“I can do it,” said Harold. Like a good economical soul and husband, he had taken his jacket off when he came in, and was in his shirtsleeves. “I’ll take th’ oven shelf up, Fanny,” he added.
“Take the bottom one,” said Fanny, who was faintly squeezing her breast between two fingers as she directed the nipple to the infant. “It’s not so red-hot as the top one.”
Harold wrapped the oven shelf in an old piece of blanket, and took it upstairs with him and the candle, for a bed- warmer. In the spare bedroom he went methodically about, making up the bed.
“I tell you what,” he said as he came down, “I’ll put that oil-stove up there a bit, to warm the air. It comes rather cold.”
And he rubbed his arms, through his shirtsleeves.
Another half-hour, then, saw Emmie in a warm bed, in company of the oven shelf against which she knew she’d knock her toe. She screwed herself up upon her pains, which, though genuine enough, seemed to proceed from a sort of crossness which she could not get over. The little paraffin oil- stove shed its low light and its curious flat oil-flame warmth across the atmosphere. Harold appeared with a cup of the brown, slimy steaming linseed-and-liquorice stew and pressed her to drink it.
“I take a lot of it, and find it does me worlds of good. I think it’s the oil, myself. I’m sure it’s better than cod-liver oil. Your skin gets so nice and soft if you take it regular.”
But Emmie, her naturally fluffy hair rather astray over the pillow, her little brows rather tense, would not look at it.
“Don’t come near me, my lad. I don’t want to be looked at,” she said, half hiding her crossness in a sort of gruffness.
“Is it all that bad. I’ll go down and make you a bran-bag, should I? — You’ve not lost your good looks, anyhow. — But should I make a bran-bag for you?”
“Ay — ” said Emmie.
Down he went, found there was no bran, put his hat and coat on and went down the lane to borrow some: returned, and stuffed it into a flat flannel bag, put this between two plates in the oven, to heat, and finally carried it, piping hot, up to Emmie, who gratefully hugged it against her.
“Thank you, my old chuck,” she said to him. “It’s rosy, that is.”
“Perhaps that’ll shift it,” said Harold.
“Ay — perhaps.”
But she had her pains all through the night, and said in the morning she hadn’t slept a wink. She looked peaked, and Harold was bothered, so he sent a note for the doctor: much against Emmie’s will. The doctor said it was neuralgia of the stomach, and Emmie said it felt like it. Harold made Fanny write to Woodhouse, and in the school-room from time to time he would raise his voice a little and say:
“Less noise there down at that end! You know what I’ve told you. You know how poorly Miss Bostock is, in bed in the house. Think of others besides yourselves.”
And the scholars duly hushed themselves, and felt important, having somebody poorly in bed in the school-house.
That evening Harold came up to Emmie for a fatherly talk.
“What’s wrong between you an’ Dad more than usual?” he asked.
“Oh nothing,” said Emmie.
“Nay, come, it’s not nothing. It must be something rather special, if you’ve not told Fanny yet.”
“I don’t feel like talking, either,” she said.
“You’d better tell us. You’d feel better if you got it off your chest.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” said Emmie.
“Nay,” expostulated the young man. “If that’s the way you feel towards me and Fanny, then we know how matters stand.”
Emmie sulked in the bed with her new bran-bag, and Harold sat in the chair beside the little oil-stove — there was no fireplace in the bedroom — and felt offended.
“Oh damn you,” said Emmie. “You’re an old nuisance.”
“Ay, I know I’m an old nuisance, if I don’t just please you altogether,” said Harold, rather flattered than otherwise. “But it’s for your own good I ask you. It’s nothing to me personally — except I always want to do my best for you and for all of you, for Fanny’s sake. Though it isn’t so very much I can do. Still, I’ll do my bit whenever I get a chance.”
There was a slight pause after this oration.
“I had a walk with Gilbert Noon, if you want to know,” said Emmie.
“What, with Gilbert Noon from Haysfall Technical? I should have thought he’d have known better. And did your Dad catch you?”
“Yes.”
“And what did he say?”
“He knocked Gilbert Noon’s cap off, and had his own cap knocked off back again, and they both fell down in the dark in a gooseberry bush, and all the blame laid on me, of course.”
