzza-a-a!
Please to remember the Fifth of November
Gunpowder treason and plot;
We know no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
A stick and a stake for King George’s sake,
A stick and a stump for Guy Fawkes’s rump
Holla, boys! holla, boys! huzza-a-a!
Madame Oriano smiled grimly when Caleb tried to quiet the clamour by explaining that she was flesh and blood.
“Letta dem sing, Caleb.Non fa niente a me.It don’ta matter notting to me.”
A maroon burst to mark the opening of the performance. This was followed by half-a-dozen rockets, the stars of which glowed with such greens and blues and reds as Madame Oriano had never dreamed of. She tried to raise herself in her chair.
“Bravo, Caleb!Bravissimo! Ah dio, non posso più!It is the bestacoloreI havva ever seen, Caleb.E ottimo! Ottimo, figlio mio.”
She sat entranced for the rest of the display; that night, like a spent firework, the flame of her ardent life burnt itself out.
The death of his mother-in-law allowed Caleb to carry out a plan he had been contemplating for some time. This was to open a factory in Cheshire on the outskirts of his native town. He anticipated trouble at first with the Peculiar Children of God, who were unlikely to viewwith any favour the business of making fireworks. He hoped, however, that the evidence of his growing prosperity would presently change their point of view. There was no reason to accuse Caleb of hypocrisy, or to suppose that he was anything but perfectly sincere in his desire to occupy a high place in the esteem of his fellow believers. Marriage with a Papist had in truth begun to worry his conscience more than a little. So long as Letizia had been a temptation, the fact of her being a daughter of Babylon instead of a Peculiar Child of God had only made the temptation more redoubtable, and the satisfaction of overcoming it more sharp. Now that he was licensed to enjoy her, he began to wonder what effect marriage with a Papist would have on his celestial patron. He felt like a promising young clerk who has imperilled his prospects by marrying against his employer’s advice. It began to seem essential to his salvation that he should take a prominent part in the prayer-meetings of the Peculiar Children of God. He was ambitious to be regarded himself as the most peculiar child of all those Peculiar Children. Moreover, from a practical standpoint the opening of a factory in the North should be extremely profitable. He already had the London clients of Madame Oriano; he must now build up a solid business in the provinces. Fuller’s Fireworks must become a byword. The King was rumoured to be ill. He would be succeeded by another king. That king would in due course have to be solemnly crowned. Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, and many other large towns would be wanting to celebrate that coronation with displays of fireworks. When the moment arrived, there must be nobody who would be able to compete with Fuller and his chlorate of potash.
So to Brigham in Cheshire Caleb Fuller brought his wife. In some fields on the outskirts of the town in which he had spent a poverty-stricken youth he built his first sheds, and in a dreary little street close to Bethesda, the meeting-house of the Peculiar Children of God, heset up his patriarchal tent. Here on a dusty September dawn just over two years after her last public appearance at “Neptune’s Grotto,” Letizia’s eldest daughter was born. The young wife of Caleb was not yet thoroughly tamed, for she produced a daughter exactly like herself and called her Caterina in spite of the father’s objection to a name associated with the wheels of which he made so many. Not only did she insist on calling the child Caterina, but she actually took it to the nearest Catholic chapel and had it baptised by a priest.
It happened about this time that one of the apostles of the meeting-house was gravely ill, and Caleb, who had designs on the vacant apostolic chair, decided that his election to it must not be endangered by the profane behaviour of his young wife. When he remonstrated with her, she flashed her eyes and tossed her head as if he were still Caleb the clerk and she the spoilt daughter of his employer.
“Letizia,” he said lugubriously, “you have destroyed the soul of our infant.”
“Nonsense!”
“You have produced a child of wrath.”
“My eye!” she scoffed.
Caleb’s moist lips vanished from sight. There was a long silence while he regarded his wife with what seemed like two pebbles of granite. When at last he spoke, it was with an intolerable softness.
“Letizia, you must learn to have responsibilities. I am frightened for you, my wife. You must learn. I do not blame you entirely. You have had a loose upbringing. But you must learn.”
