Chapter 13

"THE VERY DEVIL"

When spring had passed, and part of the summer, the Osborn Kerrs did as all their neighbours did; they packed up their best clothes, folded the baby's cot, swathed the ten-guinea perambulator, and with the baby and his cumbersome impedimenta, made an exhausting effort and went to the sea.

They did not go to the sea altogether lightly; it had cost a great deal of thought and arithmetic and discussion as to a stopping-place. Osborn was keen on a boarding-house; he knew a jolly one where he had stayed before, but Marie vetoed that. They wouldn't have babies in boarding-houses; they wouldn't like her keeping the perambulator there, and wheeling it through the hall; likewise they wouldn't like her intruding into the back regions with it. She knew that what one did with a young family was to take rooms, and cater for oneself. So they wrote to engage rooms, and after much correspondence found what would suit their purse, and started for a week by the sea.

The baby fretted a little during its unaccustomed travelling, and, fretting, fretted its parents. Osborn was dimly annoyed with Marie for not being able to keep the baby up to the best standard of infantile behaviour, feeling that the things he was called upon to do, in a public railway carriage, made him look a fool; and Marie was hurt with Osborn that he should show so little sympathy and patience. She wrote, upon arrival, a letter to Mrs. Amber, which brought her down within a couple of days, to stay at a boarding-house within a stone's throw.

Grandmother was very good. She was always nice-tempered and kind and soothing. In the morning she came round early to the rooms in a side street, and took the baby out for his airing upon the promenade, so that Marie and Osborn might bathe together. She it was who persuaded their landlady to take charge of the baby for just one hour, one afternoon, while Marie and Osborn came to take fashionable tea with her at the boarding-house. In the evening, when the pier was lighted and the band played, and the summer life of the place was at its giddiest, she would arrive with her comfortable smile and her knitting to sit within earshot of her sleeping grandson while his parents went out to enjoy themselves.

Marie did not know what she would have done without the wise woman upon this holiday; but when they talked together she was still shy of confidences, and still reluctant to admit any but the most modern interpretation of the married relationship. Mrs. Amber, however, saw all there was to see and felt no resentment about it. Things were so; and they always had been. You might be miserable if you were married, but then you would have been far more miserable if you had not married. She pitied all spinsters profoundly. She was glad her daughter had found a husband and a home; and she would not have dreamed of combating Osborn. He was that strange, wilful despotic thing, a man. She would have handed him without contest that dangerous weapon of complete power over a woman and her children. Mrs. Amber propitiated Osborn; she pleased and flattered him; and her judgment of him was that he was far better than he might have been.

Grannie travelled back with them to town, and she was very useful during the journey. She kept a strict eye upon the hand-luggage and nursed the baby, while Marie and Osborn smiled together over the sketches in a humorous weekly. Their money was all spent, and they were really half-relieved to be going back to the flat, where they need not keep up that air of being so very pleased with every detail of a rather strained holiday. They would meet other people they knew, who had similarly enjoyed themselves, and would cry:

"Have _you_ been away? We're just back. We went to Littlehampton and had a gorgeous time! We had such awf'ly comfortable rooms, not actually _on_ the front, but within a minute's walk. We _prefer_ rooms to an hotel. We enjoyed ourselves tremendously. Where did you go?"

Mrs. Amber was with Marie a great deal during the rest of that hot summer; she had waited for the close intimacy of the honeymoon time, of the first year, to wear away; she had bided her hour very patiently. When the husband began--as he would--to go out for an hour after dinner, just to meet a friend, and would stay two--three, four hours perhaps, then the mother had come into her own again. Sitting with the strangely-quietened Marie by the open windows of the pale sitting-room--which they could use again with perfect economy during the summer weather--Mrs. Amber was well content with the way of things. She knitted placidly for baby George all the while, and Marie, who hated knitting, sewed for him.

They were evenings such as Mrs. Amber the young wife used to spend with her own mother, while young Mr. Amber betook himself to the strange and unexplained haunts of men.

And on one of these evenings, while the weather was still warm enough to sit looking out into the darkness through the opened windows, but when an autumn haze had begun to hang again about the night, Marie had something to tell her mother, which had blanched her cheek and moistened her eyes all day.

"Mother, I don't know _what_ you'll think, but--I'm going to have another baby."

"Oh--my--dear!" said Mrs. Amber.

The two women gazed into each other's eyes, and while a half-pleased expression stole through the solicitude in Mrs. Amber's, Marie's were wide with fear.

"Are you sure, duck?" said the elder woman, her knitting dropped in her lap.

"Sure," Marie murmured hoarsely. "I've been afraid--and I waited before I told you. But I'm sure. It--it'll be next summer--in the hot weather, just when we'd have been going away to the sea. We shan't be able to afford to go to Littlehampton next year."

"An only child," said Mrs. Amber comfortingly, "is a mistake. It's almost cruel to have an only child. You'll be much better with two than one."

"How can you say so? All that to go through again--"

"Oh, duck, I know! But it won't be so bad next time; anyone'll tell you that. Ask your doctor."

"I shan't have the doctor till I'm obliged."