“You don’t mean to say so! Did they go for one another?”
“I didn’t stop to look. Our Dad’s a devil — an interfering spying devil. He’ll kill me before he’s done.”
And Emmie pulled the sheet over her face and blubbered underneath it. Poor Harold, who was in a whirlpool of emotion, sat pale as death in the chair, and felt like offering himself up as a burnt offering, if he could but find an altar with a fire going.
“Well now,” he said at length. “You shouldn’t let it get on your nerves. Dad means well, I suppose, only he goes a funny way about it. What do you take it to heart for? You can stop here for a bit till things blow over. Have you written to Walter George?”
He waited with beating heart for an answer. No answer: though a certain stilling of the under-sheet waters.
“Have you written to Walter George, Emmie?” asked Harold once more, in an excruciatingly gentle and pained voice.
A sniff from under the sheet.
“No” — from under the sheet.
Harold watched the sheet-top, which had grown damp during the bad weather, and, to its mournful blotting-paper blankness he said, tender, anxious, treading gingerly on the hot bricks of emotion:
“And aren’t you going to?”
No answer from under the sheet.
“You’re going to, aren’t you Emmie?”
No motion from under the winter-landscape of a sheet.
“You’re not in love with Gilbert Noon, are you Emmie? You’d never make such a mistake.”
“No I’m not, fat-head.”
This barked out from under the sheet gave Harold hopes of the re-emergence of the crocuses and scyllas of Emmie’s head. Surely a thaw had set in beneath the damp snow-scape of the sheet.
“Well I’m glad to hear that, at any rate. Because I’m sure it would be a mistake. I’m sure Walter George is the man for you, Emmie; though I must say your treatment of him is such as most men wouldn’t stand. I know I shouldn’t. But he hasn’t got a jealous nature, and that’s why he’s the right sort for you. — My word, if your Fanny treated me as you treat him, there’d be some fat in the fire, I can tell you. Somebody would have to look out. But different men, different ways. He’s not a jealous nature, thank goodness.”
Out popped crocuses, scyllas, christmas roses and japonica buds in one burst from beneath the wintry landscape. In short, Emmie’s head came out of the sheet, and her nose was so red with crying that we felt constrained to make the japonica flower too early.
“Different men have different ways of showing it, you mean,” she snapped. “He won’t have any occasion to be jealous, once he isn’t a hundred miles off. So there! I know what I’m doing.”
“Well, I’ve always said so. I’ve said to him more than once, ‘she’ll be as true as wax once the knot is tied, Walter George, but she’s not the one to leave at a loose end.’ And he sees it plain enough. Only he doesn’t think he’s in a position yet —
“But I tell you what! Why don’t you come here and help me? Miss Tewson is leaving at the end of February. You come here and help me, and you could see a bit more of one another while you make your minds up.”
Harold had his little plan. Indeed, life is made up of little plans which people manufacture for o
ne another’s benefit. But this little plan Emmie had fore-ordained herself. It had occurred to her when she heard Miss Tewson’s treble chiming after Harold’s baritone in the school beneath. She wanted a little peace.
And so she began to feel somewhat better, and the pains began to diminish.
“You write him a note,” said Harold, “and I’ll ride over tomorrow night and take it him, and ask him to come over for the week-end. How about that, now? Does that suit?”
“I’ll see,” said Emmie.
But Harold knew the victory was won, and he went to bed with his Fanny as pleased as if all the angels were patting him on the back. And his Fanny was quite content that the marigolds of his self-satisfaction should shed themselves in her lap.
In the morning Emmie wrote to Walter George.
“Dear old bean-pod Lo and behold I’m at our Fanny’s, and bad in bed, and that mad with myself I could swear like a trooper. Come over and cheer me up a bit if you can. If you can’t, come over to the funeral. Ollivoy! E.B.”
Ollivoy was Emmie’s little pleasantry, substituted for au revoir. Sometimes she wrote olive-oil instead.
