Hatter's Castle

by A. J. Cronin

  From the middle of the road way they looked knowingly at the house, as though their eyes, having embraced and criticised every architectural feature of its outer aspect, bored like gimlets through the hard stone walls, examining the inadequacies of its inner structure, and contemptuously discovering a host of deficiencies hitherto concealed even from its occupants.

  At length, after a prolonged, impassive stare, one of the two turned his head slowly and, out of the corner of his mouth, said something to his companion, who on his part pushed his hat further back upon his head, veiled his protuberant eyeballs, and laughed with an experienced air.

  Like a sudden, startled victim of diplopia, Mrs Brodie now saw them advance simultaneously, proceed through the gateway abreast, saw them glance in unison at every stone on the courtyard, and, as they paused before the cannon in front of the porch, she shrank back behind the concealment of her curtain.

  ‘Bit o’ junk that, but solid stuff – brass by the look on it,’ she heard one say as he fingered his large, pearly tiepin. The other flicked the gun barrel with his finger nail, as though he wished to see if it might ring true, but immediately he withdrew the finger and thrust it hastily into his mouth. ‘Ow! it’s bloody hard, anyway,’ floated in through the half-open window towards Mamma’s astounded ears. The bell rang. Mechanically she went to answer it and, as she threw open the door, she was confronted by two identically competent smiles which met and returned her shrinking gaze with a dazzling exhibition of gold and ivory.

  ‘Mrs Brodie?’ said one, extinguishing his smile.

  ‘You wrote?’ said the other, doing likewise.

  ‘Are you from Mr McSevitch?’ she stammered.

  ‘Sons,’ said the first, easily.

  ‘Partners,’ said the second, gracefully.

  Overcome by the ease of their manners, but none the less shaken by a faint misgiving, she hesitatingly took them into the parlour. Immediately their sharp eyes, which had been glued upon her, detached themselves, and darted round every object in the room, in abstracted yet eager estimation until, finally, as the orbits of their inspection intersected, their glances met significantly and one addressed the other in a tongue unknown to Mrs Brodie. The language was strange, but the tone familiar, and, even as she winced at its disparaging, note, her cheeks coloured with a faint indignation as she thought that such words as these were, at least, not genuine Scottish. Then, alternately, they began to bombard her.

  ‘You want forty pounds, lady?’

  ‘On the quiet – without anyone knowin’ – not even the old man, lady.’

  ‘Been havin’ a little flutter perhaps?’

  ‘What do you want it for, lady?’

  Their well-informed glances devastated her as they moved their fingers, sparkling their rings affluently, demonstrating agreeably that they had the money, that she it was who desired it. She was at their mercy.

  When they had drawn everything from her regarding the house, her husband, herself, and her family, they exchanged a nod and, as one man, arose. They toured the parlour, then tramped loudly and indifferently through the house, fingering, handling, stroking, twiddling and weighing everything in it, peering, poking, and prying into every room with Mamma at their heels like a debased and submissive dog. When they had reviewed the most intimate details of the life of the household as manifested to them in the interior of cupboards, the inside of wardrobes, the contents of drawers, and made her blush painfully as, penetrating even to her bedroom, they regarded with a knowing air the space beneath her bed, they at last descended the stairs, looking everywhere but at her. She could see refusal in their faces.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s no good, lady. Your furniture’s poor stuff, heavy, old-fashioned, won’t sell!’ said one, at last, with an odious show of candour. ‘We might lend you two tens on it – or even say even twenty-four pounds. Yes, say twenty-five at the outside limit and on our own terms of interest,’ he continued, as he produced a quill toothpick from his waistcoat pocket and assisted his calculations by its assiduous application. ‘What say?’

  ‘Yes, lady,’ said the other, ‘ times is bad these days, and you’re not what you might call a good loan. We’re always polite to a lady – funny the number of ladies we does business with – but you haven’t got the security.’

  ‘But my things are all good,’ quavered Mamma in a faint voice; ‘they’ve been handed down in the family.’

  ‘You couldn’t given them away now, ma’am,’ the gentleman with the toothpick assured her, shaking his head sadly. ‘No, not even in a downright gift. We’ve reached the limit, the fair limit. How about that twenty-five pounds of good money?’

