Part 22

"'Your son's your son till he gets him a wife,'" said Mrs. Folyat to Frederic, and then to Minna she completed the tag, "'Your daughter's your daughter the rest of your life.'"

It was a very exciting and a very happy day in the Folyat household. Mrs. Folyat chattered all the evening. Mary and Gertrude said not a word and went silently off to bed, so that Francis was compelled to escort his wife to her room and perform the innumerable little services she required.

"Doesn't the house feel empty?" she said.

Francis mumbled.

"I'm sure Annette is going to have a baby."

"M-m-m-m."

"I thought I was never going to be a grandmother."

"You always were impatient," said Francis in an unexpectedly loud voice.

That was criticism, which she could not abide. Francis rued his precipitancy. He was very unhappy about Frederic, but, he asked himself, what could he do? What could he do? There was no doubt that Jessie loved Frederic, but did not that, in itself, the more dangerously expose her to his folly and weak selfishness?

He hardly heard his wife's words as she went maundering on. In the darkness he prayed that all might be, as he tried to believe, for the best.

XXVII

GERTRUDE MAKES THE BEST OF IT

_De quels ravissements nous privent nos intempérances._ JOUBERT.

WHEN Annette's baby--a boy--was born, Gertrude was the first to go and see it. She took with her a woollen bonnet and a horn spoon.

Having become capitalists with the enormous sum that had come to Annette, they had left their lodgings for a little house in a row of little houses each of seven rooms and a scullery. They had a little maid, who opened the door to Gertrude. She was a tiny wizened creature but very voluble. Gertrude was not a yard inside the house when she had a full description of the baby, its layette, Annette's condition and appearance, and the devotion of Bennett, who, she said, "never had no eyes for nothink 'cept 'is ugly little wife."

Gertrude was shown upstairs, to find Annette sitting up chattering to an enormously fat woman, who was introduced to her as Mrs. Entwistle. They were talking about Serge, of whom the fat woman expressed the most glowing admiration.

The baby, a very little one, ugly and blotched, was handed to Gertrude, and she was properly ecstatic over it. Mrs. Entwistle said:

"Eeh! Ow I did 'ave to slap 'is little buttocks to make 'im cry!"

"Slap?" said Gertrude, rather horrified.

"Eeh! Miss, didn't ye know that? Well, I never. Sometimes you 'ave to fair leather into 'em."

Gertrude held the baby in her arms and hugged him close to her breast. She was feeling very mournful, and envy tugged at her heart. She said:

"It's a very little house you live in."

"Isn't it? But we love it. It's just big enough for the three of us."

"How--how is Bennett?"

"Oh! He's very well, and he gets more money now, though still very little. I'm afraid we shall never have very much as long as he remains in business, and if he left it I suppose we should have nothing. But we don't think about it--much."

"You must be very happy."

Very mournfully Gertrude said this. She was disappointed. She had fancied that when she held Annette's baby in her arms she would feel all kinds of beautiful and exalted emotions. It was certainly pleasant to feel its warmth, and to hold it, so helpless as it was, gave her a genial sense of protection, but she was wanting, hoping for more than that. And when Annette replied that she was very happy--she looked it too--Gertrude realised painfully that she was brutally indifferent.

The starving cannot rejoice with the well-fed.

Gertrude felt her life trickling away through her fingers: worst of all, though she was not conscious of it, her desire for life was ebbing away from her. All the bitterness, all the hunger, all the hard envy in her heart she translated into one word: "Old." She said to herself: "I am getting old." . . . Having come to a concise and rounded thought she was pricked by it into revolt, and she said gently, at first, to Annette:

"I envy you. I remember you when you were a little girl. I have always thought of you as little, so that I have hardly known you. . . . And I must have always seemed to you beyond your reach. Now it is you who are beyond mine. Isn't it funny?"