Then, as gently as he was speaking, he stole to the door and left Letizia locked behind him in her bedroom. Oh, yes, he tamed her body gradually, and for a long time it looked as if he would tame her soul. She had no more daughters like herself, and each year for many years she flashed her eyes less fiercely and tossed her head less defiantly. She produced several other children, but theyall took after their father. Dark-eyed Caterina was followed by stodgy Achsah. Stodgy Achsah was followed by podgy Thyrza. These were followed by two more who died almost as soon as they were born, as if in dying thus they expressed the listlessness of their mother for this life. Maybe Letizia herself would have achieved death, had not the way Caleb treated little Caterina kept her alive to protect the child against his severity.
“Her rebellious spirit must be broken,” he declared, raising once more the cane.
“You shall not beat her like this, Caleb.”
“Apostle Jenkins beat his son till the child was senseless, because he stole a piece of bread and jam.”
“I wish I could be as religious as you, Caleb,” said his wife.
He tried to look modest under the compliment.
“Yes,” she went on fiercely, “for then I’d believe in Hell, and if I believed in Hell I’d sizzle there with joy just for the pleasure of seeing you and all your cursed apostles sizzling beside me.”
But Letizia did not often break out like this. Each year she became more silent, taking refuge from her surroundings in French novels which she bought out of the meagre allowance for clothes that her husband allowed her. She read French novels because she despised the more sentimental novelists of England that were so much in vogue at this date, making only an exception in favour of Thackeray, whom she read word for word as his books appeared. She was learning a bitter wisdom from literature in the shadows and the silence of her wounded heart. After eight years of married life she bore a son, who was called Joshua. There were moments when Letizia was minded to smother him where he lay beside her, so horribly did this homuncule reproduce the lineaments of her loathed husband.
Meanwhile, the factory flourished, Caleb Fuller became the leading citizen of Brigham and served three times as Mayor. He built a great gloomy house on the small hillthat skirted the mean little town. He built, too, a great gloomy tabernacle for the Peculiar Children of God. He was elected chief apostle and sat high up in view of the congregation on a marble chair. He grew shaggy whiskers and suffered from piles. He found favour in the eyes of the Lord, sweating the poor and starving even the cows that gave him milk. Yes, the renown of Fuller’s Fireworks was spread far and wide. The factory grew larger year by year. And with it year by year waxed plumper the belly and the purse of Caleb himself, even as his soul shrivelled.
In 1851 after twenty years of merciless prosperity Caleb suffered his first setback by failing to secure the contract for the firework displays at the Great Exhibition. From the marble chair of the chief apostle he called upon the Peculiar Children of God to lament that their Father had temporarily turned away His countenance from them. Caleb beat his breast and bellowed and groaned, but he did not rend his garments of the best broadcloth, because that would have involved his buying new ones. The hulla-balloo in Bethesda was louder than that in a synagogue on the Day of Atonement, and after a vociferous prayer-meeting the Peculiar Children of God went back to their stuffy and secretive little houses, coveting their neighbours’ wives and their neighbours’ maids, but making the best of their own to express an unattainable ideal. Horrid stuffy little bedrooms with blue jets of gas burning dimly through the night-time. Heavy lumps of humanity snoring beneath heavy counterpanes. Lascivious backbiting of the coveted wives and maids on greasy conjugal pillows. Who in all that abode of prurient respectability and savage industrialism should strip Caleb’s soul bare? Who should not sympathise with the chief apostle of the Peculiar Children of God?
Yet, strange to say, Caleb found that God’s countenance continued to be averted from his own. He was still licking the soreness of his disappointment over the Exhibition fireworks when one morning in the primeof June his eldest daughter left the great gloomy house on the hill, never to return. While Caleb stormed at his wife for not taking better precautions to keep Caterina in bounds, he was aware that he might as well be storming at a marble statue. He lacked the imagination to understand that the soul of Letizia had fled from its imprisonment in the guise of Caterina’s lissom body. But he did apprehend, however dimly, that henceforth nothing he might say or do would ever again affect his wife either for good or for ill.
Cold dark eyes beneath black arched brows surveyed him contemptuously. He had never yet actually struck Letizia; but he came near to striking her at that moment.
