Hatter's Castle

by A. J. Cronin

  ‘You’ll fall on your feet all right, Matt,’ she assured him fondly. ‘You couldn’t help it the way you get round people. Then your music will be a great help to you socially. Have you got all your songs packed?’ He nodded his head complacently, saying: ‘And the mandolin. I put a new pink ribbon on it yesterday!’

  Her sable brows contracted at the thought of those who might receive the benefit of this decoration, knotted on such a romantic instrument, but she did not wish to press him too far so, with an effort, she controlled her apprehensions and, forcing a smile, deflected the conversation into a nobler channel.

  ‘The church choir will miss you, too, Matt. The choir practice won’t be the same place without you.’ He protested modestly, but she would not permit his humility. ‘No!’ she cried, ‘ don’t deny it, dear. Your voice will be missed in that church. Do you remember that night after the practice when you first walked home with me, dear? I’ll never forget the way you spoke to me. Don’t you remember what you said?’

  ‘I can’t think the now, Aggie,’ he answered inattentively. ‘Did you not speak to me first?’

  ‘Oh! Matt,’ she gasped, widening her eyes at him reproachfully, ‘how can you? You know you smiled at me over your hymn book all that night, and you did speak first. I only asked if you were going my way.’ He nodded his head apologetically, as he replied: ‘I remember now, Agnes! We ate all that big bag of liquorice all sorts you had with you. They were real nice, too.’

  ‘I’m going to send you out a big tin box of sweets every month,’ she promised eagerly. ‘ I wasn’t going to mention it, but as you speak of it I might as well tell you, dear. I know you’re fond of a good sweet and you’ll never get good confectionery out in those parts. They’ll carry perfectly well if I send them in a tin.’ He thanked her with a satisfied smile, but, before he could speak, she hurried on, striking on the heat of his gratitude.

  ‘There’s nothing your Agnes will not do for you, Matt, if you just don’t forget her,’ she continued fervently. ‘You’ve never to forget me for a minute. You’ve got all my photographs with you! Put one in your cabin straight away, won’t you, dear?’ She laid her head more heavily on his shoulder and gazed up at him entrancingly. ‘Kiss me, Matt! That was nice. It’s so delightful to feel that we are engaged. It’s almost as binding as matrimony. No good girl could feel like I do without being affianced to her young man.’

  The couch being apparently without springs, Matt began to feel uncomfortable under the considerable weight he was supporting. His calf-love for Miss Moir, developed under the insidious flattery of her attentions, was not strong enough to stand the strain of this powerful amatory embrace.

  ‘Would you permit me to smoke?’ he suggested tactfully. Agnes looked up, her liquid eyes swimming beneath the inky tangle of her hair.

  ‘On the last night?’ she asked reproachfully.

  ‘I thought it might pull me together,’ he murmured. ‘The last few days have been very heavy for me – all that packing has been such a strain on a man.’

  She sighed and raised herself reluctantly, saying:

  ‘All right then, dear! I can refuse you nothing. Have just a few puffs if you feel it will do you good. But you’re not to over-smoke yourself in India, Matt. Remember your chest is not strong.’ Then, graciously, she added: ‘ Let me light this one for you as it’s the last time.’ She timidly ignited the slightly bent weed he withdrew from his waistcoat pocket and watched him fearfully as he blew out thick clouds in manly taciturnity. Now she could only love and admire him from a distance, but at arm’s length she still fondled his watch chain.

  ‘You’ll miss your little Aggie, won’t you, Matt?’ she asked soulfully, but coughing slightly as she inhaled the noxious odour from his cigar.

  ‘Most dreadfully,’ he replied solemnly. This was what he really enjoyed, himself smoking heroically, she at his feet in fond womanly admiration. ‘It will be – unbearable.’ He would have liked to say, dashingly: ‘Hell,’ but out of respect he used the less manly expression, and he shook his head as if he doubted his ability to stand the strain of it all.

  ‘We must suffer for each other’s sake,’ said Agnes, with a sigh. ‘I feel it will make you do great and good work out there, Matt. You’ll write and tell me all your doings.’

  ‘I’ll write to you and Mamma every mail,’ promised Matthew.

  ‘I’ll be in close touch with Mamma, of course,’ responded Agnes, as if she were already a daughter of the house.

