“Victoria is goin mad again,” said the General.
We looked at Bella and I heard old Mr. Hattersley moan in something like terror.
Her flesh had shrunk so close to the bones that her figure was now angular, but the horriblest change was in her face. The white sharp nose, hollow cheeks and sunken eye-sockets showed the skull all too clearly, yet within the sockets each black pupil had expanded to fill the whole eye, leaving just a tiny wee triangle of white in the corners. Her dark curling mass of hairs had also expanded, for the first inch of each one stood straight out from the head “like quills upon the fretful porcupine”. I did not doubt that before me stood the emaciated form of Lady Victoria Blessington, exactly as she had emerged from the coal-cellar. But her voice, though sad, was distinctly Bella’s.
“I feel how that poor thing felt,” she said, “but it will not madden me. So I visited you in Manchester, Dad. What did you do to me?”
“The wrong thing! The wrong thing, Vicky,” said the old man thumping the arms of the chair with his fists. “I should have kept you with me, sent for Sir Aubrey and thrashed out a better deal with him—a deal which would have benefited you as well as me. Instead I explained that a wife who abandons her husband is a truant in the eyes of man and God. I said you must fight the marital war on your own hearthstone or you would never win it. I told you to tell Sir Aubrey that if he lacked cash to bribe his cast-offs into holding their tongues he should send them to me—I know how to handle that sort of woman. All I said was true, Vicky, but I said it because I wanted you out of the house, out of my sight as soon as possible. I was afraid you would go into labour and I HATE women near me when they are whelping, hate the blood, screams and stinking mess they make, ugh, the thought of it makes me want to retch. So I took you back fast to the station and bought you a ticket for London. You were acting very calm and sensible, Vicky, and said I need not wait with you for the train, so I charged off in case you pupped on the platform. I was a coward, I admit, and I apologize. As soon as my back was turned you must have changed my first-class ticket to London for a third-class ticket to Glasgow. So here you are!”
“And here I stay,” said Bella calmly, and as she spoke the lines of her figure and face relaxed into their proper softness, her hair began to settle, her eyes recovered their usual depth, size, and golden-brown warmth. She said, “Thank you for giving me life, Father, though from what you say my mother had most trouble making me and you took none at all. Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having. Thank you, Sir Aubrey, for releasing me from my father, and thank you for driving me away from your house. Or perhaps I should thank Dolly Perkins for doing that. Without her it seems I would have gone on clinging to you. Thanks, Dr. Prickett, for trying to make life bearable for the poor silly creature I used to be. You cannot help being one still. Thank you, Mr. Grimes, for discovering and telling me how I had to travel through water to get my useless past washed off. Thank you for mending me, God, and giving me a home that is not a prison. I will continue living here. And Candle, how good to have a man I need not thank at all, who I cuddle and who cuddles me every night, is pleasant company in the mornings and evenings, and leaves me alone every day to get on with my work.”
She smiled and came to me, embraced and kissed me and I could not resist her; though I was sorry to show our affections so openly before her first husband. He was a Liberal M.P. as well as a great soldier.
23
Blessington’s Last Stand
It is a remarkable fact that since Bella had pulled her hand so abruptly from his, the General had lain perfectly flat and still, apart from the movements of lips and tongue, eyelids and flickering eyes: thus when old Mr. Hattersley had called him “three-quarters dead” it seemed more of a diagnosis than an insult. Now he asked softly, “What is your opinion, Harker?”
“They cannot win a divorce action against you, Sir Aubrey. Your alleged adultery with Dolly Perkins is irrelevant. A husband’s adultery is no ground for divorce unless it is unnatural—committed anally, incestuously, homosexually or with a beast. If they appeal on grounds of extreme cruelty their own witnesses must testify that you locked Lady Blessington in the cellar because she was raving mad, and to keep her safe while you fetched medical help. A divorce action will end with Lady Blessington taken into protective custody as a ward of court. Were it not for the scandal we should welcome it.”
