Part 2

All these things had a quite sufficiently disorganizing effect upon Mr. Huss; upon his wife the impression they made was altogether disastrous. She was a worthy but emotional lady, effusive rather than steadfast. Like the wives of most schoolmasters, she had been habitually preoccupied with matters of domestic management for many years, and her first reaction was in the direction of a bitter economy, mingled with a display of contempt she had never manifested hitherto for her husband’s practical ability. Far better would it have been for Mr. Huss if she had broken down altogether; she insisted upon directing everything, and doing so with a sort of pitiful vehemence that brooked no contradiction. It was impossible to stay at Woldingstanton through the vacation, in sight of the tragic and blackened ruins of School House, and so she decided upon Sundering-on-Sea because of its nearness and its pre-war reputation for cheapness. There, she announced, her husband must “pull himself together and pick up,” and then return to the rebuilding of School House and the rehabilitation of the school. Many formalities had to be gone through before the building could be put in hand, for in those days Britain was at the extremity of her war effort, and labour and material were unobtainable without special permits and great exertion. Sundering-on-Sea was as convenient a place as anywhere from which to write letters, but his idea of going to London to see influential people was resisted by Mrs. Huss on the score of the expense, and overcome when he persisted in it by a storm of tears.

On her arrival at Sundering Mrs. Huss put up at the Railway Hotel for the night, and spent the next morning in a stern visitation of possible lodgings. Something in the unassuming outlook of Sea View attracted her, and after a long dispute she was able to beat down Mrs. Croome’s demand from five to four and a half guineas a week. That afternoon some importunate applicant in an extremity of homelessness—for there had been a sudden rush of visitors to Sundering—offered six guineas. Mrs. Croome tried to call off her first bargain, but Mrs. Huss was obdurate, and thereafter all the intercourse of landlady and her lodgers went to the unspoken refrain of “I get four and a half guineas and I ought to get six.” To recoup herself Mrs. Croome attempted to make extra charges for the use of the bathroom, for cooking after five o’clock, for cleaning Mr. Huss’s brown boots with specially bought brown cream instead of blacking, and for the ink used by him in his very voluminous correspondence; upon all of which points there was much argument and bitterness.

But a heavier blow than any they had hitherto experienced was now to fall upon Mr. and Mrs. Huss. Job in the ancient story had seven sons and three daughters, and they were all swept away. This Job was to suffer a sharper thrust; he had but one dear only son, a boy of great promise, who had gone into the Royal Flying Corps. News came that he had been shot down over the German lines.

Unhappily there had been a conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Huss about this boy. Huss had been proud that the youngster should choose the heroic service; Mrs. Huss had done her utmost to prevent his joining it. The poor lady was now ruthless in her anguish. She railed upon him as the murderer of their child. She hoped he was pleased with his handiwork. He could count one more name on his list; he could add it to the roll of honour in the chapel “with the others.” Her _baby_ boy! This said, she went wailing from the room.

The wretched man sat confounded. That “with the others” cut him to the heart. For the school chapel had a list of V.C.’s, D.C.M.’s and the like, second to none, and it had indeed been a pride to him.

For some days his soul was stunned. He was utterly exhausted and lethargic. He could hardly attend to the most necessary letters. From dignity, hope, and a great sheaf of activities, his life had shrunken abruptly to the compass of this dingy lodging, pervaded by the squabbling of two irrational women; his work in the world was in ruins; he had no strength left in him to struggle against fate. And a vague internal pain crept slowly into his consciousness.

His wife, insane now and cruel with sorrow, tried to put a great quarrel upon him about wearing mourning for their son. He had always disliked and spoken against these pomps of death, but she insisted that whatever callousness he might display she at least must wear black. He might, she said, rest assured that she would spend no more money than the barest decency required; she would buy the cheapest material, and make it up in her bedroom. But black she must have. This resolution led straight to a conflict with Mrs. Croome, who objected to her best bedroom being littered with bits of black stuff, and cancelled the loan of her sewing machine. The mourning should be made, Mrs. Huss insisted, though she had to sew every stitch of it by hand. And the poor distraught lady in her silly parsimony made still deeper trouble for herself by cutting her material in every direction half an inch or more short of the paper pattern. She came almost to a physical tussle with Mrs. Croome because of the state of the carpet and counterpane, and Mrs. Croome did her utmost to drag Mr. Huss into an altercation upon the matter with her husband.