The day was Friday. She listened to the business of the school, and at last felt happier in bed. She felt what a luxury it was, to lie in bed and hear school going on: hateful school. She heard the children go shouting out, at midday, into the rain. There was rain on the window and on the wet bare creeper stalks. She wondered if Harold would ride ten miles through the weather.
Listening, she heard thud-thud-thud, and realised it was Fanny knocking with the poker on the fire-back downstairs, to summon Harold in from the school-room. This was Fanny’s wireless message to her overdue schoolmaster. Presendy the sister, rather blowsy but pleasant-looking, came up with stewed rabbit and a baked onion. Harold had thought out the baked onion. It was such a good receipt for earache and neuralgia of the face — a hot onion placed against the ear: therefore why not just as good taken internally, for neuralgia of the stomach. Nourishing as well. He explained to the two sisters, who had been school-teachers as well as he, what proportion of sugar there was in onions, and what proportion of other matter: something very encouraging, though we forget exactly the ratio. So Emmie plunged her fork into the nutritious bulb, which sent its fumes wildly careering round the room, and even tickled the nostrils of afternoon scholars, so that they became hungry again at five past two. We little know the far- reaching results of our smallest actions.
Chapter X.
Introduces Walter George.
The afternoon, thank goodness, cleared up, and Harold prepared his acetylene lamp till the whole village knew he was going to ride out on his bicycle, and wondered if Miss Bostock was taken worse, you know.
He reached Warsop by half-past six, having ridden against the wind. Walter George did not come in till seven, because the bank was doing overtime. When he came, Harold greeted him as man to man, and met with a similar greeting back again.
Walter George — his family name was Whiffen, since trifles matter — was a nice, well-built, plump lad of twenty-one, with round rosy cheeks and neat hair cut rather long and brushed carefully sideways: not backwards: who looked exacdy like a choir-boy grown into a High-School boy, and a High-School boy grown into a bank-clerk, and a bank-clerk just budding for a nice, confidential, comfortable-looking, eminendy satisfactory manager of a little bank in some little industrial place in the provinces. Already he inspired confidence, he looked so like the right kind of choir-boy grown into the right kind of high-school boy, the kind that mothers find so satisfactory as a product of their own.
And indubitably he was gone on Emmie. We prefer the slang, as having finer shades than the cant though correct phrase in love with. In-love-with means just anything. But to be gone on somebody is quite different from being smitten by her, or sweet on her, or barmy over her. Walter George was gone on Emmie, and he was neither smitten by her nor barmy over her.
“Hello Harold! You’re a stranger.”
Walter George Whiffen was just a tinge patronising towards the bicycle-bespattered, wind-harrowed young schoolmaster.
“You’ve not ridden over from Eakrast?”
Why, you bank-clerk, do you think he’d flown over, with bicycle clips round his trouser-ankles and spots of mud on his nose.
“Yes, I’ve come with a message for you.”
“For me?”
Immediately Walter George’s rosy face looked anxious.
“We’ve got Emmie bad at our house.”
The choir-boy — he was no more at this moment — looked with round eyes on Harold.
“Bad!” he re-echoed. “How long?”
“Oh, since Tuesday. She’s been in a rare way, I tell you: awful amount of pain.”
“Where?”
“Why, the doctor says neuralgia of the stomach, but I say it was more like cramp of the stomach. We were up half the night two nights with hot bran-bags. I thought she’d go off any minute, as true as I’m here I did. She couldn’t speak, and her face went that funny. Cramp of the stomach catches you and you die like a fly, almost before you know where you are. I was thankful when she came round a bit, with hot bran-bags and hot water-bottles to her feet, I can tell you.”
The choir-boy stood with his mouth open and his eyes blue and round, and did not say a word for some moments.
“Had she got it when she came?” he asked at length.
“Bad, she had. She’d got it bad when I came in and found her at tea-time. It took her I don’t know how long to walk from the station. She had to keep sitting down by the roadside, and going off in a dead faint. — It’s a thousand wonders she ever got to our house: our Fanny says so an’ all.”
The choir-boy’s pleasant mouth, that still looked more like chocolate than cigarettes, began to quiver, and he turned aside his face as his eyes filled with tears. Harold, also moved too deeply, turned his pale and hollow face in the opposite direction, and so they remained for some minutes like a split statue of Janus, looking two ways.
