Hatter's Castle

by Арчибальд Джозеф Кронин

  "Something about wishing she could have tasted that pineapple," remarked Mary indifferently.

  Mamma bridled as she carefully took the sacred letter from her daughter. "The like of that," she said, "and the poor boy nearly drowned and consumed by sharks. You might show a little raaore interest yourself with your brother in such danger. Ye've been trailing about like a dead thing all morning. Now, are ye listening to me? I want you to run over to Agnes with it this afternoon. And you're to take a parcel over to her as well."

  "Very well," said Mary. "When am I to be back?"

  "Stay and have a chat with Agnes if you like. And if she asks you to wait for tea, I'll allow you to do so. You can come to no harm in the company of a Christian girl like that."

  Mary said nothing, but her lifeless manner quickened. A frantic plan, which had hung indefinitely in her mind during the previous sleepless night, began already to take substantial form under this unexpected offering of chance.

  She had resolved to go to Darroch. To venture there alone would be for her, at any time, a difficult and hazardous proceeding, fraught with grave possibilities of discovery and disaster. But if she were to undertake such an unheard-of excursion at all, the timely message of Mamma's was clearly her opportunity. She knew that a train left Levenford for Darroch at two o'clock, covering the four miles between the two towns in fifteen minutes, and that the same train made the return journey, leaving Darroch at four o'clock. If, incredibly, she ventured upon the expedition, she saw that she would have more than one hour and a half to accomplish her purpose, and this she deemed to be adequate. The sole question which concerned her was her ability to deliver her message successfully before two o'clock, and, more vitally, whether she could disentangle herself from the embarrassing and effusive hospitality of Agnes in time for her train.

  With the object of speed in her mind she worked hard all morning and had finished her household duties before one o'clock when, snatching a few mouthf uls of food, she hurried upstairs to change.

  But, as she reached her room at the head of the stairs, a remarkable sensation overtook her. She felt suddenly light, ethereal, and giddy; before her startled eyes the floor of her bedroom moved gently upwards and downwards, with a slow seesawing instability; the walls, too, tottered in upon her like the falling sides of a house of cards; across her vision a parabola of lights danced, followed instantly by darkness. Her legs doubled under her and she sank silently down upon the floor in a faint. For a long time she lay recumbent upon her back, unconscious. Then gradually her prone position restored her feeble circulation, tiny currents of blood seemed to course again under the dead pallor of her skin, and with a sigh she opened her eyes, which fell immediately upon the hands of the clock that indicated the time to be half -past one. Agitatedly she raised herself upon her elbow, and, after several fruitless attempts, at last forced herself to stand upright again. She felt unsteady and languid, but her head was light and clear, and with soft, limp fingers, that felt to her useless for the purpose, she compelled herself to dress hastily. Then hurriedly she went downstairs.

  Mamma met her with the letter and the package and a host of messages, greetings and injunctions for Agnes. So engrossed was she in her benevolent generosity that she failed to notice her daughter's distress.

  "And don't forget to tell her it's the new season's jam," she called out, as Mary went out of the gate, "and that the cake has two eggs in it," she added. "And don't leave the letter. Say I want it back!" she shouted, finally.

  Mary had twenty minutes to get to the station, which was enough time and no more. The heavy parcel, containing two pounds of cake and two pounds of jam, dragged upon her arm; in her weak state the thought of the rich cake sickened her and the sweet jam smeared itself cloyingly over her imagination. She had no time to deliver it to Agnes and manifestly it was impossible for her to carry it about all afternoon. Already in her purpose she stood committed to a desperate act and now an incitement to further rashness goaded her. Something urged her to dispose of Mamma's sumptuous present, to drop it silently in the gutter or cast it from her into an adjacent garden. Its weight oppressed her and her recoil from the contemplation of its contents thrust her into sudden recklessness. Beside the pathway stood a small boy, ragged, barefooted and dirty, who chalked lines disconsolately upon a brick wall. As she passed, with one sudden, unregenerate impulse, Mary thrust the bundle upon the astounded urchin. She felt her lips move, heard herself saying,

  "Take it! Quick! Something to eat!"