  ‘I must have forty pounds,’ said Mamma, weakly, ‘anything else is no good.’ She had set the fixed sum in her mind and nothing short of its complete achievement would satisfy her.

  ‘You’ve nothing else to show, lady?’ said one insinuatingly. ‘Funny what you ladies will shake out when you’re put to it. You’ve nothing up your sleeve for the last?’

  ‘Only the kitchen,’ replied Mrs Brodie humbly, as she threw open the door, loath to allow them to depart, desiring despairingly to entice them into the plain apartment for a last consideration of her appeal. They went in, following her reluctantly, disdainfully, but immediately their attention was riveted by a picture which hung conspicuously upon the wall, framed in a wood of mottled, light yellow walnut. It was an engraving entitled ‘ The Harvesters,’ was marked First Proof, and signed J. Bell.

  ‘Is that yours, lady?’ said one, after a significant pause.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Brodie, ‘it’s mine. It was my mother’s before me. That small pencil sketch in the corner of the margin has been much admired.’

  They talked in low tones before the picture, peered at it through a glass, rubbed it, pawed it possessively.

  ‘Would you like to sell this, lady? Of course it’s nothing to make a noise on – oh dear, no! – but we would offer you – yes – five pounds for it,’ said the second eventually, in an altered, ingratiating tone.

  ‘I can sell nothing,’ whispered Mamma. ‘Mr Brodie would notice it at once.’

  ‘Say ten pounds then, lady,’ exclaimed the first, with a great show of magnanimity.

  ‘No! No!’ returned Mamma, ‘but if it’s worth something will ye not lend me the rest of the money on it? If it’s worth something to buy it’s surely worth something to lend on.’ She waited in a fever of anxiety, hanging upon the inflections of their voices, upon their quick, expressive gestures, upon the very lift of their eyebrows while they held colloquy together upon her picture. At last, after prolonged argument, they agreed.

  ‘You win, then, lady,’ said one. ‘We’ll lend you the forty pounds, but you’ll have to give us your bond on the picture and the rest of the furniture as well.’

  ‘We’re giving the money away, lady,’ said the other, ‘but we’ll do it for your sake. We see you need the money bad; but you must understand that if you don’t pay up, that picture and your furniture belongs to us.’

  She nodded dumbly, feverishly, filled with a choking, unendurable sense of a hard-bought victory. They went back into the parlour and sat down at the table, where she signed the endless papers that they produced for her, appending her signature where they indicated with a blind, reckless indifference. She understood that she would have to repay three pounds a month for two years, but she cared nothing for that and, as they counted out the money in crisp pound notes, she took it like a woman in a dream, and, like a sleepwalker, she showed them to the door. In spite of everything she had got the money for Matt.

  Early that afternoon she wired off the money. In the over-wrought state of her imagination she seemed to see the clean bank notes actually rushing through the blue to the salvation of her son and, when they had gone, for the first time in three days she breathed peacefully, and a mantle of tranquility descended upon her.

  Chapter Six

  On the following morning Brodie sat at breakfast, cold, moody, detach
ed, the two, sharp, vertical furrows – lately become more intensely grooved – marking the centre of his forehead between his sunk eyes like cicatriced wounds, and giving to his gloomy visage a perpetual air of brooding perplexity. Caught in the unrelieved severity of the pale morning light his unwary countenance, relieved of observation, seemed to justify the idle remark uttered in the Paxton home that now he was beyond his depth, and, from behind that low wall of his harassed forehead, the confusion of his mind seemed to obtrude itself so forcibly that, even as he sat still and quiet at table, he appeared to flounder helplessly with all the impotent brute strength of a harpooned whale. His diminutive intellect, so disproportionate to his gigantic body, could not direct him towards safety and, while he lashed out in the most mistaken directions in his efforts to avoid a final catastrophe, he still saw that disaster steadily closing in upon him.

  He, of course, knew nothing of the wire or of Mamma’s action on the previous day. Mercifully, he was not aware of the unauthorised feet that had so boorishly tramped through his domain, yet his own worries and misfortunes were more than sufficient to render his temper like tinder, ready to ignite and flame furiously at the first spark of provocation, and now, having finished his porridge, he awaited with ill-concealed impatience his special cup of coffee which Mrs Brodie was pouring out for him at the scullery stove.