“No scandal, please,” said the General smiling slightly. “I am leavin, Harker. Go down and bring the cabs to the front door. Make sure me own cab is directly opposite the door, and send up Mahoun to help me downstairs. I find goin down harder than comin up.”
The solicitor arose and left the room without a word.
A moment later General Blessington sat up, swung his legs to the floor and, placing his hands on his knees, looked smilingly round the room, nodding to each of us in turn. There was a sudden touch of colour in his cheeks, a mischievous brightness in his glance which I thought wonderful in a man accepting defeat.
“Would you like tea before you go?” asked Baxter. “Or something stronger?”
“No refreshments, thank you,” said the General, “and I apologize, Mr. Baxter, for wastin so much of your time. Parliamentary methods always waste time. Are you ready Grimes?”
“Yessir,” said Grimes with a promptness suggesting he had served in the army.
“See to McCandless,” said the General, and taking a revolver from a pocket, clicked off the safety-catch and levelled it at Baxter.
“Sit down please, Mr. McCandless,” said Grimes in a polite and friendly voice. I sat in the nearest chair, more hypnotized than terrified by the little black hole at the end of the weapon he so steadily showed me. I could not look away from it. I heard the General saying cheerfully, “There will be no killin Mr. Baxter, but if you do not stay where you are I promise to put a bullet into your groin. Are you ready with the chloroform, Prickett?”
“I—I—I do this with the gugugreatest—reluctance Sir Aubrey,” said the doctor. He was sitting beside Grimes and I saw him struggle feebly to stand up while fumbling a bottle and cloth out of inner pockets.
“Of course you’re reluctant, Prickett!” said the General with genial force, “but you’ll do it because you are a good man and a good doctor and I trust you. Now Victoria, you love Mr. Baxter dearly because he saved your life and did you some other little services. Come and sit beside me and let Prickett put you to sleep. If you do not, I will disable Baxter painfully with a bullet before stunnin you with the butt of this weapon GET OUT OF THE WAY WOMAN!”
I looked sideways.
And saw Bella had stepped between Baxter and Blessington and was going toward Blessington with her right hand outstretched for his gun. He slid along the sofa to aim at Baxter round her but with a light leap she landed before him, gripped the barrel and pointed it to the floor. It fired. I think the General was as shocked by this as everyone but Bella. She easily pulled the gun from his hand by the barrel and put the butt of it into her left. Like Baxter she was (is) ambidextrous, so naturally held the revolver as it was designed to be held, and this pointed it straight at the General’s head.
“You silly soldier,” she said, rubbing the palm of her right hand (scorched by the heat of the barrel) against the side of her wedding-dress, “you have shot me in the foot.”
“The game is up, General,” said Seymour Grimes, and with an apologetic shrug to me he locked the safety-catch of his revolver and pocketed it.
“Is the game really up, Grimes?” said the General, without taking his eyes off Bella’s thoughtfully frowning face. “No, Grimes, I do not think the game is quite up yet.”
With an effort he suddenly stood erect, to attention, like a soldier in a parade inspection, and now the point of the barrel pressed into the cloth of the coat over his heart and was an inch from it.
“Shoot!” he said, staring coldly ahead. A moment passed then he smiled benignly down at Bella who returned his look with wonder.
Another moment passed then his face flushed crimson.
“SHOOT! I ORDER YOU TO SHOOT!” he cried, and to my ears the order rang backward in history through Balaclava, Waterloo, Culloden and Blenheim to Agincourt and Crécy. I realized General Blessington truly wanted to be shot, had wanted it all his life, which was why he had been wounded so often. This historical command and passionate plea were so powerful that I imagined all the men killed in his battles rising from their graves to shoot him where he stood. Bella partly obeyed him. Half turning her body from the waist she fired the remaining five shots into the back of the fireplace. The detonations half stunned us; the smoke of it made my eyes water and other people cough. She blew fumes away from the reeking barrel in a gesture I later recognized when we went to see Buffalo Bill’s circus during the Great Glasgow East End Exhibition of 1891. Then she put the revolver into the General’s coat pocket and fainted.
