"Did she say that?" he asked.
"She mentioned it casually," I explained: "though now I come to think of it she asked me not to say so. What she wanted me to impress upon you was that her father would be disappointed in you."
Dick walked beside me in silence for awhile.
"Sorry I've been a worry to you, dad," he said at last
"Glad to hear you say so," I replied.
"I'm going to turn over a new leaf, dad," he said. "I'm going to work hard."
"About time," I said.
CHAPTER VI
We had cold bacon for lunch that day. There was not much of it. I took it to be the bacon we had not eaten for breakfast. But on a clean dish with parsley it looked rather neat. It did not suggest, however, a lunch for four people, two of whom had been out all the morning in the open air. There was some excuse for Dick.
"I never heard before," said Dick, "of cold fried bacon as a hors d'oeuvre."
"It is not a hors d'oeuvre," explained Robina. "It is all there is for lunch." She spoke in the quiet, passionless voice of one who has done with all human emotion. She added that she should not be requiring any herself, she having lunched already.
Veronica, conveying by her tone and bearing the impression of something midway between a perfect lady and a Christian martyr, observed that she also had lunched.
"Wish I had," growled Dick.
I gave him a warning kick. I could see he was on the way to getting himself into trouble. As I explained to him afterwards, a woman is most dangerous when at her meekest. A man, when he feels his temper rising, takes every opportunity of letting it escape. Trouble at such times he welcomes. A broken boot-lace, or a shirt without a button, is to him then as water in the desert. An only collar-stud that will disappear as if by magic from between his thumb and finger and vanish apparently into thin air is a piece of good fortune sent on these occasions only to those whom the gods love. By the time he has waddled on his hands and knees twice round the room, broken the boot-jack raking with it underneath the wardrobe, been bumped and slapped and kicked by every piece of furniture that the room contains, and ended up by stepping on that stud and treading it flat, he has not a bitter or an angry thought left in him. All that remains of him is sweet and peaceful. He fastens his collar with a safety-pin, humming an old song the while.
Failing the gifts of Providence, the children―if in health―can generally be depended upon to afford him an opening. Sooner or later one or another of them will do something that no child, when he was a boy, would have dared―or dreamed of daring―to even so much as think of doing. The child, conveying by expression that the world, it is glad to say, is slowly but steadily growing in sense, and pity it is that old-fashioned folks can't bustle up and keep abreast of it, points out that firstly it has not done this thing, that for various reasons―a few only of which need be dwelt upon―it is impossible it could have done this thing; that secondly it has been expressly requested to do this thing, that wishful always to give satisfaction, it has―at sacrifice of all its own ideas―gone out of its way to do this thing; that thirdly it can't help doing this thing, strive against fate as it will.
He says he does not want to hear what the child has got to say on the subject―nor on any other subject, neither then nor at any other time. He says there's going to be a new departure in this house, and that things all round are going to be very different. He suddenly remembers every rule and regulation he has made during the past ten years for the guidance of everybody, and that everybody, himself included, has forgotten. He tries to talk about them all at once, in haste lest he should forget them again. By the time he has succeeded in getting himself, if nobody else, to understand himself, the children are swarming round his knees extracting from him promises that in his sober moments he will be sorry that he made.
I knew a woman―a wise and good woman she was―who when she noticed that her husband's temper was causing him annoyance, took pains to help him to get rid of it. To relieve his sufferings I have known her search the house for a last month's morning paper and, ironing it smooth, lay it warm and neatly folded on his breakfast plate.
"One thing in this world to be thankful for, at all events, and that is that we don't live in Ditchley-in-the-Marsh," he would growl ten minutes later from the other side of it.
"Sounds a bit damp," the good woman would reply.
"Damp!" he would grunt, "who minds a bit of damp! Good for you. Makes us Englishmen what we are. Being murdered in one's bed about once a week is what I should object to."
"Do they do much of that sort of thing down there?" the good woman would enquire.