  This morning cup of coffee was one of the minor tribulations of Mamma’s harassed existence, for, although she made tea admirably, she rarely succeeded in making coffee to Brodie’s exacting taste, which demanded that it must be freshly brewed, freshly poured, and steaming hot. This innocent beverage had become a convenient peg upon which to hang any matutinal grievance, and most mornings he complained bitterly about it, on any or every pretext. It was too sweet not strong enough, had too many grounds in it; it burned his tongue or was full of the straggling skin of boiled milk. No matter how she made it the result was declared unsatisfactory. The very action of carrying his cup to the table became to her a penance as, knowing the tremor of her hand, he insisted further that the cup must be brimming full and that not a single drop must be spilled upon the saucer. This last transgression was the most deadly that she could commit, and when it occurred he would wilfully allow the drop from the bottom of the cup to fall upon his coat, and would then roar:

  ‘Ye careless besom, look what you’ve done! I can’t keep a suit of clothes for your feckless, dirty ways.’

  Now, as she entered with the cup, he flung at her an irascible look for having kept him waiting exactly nine seconds, a look which developed into a sneering stare as, maintaining the brimming cup erect and the saucer inviolate by a tense effort of her slightly trembling hand, she walked slowly from the scullery door to the table. She had almost achieved her objective when suddenly with a frantic cry she dropped everything upon the floor and clutched her left side with both hands. Brodie gazed with stupefied rage at the broken crockery, the spilled coffee, and, last of all, at her distorted figure writhing before him amongst the wreckage on the floor. He shouted. She did not hear his bellow, she was so pierced by the sudden spasm of pain which transfixed her side like a white-hot skewer from which burning ripples of agony emanated and thrilled through her flesh. For a moment she suffered intensely, then gradually as though this awful cautery cooled, the waves of pain grew less and with a bloodless face she rose to her feet and stood before her husband, heedless at that instant of her enormity in upsetting his coffee. Relief at her emancipation from pain gave her tongue an unusual liberty.

  ‘Oh! James,’ she gasped, ‘that was far the worst I’ve ever had. It nearly finished me. I really think I should see the doctor about it. I get the pain so much now and I sometimes feel a wee, hard lump in my list.’ Then she broke off, becoming aware suddenly of his high, affronted dignity.

  ‘Is that a fact now?’ he sneered; ‘we’re goin’ to run to the doctor for every touch o’ the belly ache that grips us, we can so well afford it! And we can afford to scale the good drink on the floor and smash the china! Never mind the waste! Never mind my breakfast; just smash, smash a’ the time.’ His voice rose with each word, then changed suddenly to a sneering tone – ‘ Maybe ye would like a consultation of a’ the doctors in the town? They might be able to find something wrang wi’ ye if they brought round a’ their learned books and put their empty heads together about ye! Who was it ye would be speirin’ to see now?’

  ‘They say that Renwick is clever,’ she muttered, unthinkingly.

  ‘What!’ he shouted, ‘ ye talk o’ goin’ to that snipe that fell foul o’ me last year. Let me see you try it!’

  ‘I don’t want to see anybody, father,’ cringed Mamma; ‘it was just the awfu’ pain that’s been grippin’ me off and on for so long; but it’s away now and I’ll just not bother.’

  He was thoroughly infuriated.

  ‘Not bother! I’ve seen you botherin’! Don’t think I havena seen you with a’ your dirty messin’. It’s been enough to scunner a man and I’ll put up wi’ it no longer. Ye can take yersel’ off to another room. From to-night onwards ye’ll get out of my bed. Ye can move out o’ my road, ye fusty old faggot!’

  She understood that he was casting her out of their marriage bed, the bed in which she had at first lain beside him in love, where she had borne for him her children. For nearly thirty years of her life it had been her resting place; in sorrow and in sickness her weary limbs had stretched themselves upon that bed. She did not think of the relief it would afford her to have her own, quiet seclusion at nights away from his sulky oppression, to retire to Mary’s old room and be alone in peace; she felt only the cutting disgrace of being thrown aside like a used and worn-out vessel. Her face burned with shame as though he had made some gross, obscene remark to her, but, as she looked deeply into his eyes, all that she said was:

  ‘It’s as you say, James! Will I make ye some more coffee?’