“Croome don’t interfere much, but some things he or nobody ain’t going to stand, Mr. ’Uss.”

For some days in this battlefield of insatiable grief and petty cruelty, and with a dull pain steadily boring its way to recognition, Mr. Huss forced himself to carry on in a fashion the complex of business necessitated by the school disaster. Then in the night came a dream, as dreams sometimes will, to enlighten him upon his bodily condition. Projecting from his side he saw a hard, white body that sent round, wormlike tentacles into every corner of his being. A number of doctors were struggling to tear this thing away from him. At every effort the pain increased.

He awoke, but the pain throbbed on.

He lay quite still. Upon the heavy darkness he saw the word “Cancer,” bright red and glowing—as pain glows....

He argued in the face of invincible conviction. He kept the mood conditional. “If it be so,” he said, though he knew that the thing was so. What should he do? There would have to be operations, great expenses, enfeeblement....

Whom could he ask for advice? Who would help him?...

Suppose in the morning he were to take a bathing ticket as if he meant to bathe, and struggle out beyond the mud-flats. He could behave as though cramp had taken him suddenly....

Five minutes of suffocation he would have to force himself through, and then peace—endless peace!

“No,” he said, with a sudden gust of courage. “I will fight it out to the end.”

But his mind was too dull to form plans and physically he was afraid. He would have to find a doctor somehow, and even that little task appalled him.

Then he would have to tell Mrs. Huss....

For a time he lay quite still as if he listened to the alternative swell and diminuendo of his pain.

“Oh! if I had someone to help me!” he whispered, and was overcome by the lonely misery of his position. “If I had someone!”

For years he had never wept, but now tears were wrung from him. He rolled over and buried his face in the pillow and tried to wriggle his body away from that steady gnawing; he fretted as a child might do.

The night about him was as it were a great watching presence that would not help nor answer.

§ 3

Behind the brass plate at the corner which said “Dr. Elihu Barrack” Mr. Huss found a hard, competent young man, who had returned from the war to his practice at Sundering after losing a leg. The mechanical substitute seemed to have taken to him very kindly. He appeared to be both modest and resourceful; his unfavourable diagnosis was all the more convincing because it was tentative and conditional. He knew the very specialist for the case; no less a surgeon than Sir Alpheus Mengo came, it happened, quite frequently to play golf on the Sundering links. It would be easy to arrange for him to examine Mr. Huss in Dr. Barrack’s little consulting room, and if an operation had to be performed it could be managed with a minimum of expense in Mr. Huss’s own lodgings without any extra charge for mileage and the like.

“Of course,” said Mr. Huss, “of course,” with a clear vision of Mrs. Croome confronted with the proposal.

Sir Alpheus Mengo came down the next Saturday, and made a clandestine examination. He decided to operate the following week-end. Mr. Huss was left at his own request to break the news to his wife and to make the necessary arrangements for this use of Mrs. Croome’s rooms. But it was two days before he could bring himself to broach the matter.

He sat now listening to the sounds of his wife moving about in the bedroom overhead, and to the muffled crashes that intimated the climax of Mrs. Croome’s preparation of the midday meal. He heard her calling upstairs to know whether Mrs. Huss was ready for her to serve up. He was seized with panic as a schoolboy might be who had not prepared his lesson. He tried hastily to frame some introductory phrases, but nothing would come into his mind save terms of disgust and lamentation. The sullen heat of the day mingled in one impression with his pain. He was nauseated by the smell of cooking. He felt it would be impossible to sit up at table and pretend to eat the meal of burnt bacon and potatoes that was all too evidently coming.