  He felt that the prayers of two loyal adoring women would ascend in unison for him as he faced his stern task abroad, but the cigar, despite his efforts to prolong it, was burning his lips, and at length he regretfully discarded it. Immediately Agnes nestled her head upon his chest ‘Kiss me again, dear!’ she said. Then after a pause she whispered, suggesting alluringly, ‘You’ll come back to me a big, strong, fierce man, won’t you, Matt? I like to be crushed hard in your arms, as hard as ever you like.’ As he placed a limp arm around her shoulders he felt somehow that too much was being demanded of a man who had to face the perils of an arduous and unknown journey in the morning.

  ‘I’m really ashamed to show my feelings like this,’ she continued bashfully, ‘but there’s no harm in it, Matt, is there? We’ll be married whenever you come back. Indeed it breaks my heart to think we couldn’t have got married before ye left. I would willingly have gone out with you!’

  ‘But, Agnes,’ he protested, ‘ it’s not the country for a white woman, at all.’

  ‘There’s plenty go out there, Matt, plenty! Officers’ wives, and what not! I’ll go back with you if you’ve got to go out again when your time’s up,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s just the fact that you’ve got to make your way that has hindered us, dear.’

  He was silent, startled at the decision in her words, never having viewed himself as being so near the altar, nor having quite suspected the extent of her ascendancy over him, thinking too, that the embrace was being protracted indefinitely. At length he said:

  ‘I’m afraid I must be going now, Aggie.’

  ‘But it’s so early yet, Matt,’ she asserted petulantly. ‘You never leave before ten o’clock as a rule.’

  ‘I know, Agnes, but I’ve got a big day ahead of me to-morrow,’ he replied importantly. ‘Got to get on the packet by noon.’

  ‘This separation is going to kill me,’ said Agnes dramatically, unwillingly releasing him.

  As he stood up, straightening his tie, shaking down his trousers, and inspecting the damage to his creases, he felt that it was worth while, that it was good to know that women would die for him.

  ‘Good-bye, then, Agnes,’ he exclaimed gallantly, straddling his legs and throwing out both hands towards her. ‘We shall meet again.’ She flung herself again into his proffered arms and buried her head against him, whilst the force of her sobs rocked them both.

  ‘I feel I should never let you go,’ she cried, brokenly, as he separated from her, ‘ I should never give you up like this. You’re going too far away. I’ll pray for you, though, Matt! May God take care of you for me,’ she wept as she saw him down the stairs.

  Out again in the street he felt consoled, uplifted, strengthened by her grief, as though the devastation he had wrought within her virgin heart ennobled him, added inches to his stature. But as he retired early to bed in preparation for the fatigues of the next day he reflected in his more mature and worldly vein that perhaps Miss Moir had been lately a little pressing in her attentions upon him, and as he fell asleep he realised that a man might as well think twice before tying himself up in a hurry, especially if that man were such a knowing blade as Matthew Brodie.

  Next morning, although he awoke early, it was nine o’clock before Mamma let him get up.

  ‘Don’t rush! we’ll take it easy. Conserve your strength, my boy,’ she said, as she brought him his morning tea. ‘We’ve plenty of time, and you’ve a long journey ahead of you.’

  She apparently visualised him journeying to C
alcutta without repose, and in consequence of his deferred rising he was only half-dressed when his father called to him from the foot of the stairs. Brodie would not depart an inch from his habit; he would, indeed, have considered it a weakness to wait to see his son away, and at half-past nine he was off to business in the usual fashion. As Matthew came scuttering down the stairs in his braces, a towel in his hand, his wet hair over his pallid brow, and came up to his father in the hall, Brodie fixed a magnetic eye upon his son and held for a moment the other’s wavering glance. ‘Well, Matthew Brodie,’ he said, looking down at his son, ‘you’re off to-day, and that means good-bye to your home for five years. I hope to God you are goin’ to prove yourself in these years. You’re a sleekit, namby-pamby fellow and your mother has a’ but spoiled ye, but there must be good in ye. There must be good,’ he cried, ‘because you’re my son! I want that brought out in ye. Look a man between the eyes and don’t hang your head like a dog. I’m sending you out there to make a man of ye. Don’t forget that you’re the son, ay, and the heir of James Brodie.

