‘He didn’t care to shut up the shop and come too, I suppose?’ asked my Aunt Claybrook. ‘But I expect he’ll manage,’ she added dolefully, not waiting for an answer.
‘I found somebody to cook and clean for him,’ my mother assured her. ‘A nice daily woman from The Freehold. I only hope she doesn’t bring anything with her … ’
‘Eh?’ said my uncle.
But his wife understood all too clearly. ‘My dear Essie, you don’t mean to say … ’
‘Well,’ said my mother, ‘she lives in a dreadful slum, so there’s no knowing, is there?’
‘I see.’ My aunt struggled with a problem. ‘Was it quite a suitable choice, dear?’
‘Let the poor girl get on with her meal,’ said my uncle, intervening. ‘No time for talk at teatime. What do you say, Claud? Hey?’
‘Yes, it was the best possible choice,’ said my mother. ‘I spent a lot of trouble on it. Elderly and stout and looks honest. And I’ve never seen a plainer woman in my life. The very thing I wanted.’
‘Oh Essie dear!’ murmured my aunt reproachfully. ‘I’m sure that wasn’t necessary. I’m sure dear Robert—’
My mother interrupted with a wry face. ‘Of course. There’s nothing you can tell me about Robert, Bertha. But you don’t know our neighbours, darling. Does she, Claud?’
It shocked my Aunt Claybrook, set her in quite a twitter, that I, a mere boy, should be not only privy to so scandalous a conversation, but actually invited to add my voice to it. There fell a somewhat strained silence. I said nothing. But I exchanged a conspiratorial glance with my mother, whose eyes—as I saw with a thrill of delight and alarm—were dancing with mischief.
Chapter X
Presently we shall be visiting an ancient lady known as Aunt Mary, or Aunt Westrup, the aunt of my Uncle Claybrook and no true relative of mine or my mother’s. She grew smaller as I grew older, for it was at long intervals that I saw her. At our first meeting, as I remember even now, my chin reached only to the silver-mounted head of the ebony stick on which she leaned. But no, not ‘leaned’: she was none of your bent old crones, but a very small, slight, perfect figure of an old lady. She was something of an historic monument, her husband having been killed in the Crimean War, when she was a young woman. It happened, this encounter, one Sunday evening. For a reason that is now too far to seek I had been taken to evensong, and during the long sermon my wandering attention became fixed on two gargoyles, which stared down from their opposite corners into the chancel. Outside, as I knew, there were others, still more hideous; but these two, meanwhile, were lively enough to engage a small child’s imagination. They looked like the heads of men who had died by violence and in anger. But they were not dead. In some fashion I supposed them to be both human and alive. Not human as the Mr Peacock the Vicar was human, not alive as I was alive … yet there they were, two faces visibly real, expressive, and terrifying. I suppose that at that tender age my mind made no distinction between a powerful fancy and a definite belief: a respect in which, very likely, I resembled the great majority of my pew-companions of whatever age. Certainly I can recall no conflict, no considering of evidence, no perplexity. I did not, so far as I remember, attempt to reconcile my ‘belief’ with the elementary facts that contradicted it. That the gargoyles were of stone, for example, must have been (one would suppose) a fact within my knowledge even then; but, if so, it was a piece of knowledge that dwelt in isolation, unrelated to my fancy. If I could have brought them together, the one would have destroyed the other; but it no more occurred to me to do this than it occurred to Mr Peacock to examine his mainly mediæval creed in the light of common knowledge and common sense. His mind, like mine, could accommodate contradictions without the least discomfort, because the x group of beliefs and the y group, though mutually exclusive, could exist very happily in the strict segregation he imposed on them. In my gargoyles, then, for the duration of evensong at least, I was a true believer; and, little as she herself deserves it, my memory has never quite succeeded in dissociating the idea of gargoyles from that of Aunt Mary, to whom, in the churchyard just after the service, I was presented while still in the grip of my terrors. All this, you must understand, was part of my Lutterthorpe. On later visits, and on the last visit of all (to which, in its own time, my narrative will return), these memories, slight though they must seem to anyone but