It came. Its progress along the passage was announced by a clatter of dishes. The door was opened by a kick. Mrs. Croome put the feast upon the table with something between defence and defiance in her manner. “What else,” she seemed to intimate, “could one expect for four and a half guineas a week in the very height of the season? From a woman who could have got six!”

“Your dinner’s there,” Mrs. Croome called upstairs to Mrs. Huss in tones of studied negligence, and then retired to her own affairs in the kitchen, slamming the door behind her.

The room quivered down to silence, and then Mr. Huss could hear the footsteps of his wife crossing the bedroom and descending the staircase.

Mrs. Huss was a dark, graceful, and rather untidy lady of seven and forty, with the bridling bearing of one who habitually repels implicit accusations. She lifted the lid of the vegetable dish. “I thought I smelt burning,” she said. “The woman is impossible.”

She stood by her chair, regarding her husband and waiting.

He rose reluctantly, and transferred himself to a seat at table.

It had always been her custom to carve. She now prepared to serve him. “No,” he said, full of loathing. “I can’t eat. I _can’t_.”

She put down the tablespoon and fork she had just raised, and regarded him with eyes of dark disapproval.

“It’s all we can get,” she said.

He shook his head. “It isn’t that.”

“I don’t know what you expect me to get for you here,” she complained. “The tradesmen don’t know us—and don’t care.”

“It isn’t that. I’m ill.”

“It’s the heat. We are all ill. Everyone. In such weather as this. It’s no excuse for not making an effort, situated as we are.”

“I mean I am really ill. I am in pain.”

She looked at him as one might look at an unreasonable child. He was constrained to more definite statement.

“I suppose I must tell you sooner or later. I’ve had to see a doctor.”

“Without consulting me!”

“I thought if it turned out to be fancy I needn’t bother you.”

“But how did you find a doctor?”

“There’s a fellow at the corner. Oh! it’s no good making a long story of it. I have cancer.... Nothing will do but an operation.” Self-pity wrung him. He controlled a violent desire to cry. “I am too ill to eat. I ought to be lying down.”

She flopped back in her chair and stared at him as one stares at some hideous monstrosity. “Oh!” she said. “To have cancer now! In these lodgings!”

“I can’t _help_ it,” he said in accents that were almost a whine. “I didn’t choose the time.”

“_Cancer!_” she cried reproachfully. “The horror of it!”

He looked at her for a moment with hate in his heart. He saw under her knitted brows dark and hostile eyes that had once sparkled with affection, he saw a loose mouth with downturned corners that had been proud and pretty, and this mask of dislike was projecting forward upon a neck he had used to call her head-stalk, so like had it seemed to the stem of some pretty flower. She had had lovely shoulders and an impudent humour; and now the skin upon her neck and shoulders had a little loosened, and she was no longer impudent but harsh. Her brows were moist with heat, and her hair more than usually astray. But these things did not increase, they mitigated his antagonism. They did not repel him as defects; they hurt him as wounds received in a common misfortune. Always he had petted and spared and rejoiced in her vanity and weakness, and now as he realized the full extent of her selfish abandonment a protective pity arose in his heart that overcame his physical pain. It was terrible to see how completely her delicacy and tenderness of mind had been broken down. She had neither the strength nor the courage left even for an unselfish thought. And he could not help her; whatever power he had possessed over her mind had gone long ago. His magic had departed.

Latterly he had been thinking very much of her prospects if he were to die. In some ways his death might be a good thing for her. He had an endowment assurance running that would bring in about seven thousand pounds immediately at his death, but which would otherwise involve heavy annual payments for some years. So far, to die would be clear gain. But who would invest this money for her and look after her interests? She was, he knew, very silly about property; suspicious of people she knew intimately, and greedy and credulous with strangers. He had helped to make her incompetent, and he owed it to her to live and protect her if he could. And behind that intimate and immediate reason for living he had a strong sense of work in the world yet to be done by him, and a task in education still incomplete.

He spoke with his chin in his hand and his eyes staring at the dark and distant sea. “An operation,” he said, “might cure me.”