“She wanted to go on the stage.”
“A play-actress! My eldest daughter a play-actress!”
“Alas, neither she nor I can cup those drops of blood she owes to you. But her soul is hers and mine. You had no part in making that. Even if you did crawl over my body and eat the heart out of me, you slug! Do what you like with the others. Make what you can of them. But Caterina is mine. Caterina is free.”
“As if I had not suffered enough this year,” Caleb groaned.
“Suffered? Did you say that you had suffered?” His wife laughed. “And what about the sufferings of my Caterina all these years of her youth?”
“I pray she’ll starve to death,” he went on.
“She was starving to death in this house.”
“Ay, I suppose that’s what the Church folk will be saying next. The idle, good-for-nothing slanderers! Not content with accusing me of starving my cows, they’ll be accusing me of starving my children now. But the dear Lord knows....”
“You poor dull fool,” Letizia broke in, and with one more glance from her cold dark eyes she left him.
Caterina had as dissolute a career as her father could have feared and as miserable an end as he could have hoped, for about twelve years later, after glittering withconspicuous shamelessness amid the tawdry gilt of the Second Empire, she died in a Paris asylum prematurely exhausted by drink and dissipation.
“Better to die from without than from within,” said her mother when the news was brought to Brigham.
“What do you mean by that?” Caleb asked in exasperated perplexity. “It’s all these French novels you read that makes you talk that high-flown trash. You talk for the sake of talking, that’s my opinion. You used to talk like a fool when I first married you, but I taught you at last to keep your tongue still. Now you’ve begun to talk again.”
“One changes in thirty-four years, Caleb. Even you have changed. You were mean and ugly then. But you are much meaner and much uglier now. However, you have the consolation of seeing your son Joshua keep pace with you in meanness and in ugliness.”
Joshua Fuller was now twenty-six, an eternal offence to the eyes of his mother, who perceived in him nothing but a dreadful reminder of her husband at the same age. That anybody could dare to deplore Caterina’s life when in Joshua the evidence of her own was before them enraged Letizia with human crassness. But Joshua was going to be an asset to Fuller’s Fireworks. Just as his father had perceived the importance of chlorate of potash in 1829, so now in 1863 did Joshua perceive the importance of magnesium, and the house of Fuller was in front of nearly all its rivals in utilising that mineral, with the result that its brilliant fireworks sold better than ever. The Guilloché and Salamandre, the Girandole and Spirali of Madame Oriano, so greatly admired by old moons and bygone multitudes, would have seemed very dull affairs now. Another gain that Joshua provided for the business was to urge upon his father to provide for the further legislation about explosives that sooner or later was inevitable. With an ill grace Caleb Fuller had complied with the provisions of the Gunpowder Act of 1860; but, when the great explosion at Erith occurred afew years later, Joshua insisted that more must be done to prepare for the inspection of firework establishments that was bound to follow such a terrific disaster. Joshua was right, and when the Explosives Act of 1875 was passed the factory at Brigham had anticipated nearly all its requirements.
By this time Joshua was a widower. In 1865, at the age of twenty-eight, he had married a pleasant young woman called Susan Yardley. After presenting him with one boy who was christened Abraham, she died two years later in producing another who was christened Caleb after his grandfather.
The elder of these two boys reverted both in appearance and in disposition to the Oriano stock, and old Mrs. Fuller—she is sixty-three now and may no longer be called Letizia—took a bitter delight in never allowing old Mr. Fuller to forget it. She found in the boy, now a flash of Caterina’s eyes, now a flutter of Madame Oriano’s eyelids. She would note how much his laugh was like her own long ago, and she would encourage him at every opportunity to thwart the solicitude and defy the injunctions of Aunt Achsah and Aunt Thyrza. When her son protested against the way she applauded Abraham’s naughtiness, she only laughed.
“Bram’s all right.”
“I wish, mamma, you wouldn’t call him Bram,” Joshua protested. “It’s so irreverent. I know that you despise the Bible, but the rest of us almost worship it. I cannot abide this irreligious clipping of Scriptural names. And it worries poor papa terribly.”