"I'm sure Osborn would wish you to--"

"How do you know what Osborn would wish?" And she said as so many rebellious women have said before her: "He promised I should never have another. He was crying. I've never told you before, but he was. He cried; and promised me."

"Cried!" Mrs. Amber echoed aghast. "Poor fellow, oh, poor fellow! Osborn has a very good heart. The dear boy!"

"What about me, mother? Where's your sympathy for me? I cried, too."

"We're different."

"No, we aren't. And he _promised_."

"Oh, my duck," said Mrs. Amber in a voice of confidential bustle, "that's not to be depended on. Men always promise these things; I've known it scores of times. But it doesn't do to depend upon them, love."

"I despise men."

"Oh, don't say that, like Miss Winter. I never did approve of that girl."

"She's wiser than I. She won't marry."

"I guess she hasn't had the chance," said Mrs. Amber, with the disbelief of the old married woman in spinster charms.

"Oh, yes, she has, mother. She's had several chances. But she knows when she's lucky; she's her own mistress, and she has her own money and her freedom."

"She's missing a great deal; and some day she'll know it."

"She knows it now, thank you. She knows she's missing illness and pain and poverty and worry, and the whims and fancies and bad tempers of a husband."

Mrs. Amber said soothingly: "Now, now, my dear, you're not yourself, or you wouldn't say such things. It's every woman's duty to marry if she can and have children. As to your husband, it's no use expecting anything of men but what you get; and the sooner you realise it, my love, the happier you'll be."

"I'll never realise it!" Marie fired.

"Then you'll never settle down contentedly as you ought to."

"Why ought I, mother?"

"Because there's nothing else to be done," replied Mrs. Amber sensibly.

"You're right there," Marie moaned, with her forehead against the chair back, "there's nothing else to be done."

"What does Osborn say now about a second baby?"

"He doesn't know."

Mrs. Amber paused and thought before she said: "You ought to tell him at once, my dear. It's possible--he might be pleased."

"He'll be anything but pleased. I dread telling him."

"Oh, my duck!" said Mrs. Amber helplessly.

Marie enumerated: "He'll hate the expense, and the worry, and my illness, and the discomforts he'll have while I'm ill. He'll hate everything."

"Men do, of course, poor things," Mrs. Amber commented with sympathy.

"Poor things!" Marie flared. "I'd like to--"

"No, you wouldn't like to do anything unkind, love. And when you've got your dear little new baby you'll love it, and be just as pleased with it as you are with George. You will, my dear; there's no gainsaying it, because we women are made that way."

"I know," said Marie very sorrowfully.

Mrs. Amber regarded her knitting thoughtfully, then she dropped it to regard her daughter thoughtfully. She rose and shut the windows against the now chill night air of October, and drawing the curtains, made the room look cosy. She looked at the fire laid ready in the grate, but unlighted, and puckered her eyebrows doubtfully.

"The dining-room fire isn't lighted either, is it, duck?"

"No mother. When Osborn goes out in the evenings, I don't light one just for myself after these warm days."

"You should, my love. Really you should make yourself more comfortable."

"Now, mother, I'm sure you never lighted fires for yourself when father was out, unless it was to keep all the pipes in the place from freezing solid. I'm sure you screwed and skimped and saved and worried along, as all we other fools of women do."

Mrs. Amber did not deny this, knowing it to be true; she said something remote, however, about the pleasure of women being duty, and their duty sacrifice.

Marie remained limp in her chair.

"The point is, mother, that I don't know how to tell Osborn."

"Well, my love, let me tell him."

"Oh, mother," said Marie, "would you?"

"I'll tell him with pleasure. You go to bed, and I'll wait here to tell him when he comes in."

"Supposing he's very late?"

"He won't be later than the last Tube train. I shall get home comfortably, my love; don't you worry about me. We old women can take care of ourselves, you know. It's ten o'clock, and you go off to bed."

"I don't know that I want to, mother."

"Shoo!" said Mrs. Amber.

When Marie was in bed, her mother went to the dining-room, established herself in an armchair, and put a match to the fire. Her husband being long dead, she regarded her own sacrificial days as over, and she remained tolerably comfortable on what he had left behind him. In the days of his life, the money had taken him away to those vague haunts of men; but now it solaced, every penny of it, his widow. As she sat by the kindled fire, Mrs. Amber resumed her knitting, and as she knitted she wondered fondly what the new baby would be like; whether it would be boy or girl, and just exactly what piece of work she had better get in hand against its arrival.

So Osborn Kerr, arriving home not very late--it was only just after eleven o'clock--found his mother-in-law seated alone upon his hearth, needles flying over one of the pale blue jerseys in which little George was to winter.

She greeted his stare of astonishment placidly, with her propitiating smile and deceitful words:

"I thought you would be cold, Osborn, so I put a match to the fire."

"Oh, thanks," said Osborn, "thanks very much. Where's Marie?"

"She's gone to bed."

"Gone to bed, and left you here by yourself!" Then a thought assailed him: "I say," he asked himself, "is she--is she staying behind to give me a talking-to about anything? What've I done now?"