"Seems to be the chief industry of the place. Do you mean to say you don't remember that old maiden lady being murdered by her own gardener and buried in the fowl-run? You women! you take no interest in public affairs."
"I do remember something about it, now you mention it, dear," the good woman would confess. "Always seems such an innocent type of man, a gardener."
"Seems to be a special breed of them at Ditchley-in-the-Marsh," he answers. "Here again last Monday," he continues, reading with growing interest. "Almost the same case―even to the pruning knife. Yes, hanged if he doesn't!―buries her in the fowl-run. This is most extraordinary."
"It must be the imitative instinct asserting itself," suggests the good woman. "As you, dear, have so often pointed out, one crime makes another."
"I have always said so," he agrees; "it has always been a theory of mine."
He folds the paper over. "Dull dogs, these political chaps!" he says. "Here's the Duke of Devonshire, speaking last night at Hackney, begins by telling a funny story he says he has just heard about a parrot. Why, it's the same story somebody told a month ago; I remember reading it. Yes―upon my soul―word for word, I'd swear to it. Shows you the sort of men we're governed by."
"You can't expect everyone, dear, to possess your repertoire," the good woman remarks.
"Needn't say he's just heard it that afternoon, anyhow," responds the good man.
He turns to another column. "What the devil! Am I going off my head?" He pounces on the eldest boy. "When was the Oxford and Cambridge Boat-race?" he fiercely demands.
"The Oxford and Cambridge Boat-race!" repeats the astonished youth. "Why, it's over. You took us all to see it, last month. The Saturday before―"
The conversation for the next ten minutes he conducts himself, unaided. At the end he is tired, maybe a trifle hoarse. But all his bad temper is gone. His sorrow is there was not sufficient of it. He could have done with more.
Woman knows nothing of simple mechanics. A woman thinks you can get rid of steam by boxing it up and sitting on the safety-valve.
"Feeling as I do this morning, that I'd like to wring everybody's neck for them," the average woman argues to herself; "my proper course―I see it clearly―is to creep about the house, asking of everyone that has the time to spare to trample on me."
She coaxes you to tell her of her faults. When you have finished she asks for more―reminds you of one or two you had missed out. She wonders why it is that she is always wrong. There must be a reason for it; if only she could discover it. She wonders how it is that people can put up with her―thinks it so good of them.
At last, of course, the explosion happens. The awkward thing is that neither she herself nor anyone else knows when it is coming. A husband cornered me one evening in the club. It evidently did him good to talk. He told me that, finding his wife that morning in one of her rare listening moods, he had seized the opportunity to mention one or two matters in connection with the house he would like to have altered; that was, if she had no objection. She had―quite pleasantly―reminded him the house was his, that he was master there. She added that any wish of his of course was law to her.
He was a young and inexperienced husband; it seemed to him a hopeful opening. He spoke of quite a lot of things―things about which he felt that he was right and she was wrong. She went and fetched a quire of paper, an
d borrowed his pencil and wrote them down.
Later on, going through his letters in the study, he found an unexpected cheque; and ran upstairs and asked her if she would not like to come out with him and get herself a new hat.
"I could have understood it," he moaned, "if she had dropped on me while I was―well, I suppose, you might say lecturing her. She had listened to it like a lamb―hadn't opened her mouth except to say 'yes, dear,' or 'no, dear.' Then, when I only asked her if she'd like a new hat, she goes suddenly raving mad. I never saw a woman go so mad."
I doubt if there be anything in nature quite as unexpected as a woman's temper, unless it be tumbling into a hole. I told all this to Dick. I have told it him before. One of these days he will know it.
"You are right to be angry with me," Robina replied meekly; "there is no excuse for me. The whole thing is the result of my own folly."
Her pathetic humility should have appealed to him. He can be sympathetic, when he isn't hungry. Just then he happened to be hungry.