“It won’t worry your father half as much to hear Bram called Bram as it’ll worry poor little Bram later on to be called Abraham. That boy’s all right, Josh. He’s the best firework you’ve turned out of this factory for many a day. So, don’t let Achsah and Thyrza spoil him.”
“They try their best to be strict, mamma.”
“I’m talking about their physic, idiot. They’re a pair of pasty-faced old maids, and it’s unnatural and unpleasantto let them be for ever messing about with a capital boy like Bram. Let them physic young Caleb. He’ll be no loss to the world. Bram might be.”
Joshua threw his eyes up to Heaven and left his unaccountable mother to her own unaccountable thoughts. He often wondered why his father had never had her shut up in an asylum. For some time now she had been collecting outrageous odds and ends of furniture for her room to which none of the family was allowed access except by special invitation. Ever since Caterina had run away old Mrs. Fuller had had a room of her own. But she had been content with an ordinary bed at first. Now she had procured a monstrous foreign affair all gilt and Cupids and convolutions. If Joshua had been his father he would have taken steps to prevent such a waste of her allowance. He fancied that the old man must be breaking up to allow such furniture to enter the house.
Not long after the conversation between Joshua and his mother about Bram, a travelling circus arrived at Brigham on a Sunday morning. The Peculiar Children of God shivered at such a profanation of the Sabbath, and Apostle Fuller—in these days a truly patriarchal figure with his long white food-bespattered beard—preached from the marble chair on the vileness of these sacrilegious mountebanks and the pestilent influence any circus must have on a Christian town. In spite of this denunciation the chief apostle’s own wife dared to take her elder grandchild on Monday to view from the best seats obtainable the monstrous performance. They sat so near the ring that the sawdust and the tan were scattered over them by the horses’ hoofs. Little Bram, his chin buried in the worn crimson velvet of the circular barrier, gloated in an ecstasy on the paradisiacal vision.
“Brava! Bravissima!” old Mrs. Fuller cried loudly when a demoiselle of thehaute écoletook an extra high fence. “Brava! Bravissima!” she cried when an equestrienne in pink tights leapt through four blazing hoopsand regained without disarranging one peroxide curl the shimmering back of her piebald steed.
“Oh, grandmamma,” little Bram gasped when he bade her good night, “can I be a clown when I’m a man?”
“The difficulty is not to be a clown when one is a man,” she answered grimly.
“Whatdoyou mean, grandmamma?”
“Ah, what?” she sighed.
And in their stuffy and secretive little bedrooms that night the Peculiar Children of God talked for hours about the disgraceful amount of leg that those circus women had shown.
“I hear it was extremely suggestive,” said one apostle, smacking his lips with lecherous disapprobation.
“Was it, indeed, my dear?” the dutiful wife replied, thereby offering the man of God an opportunity to enlarge upon the prurient topic before he turned down the gas and got into bed beside her.
“Bram was very naughty to go to the circus, wasn’t he, Aunt Achsah?” young Caleb asked in a tone of gentle sorrow when his pasty-faced aunt leaned over that Monday night to lay her wet lips to his plump pink cheeks.
“Grandpapa was very cross,” Aunt Achsah mournfully replied, evading the direct answer, but implying much by her expression.
“Gran’papa’s not cross with me, is he, auntie?” young Caleb asked with an assumption of fervid anxiety.
“No, my dear child, and I hope that you will never, never make your dear grandfather cross with you.”
“Oh, I won’t, Aunt Achsah,” young Caleb promised, with what Aunt Achsah told Aunt Thyrza was really and truly the smile of one of God’s most precious lambs.
“Thyrza, Thyrza, when that blessed little child smiles like that, nobody could deny him anything. I’m sure his path down this vale of tears will always be smoothed by that angelic smile.”
She was talking to her sister in the passage just outside young Caleb’s bedroom—he had already been separatedfrom his elder brother for fear of corruption—and he heard what she said.
When the footsteps of his aunts died away along the passage, the fat little boy got out of bed, turned up the gas, and smiled at himself several times in the looking-glass. Then he retired to bed again, satisfied of his ability to summon that conquering smile to his aid whenever he should require it.