The question made him antagonistic, and he looked at her keenly.

"Are you--are you staying the night?" he asked; "because, if so, I'll just take my things out of the dressing-room into our room, unless you have done it?"

She lifted her hands. "Oh, my dear boy, I shouldn't dream of putting you so about! It is only that I stayed to tell you a little bit of news which Marie seemed a trifle reluctant to tell you."

She put her head on one side and looked at him smilingly. There was no sign upon her face to tell him how anxious her heart was, nor how she had offered up a prayer as his latchkey clicked in the lock: "Oh, Lord, don't let him be angry; let him be very kind to Marie, for Christ's sake! Amen."

"If there's anything Marie can't tell me herself--"

In her most propitiatory voice she said, smiling up at the young man, "Can't you guess? I expect you do know, don't you, though Marie thinks you don't?"

Osborn sat down.

"I can't possibly guess. Is it a puzzle, at this time of night?"

"It is not a puzzle," said Mrs. Amber, overflowing with feeling so that she had to remove and wipe her glasses; "it is just the most natural and ordinary and beautiful thing in the world."

He sat forward quickly, beginning to have some glimmer of her significance.

"You _can't_ mean--"

"You and Marie are going to be blessed with another child."

"'Blessed'?" said Osborn, after a short pause, "'blessed'?"

"Blessed!" repeated Mrs. Amber anxiously.

"Some people," said Osborn, "have rum ideas about blessings."

"Won't you go in and see Marie and tell her you're pleased?"

"Is she awake?"

"I expect she is; most women would be," said Mrs. Amber slowly.

She began with extreme care to roll up her knitting while she awaited his further words; she did not look at him, but glanced about the room, as if seeking some happy idea which she could clothe in the right and most acceptable words.

"Does she expect me to be pleased?" Osborn asked.

"Well," said Mrs. Amber confidentially, "between you and me, she doesn't; and that's why I offered to tell you, Osborn. She didn't like to."

"Poor girl," said Osborn soberly.

He stared in front of him, whistling softly. "Life's queer," he uttered abruptly; "marriage seems so gay at the beginning, and then--all these infernal complications. There's always things nibbling at one; they never seem to stop. When you've weathered one squall another gets up on top of the first...."

"There must be a great deal of give-and-take in marriage," began Mrs. Amber. "I'm as old as both of you put together, and I assure you that everyone has to make sacrifices, and try to do their duty cheerfully, and welcome the children whom God sends them."

A little derision curled Osborn's lips.

"I'm afraid these mere platitudes are no solid help."

Mrs. Amber murmured protestingly, but, not knowing what a platitude was, felt she could not follow up the subject. She rose and picked up her coat from a chair back, and wrapped herself up to face the night.

"Tell Marie you're pleased," she coaxed.

"But she knows I'm not," said Osborn gloomily, "and neither will she be. One child on our income is enough. It would be different if we had plenty of money, but we haven't. Why, a family in this flat! This flat with two bedrooms! Imagine it! When God sends these blessings, as you infer He does, He should build rooms for 'em. _I_ can't."

"Oh, don't!" Mrs. Amber implored, "don't! I'm not superstitious, but--" she looked around her and shuddered--"but you ought not to say such things. It isn't right. People must make sacrifices."

"Don't say it all over again."

She went with her waddling gait, agitatedly, to the door.

"Good night," she said. "Be very, very kind to Marie, won't you?"

"I don't need anyone to tell me how to treat my own wife," he replied stiffly.

"Oh, Osborn, don't be offended."

"I'm not offended," he said shortly. "Good night, and thanks for staying in, and lighting the fire and all that."

He did not remain to watch her slow progress down the stone stairs, but closed the door and went back to the fire. He pulled out his pipe, filled and lighted it. There descended upon him that feeling of hopeless exasperation which many a young man has felt in many such a situation. When one married did one's liabilities never cease? Did they never even remain stationary, allowing a man to settle his course and keep to it, in spite of the boredom involved? Would life be always just a constant ringing of the changes on paying the rent, paying the instalment on the furniture, paying the doctor, paying the nurse, paying to go for one anxious week to Littlehampton? Wasn't there some alternative?

All a man appeared able to do was to escape for furtive minutes from his chains, to steal furtive shillings from his obligations and spend them otherwise.

A lot of men seemed to keep sane under the most unfavourable conditions.

When Osborn had sucked his pipe to the very last draw, he got up with a heavy sigh, stretched himself, took the coal off the fire to effect the minute saving, and went to undress. He wondered whether Marie really was still awake.

She was, and she was lying wide-eyed and watchful for him. As he opened the door cautiously he heard the rustle of her head moving on the pillow, and then the movement of her whole body turning towards him. Her anxiety filled the air with the sense of one poignant question: "Do you know?"

In answer to her unspoken inquiry he went at once to her side, and laid his hand upon her head, where the hair, smoothly parted for the night, looked sleek and innocent like a little girl's.

"Your mother told me," he began; then he bent and kissed her. "I'm awf'ly sorry. I s'pose we've got to make the best of it, old thing. I will if you will. It's the very devil, isn't it?"

"Yes," she sighed.