"I left you making a pie," he said. "It looked to me a fair-sized pie. There was a duck on the table, with a cauliflower and potatoes; Veronica was up to her elbows in peas. It made me hungry merely passing through the kitchen. I wouldn't have anything to eat in the town for fear of spoiling my appetite. Where is it all? You don't mean to say that you and Veronica have eaten the whole blessed lot!"
There is one thing―she admits it herself―that exhausts Veronica's patience: it is unjust suspicion.
"Do I look as if I'd eaten anything for hours and hours?" Veronica demanded. "You can feel my waistband if you don't believe me."
"You said just now you had had your lunch," Dick argued.
"I know I did," Veronica admitted. "One minute you are told that it is wicked to tell lies; the next―"
"Veronica!" Robina interrupted threateningly.
"It's easy for you," retorted Veronica. "You are not a growing child. You don't feel it."
"The least you can do," said Robina, "is to keep silence."
"What's the good," said Veronica―not without reason. "You'll tell them when I've gone to bed, and can't put in a word for myself. Everything is always my fault. I wish sometimes that I was dead."
"That I were dead," I corrected her. "The verb 'to wish,' implying uncertainty, should always be followed by the conditional mood."
"You ought," said Robina, "to be thankful to Providence that you're not dead."
"People are sorry when you're dead," said Veronica.
"I suppose there's some bread-and-cheese in the house," suggested Dick.
"The baker, for some reason or another, has not called this morning," Robina answered sweetly. "Neither unfortunately has the grocer. Everything there is to eat in the house you see upon the table."
"Accidents will happen," I said. "The philosopher―as our friend St. Leonard would tell us―only smiles."
"I could smile," said Dick, "if it were his lunch."
"Cultivate," I said, "a sense of humour. From a humorous point of view this lunch is rather good."
"Did you have anything to eat at the St. Leonards'?" he asked.
"Just a glass or so of beer and a sandwich or two," I admitted. "They brought it out to us while we were talking in the yard. To tell the truth, I was feeling rather peckish."
Dick made no answer, but continued to chew bacon-rind. Nothing I could say seemed to cheer him. I thought I would try religion.
"A dinner of herbs―the sentiment applies equally to lunch―and contentment therewith is better," I said, "than a stalled ox."
"Don't talk about oxen," he interrupted fretfully. "I feel I could just eat one―a plump one."
There is a man I know. I confess he irritates me. His argument is that you should always rise from a meal feeling hungry. As I once explained to him, you cannot rise from a meal feeling hungry without sitting down to a meal feeling hungry; which means, of course, that you are always hungry. He agreed with me. He said that was the idea―always ready.
"Most people," he said, "rise from a meal feeling no more interest in their food. That was a mental attitude injurious to digestion. Keep it always interested; that was the proper way to treat it."
"By 'it' you mean . . . ?" I said.
"Of course," he answered; "I'm talking about it."
"Now I myself;" he explained―"I rise from breakfast feeling eager for my lunch. I get up from my lunch looking forward to my dinner. I go to bed just ready for my breakfast."
Cheerful expectancy, he said, was a wonderful aid to digestion. "I call myself;" he said, "a cheerful feeder."
"You don't seem to me," I said, "to be anything else. You talk like a tadpole. Haven't you any other interest in life? What about home, and patriotism, and Shakespeare―all those sort of things? Why not give it a square meal, and silence it for an hour or two; leave yourself free to think of something else."
"How can you think of anything," he argued, "when your stomach's out of order?"
"How can you think of anything," I argued, "when it takes you all your time to keep it in order? You are not a man; you are a nurse to your own stomach." We were growing excited, both of us, forgetting our natural refinement. "You don't get even your one afternoon a week. You are healthy enough, I admit it. So are the convicts at Portland. They never suffer from indigestion. I knew a doctor once who prescribed for a patient two years' penal servitude as the only thing likely to do him permanent good. Your stomach won't let you smoke. It won't let you drink―not when you are thirsty. It allows you a glass of Apenta water at times when you don't want it, assuming there could ever be a time when you did want it. You are deprived of your natural victuals, and made to live upon prepared food, as though you were some sort of a prize chicken. You are sent to bed at eleven, and dressed in hygienic clothing that makes no pretence to fit you. Talk of being hen-pecked! Why, the mildest husband living would run away or drown himself, rather than remain tied for the rest of his existence to your stomach."