  The small boy looked up at her with astonished, distrustful eyes which indicated, more clearly than articulate speech, his profound suspicion of all strangers who might present him with heavy packages under the pretext of philanthropy. With one eye still mistrustfully upon her, he tore open the paper cover to ensure he was not being deceived, when, the richness of the contents having been thus revealed to his startled eyes, he tucked the parcel under his arm, exploded into activity before this peculiar lady might regain her sanity, and vanished like a puff of smoke down the street.

  Mary felt shocked at her own temerity. A sudden pang struck her as to how she would conceal from Mamma her inexcusable action, or, failing this, how she might ever explain away the dissipation into thin air of the fruits of her mother's honest labour. Vainly she tried to obtain comfort by telling herself she would deliver the letter to Agnes when she returned after four, but her face was perturbed as she hastened onwards to the station.

  In the train for Darroch she made a powerful effort to concentrate her fatigued attention upon the conduct of her scheme, tracing mentally in advance the steps she would take; she was determined that there should be no repetition of the weakness and indecision of the day before. Darroch she knew sufficiently well, having visited it several times before it had become vested for her with a halo of glamour and romance as the place in which Denis lived. Since she had known that he resided there, the drab town, consisting in the main of chemical and dye works, the effluent of which frequently polluted the clear Leven in its lower reaches, had undergone a manifest and magical metamorphosis. The ill-cobbled, narrow streets assumed a wider aspect because Denis moved along them, and the

  smoke-splashed buildings became more splendid because amongst them he had his being.

  As she drew slowly nearer to this enchanted place Mary, in spite of her crushing anxiety, felt actually a breathless anticipation. Although it was not her intention to see Denis, she could not suppress a throb of excitement as drawing near to him in his own environment.

  When the train steamed into Darroch station she quickly left her compartment, surrendered her ticket, and was amongst the first of the small handful of passengers to leave the platform. Walking without hesitation, and as rapidly as her strength permitted, she passed along the main street, inclined sharply to the left, and entered a quieter residential locality. None of the persons she encountered knew her; her appearance caused neither stir nor interest. Darroch, though lacking the county atmosphere, was as large a township as Levenford; was, indeed, the only other large town within a radius of twelve miles, and it was easy for Mary to slip unnoticed through the busy streets and to submerge her identity beneath that of the crowd which thronged them. It was for these very reasons that she had chosen Darroch for her present purpose.

  When she had proceeded halfway along the secondary street she observed, to her relief, that her memory had served her correctly, and, confronted by a crescent of terrace houses, she advanced resolutely to the end house and at once rang the bell loudly. A diminutive maid in a blue cotton overall opened the door.

  "Is the doctor at home?" asked Mary.

  "Will you please to come in," replied the small domestic, with the indifferent air of one who is tired of repeating the formula endlessly.

  Mary was shown into the waiting room. It was a poor room with dull walls and a thin, worn carpet upon the floor, furnished by an array of chairs in varying degrees of decrepitude and a large oak table bearing several tattered, dog-eared,
out-of-date periodicals and a pink china pot containing a languishing aspidistra.

  "What is the name?" apathetically inquired the slave of the door.

  "Miss Winifred Brown," replied Mary distinctly.

  Clearly she was, she now saw, a liar! Whilst she should have been in Levenford, sitting in amiable conference with her brother's legitimately engaged fiancee, here she was, having cast her mother's parcel from her, four miles away, giving a false name and waiting in the house of a strange doctor, whose name and domicile she had recollected only by fortunate chance. The faint colour which had entered her face as she enunciated the fictitious name now violently flushed it at these thoughts, and it was with difficulty that she essayed to thrust the feeling of guilt from her as she was ushered into the consulting room.

