CHAPTER NINETEENThe Conversion of Caroline
MR. TRIMBLERIGG joined his family in a small retired bungalow, standing between estuary and sea, on the outskirts of a large health-resort looking south. It was the very place for him to be—if not exactly alone—unobserved. The shore was shadeless; across an arm of the estuary a rickety foot-bridge led to copse and field, and across the railroad to a wide expanse of heath. After that came the littered margin of the town, with its cheap and scrubby architecture run up as a trap for holiday-makers.
He had arrived by daylight, and occupying a window-seat on the sunny side of the carriage had managed to get through without further adventures. At the office also he had done fairly well, entering by the door marked ‘private,’ and working with the electric light well over him.
His children, who always loved him when they saw him, but forgot him easily again in absence, ran boisterously to greet him, and each in turn entered the charmed circle without making remark. So did Caroline. They kissed him, noticing nothing.
This cheered him, but he knew it could only be for a time, and as soon as they got to ‘The Mollusc,’ which was the bungalow’s name, he said to his wife, ‘I want to speak to you,’ and drawing her into a room apart, waited—to see.
She was slow to realize that anything was amiss; and this ought to have cheered him still more. But now that it was his wife alone—a public of which he was not afraid—he was irritated. It was an instance of the extreme slowness of her mental uptake.
‘Well?’ he said at last, challengingly, ‘don’t you notice anything?’ He moved from the window as he spoke. Then she did.
‘Good gracious!’ she exclaimed. ‘Jonathan, what have you been doing to yourself? Have you been going about in town looking like that?’
This tone, from Caroline of all people, he could not stand; she at least should be taught to look at the thing properly—with respect.
‘I have been doing nothing to myself—nothing!’ he replied. ‘As it is the will of Heaven, you might try to speak respectfully about it—or else hold your tongue!’
She looked at him in pained bewilderment. ‘Do you mean you can’t help it?’ she said at last.
‘That is exactly what Idomean,’ he said. His pent-up bitterness broke out. ‘I’ve had two days of it—about as much as I can stand. Yes! you round your eyes, but you don’t realize what it has made me go through. It’s been spiritual desolation. I was like an owl in the wilderness, with all the other silly owls hooting at me, taking it for a show, a trick-turn, a patent night-light that burns all through the day to amuse itself; and nowyou! No; it’s not X-ray; it’s not Tatcho for the hair; it’s not luminous paint; nor is it a mechanical adjustment to prevent people tumbling against one in the dark or help them to read newspapers in omnibuses. All those things have been said to me in the last twenty-four hours; and if only one of them were true, I believe to God I should be a happier man than I am! The plagues of Egypt may have seemed all right to Moses, but Pharaoh didn’t like them! Why Heaven has seen fit—I don’t know.’ He paused. ‘But there it is, so I must learn to bear it.’
Caroline said: ‘When you’ve had your supper, you’ll feel better.’
‘I shall not feel better; I shall never feel better until I know—either what sense to make of it, or how to get rid of it. It’s just as if—as if Heaven didn’t know that the world’s mind has changed about things. I shall become a laughing-stock. What good will that do?’
And then Caroline, who had been brought up on biblical knowledge, was very annoying. ‘Didn’t Jeremiah shave one side of his head?’ she inquired, ‘or roll in the dirt and eat books, and things of that sort? Or was it Isaiah!’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mr. Trimblerigg shortly. ‘It wasn’t me, anyway. If one did that sort of thing to-day, one’s use in the world would be over.’
Mr. Trimblerigg’s view was the social: Caroline’s was only the practical: trying to be resourceful, she said. ‘You might try brushing it.’
‘I might try cutting my head off,’ he retorted. ‘I wish you’d stop talking foolishly.’
Then Caroline, being a dutiful wife, and seeing how much he was put out, did her best to soothe him. ‘I don’t think people will notice it,’ she said; ‘not much if you don’t want them to.’
‘Then you’d better leave off thinking!’ he said. ‘Though I haven’t wanted them to, theyhavenoticed: they’ve done nothing but notice! If you like, I’ll go and put my head into the kitchen now, and you’ll hear that charwoman of yours faint at the mere sight of me.’
‘No, she won’t,’ said Mrs. Trimblerigg, ‘she’s gone. She lays the table for supper and then goes home, and doesn’t wash up till she comes again in the morning. And it’s Jane’s evening out; so there’ll be nobody.’
These domestic details infuriated him; Caroline was so stupid. And she continued to be.
‘Don’t you think you ought to see a Doctor?’ she inquired.
‘I’ll see the Doctor damned first,’ replied Mr. Trimblerigg. Her suggestion of ice was no better received; it seemed as if she could only annoy him. And then one of the children outside shouted, ‘Mummy, when are we going to have supper?’
‘Go and give them their supper!’ he said; and his tone was very bitter; bitter against her, and against the children, and against the whole world wanting its supper, while on his head fate had laid this burden of a blessing, too grievous for the flesh to bear. Yes, the flesh; that was the trouble. He saw the spiritual side of it—the symbolic splendour beckoning clear from heights which he could realize but which the world could not. He saw that, but he saw the other side also! There was no public for it; and if no public, where was the good—what could he do with it? Live it down?—or so arrange matters that it should never show? That meant cutting his life in half, and concealing the best of it.
There he was, a furtive fugitive in the bosom of his own family; the children wanting their supper, and he avoiding it; yet surely—if this thing was from Heaven—children, his own children at least, ought to be trained to grow accustomed to it, and take a right view of it. Then why not begin?