After that several things happened quickly. Baxter lumbered across, lifted Bella up, laid her on the sofa and stripped shoe and stocking from the foot. Meanwhile I sprang to a cupboard containing a medical cabinet and brought it over to them. The bullet had luckily gone clean through into the carpet, puncturing the integument between the ulna and radius of the second and third metacarpals without even chipping a bone. Meanwhile old Mr. Hattersley was clapping his hands and shouting, “Eee she’s a wonderful lass! Did you ever see anythink so brave? No never! A true daughter of Blaydon Hattersley, that’s who she is!”
The door opened and two surprisingly different figures stood in it: Mrs. Dinwiddie and a tall brown turbaned man in an overcoat reaching from neck to ankles. I took this to be Mahoun, the General’s manservant.
“Will I get the police Mr. Baxter?” asked our housekeeper. “No, fetch some boiling water please, Mrs. Dinwiddie,” said Baxter. “One of our visitors has just conducted an unsuccessful experiment, but done no great damage.”
Mrs Dinwiddie left. The General stood to one side, gloomily tugging a corner of his heavy moustache.
“Time to leave, sir?” suggested Seymour Grimes smartly.
“O please, please let us leave!” begged Dr. Prickett, and had General Blessington left at once I believe he would have lived for several more years and been honoured with a state funeral and public monument.
I think what kept him beside us was his bafflement at being neither victorious nor wholly defeated. Bella, though not chloroformed, was now unconscious, and Baxter and I knelt with our backs to him behaving as if he did not exist. With the butt of the pistol in his pocket he could easily have stunned me and perhaps Baxter, and carried off Bella to the waiting cabs with the help of Mahoun. But that would have been a cowardly action and the General was no coward. Maybe he lingered because he was seeking a short, fierce, gentlemanly phrase to attract our attention before he strode out, for he was not used to being ignored. Meanwhile we gave Bella morphine, poured iodine into the wound and bound gauze round it. Suddenly she opened her eyes, looked at the General and said to him thoughtfully, “I remember you now, from the Dungeon Suite of the Hôtel de Notre-Dame, in Paris. You were the man in the mask—Monsieur Spankybot.”
Then between bursts of laughter she cried aloud, “General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Spankybot V.C., how funny! Most brothel customers are quick squirts but you were the quickest of the lot! The things you paid the girls to do to stop you coming in the first half minute would make a hahahahaha make a cat laugh! Still, they liked you. General Spankybot paid well and did no harm—you never gave one of us the pox. I think the rottenest thing about you (apart from the killing you’ve done and the way you treat servants) is what Prickett calls the pupurity of your mumarriage bed. Fuck off, you poor daft silly queer rotten old fucker hahahahaha! Fuck off!”
I drew my breath in sharp. I have since been told that only in English is the word for bodily loving—whether used as noun, verb or adjective—an evil, unmentionable word. I had heard the hired men round the Whauphill farms use it from my earliest years, but both my mother and Scraffles would have knocked me senseless had they heard it from me. Yet Baxter now smiled as if at a magic word solving all our problems. The General’s face went so pale that his grey moustache and beard looked dark against it. With half-shut eyes and gaping mouth he staggered sideways until he bumped into Prickett, reeled the other way until upheld by Grimes, then supported by both was moved on trembling legs toward the door which Mahoun held politely open for them. Mr. Hattersley followed with the dazed movements of a sleep-walker, but before Mahoun shut the door behind him he turned and in a sing-song moaning voice said, “That woman is no daughter of Blaydon Hattersley.”
And then they were all gone.