“Did she ask for me?” quavered the choir-boy’s voice in the east.
“She did,” sounded the schoolmaster’s voice from the west. “She sent you a note.” And he took the missive from his pocket.
Then the two halves of the Janus statue turned to one another as if for the first time, and the choir-boy wiped his eyes with a dashing and gentlemanly silk handkerchief which he had bought for himself at the best shop in Warsop. Having wiped his eyes he took the letter. Having read the contents he looked at the envelope. After which he kissed the note-paper, and let Harold see him do it. Harold approved heartily, and knew that was how he himself would feel if it was Fanny. The hearts of the two young men beat as one.
“Poor little child,” said the high-school boy, wiping his eyes again. “How did she get it?”
“It’s nerves, you know. She’s a bundle of nerves — / know from Fanny. She lives on her spirit, till her nerves break down. And she’d had a row with her father again. He doesn’t understand her a bit.” This last from the psychological schoolmaster with some spleen.
“Had he been tormenting her?” asked the bank-clerk.
“Why he makes her life a misery,” said the schoolmaster, with a curl of the lip.
The bank-clerk, almost a man now, looked aside and became red with profound indignation.
“She’s only a bit of a thing you know,” he said brokenly.
“I tell you,” rejoined Harold. “She ran away to Fanny and me for a bit of protection.”
“Damned devil,” murmured the bank-clerk, making his brows heavy against the bugbear.
“Oh but she’s a king to what she was,” said Harold. “And that’s one thing, she’ll be better nearly as sudden as she got bad: I’m hoping so, anyhow. She’s eating a bit today. She seemed fair comforted when I told her to ask you over for the week-end, and when I said she could stop with us and take Miss Tewson’s place. Don’t you think that would be better all round?”
“Yes — ” but the
young gentleman wasn’t listening. “I’ll ride back with you tonight.”
“Oh I shouldn’t,” said Harold. “Can’t you come tomorrow and stop over Sunday? That’s what we were counting on.”
“Yes, I shall be only too glad. But I’ll see her tonight.”
The high-school boy had no sooner uttered this resolve, and was fixing his clouded brow like another Roland, than his landlady tapped at the door and hovered half way into the little parlour. She was a nice old lady with a lace cap.
“Your pardon, young gentlemen — but tea is ready for you.”
“Oh!” and the high-school boy became the incipient bank- manager. He put his hand lightly through Harold’s arm. “Come on. We have dinner at one o’clock here, and a late tea. Mrs Slater can’t cope with dinner at night. We’ll sit down, shall we?” And he led the half-willing Harold to the door.
“No thanks,” said Harold. “I’ll be off. I had my tea before I came. I’d better be getting back.”
“Oh no you won’t — not till you’ve had a cup of tea.” And he led his friend hospitably across the little hall or entrance passage, to where his landlady stood hovering in the doorway of the little dining-room.
“Mrs Slater — you know Mr Wagstaff, don’t you?”
“Indeed I do. Indeed I do. Come and sit down both of you.”
She spoke in a small, piping voice, quite briskly for the sake of the young men. But her face looked remote, as if she hardly belonged. She seemed to be looking across the gulfs which separate us from early Victorian days, a little dazedly and wanly.
Walter George, of course, did not dream of going without his tea. He ate large quantities of toast and bloater-paste and jam and cake, and Harold tucked in also. And the little woman in a lace cap looked at them from far away behind the tea-pot — not that it was geographically far away, only ethnologically — and was glad they were there, but seemed a little bewildered, as if she could hardly understand their language.
Harold, as appetite began to be appeased, demonstrated methodically to the bank-clerk that it was no use his, Walter George’s, riding to Eakrast tonight, that he would only knock himself up for tomorrow and spoil Emmie’s chance of a perfect recovery and her bliss in a perfect meeting. Of which the young gentleman allowed himself to be convinced. Therefore he begged to be allowed to write a line in answer to Emmie’s. Therefore Harold sat on pins and needles while the young Tristan covered much paper. Harold, of course, was thinking of Fanny and the baby, and how they’d be getting nervous etc. etc.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 276