  The doctor was a middle-aged man, bald, untidy, disillusioned, and the possessor of an indifferent, cheap practice. It was not his usual consulting hour, which caused him a justifiable annoyance, but his economic position was such as to compel him to see patients at any hour. He was a bachelor and his housekeeper had just served him up a midday meal of fat boiled beef with suet puddings, which he had eaten hurriedly, and, as a result, the chronic indigestion, due to

  badly cooked food, irregular hours and septic teeth, to which he was a martyr, was beginning to gnaw at him painfully. He looked surprisedly at Mary.

  "Is it a call?" he enquired.

  "No! I have come to consult you," she replied, in a voice which seemed far away and unrecognisable as her own.

  "Be seated then," he said abruptly. Immediately he sensed the unusual and his irritation deepened. He had long ceased to derive interest from the clinical aspect of his cases, and any deviation from the humdrum routine of ordinary practice associated with the rapid issuing of bottles, containing dilute solutions of cheap drugs and colouring agents, always dismayed him; he was, in addition, anxious to get back to his couch and lie down; a spasm of pain gripped his middle as he remembered that his evening surgery would be heavy this night.

  "What is it?" he continued shortly.

  Haltingly she began to tell him, blushed, faltered, went on again, speaking in a daze. How she expressed herself she did not know, but apparently his aroused suspicions were confirmed.

  "We must examine you," he told her coldly. "Will it be now, or shall you return with your mother?" Hardly understanding what he meant, she did not know how to reply. His impersonal manner discouraged her, his callous air chilled her, and his general slovenly appearance, with ragged, untrimmed moustache, uncared-for finger nails, and grease spots on his waistcoat, affected her equally with a sense of strong antipathy. She told herself, however, that she must go through with her ordeal, and in a low voice she said, "I cannot come back again, Doctor."

  "Take your things off, then, and prepare yourself," he told her bluntly, indicating the couch as he went out of the room.

  In her awkward timidity she had barely time to loosen her clothing and lie down upon the shabby, torn settee before he returned. Then with eyes shut and clenched teeth she submitted herself to his laboured and inexpert examination. It was agony for her, mentally and physically. She shrank in her fastidious mind from his coarse and uncouth presence and the touch of his unskilful fingers made her wince with pain. At last it was over and, with a few short words, he

  again left the room.

  Inside the space of five minutes she was back again in her chair, dressed, and gazing dumbly at him as he lumbered back to his desk.

  The doctor was for once slightly at a loss. He had met this calamity frequently in women of a different class, but he was, despite his obtuse, case-hardened intellect, aware that this girl, who was nothing more than a frightened child, was uninstructed and innocent. He felt that her unconscious defloration had undoubtedly coincided with her conception. He realised why she had so self-consciously given him an assumed name and in his dry, empty heart a vague pity stirred. At first, with all the anxiety of the unsuccessful practitioner jealous of his meagre reputation, he had suspected that she desired him to apply some means of terminating her condition, but now he realised fully the extent of her sublime ignorance. He moved uncomfortably in his chair, not knowing how to begin.

  "You are not married?' he said at length, in a flat voice.

  She shook her head with swimming, terrified eyes.

  "Then I advise you to get married. You are going to have a baby."

  At first she hardly understood. Then her lips contorted with a quivering spasm, her eyes overflowed and tears ran soundlessly down her face. She felt paralysed, as though his words had bludgeoned her. He was talking to her, trying to tell her what she must do, what she must expect, but she scarcely heard him. He receded from her; her surroundings vanished; she was plunged into a grey mist of utter and incomparable dejection, alone with the obsessing horror of certain and inevitable calamity. From time to time fragments of his meaning came to her, like haggard shafts of daylight glancing suddenly through the swirling wreaths of fog which encircled her.

  "Try not to worry," she heard him say; then again through the enveloping pall came the words, "You are young; your life is not wasted."

  What did he know or care? His well-meant platitudes left her untouched and cold. Instinctively she realised that to him she represented merely a transient and unwelcome incident in his monotonous day, and, as she rose and asked to know his charge, she detected instantly in his eye a half -veiled flicker of relief. Her intuition had not deceived her, for, having taken his fee and shown her to the door, he fled immediately to his bismuth bottle, took a large dose, settled himself down, with a sigh of relief, to rest and straight away completely forgot her.