  ‘I’ve got you everything you want,’ he continued. ‘A position of trust and of great possibilities. I’ve given you the best outfit money can buy and best of all I’ve given you a name. Be a man, sir, but above all be a Brodie. Behave like a Brodie wherever you are, or God help you.’ He shook hands firmly, turned, and was gone.

  Matthew finished dressing in amaze, aided by Mamma – who continually darted in and out of his room – ate his breakfast without tasting it, and was startled by the cab at the door before he could collect himself. Other farewells were showered upon him. Old Grandma Brodie, cross at being disturbed so early, called out from the head of the stairs as she clutched her long nightgown above her bare, bony feet: ‘Good-bye to ye, then, and watch you don’t get drouned on the way over.’ Nessie, in tears long before the time, from the very solemnity of the occasion, could only sob incoherently: ‘I’ll write to you, Matt! I hope the compass will be useful to you.’ Mary was deeply affected. She clasped her arms round Matthew’s neck and kissed him fondly. ‘ Keep a stiff upper lip, Matt dear. Be brave, and nothing can hurt you, and don’t forget your own loving sister.’

  He was in the cab with Mamma, sitting in hunched apathy, being bumped unmercifully, on the way to the station, while Mrs Brodie looked proudly out of the window. In her mind’s eye she saw people nudging each other as they watched the sweep of her spanking equipage, and saying: ‘ That’s Mrs Brodie seein’ her laddie off to Calcutta. She’s been a good mother to that boy, ay and a fine fellow he is, too, an’ all, an’ all.’ Indeed it was not every day that a mother in Levenford took her son to the boat for India, she reflected complacently, drawing her paletot more becomingly around her, and sitting up grandly in the decrepit vehicle as though it were her private carriage.

  At the station she paid the cabman with a conscious air, glancing sideways from under her hat at the few chance loungers under the archway, and to the man who carried the luggage she could not forbear to remark, casually: ‘ This young gentleman is for India.’ The porter, staggering under the heavy case and stupefied by the reek of camphor which emanated from it, twisted his red neck round the angle of the box and gaped at her obtusely, too overcome to speak.

  Although they were now on the platform the train of destiny was late, for the schedule of the Darroch and Levenford joint railway, never the object of public approbation, did not to-day belie its reputation and was apparently not working to any degree of accuracy. Mamma tapped her foot restlessly, pursed her lips impatiently, looked repeatedly at the silver watch that hung around her neck by its chain of plaited hair, Matthew, filled with a despairing hope that there might have been a breakdown on the line, looked vaguely, disconsolately, at the porter who, in turn, gazed with mouth at Mrs Brodie. He had never seen her before and, as his oafish look engulfed her brisk, nonchalant demeanour, so out with the compass of his local experience, he took her for a prodigy – a traveller at least of European experience.

  At last a clanking noise was heard in the distance, sounding the knell of Matt’s last hope. The train smoked its way into the station, and in a few minutes puffed out again with Mrs Brodie and Matthew inside, facing each other on the hard wooden seats, and leaving the porter looking incredulously at the penny piece which the lady had magnificently pressed into his palm. He scratched his head, spat disgustedly, dismissed the whole episode as a mystery beyond the powers of his comprehension.

  In the train Mrs Brodie utilised every lull in the din, when her voice might be audible, to utter some lively remark to Matthew, and between these parentheses she contemplated him vivaciously. Matthew squirmed in his seat; he knew he was the object of a cheering-up process and he loathed it. It’s all right for her, he thought moodily, she hasn’t got to go.

  At length they reached Glasgow, after a journey that was, for Matthew, mournfully short. They made their way out of the station down Jamaica Street and along the Broomielaw to where the S.S. Irrawaddy was lying at Stobcross dock with steam up, and two tugs in attendance. She seemed to them an enormous ship with paddles wide as the spread of a bat’s wings, and a funnel which dwarfed the masts of all the other shipping, and Mamma remarked, admiringly: ‘My word! that’s a great big boat Matt! I’ll not be so feared for ye when I think on ye aboard o’ that. That lum is as high as the Town steeple. Look at a’ these folks on deck too. I suppose we maun go on board.’ Together they advanced up the gangway and gained the deck, where the flurry of embarkation had begun and an exaggerated bustle and confusion prevailed. Sailors leaped about the deck performing miracles with ropes; officers in gold braid shouted importantly and blew whistles loudly; stewards pursued passengers and passengers ran after stewards; Anglo-Indians returning to the country of their selection glared passionately at all who got in their way; relatives on the verge of bereavement stubbed their toes over iron stanchions and piles of luggage.