  ‘No! keep your demned coffee. I’ll do without any breakfast,’ he bawled. Although he had already eaten a large bowl of porridge and milk, he felt that she had wilfully defrauded him out of his breakfast, that he was again suffering because of her incompetence, her malingering assumption of illness. ‘I wouldna be surprised if ye tried to starve us next, with your blasted scrimpin’,’ he shouted finally, as he pranced out of the house.

  His black resentment continued all the way to the shop, and although his mind left the incident, the sense of injustice still rankled while the thought of the day before him did nothing to restore his serenity. Perry had now left him, amidst a storm of contumely and reproaches no doubt, but he had nevertheless gone, and Brodie had been able to substitute for his rare and willing assistant only a small message boy who merely opened the shop and ran the errands. Apart from the loss of trade through the defection of the competent Perry, the onus of supporting the entire work of the shop now lay upon his broad but unaccustomed shoulders, and, even to his dull comprehension, it became painfully evident that he had entirely lost the knack of attending to such people as now drifted into his shop. He hated and despised the work, he never knew where to find things, he was too irritable, too impatient, altogether too big for this occupation.

  He had, also, begun to find that his better-class customers, upon whose social value he had so prided himself, were insufficient to keep his business going; he realised with growing dismay that they patronised him only upon odd occasions and were invariably neglectful, in quite a gentlemanly fashion of course, of the settlement of their indebtedness to him. In the old days he had allowed these accounts to run on for two, three, or even four years, secure in the knowledge that he would eventually be paid; they would see, he had told himself in a lordly fashion, that James Brodie was not a petty tradesman grasping for his money, but a gentleman like themselves who could afford to wait another gentleman’s convenience. Now, however, with the acute drop in the cash income of the business, he was in such need of ready money that these large, outstanding amounts by the various county families became a source of grea
t anxiety, and although he had sent out, with much laborious auditing and unaccustomed reckoning, a complete issue of them, apart from a few, including the Latta account, which were paid to him immediately, the entire bundle might have been posted into the middle of the Leven for all the result that immediately accrued to him. He fully realised that it was useless to send them out again, that these people would pay in their time and not in his; the mere fact that he had already requested settlement with an unusual urgency might possibly estrange them from him altogether.

  His own debts to the few, conservative, wholesale houses whom he favoured had grown far beyond their usual limits. Never a good business man, his usual method had been to order goods when, and as, he pleased, and to pay no heed to amounts, invoices, or accounts until the dignified representative of each house visited him at recognised intervals, in the accepted and friendly manner consonant between two firms of standing and reputation. Then, after a polite and cordial conversation upon the topics of the moment, Brodie would go to the small, green safe sunk in the wall of his office, unlock it grandly, and produce a certain canvas bag.

  ‘Well,’ he would remark, imposingly, ‘ what is our obligation to-day?’

  The other would murmur deprecatingly, and, as if urged against his will to present the bill, would produce his handsome pocket book, rustle importantly amongst its papers, and reply suavely:

  ‘Well, Mr Brodie, since you wish it, here is your esteemed account’; whereupon Brodie, with one glance at the total, would count out a heap of sovereigns and silver from the bag in settlement. While he might more easily have paid by cheque, he disdained this as a mean, pettifogging instrument and preferred the magnaminous action of disbursing the clean, bright coins as the worthier manner of the settlement of a gentleman’s debts. ‘That’s money,’ he had once said in answer to a question, ‘ and value for value. What’s the point o’ writin’ on a small slip of printed paper. Let them use it that likes it – but the braw, bright siller was good enough for my forebears, and it’ll be good enough for me.’ Then, when it was stamped and signed, he would negligently stuff the other’s receipt in his waistcoat pocket and the two gentlemen would shake hands warmly, and part with mutual expressions of regard. That, considered Brodie, was how a man of breeding conducted such affairs.