She gave the child to Annette, watched it blindly wriggling against its mother's breast, and tears trickled down her nose on to the counterpane. Annette was so engrossed in her boy that she did not notice it, and Gertrude was at once ashamed of her tears, brushed them away, and angrily, in her heart, accused Annette of selfishness. She would have been so grateful only for a little pressure of the hand, a little smile, something that would bid her come into the circle of warmth, so radiant with the joy of the child. She was too timid, too much taken up with pity for herself, to force her way in. She dared not assume that she would be welcome, for she was too conscious of her own awkwardness.

She let slip the opportunity as she had spoiled so many. The conflict in her soul left her bruised and sore, and she almost hated Annette--Annette who had lied and cheated to take her lover. She turned from her thwarted emotion to sentimentality, raked over the ashes of the past, and artificially reconstructed the ruses and strategems that she supposed Annette had used to capture Bennett during her absence. . . . With effusive cordiality she kissed Annette and the baby and promised often to come and see it. A little awkwardly--she was not always tactful--Annette explained that Bennett's sister was to be the baby's Godmother. That gave Gertrude the handle she was seeking, and she persuaded herself that she had deliberately been slighted.

She went away almost without another word. On her way home she was thrust by her fancied injuries into contemplating her future. As people always do when they contemplate the future, she lost sight of the infinite gradations which led from the point at which she stood to the point on which her eyes were fixed, so that all her forward life was presented to her mental vision as acid, cold, bitterly assailing her without clemency. All her desire was to escape that future, and to evade the phantoms conjured up by her own mind--a mind very similar to her mother's and also infected by it--and to do so in a way that should, if ever so slightly, prick Annette's conscience . . .

Ideas are too often the gaolers of our souls, which, seeking health and freedom, groping out of prison, take counsel of the first-comer, an idea whom we have fee'd with prejudice and cowardice to stand guard over us. Gertrude, seeking freedom from her home, from her own folly, from herself, accosted the first-comer, Marriage, who, with a false smile, opened a door and clapped her into another cell. This, being larger than the other, she took for a place wide open to the winds of Heaven, and passed from querulous fear of the future to excitement in the immediate view. To be sure, she only saw four walls, but there was more light on them, more air and mystery between her and them. . . . Above all, nowhere in her cell could she see the figure of her sister Mary, whom she had begun to detest, nervously and irritably. . . . Mrs. Folyat had grown more and more incapable. The work of the house was divided between Gertrude and Mary. Between the two there was a grim struggle as to which of the two should make herself the less indispensable to her mother. It was very certain, as both knew in their inmost hearts, that if one of them were to be left, that one would remain for ever, with nothing to do save to turn the hour-glass when the sands ran out. Mary, being the weaker of the two, was the more good-natured, and it was for Mary that Mrs. Folyat most often called when she dropped her knitting-needle, or mislaid her spectacles, or lost her book by sitting on it, or wished to play Patience at some inappropriate hour. Everybody said Mrs. Folyat was a dear old lady. She liked the character, clung to it and abused it. Either Gertrude or Mary must be gobbled up by her selfishness. Both Gertrude and Mary believed that their mother was a dear old lady. They dreamed not that they were in revolt against her, but fancied--as it seemed more heroical to do--that they were at grips in a fearful struggle with life. They were both very near hysteria, Gertrude, after her visit to Annette, being the nearer.