  In the face of this hustling activity Mrs Brodie’s spirit quailed. The superior look of the purser as he directed them below intimidated her, and though she had intended at least to approach the captain of the vessel and turn over Matthew, in the appropriate manner, to his especial care, now she wilted; as she sat in the stuffy confines of the den which was to serve Matt as cabin for the next eight weeks, and she felt the gentle lift and fall of the boat against the fenders of the quay, she realised that the sooner she went ashore the better.

  Now that the actual farewell was at hand the spurious exaltation derived from her romantic imagination collapsed, as her husband had sardonically foreseen, like a pricked bladder. She was herself again, the weak woman who had given birth to this child, suckled him at her breast, seen him grow to manhood, and now was about to see him leave her. A tear crept slowly down her cheek.

  ‘Oh! Matt,’ she cried, ‘I’ve tried to bear up well for ye, son – for your own dear sake, but I’m sorry to lose you. I doubt if you’re the man for these foreign parts. I would rather you stayed at home.’

  ‘I don’t want to go either, Mamma,’ he implored eagerly, as though at the last moment she might stretch out her hand and pluck him from his awful predicament.

  ‘You’ll need to go now, my son. It’s gone too far to be altered now,’ she replied sadly, shaking her head. ‘Your father has it wished all along. And what he says must be done. There’s just no other way about it But you’ll do your best to be a good boy, won’t you, Matt?’

  ‘Yes, Mamma.’

  ‘You’ll send home something of your pay for me to put in the Building Society for you?’

  ‘Yes, Mamma.’

  ‘You’ll read a chapter of your Bible every day?’

  ‘Yes, I will, Mamma.’

  ‘And don’t forget me, Matt.’

  Matthew burst into broken, uncouth sobs.

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ he blubbered, catching at her dress. ‘You’re all sending me away and I’ll never come back. It’s my death I’m goin’ out to. Don’t let me go, Mamma.’

  ‘Ye m
aun go, Matt,’ she whispered. ‘He would kill us if we came back thegither.’

  ‘I’ll be sick on the boat,’ he whined. ‘I feel it comin’ on already. I’ll get the fever out there. You know I’m not strong. I tell ye, Mamma, it’ll finish me.’

  ‘Wheesht, son!’ she murmured, ‘ye maunt calm yoursel’. I’ll pray to the Lord to protect ye.’

  ‘Oh! well, Mamma, if I’m to go, leave me now,’ he wailed. ‘I can’t stand any more. Don’t sit there and mock me. Leave me and be finished with it!’ His mother stood up and drew him into her arms; at last she was a woman. ‘Good-bye, son, and God bless you,’ she said quietly. As she left the cabin with streaming eyes and shaking head, he flung himself impotently upon his bunk.

  Mrs Brodie stepped off the gangway and set out for Queen Street station. As she retraced her steps through the docks her feet dragged along the very pavements over which she had advanced so airily; gradually her body drooped forward, her dress trailed behind heedlessly; her head inclined itself pathetically; a mantle of resignation descended upon her, she had emerged completely from her dreams, and was again the hapless and handless wife of James Brodie.

  In the train homewards she felt tired, exhausted by the rapid flight of emotions that had traversed her being. A drowsiness crept over her and she slept. In the shadows of her sleeping brain spectres sprang from their lurking places and tormented her. Someone was thrusting her downwards, crushing her with stones; square grey stones were all around, compressing her. Upon the earth beside her lay her children, their cadaverous limbs relaxed in the inanition of extreme debility, and, as the walls slowly drew in nearer upon them, she awoke with a loud shriek which mingled the blast of the engine’s whistle. The train was entering the outskirts of Levenford. She was home.

  Chapter Five

  On the following morning about ten o’clock, Mrs Brodie and Mary were together in the kitchen, according to their custom of consulting together to discuss the household plans for the day when the master of the house had departed after breakfast. This morning, however, they sat without reviewing the possibilities of their cleaning or mending, without debating whether it should be stew or mince for the day’s dinner, or considering whether father’s grey suit required pressing, and instead remained silent, somewhat subdued, with Mrs Brodie mournfully sipping a cup of strong tea and Mary gazing quietly out of the window.