“Good,” said Baxter a moment later, having found Bella’s pulse and temperature satisfactory. “I think the General will agree to a legal separation without the publicity of a divorce. Of course that means you and Bella cannot marry, but a divorce would seriously injure the career of woman doctor starting work in Scotland. A discreet private understanding will be the best thing for Bella and you until General Blessington dies of natural causes.”
But two days later the papers announced that General Blessington had been found dead on the gun-room floor of his country house at Loamshire Downs.28 The revolver in his hand and angle of the bullet through his brain ruled out accident. The coroner said he had died “while the balance of his mind was disturbed”, so he was given a Church of England burial service, but not a state funeral. The obituary in The Times of London said that perhaps political disappointment had made him choose “a Roman end”, and implied that Gladstone was to blame.
24
GOOD-BYE
Reader, she married me and I have little more to tell. Our family prospers happily. Our public work is useful and noticed as such. Dr. Archibald McCandless is chairman of the Glasgow Civic Improvement Trust; Dr. Bella McCandless—through her management of the Godwin Baxter Natal Clinic, her Fabian pamphlets and promotion of female suffrage—has been invited to speak on platforms in nearly all the European capitals, while her old friend Dr. Hooker is currently organizing a lecture tour for her in America. When my friends in the Glasgow Arts Club twit me with my wife’s greater fame I have a ready reply: “One famous McCandless is enough for any family.” I believe our sons find their stolid father a welcome counterpoise to their brilliant, unconventional mother. I believe their mother finds me that too. She is the swelling sail, trim rigging and busy sunlit deck of our matrimonial yacht; I am the low hull with the invisible ballast and keel. This metaphor greatly contents me.
It is with a heavy heart that I now describe the last days of he who I will always consider the wisest and the best of men.
On the day after General Blessington’s defeat Baxter’s health deteriorated in ways he carefully hid from even his closest friends. He called us to his bedside, explained that he would need rest for a few weeks, and asked us to shift the apparatus for his feeding to a bench beside his bed. We did so. Happiness made Bell and I selfish, for we enjoyed our meals better without the queer smell from his end of the table and his sudden, disconcerting adjournments to the distillation plant. A week later our honeymoon took us abroad. When we returned Bella resumed her nurse’s training in Duke Street Hospital, and I my doctoring in the Royal Infirmary, for the careers we aimed at were still beyond our reach. Each night before retiring we spent an hour or more by Baxter’s bedside, I playing chess or cribbage with him while Bella discussed her work. It sometimes drove her into rages. Miss Nightingale has designed the British nursing service like the army it was first created to assist. The doctors correspond to superior officers, the matrons and sisters to sergeant-majors, the common nurses to private soldiers. Lower ranks seldom address the superiors unless ordered, since much of their intelligence is deliberately not employed. I saw the wisdom of this, but wisely did not say so, because Bella cou
ld not see it. Baxter told her, “Do not quarrel with the institution before you have seen through all its workings and understand them. Meanwhile use your free intelligence to plan better ways of doing things.”
He also pointed out the flaws in what she planned, not to stop her seeking better ways, but to help her make them practical. The Godwin Baxter Natal Clinic is organized in ways they discussed through the spring of 1884. By then we took Baxter’s bed-ridden state for granted. He had kept the mysteries of his metabolism a secret from us, so we were powerless to advise him.
One morning as I left for work Mrs. Dinwiddie gave me a note from him.
Dear Archie, Please persuade someone to relieve you today, and return to see me as near noon as possible. I would like a private talk. Bella must not hear of it till afterwards. If you take this trouble, I will not trouble you again.
Sincerely, G.
I was disturbed by the tremulous and broken character of his pen strokes; also by his use of my Christian name. I could not remember him using it before. I returned prompt at noon and met Mrs. Dinwiddie in the lobby. She seemed to have been weeping, and said, “I have just helped Mr. Godwin dress and go into Sir Colin’s old study. He needs you terribly, Dr. McCandless. Go quickly.”
Poor Things Page 20