* * *

There came to live near the town at this time Mrs. Bradby-Folyat, an aunt of the Folkestone Folyats, an old lady of much wealth, whose estate was continually being augmented by legacies bequeathed by irascible Bradbys and Folyats who were sickened by the attentions of their legacy-hunting poorer relations. Mrs. Bradby-Folyat left her relations alone, and the harvest of her wisdom was great. . . . Being a lady of strong character and almost masculine intelligence she had a great fondness for the weak and almost idiotic Streeten Folyat, who long ago had abandoned his sheep-farm in Westmoreland and wandered from one profession to another, shedding in each a portion of his patrimony. Between journalism and market-gardening he spent several months with his aunt at Boynton and amused himself in the town in Frederic's company. Occasionally he visited the house in Burdley Park. . . . Then he bought a small fleet of fishing-smacks at Scarborough, sold them after ten months at a heavy loss and returned to Boynton. His income had dwindled to four hundred. He bought houses in our town and was quickly embroiled in a law-suit--his idleness made him quarrelsome--and placed the case in Frederic's hands. By sheer luck Frederic won the case and delighted the old lady at Boynton, who insisted on considering that he had saved Streeten from ruin. She invited Frederic and his wife to stay with her, and entrusted him with the management of her estate. Frederic was almost delirious at this access of fortune, and calculated that if the old lady lived for another ten years he would make at least six thousand pounds. He was in debt--he could not amuse himself with Streeten for nothing--and he borrowed money from a friendly moneylender whose rate of interest per cent. _per mensem_ seemed reasonable and low.

When Frederic was not at Boynton Streeten was at Frederic's house, and when Streeten was at Frederic's house there also was Gertrude. Streeten was amazingly vain, a fop, and as eager to scan his features in the glass as a little boy just on the verge of adolescence, who is beginning to feel that the eyes of the world are upon him. Such men, when no mirror is near, will turn to the nearest woman. If in her he can see the faintest reflection of himself, pat he will fall in love with it. . . . There were not many mirrors in Frederic's house. Streeten turned to Jessie but saw only Frederic, to Gertrude then, and he saw himself enlarged, heightened, dazzling. It was the most bewildering reflection of himself that he had ever seen, and at once he was prostrate before it.

Almost before he could realise what had happened he was picked up, thrust into a frock-coat and silk hat, taken to church, married to Gertrude, and packed off for a honeymoon to Ilfracombe. He was very bored and savage. He wanted to be at Boynton or amusing himself with Frederic.

It is one thing to steal glances at your own reflection when you think no one is looking, quite another to be married to it, though the mirror tell its tale never so constantly.

It were too cruel, it were indecent, to write of Gertrude's honeymoon.

XXVIII

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

_Life . . . is like love. All reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it._ EREWHON REVISITED.

ON hearing of the capture of Streeten, celebrated in the most jubilant strain by Mrs. Folyat, with a magnificently unjust comparison of her new son-in-law with Bennett Lawrie, Minna wrote this letter to Mary:

"Mother Bub loves cutting her lamb up into chops. Did she fix him with an eye? You know how she can bore into the back of a man's neck. I'm almost sorry I missed the fun. I suppose she'll be better off than any of us. We're beastly poor, the studio's always in a mess and we can't get it straight. London is amusing but awfully big and callous. It makes you feel that it never cares whether you're there or not, and the river is almost the most human thing in it. Nobody seems to want Basil's work. I suppose there are thousands of Basils all wanting to do the same thing, and I suppose each Basil has a _me_ wanting a great deal to eat and more pleasure and fun than is good for her, and not caring particularly how much of his soul he has to sell to give it her. The Folyats have a certain charm, but we're all selfish--except, of course, dear old Ma, who always would have it that we got our wickedness from Pa. Mother Bub has the charm of a basilisk, or a fly-paper. I hope she will come to London, as it will be nice to borrow money from her. Dearest love, Mottle dear, M.

P.S.--Basil has just sold a drawing. Sausages and mashed for supper! Also beer!

P.P.S.--Did Bennett go to the wedding? How grateful he must have been to Streeten for stepping into his shoes.

P.P.P.S.--I wouldn't get married if I were you. And to think I might have been a Countess! Willie Folyat lives in London--the Hearl of Leedham, if you please. I hear he's turned out a horrid little prig. I knew he would, I felt it in my bones. I have such clever bones. M. H."