myself, and submerged though they may have been under the flowing tide of the present, contributed each its delicate essence to the flavour, the idea, the complex of experiences, that was Lutterthorpe. The place was a world in itself, populated almost entirely by uncles and aunts. For at no great distance from my Uncle Claybrook’s—it took only an hour and a half in the trap—lived Uncle Percy Caundle, a learned venerable personage, and his wife, Aunt Hilda, a sister of Uncle Claybrook’s. Dr. Caundle (for such was his awful designation) kept a boarding ‘college’ of some twenty or thirty boys, whom he undertook to prepare for the church, the army, or any other sphere of real usefulness. He was stout, white-bearded, and pompously jovial. Always, when he talked, he had the air of making a speech to the school. His words were chosen carefully, with hesitation; he drummed with his fingers on the nearest available solid object, which in the earlier days of our acquaintanceship was not seldom my own head; or else he toyed with a pair of what he called ‘nip-noses’, which at other times were fixed low on his nose, his serious, surprised, pensive eyes gazing over them. Aunt Hilda was always too busy ‘mothering the boys’, as my Uncle Claybrook said, to be or do anything on her own account. She was small, with a plump olive-complexioned face and black hair dressed quakerishly and parted in the middle; and her behaviour, which was that of a typhoon, was the more surprising by reason of the placid appearance she presented in her rare moments of rest and calm.
These, however, were but minor characters; for we all, Claybrooks and Caundles and Calamys alike, regarded Aunt Mary Westrup as in some sense the chief of our tribe. We permitted ourselves to smile at her prejudices, and to shake our heads over her audacities of speech; but we went in some awe of her, none the less; for at the age of eighty-two she had still the trick of making even the eldest among us, my Uncle Claybrook, feel like a not too intelligent schoolboy.
Chapter XI
We were several weeks at Lutterthorpe on this occasion, and my mother’s health seemed to mend from time to time, though not very decisively. As to the nature of her malady, that was precisely what we all—except herself—wanted to know. The problem baffled us, and baffled—though he did not confess as much—the expensive Mercester physician to whom my Uncle Claybrook insisted on taking her. ‘Nothing really the matter. A bit run down, that’s all.’ And he gave her a bottle of pink tonic. Her disease, though it plainly reduced her physical vitality, was primarily a disease of the spirit, or so I now suspect. But perhaps in those days health was conceived in purely physiological terms; unhappiness had no status in the hierarchy of diseases; Macbeth’s reproach was still in point. Certainly no tonic, however pink and sweet, could avail with my mother to raze out the written troubles of the brain. Perhaps, too, her troubles lay deeper than the brain; perhaps they were beyond even her own conjecture. She seemed, indeed, sincerely ignorant of what ailed her. She was listless, dispirited, tired of living. And this was so unlike her as to be fantastic as well as terrifying. I could not then and do not now believe that she suffered from any sense of guilt. I was a precocious boy, older than my years; and I was devotedly fond of my mother; and so I did what perhaps few sons could have done in like case: I begged her to tell me if she had anything preying on her mind.
She responded with one of her rarest and loveliest smiles. ‘I don’t know, darling. Have I? I don’t think so. You’re a funny old duffer, aren’t you?’
‘Why?’ I asked her, grateful for this glimpse of her old self.
‘Fussing about your mother the way you do. And such a lanky fellow, too. In a few years’ time you’ll be finding a younger woman than me to bother your head about.’ She looked wistf
ul. ‘I hope you’ll choose a nice one, Claud.’
I grinned cheekily. ‘If she’s much younger than you, Mum, I’ll need a pram to push her round in.’
‘Impudent little monster!’
She made so happy a grimace at me that I was moved to exclaim, ‘Why, I don’t believe you’re really ill after all.’
‘Who said I was?’ she challenged me. ‘I never did. It’s only you nice silly people—you and Frank and Bertha.’
‘And Father Calamy too,’ I remarked. ‘Don’t leave him out. But you are better now, aren’t you?’
She didn’t answer the question, but after a silence she remarked with apparent inconsequence: ‘I’d like to see that girl of yours, Claud.’