  As she passed out of the house into the street it was just three o'clock. She had an hour to wait for her train if ever she would take it. In a lorture of mind she walked down the street whispering to herself, "God! Oh God! Why have You done this to me? I've never done You any harm. Stop this from happening. Stop it!" A blind unreason possessed her as to why and how her body had been singled out by the Almighty for this obscene experiment. It struck her as a supremely unjust manifestation of the Divine omnipotence. Strangely, she did not blame Denis; she felt herself simply the victim of some tremendous, incomprehensible fraud.

  No! She did not blame Denis; she felt, instead, that she must fly to him. Caution was now abandoned to the winds in the extremity of her anguish and, with a strained face, she walked along Main Street, at the far end of which stood the Lomond Wine and Spirit Vaults Owen Foyle, proprietor. Around the corner was a wide, double gate leading into a yard, from which an open, winding stair ascended to the Foyle house.

  She crept up this stairway and knocked faintly at the door. From inside came the tinkle of a piano. The tinkle continued, but no one came in answer; then she heard a voice cry, "Rosie, me chick, is that somebody at the door ? See if anybody's there." Some one replied, in childish tones, "I'm at my scales, Mother; you go, or wait and let them knock again." And the sound of the piano was resumed with redoubled energy and a loudness expressive of intense application.

  After a moment's irresolute pause Mary was about to knock upon the door more loudly, when suddenly, as she advanced her hand, a sharp whistle shrilled from outside the yard and drew gradually nearer to her.

  She turned and, at the same moment, Denis appeared at the foot of the stairs, his head tilted back enquiringly, his eyes widening with surprise as he perceived her. Observing immediately that Mary was in acute distress, he ran up the steps.

  "Mary!" he exclaimed hurriedly, "what is it?"

  She could not reply, could not utter his name.

  "What is the matter, dearest Mary?" murmured Denis, coming close to her, taking her cold hand and smoothing it gently in his. "Is it your father?"

  She shook her head without gazing at him, knowing that if she did so, she must break down abjectly.

  "Come away," she whispered. "Come away before anyone comes."

  Oppressed, he followed her slowly down th
e steps.

  In the street, he asked fiercely, "Have they been bad to you at home? Tell me quickly what the trouble is, dear? If anybody has touched you, I'll kill him."

  There was a pause, then she said slowly, indistinctly, painfully, dropping each word from her lips like a leaden weight:

  "I am going to have a baby."

  His face whitened as if he had received a frightful wound and became gradually more pale, as though his strength and vigour flowed out from him. He dropped her hand and looked at her with dilated, starting eyes.

  "Are you sure?" he jerked out at last.

  "I'm sure."

  "How do you know?"

  "Something seemed wrong with me. I went to a doctor. He told me."

  "A a doctor ? It's certain, then ?"

  "Certain," she echoed dully.

  It was irrevocable, then. With one sentence she had thrust upon his shoulders a load of misery and responsibility, which turned him from a gay, whistling boy into a mature and harassed man. Their love-making had been a trap, the playful dalliance and the secret meetings of the past merely snares to lure and entangle him in this draggled predicament. The pleasant, sanguine expectations of marrying her, all the alluring preparations which he had contemplated, now felt like chains binding and drawing him towards an obligation he must inevitably fulfil. A heavy sigh burst from him. In the masculine society in which he moved nothing was considered more derogatory to the male, or more ridiculous, than to be victimised into a marriage of necessity. His prestige would be lost, he would

  be lampooned at the street corners, his name would become an obloquy. He felt the position so intolerably for himself that he was moved by a desire to escape and in a flash he thought of Canada, Australia, America. He had often thought of emigrating and the prospects that existed in these new countries for an unattached young man never appealed to him more entrancingly than at this moment. Another thought struck him.

  "When did the doctor say that you would " he paused, unable to complete the sentence. Nevertheless she was now able to understand his meaning.