Mary was magnanimous and kept the letter to herself. She was essentially good-natured and bore no malice. She was amused by Minna's spite and did not believe a word she said. To her Gertrude was happy; she was married, therefore she loved her husband and her husband loved her. It was impossible for Mary to take a detached view, to tell black from white, good from bad. She was mentally short-sighted and her pleasures lay entirely in sentiment. She loved music as she loved nothing else in the world, but her pleasure in it was the pleasure of rhythm. Harmony touched her not at all. She had a sort of nervous sensitiveness which made her extremely shy and unresponsive. A kind of island existence was hers, and the island on which she dwelt was in a perpetual fog. Every sound that reached her from without--and little else but sound did reach her--was blurred. Voices more easily moved her than actions or the expressions of a person's face. She had always loved her father because of his soft, gentle voice, and when Serge was in the house she was animated and more quickly interested in what was going on around her.

She accepted her defeat by Gertrude docilely enough, gave up the majority of her pupils and much of her chamber-music and took up the reins of the household. With only her father and mother to provide for, it was fairly easy, and the expenses were so much reduced that she was able to pay more wages and to procure a better class of maid. Mrs. Folyat took a dislike to the maid, and all her service had to be performed by Mary herself.

Serge had fallen into the habit of taking supper with his family--his father and mother and Mary--nearly every Sunday evening, and he was exasperated by the petty attentions which his mother was continually demanding. He had tried many a time to find a way to the heart of this curious, stupid, yet gentle and kindly sister of his, but he had always found it impossible to set her thoughts moving. She seemed to have almost lost the capacity of thinking, and she had so little sense of humour that any blunt statement of fact hurt her as a direct attack. She showed in many ways that she was fond of him, but it was as a dog is fond, with a mute uncomprehending sympathy.

Serge fell back on action. Whenever his mother, in the metallic tones of her querulous mood, asked Mary to fetch her book from the other end of the house, or to unravel her knitting when she had dropped a stitch, or to read to her because her eyes ached, Serge bustlingly and rather ostentatiously forestalled his sister. There was never any sign that he had produced any effect on mother or daughter.

This went on for months. Existence in the house in Burdley Park passed smoothly and placidly, and Francis seemed to be happy, as he had never been, busy with his parish and greenhouse. He was silent for days together, except that every now and then he would hum tunelessly to himself, booming like a bumble-bee. He had every small joy that he asked of the world and was content. He liked the new generation of his parishioners better than the old, they were not so dour, and everything seemed to him to be going well and happily. He saw Frederic very seldom, and Annette very frequently, and Minna and Gertrude were regular correspondents. Serge had not for a very long time asked him for money, and for the first time for many, many years his expenses and income were on good terms with each other. Best of all, Mrs. Folyat had begun to see herself and her husband as a sort of Darby and Joan, and sweetened her conduct to fit the character. Everybody said you might go far before you could find a more delightful old couple. They achieved a sort of celebrity.

Mary too came in for her share of the general admiration, and her devotion to her mother was by more than one tyrannous old woman brandished over the head of a peevish and fading daughter. Mary recked nothing of it, and it would have made no impression on her if she had.

One Sunday, when her mother had rather explosively demanded her spectacles, and Serge without a word had gone down to the dining-room for them, and without a word had given them to her, a new idea came to Mary. She sat stupidly gazing at her mother and very slowly she began to think what would become of her if her father and mother were to die. There was a loud-ticking clock in the room, and it said with remorseless insistency:

"I-shall-be-alone."

This was a very dreadful idea to her. She strangled it.

There is no getting rid of thoughts. If they are strangled their corpses remain and rot in the mind, to its lasting detriment. This idea remained in Mary's mind, cold and dead, and gradually poisoned the sweetness of her nature.

A fixed idea is a dead idea.

* * *

Mary's temper suffered, and she vented her spleen on her pupils to such a degree that there came a time when she had only one left--the youngest daughter of the sausage-machine manufacturing widower, all of whose daughters she had instructed in turn in a polite mastery of the violin. Her bi-weekly visits to his house had become part of the routine of his household, and she was part and parcel of its furniture, being fitted into the heavy dinner-parties when there was a gap. At other entertainments she was never omitted and was as much part of their colour as the faded best chair-covers that were taken out for the occasion or the Japanese lanterns which illuminated them. She was useful, for she was always willing to play the piano for hours on end when the young people wanted to dance. To the widower, who never saw her on other occasions, she was always associated with gaiety.