There was a kind of sadness in her voice, though her tone was light; and when I glanced at her (with the embarrassment, disguised as contempt for the subject, which at that period of adolescence was my inevitable reaction to any mention of ‘girls’ in relation to myself), I was puzzled to see tears glistening on her long lashes: so much puzzled, and so intimately disturbed at heart, that I dared not admit to having noticed her emotion. Still less did I dare demand, even of myself, to know its cause.
‘I’m sure you’re better, Mum,’ I said, with desperate insistence, ‘or you wouldn’t rag me so.’
And it was true that in the warm human atmosphere of Lutterthorpe she was visibly beginning to flower once again. But her appearance nowadays held a hint of fragility that sometimes made me catch my breath when I looked at her. She seemed at once younger and less robust; more girlish than ever in form, with a girl’s animal grace; but thoughtful beyond her wont. Her eyes, hitherto so bright and careless, so candid and unreflecting, were veiled, too often, by a look of absence, as though, unaware of the world of immediate things, she were listening for echoes of a remote music. The stillness that enclosed her at such times was like a cold finger laid upon my heart. It is painful to me even now to recall that when at least part of the cause of these spiritual absences was made clear to me, my first pang was a jealous pang, though it was succeeded, instantly, by an impulse purely loving. The revelation followed on a night of excitement and interrupted sleep for most of the Claybrook household. At some dead hour of the night we were roused by a roaring chorus of voices from the road outside: drunken laughter, loud huzzaing, and the beating of improvised drums. Such an event had no remembered precedent in this sequestered byway of Mershire. I jumped out of bed with the absurd thought in my mind that even here my mother was not immune from persecution; and running down the first flight of stairs to a landing window that overlooked the road I half-thought to see a company of Broad Green rowdies making ready to attack us. As I approached the window, pebbles pattered on the pane, as if to confirm my suspicion; but by now, being fully awake, I had quite dismissed it, and pure curiosity filled me. Undeterred by the spray of pebbles I opened the window and thrust my head out. At the same instant a head emerged from the window of my uncle’s room, just above me, and I heard his voice barking in protest at the hooligans. There were perhaps a dozen of them, of all shapes and sizes, and in various stages of inebriation and fancy dress. One man carried the lid of a dustbin, which he was beating with a stick. The leader had a concertina hugged to his bosom. Two or three others were provided with mouth organs, and the rest had nothing but themselves to make noises with.
‘What the deuce d’ye mean by it!’ shouted my uncle. ‘Be off, or I’ll set the dogs on you.’
A roar of laughter answered him. The man with the concertina shook that instrument derisively, thereby forcing a wheezy groan from it.
‘War’s over,’ cried a tipsy voice. ‘Don’t be cross, daddy.’
‘What’s that you say?’ said my uncle sharply.
‘War’s over,’ they bellowed hilariously. ‘Old Kruger’s done a bunk.’
‘Oh!’ My uncle’s anger evaporated. ‘Well, glad to hear it, I’m sure.’ My aunt’s voice questioned him from the bed, and he turned to answer her. ‘They say the war’s over, my dear. And about time too.’
‘We’ve come all the way from Mercester to tell you,’ cried the concertina-man. ‘We’re waking up everyone from here to the sea. Ain’t we nice boys? Hip hip … hooray!’ As they staggered away, the company burst into song—in fact, into several songs. The concertina-man struck up The Absent-Minded Beggar, but he contended in vain against a rival school of musicians who preferred
Good-bye, Dolly, I must leave yer,
Though it breaks me heart ter gow …
while a vigorous minority began apostrophizing other heroines in similar terms but to not very similar tunes.
We went back to our beds, I in a state of great excitement. It was not the first rumour of the war’s end, nor the last; but I did not know that, and I wanted to be the first to break the good news to my mother. I tapped at the door of her room, which was at the back of the house; and receiving no answer I turned the handle and opened the door an inch or two, listening stealthily.. ‘Are you awake, Mother?’ The silence answered me, and after a strained interval there came from the warm darkness a long sigh that was not unlike a sob. But silence supervened again; and I stood irresolute … listening, trembling. I pictured my mother lying alone in the dark, abandoned to dreams, and I felt as though I, her son, were a hundred years old, and she a child. That loneliness hurt me, but I went away as quietly as I had come, and crept back into my bed, where I lay for a long while sleepless; and it was not until after breakfast next morning—a breakfast at which my mother did not appear—that I learned what else had happened during the night.