Her thoughts, it became apparent, had been travelling through some broken and unbeautiful country roughly parallel with the course of his own. “But need there be an operation?” she thought aloud. “Are they ever any good?”

“I could die,” he admitted bitterly, and repented as he spoke.

There had been times, he remembered, when she had said and done sweet and gallant things, poor soul! poor broken companion! And now she had fallen into a darkness far greater than his. He had feared that he had hurt her, and then when he saw that she was not hurt, and that she scrutinized his face eagerly as if she weighed the sincerity of his words, his sense of utter loneliness was completed.

Over his mean drama of pain and debasement in its close atmosphere buzzing with flies, it was as if some gigantic and remorseless being watched him as a man of science might hover over some experiment, and marked his life and all his world. “You are alone,” this brooding witness counselled, “you are utterly alone. _Curse God and die._”

It seemed a long time before Mr. Huss answered this imagined voice, and when he answered it he spoke as if he addressed his wife alone.

“_No_,” he said with a sudden decisiveness. “No. I will face that operation.... We are ill and our hearts are faint. Neither for you, dear, nor for me must our story finish in this fashion. No. I shall go on to the end.”

“And have your operation here?”

“In this house. It is by far the most convenient place, as things are.”

“You may die here!”

“Well, I shall die fighting.”

“Leaving me here with Mrs. Croome.”

His temper broke under her reply. “Leaving you here with Mrs. Croome,” he said harshly.

He got up. “I can eat nothing,” he repeated, and dropped back sullenly into the horsehair armchair.

There was a long silence, and then he heard the little, almost mouselike, movements of his wife as she began her meal. For a while he had forgotten the dull ache within him, but now, glowing and fading and glowing, it made its way back into his consciousness. He was helpless and perplexed; he had not meant to quarrel. He had hurt this poor thing who had been his love and companion; he had bullied her. His clogged brain could think of nothing to set matters right. He stared with dull eyes at a world utterly hateful to him.

CHAPTER THE THIRD THE THREE VISITORS

§ 1

While this unhappy conversation was occurring at Sundering-on-Sea, three men were discussing the case of Mr. Huss very earnestly over a meatless but abundant lunch in the bow window of a club that gives upon the trees and sunshine of Carlton Gardens. Lobster salad engaged them, and the ice in the jug of hock cup clinked very pleasantly as they replenished their glasses.

The host was Sir Eliphaz Burrows, the patentee and manufacturer of those Temanite building blocks which have not only revolutionized the construction of army hutments, but put the whole problem of industrial and rural housing upon an altogether new footing; his guests were Mr. William Dad, formerly the maker of the celebrated Dad and Showhite car de luxe, and now one of the chief contractors for aeroplanes in England; and Mr. Joseph Farr, the head of the technical section of Woldingstanton School. Both the former gentlemen were governors of that foundation and now immensely rich, and Sir Eliphaz had once been a pupil of the father of Mr. Huss and had played a large part in the appointment of the latter to Woldingstanton. He was a slender old man, with an avid vulturine head poised on a long red neck, and he had an abundance of parti-coloured hair, red and white, springing from a circle round the crown of his head, from his eyebrows, his face generally, and the backs of his hands. He wore a blue soft shirt with a turn-down collar within a roomy blue serge suit, and that and something about his large loose black tie suggested scholarship and refinement. His manners were elaborately courteous. Mr. Dad was a compacter, keener type, warily alert in his bearing, an industrial fox-terrier from the Midlands, silver-haired and dressed in ordinary morning dress except for a tan vest with a bright brown ribbon border. Mr. Farr was big in a grey flannel Norfolk suit; he had a large, round, white, shiny, clean-shaven face and uneasy hands, and it was apparent that he carried pocket-books and suchlike luggage in his breast pocket.

They consumed the lobster appreciatively, and approached in a fragmentary and tentative manner the business that had assembled them: namely, the misfortunes that had overwhelmed Mr. Huss and their bearing upon the future of the school.

“For my part I don’t think there is such a thing as misfortune,” said Mr. Dad. “I don’t hold with it. Miscalculation _if_ you like.”