Caroline had gone into the kitchen to get the supper ready. He called her back. ‘I’ll come,’ he said, ‘they’ll have to see it sometime. Tell them—for to-night at any rate—not to make remarks.’
So Mrs. Trimblerigg went off to impose discipline on the family. To the maid she said, ‘you can go out now.’ To the children when the maid had gone: ‘your father has got something the matter with his head. You are not to make remarks.’
Presently she went and told him that supper was ready. A lamp was upon the table; but it wore a shade; Mr. Trimblerigg did not, it would have been no use. He entered the room aware, in that half-light, that he had become conspicuous; nor could he be unconscious of the three pairs of eyes turning upon him an expectant gaze which became riveted.
Benjie, the youngest, gave an instinctive squeak of excitement; then, hushed by his mother but forgetting to close his mouth, he dribbled.
Mr. Trimblerigg, according to custom, stood to ask a blessing. ‘For these, and all Thy other mercies,’ he said, and stopped short: ‘a mercy’ was what he could not feel it to be. Conversation was slow to begin. All the children reached out with healthy appetites for the bread and butter. Amy, conscientious child, still all eyes, seeking an unforbidden topic of conversation, surmounted the impediment by saying, ‘Ma, why didn’t we have pancakes to-day?’
‘Hush, my dear!’ said Caroline, who had a feeling that the remark was too apposite; and indeed the barbed point had already gone home. So that—thought Mr. Trimblerigg—was how it appeared to a child’s eyes!
He helped them all quickly from the dish before him; after that they looked at him less continuously, but not less admiringly. This eased the situation till Martin, the elder of the two boys, inquired concerning the food uponhis plate. ‘Mummy, why don’t poached eggs have their yellow outside? Why don’t they, Mummy?’
Caroline told him not to talk, but to go on eating.
Amy remedied matters in her own way, saying wisely, ‘They do come outside when they’re hatched; they turn into chickens then, don’t they, Mummy?’
Martin said, ‘No, they don’t!’ and looked corroboratively at his father. Benjie said: ‘Yes, they do: eggs do.’
Caroline said: ‘I told you not to talk.’
But children must talk, especially if there are three of them; and Martin being now silent, Benjie took up the running.
Laying his head on one side, and stroking it with his spoon, ‘Mummy,’ he said, ‘if I was to catch fire, wouldn’t I get burned up? Wouldn’t I, Mummy?’
Then Mr. Trimblerigg could stand it no longer; he took up his plate, and left the room. As soon as he had closed the door he heard Benjie give a howl, and knew that Caroline, applying useless remedies, had slapped him.
Presently, having sent the children to bed, she came in to comfort him. ‘They’ll get used to it presently,’ she assured him, ‘if it doesn’t go off. But I wish you’d see somebody.’ This time she avoided the word ‘doctor,’ because it irritated him.
‘I suppose they talked of me as soon as I’d gone?’ he said, ignoring the suggestion.
‘A little, naturally,’ she replied.
‘What did they say?’
‘D’you think I’d better tell you,’ queried Caroline, wishful to spare him.
‘Yes, I may as well hear the worst.’
‘Well,’ Martin said, ‘Is Father a holy man, Mother?’ Carolinehad made her selection apparently: she uttered it without conviction; and to hear it so repeated gave Mr. Trimblerigg no joy. Truth from the mouths of babes and sucklings—even revealed truth sceptically reported—failed to comfort him.
‘I think I’ll go out for a turn by myself,’ he said. Then stopped; for outside it was dark. He went into the bedroom instead; and Caroline took advantage of his absence, though too late for it to get through that night, to go and send off a telegram. It was addressed to Davidina, and it merely repeated what she had said to the children: ‘Jonathan has something the matter with his head. Come at once.’
But though that was her view of it, Caroline had no notion how much really was the matter with his head—having only seen the malady in its fainter and less convincing manifestations; she had not encountered it in the dark.
When she went up to bed she found him already in it, with a lamp on the table beside him, reading; and at first, as she looked at him, she thought he was already cured; the globe of light had become quite unapparent.
Wise in her way, instead of exclaiming on the fact, she said nothing. ‘Better wait,’ she thought, ‘and give it time,’—hoping that by the morning he would have quite got over it. And so with composed leisure, she went first to bed, and then presently to sleep, leaving him still at his reading. And only when Mr. Trimblerigg was quite sure she was safely asleep, did he put out the light and resign himself to the rest he so much needed.
The reason was that Caroline’s composed materialism had got upon his nerves; her detached reception of Martin’sgodly suggestion had dealt him the shrewdest blow of all. So little apparently was her mind open to conviction of a spiritual kind, that she had passed it over as not worth a thought.
But in this Mr. Trimblerigg did Caroline an injustice; she was merely dense to nuances; half-tones had not impressed her, and a thing which she could only half-see she could only half-believe in. It was far otherwise when, waking up in the small hours, she beheld Mr. Trimblerigg’s head, unconscious but luminous, lying in a charger of golden light—light so strong that she might have read by it. So overwhelming was the effect of it then, that she got out of bed, fell upon her knees beside him, and in meek simplicity, though a little late in the day, gave him the worship which was his due; for now truly he looked beautiful.
Her mind experienced a revulsion; he had been concealing himself from her. All these years she had been married to a holy man and had not known it; had even had her doubts of him. Now they were gone; that he should be able to look like that while unconscious and asleep, convinced her utterly. Contrite, she wept. How could she guess that in his sleep he was only carrying on with so much more success that to which conscious life presented difficulties? Mr. Trimblerigg was having a pleasant dream.