We sat at the breakfast-table, we others, in what I felt to be a somewhat constrained silence. My aunt had said placidly that it would do Essie good to have her sleep out, poor girl. A lamentable self-consciousness made me disguise my anxiety. I had said nothing about my visit to my mother’s room, and I stubbornly would not admit to myself that there was any occasion for alarm. Nevertheless, as the minutes ticked by (and never, I thought, had the breakfast-room clock ticked so loudly), I wished with a dumb anguish that my mother would put in an appearance. My nerves were taut with the strain of listening for her step on the stair; my eyes furtively watched the door.
‘How far is the sea from here, uncle?’ I asked. ‘They said they were walking as far as the sea, those men last night.’
‘A few hundred miles,’ he answered. ‘They were tipsy, the whole lot of ‘em.’
‘How far is the sea …’ Mechanically I began repeating the question, having already forgotten that it had been answered. But, remembering in time, I blushed confusedly and broke off my speech, staring with spurious intentness into my teacup, which was empty of all but tea-leaves. ‘I wonder if Mother’s awake yet,’ I said suddenly, with burning face.
At that very moment I saw the door of the breakfast-room opening, and there was my mother looking at me, as from a great distance, with dazed and questing eyes. My uncle and aunt turned in their seats to welcome her.
‘Why, Essie …’ he exclaimed.
‘Are you all right, dear?’ said my aunt anxiously.
She jumped up and went forward with outstretched arms. But my mother, hardly aware of her, took two slow paces towards me, on whom her eyes were fixed.
‘Claud,’ she said.
‘Yes, Mother.’ I was out of my chair, running to meet her.
‘Claud!’ I held out my hands to her and she took them in her own. ‘It’s your father—he’s dead, darling.’
The room swam in my sight. I felt a sob gathering in my rigid body. I saw Calamy lying dead. There was a confusion of voices in my ears, and my uncle and aunt seemed like a pair of marionettes, stiffly gesticulating.
But my mother spoke again and I heard her clearly, even through this whirling mist. ‘No,’ she said, answering her sister’s distraught cry in a voice strangely calm. ‘No, not Robert. Harry. He came to me in the night. He said good-bye.’
I flung my arms, possessively, round her neck. ‘It was about two o’clock,
’ she said, with an air of trying to remember more exactly. ‘Yes, I think it was about two o’clock.’ She tried to smile at me; and so, with a sigh, laid her head confidingly on my shoulder.
Chapter XII
The next episode that lives for me in that holiday is my ceremonial leave-taking of Aunt Mary Westrup. I paid this visit in the company of my Uncle Claybrook, who, finding me mooning and disconsolate in my bedroom one evening, linked his arm in mine and led me out of the house with something less than his usual boisterousness. My mother’s physical health was apparently neither better nor worse. The total collapse that we had feared for her did not happen; but she now found manifest difficulty in pretending to an interest in her surroundings, and she kept to her room a good deal. It was this last circumstance, with its suggestion of passive and hidden suffering, that so much disquieted me, making it at times quite impossible for me to follow my normal holiday pursuits. I got into the habit of hanging aimlessly about the house, wondering what to do next, and ill at ease if my mother was out of sight for any appreciable length of time. It was not, I think, an excess of filial sentiment that made me behave like this, though it is true that we three Calamys were knit more closely into each other’s lives than would have been normal in happier circumstances, social isolation having greatly tightened the family bond. But it was not, I repeat, a specifically filial sentiment that animated me, but rather the pain of losing a familiar and much loved companion for so many hours of the day. In my precocious fashion I wondered whether it was not doing her more harm than good, at this stage, to be here at Lutterthorpe with no household cares to distract her, and with nothing to do but indulge her circling thoughts. Yet I dreaded and hated the idea of her being exposed again to the malice of Broad Green. When at last she roused herself to the point of announcing that it was time we went back to Robert, I hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry.
The Quick and the Dead Page 7