One day he proposed marriage to her, and she refused him.

"Be sure," he said, "that I shall always be your friend. And I shall continue to hope."

He was really relieved at being rejected, and retired to cogitate the extraordinary impulse which had driven him to do such a thing. He felt very uncomfortable, for the fictions with which he had surrounded his dead wife had been shaken.

Mary left his house in a flutter. The man had always been kind to her, he was an admirable father, and she had always respected him as a solid man, though he was a little too Northernly solid to be taken altogether seriously. His house was very comfortable, though ugly and too reekingly prosperous, but the habit of years had made it a corner of the equilateral triangle of her life. Its atmosphere was altogether different from that of her home and delivered her from monotony.

Her only feeling about his proposal of marriage was one of surprise. She thought of it only materially and was not signally disturbed by it until he sent her an extraordinary letter in which he sought to explain away his behaviour. In the course of it he cut deeper in his contemplation of the marriage--having been married--and had, unwittingly, set his emotions stirring. Mary's emotions responded, but her modesty plucked them back. She did not, she told herself, "love" Mr. Hargreave, because, after all, he was only a common man who had begun life as a boy in a smithy. It had been easy enough when she thought of marriage as a mere translation from one house to another, but, quite clearly, he was asking for a personal relation, and from that she shrank, chiefly because it was a change from the custom of years. When she desired a concrete objection she fished out from the confusion in her mind the prejudiced idea that she would be a stepmother; worse than that, a stepmother to children to whom she had been a paid instructress, children moreover who had, upon occasion, been so cruel to her that she had been unable to retort upon them or to maintain discipline. . . . She read Mr. Hargreave's letter once more and saw that she could not easily enter his house again, except it were to leave her home.

She left the matter for a day or two, did not reply, and failed to attend for Violet Hargreave's violin lesson. A day or two more and she received another letter from Mr. Hargreave in which he completely abased himself, and, in his desire to be kind and to palliate the affront he conceived himself to have put upon her, waxed tender and was almost lyrical in her praises.

She tried to write to him but could find nothing to say. Tears rolled down and plopped on to the paper, and she grew hot and impatient with herself. Clearly she must go to his house and reassure him. No sooner had she resolved on that, than she felt that she could not explain herself, that he would renew his proposal, and she would have to say either "Yes" or "No." If "Yes," then a thousand and one objections would rise in her mind. If "No," then it would become impossible for her ever to enter his house again.

She dried her eyes and resolved that she would go there and then and get it over. It was evening. She could ask for one of the Hargreave girls, leave a piece of music; she was familiar enough at the house; no one would suspect the undercurrent.

As she went downstairs her mother called to her. She could not find "Johnny Ludlow" anywhere, and what had Mary done with it, and why was she so careless?

"I am not careless," replied Mary. "You were reading it yourself. You must have left it in your room."

"Johnny Ludlow" was found behind the cushions of Mrs. Folyat's chair. Mary felt a gust of impatience as she gave the book to her mother. She sat down suddenly, and with a desperate gulp she said very quickly:

"Mr. Hargreave has asked me to marry him!"

"You, my dear . . . Mr. Hargreave! He must be nearly sixty!"

The word "sixty" chilled Mary.

"Fifty-one," she murmured.

"An old man like that . . . Really he ought to be ashamed of himself. He ought to be preparing himself for his eternal life instead of thinking of a wife. . . . And with all those children too."

Mary's sense of justice was offended.

"A great many widowers marry again for the sake of their children, don't they?"

"But Mr. Hargreave has two grown-up daughters."

Again there was a chilly catch at Mary's heart, and she had a lump in her throat. She said:

"No one else has ever asked me to marry."