“In a sense,” said Mr. Farr ambiguously, glancing at Sir Eliphaz.

“If a man keeps his head screwed on the right way,” said Mr. Dad, and attacked a claw with hope and appetite. Mr. Dad affected the parsimony of unfinished sentences.

“I can’t help thinking,” said Sir Eliphaz, putting down his glass and wiping his moustache and eyebrows with care before resuming his lobster, “that a man who entrusts his affairs to a solicitor, after the fashion of the widow and orphan, must be singularly lacking in judgment. Or reckless. Never in the whole course of my life have I met a solicitor who could invest money safely and profitably. Clergymen I have known, women of all sorts, savages, monomaniacs, criminals, but _never_ solicitors.”

“I have known some smart business parsons,” said Mr. Dad judicially. “One in particular. Sharp as nails. They are a much underestimated class.”

“Perhaps it is natural that a solicitor should be a wild investor,” Sir Eliphaz pursued his subject. “He lives out of the ordinary world in a dirty little office in some antiquated inn, his office fittings are fifty years out of date, his habitual scenery consists of tin boxes painted with the names of dead and disreputable clients; he has to take the law courts, filled with horseboxes and men dressed up in gowns and horsehair wigs, quite seriously; nobody ever goes near him but abnormal people or people in abnormal states: people upset by jealousy, people upset by fear, blackmailed people, cheats trying to dodge the law, lunatics, litigants and legatees. The only investments he ever discusses are queer investments. Naturally he loses all sense of proportion. Naturally he becomes insanely suspicious; and when a client asks for positive action he flounders and gambles.”

“Naturally,” said Mr. Dad. “And here we find poor Huss giving all his business over—”

“Exactly,” said Sir Eliphaz, and filled his glass.

“There’s been a great change in him in the last two years,” said Mr. Farr. “He let the war worry him for one thing.”

“No good doing that,” said Mr. Dad.

“And even before the war,” Sir Eliphaz.

“Even before the war,” said Mr. Farr, in a pause.

“There was a change,” said Sir Eliphaz. “He had been bitten by educational theories.”

“No business for a headmaster,” said Mr. Farr.

“Our intention had always been a great scientific and technical school,” said Sir Eliphaz. “He introduced Logic into the teaching of plain English—against my opinion. He encouraged some of the boys to read philosophy.”

“All he could,” said Mr. Farr.

“I never held with his fad for teaching history,” said Mr. Dad. “He was history mad. It got worse and worse. What’s history after all? At the best, it’s over and done with.... But he wouldn’t argue upon it—not reasonably. He was—overbearing. He had a way of looking at you.... It was never our intention to make Woldingstanton into a school of history.”

“And now, Mr. Farr,” said Sir Eliphaz, “what are the particulars of the fire?”

“It isn’t for me to criticize,” said Mr. Farr.

“What I say,” said Mr. Dad, projecting his muzzle with an appearance of great determination, “is, fix responsibility. _Fix responsibility._ Here is a door locked that common sense dictated should be open. Who was responsible?”

“No one in School House seems to have been especially responsible for that door so far as I can ascertain,” said Mr. Farr.

“All responsibility,” said Mr. Dad, with an expression of peevish insistence, as though Mr. Farr had annoyed him, “_all_ responsibility that is not delegated rests with the Head. That’s a hard and fast and primary rule of business organization. In my factory I say quite plainly to everyone who comes into it, man or woman, chick or child....”

Mr. Dad was still explaining in a series of imaginary dialogues, tersely but dramatically, his methods of delegating authority, when Sir Eliphaz cut across the flow with, “Returning to Mr. Huss for a moment....”

The point that Sir Eliphaz wanted to get at was whether Mr. Huss expected to continue headmaster at Woldingstanton. From some chance phrase in a letter Sir Eliphaz rather gathered that he did.

“Well,” said Mr. Farr portentously, letting the thing hang for a moment, “he does.”

“Tcha!” said Mr. Dad, and shut his mouth tightly and waved his head slowly from side to side with knitted brows as if he had bitten his tongue.