"It is easy to sneer," he said.
"I am not sneering," I said; "I am sympathising with you."
He said he did not want any sympathy. He said if only I would give up over-eating and drinking myself, it would surprise me how bright and intelligent I should become.
I thought this man might be of use to us on the present occasion. Accordingly I spoke of him and of his theory. Dick seemed impressed.
"Nice sort of man?" he asked.
"An earnest man," I replied. "He practises what he preaches, and whether because, or in spite of it, the fact remains that a chirpier soul I am sure does not exist."
"Married?" demanded Dick.
"A single man," I answered. "In all things an idealist. He has told me he will never marry until he can find his ideal woman."
"What about Robina here!" suggested Dick. "Seem to have been made for one another."
Robina smiled. It was a wan, pathetic smile.
"Even he," thought Robina, "would want his beans cooked to time, and to feel that a reasonable supply of nuts was always in the house. We incompetent women never ought to marry."
We had finished the bacon. Dick said he would take a stroll into the town. Robina suggested he might take Veronica with him, that perhaps a bun and a glass of milk would do the child no harm.
Veronica for a wonder seemed to know where all her things were. Before Dick had filled his pipe she was ready dressed and waiting for him. Robina said she would give them a list of things they might bring back with them. She also asked Dick to get together a plumber, a carpenter, a bricklayer, a glazier, and a civil engineer, and to see to it that they started off at once. She thought that among them they might be able to do all that was temporarily necessary, but the great thing was that the work should be commenced without delay.
"Why, what on earth's the matter, old girl?" asked Dick. "Have you had an accident?"
Then it was that Robina exploded. I had been wondering when it would happen. To Dick's astonishment it happened then.
Yes, she answered, there had been an accident. Did he suppose that seven scrimpy scraps of bacon was her notion of a lunch between four hungry persons? Did he, judging from himself, imagine that our family yielded only lunatics? Was it kind―was it courteous to his parents, to the mother he pretended to love, to the father whose grey hairs he was by his general behaviour bringing down in sorrow to the grave―to assume without further enquiry that their eldest daughter was an imbecile? (My hair, by-the-bye, is not grey. There may be a suggestion of greyness here and there, the natural result of deep thinking. To describe it in the lump as grey is to show lack of observation. And at forty-eight―or a trifle over―one is not going down into the grave, not straight down. Robina when excited uses exaggerated language. I did not, however, interrupt her; she meant well. Added to which, interrupting Robina, when―to use her own expression―she is tired of being a worm, is like trying to stop a cyclone with an umbrella.) Had his attention been less concentrated on the guzzling of cold bacon (he had only had four mouthfuls, poor fellow)―had he noticed the sweet patient child starving before his very eyes (this referred to Veronica)―his poor elder sister, worn out with work and worry, pining for nourishment herself, it might have occurred to even his intelligence that there had been an accident. The selfishness, the egotism of men it was that staggered, overwhelmed Robina, when she came to think of it.
Robina paused. Not for want of material, I judged, so much as want of breath. Veronica performed a useful service by seizing the moment to express a hope that it was not early-closing day. Robina felt a conviction that it was: it would be just like Dick to stand there dawdling in a corner till it was too late to do anything.
"I have been trying to get out of this corner for the last five minutes," explained Dick, with that angelic smile of his that I confess is irritating. "If you have done talking, and will give me an opening, I will go."
Robina told him that she had done talking. She gave him her reasons for having done talking. If talking to him would be of any use she would often have felt it her duty to talk to him, not only with regard to his stupidity and selfishness and general aggravatingness, but with reference to his character as a whole. Her excuse for not talking to him was the crushing conviction of the hopelessness of ever effecting any improvement in him. Were it otherwise -
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