Unknown (105 page)

“Good-night, Father.” “Good-night, my boy.”

Sam's betaking himself lo his bedroom that night coincided, after about five minutes leeway, with the departure to bed of another Glastonbury bachelor, namely, Mr. Thomas Barter. The steps up which this gentleman slowly and wearily climbed were much less pleasant to ascend than those dusted and polished by Penny Pitches. Mr. Barter was no longer in his High Street room. Since his salary at the Municipal, as it was called, was based on the success of the venture under his management and as his task in organising it was a Herculean one, he found himself for the moment with a very meagre income. He had been forced to economise if he were to be able to continue his daily table d'hotes at the Pilgrims', and not to continue these meant the last straw of misery. His adventure with Lily had turned out anything but a success. This dreamy, romantic maiden had unexpectedly proven herself a past mistress in the art of giving nothing for nothing! As much kissing as he liked, where the auspicious Ruins—an entrance-fee every time, for Lily refused to steal into the grounds over the Abbey-House wall!—hid such chaste delinquencies; but beyond kissing, absolutely not one single stolen sweet. Thus, for the last month, for he had long ago quarrelled with the mercenary Clarissa, Mr. Barter had been compelled to be chaste. His sole pleasure during this epoch had been the tender but rather anxious one of snatching difficult assignations with Tossie Stickles.

In default of all other feminine society, for Mary seemed, since her marriage, deliberately to avoid seeing him alone, Mr. Barter clung quite pathetically to his interviews with his “ruined” Toss. Her sweetness to him knew no bounds. With her, if they could only manage to escape observation, everything was permitted; nothing was forbidden; and all was for pure love. He got fonder and fonder of Tossie. Her ways, in her state of pregnancy, astonished him by their sweetness and quaintness. He even became interested—and this for the first time in his masterful career—in his future progeny. Many were the whimsical colloquies, interspersed with bursts of impious merriment, that they had together over this serious event. The girl had recently got into her head, so big had her belly grown and so violent were the movements within her, that they were destined to be the parents of twins; and even this prospect, conceivably one of humorous horror to an unscrupulous Don Juan, appeared to be by no means distasteful to Mr. Barter. But dear to him as were these happy encounters, they had become so infrequent of late as the girl's time drew nearer, that they no longer served to remove the gloom which kept gathering deeper and deeper upon him.

Tonight, as he mounted those disgusting stairs in George Street, after a long wretched evening spent in his miserable little restaurant, he really felt as if he were approaching the end of his tether. When he had turned on the gas-jet—the burner had not even got a globe—he sat down on his chilly bed and surveyed his washing-basin and heavy white jug with a nauseated resentment that could see nothing in front of him but a leaden urinal-wall of blank despair.

“God!” he thought, “this won't do. I'll go cracked if this goes on. I must get hold of a new girl.” But the worst of it was whenever he tried to think of a new girl, and he knew quite a lot of them—Wollop's alone had at least half a dozen and only one of these was impossible—he always thought of Toss. What ivas it about Toss that caught him so? It must be the way she laughed. She laughed with such rich merriment. She went off at anything he'd say or do and nothing could stop her. He'd never known a girl before who laughed with such a bubbling chuckle and then such ringing peals. And she used to laugh like that when he was making love to her. God! she would laugh sometimes when really—a girl ought to be grave. But he didn't care. He liked her to laugh. Her laugh was like all the curves of her plump body. Well! Well! She won't laugh, poor little thing, when her time comes. But perhaps she will. Perhaps her child will be born in one prolonged, rich peal of laughter. Her child? Her twins! A boy and a girl. A Toss and a Tom. Yes, her laugh was like her arms between her shoulders and elbows—the inside of them, when she bent them. Her laugh was like those rings above her knees, made by those ridiculous garters.

A new girl? Damn them all! Thin, sour, puritanical, avaricious, cold-blooded hussies!

He turned his miserable gaze upon his one wretched pillow, dirty from his head, for he had grown remiss in having his bath since the weather got so chilly and “the woman down there” made such a fuss about hot water. He unlaced his boots. His socks were a sight! “I must do something about all this,” he thought. “I can't go on like this.” He took down his pyjamas from a hook behind the door and surveyed the cold thin cotton sheets and the frayed edge of the cheap blanket. “I'm damned if I'll take off my vest and drawers,” he thought, “just for tonight!” This “just for tonight” had been repeated ever since the middle of September. Mr. Barter, the sturdy fen-man, was certainly becoming degenerate.

He turned off the light and got into bed. “I can't go on like this,” he repeated. And he set himself to do what he disliked extremely to do—to consider his financial position. He had saved up, since his parents died, leaving him nothing, exactly a thousand pounds. He remembered the day when, in his balance-book received from Mr. Robert Stilly, he had first beheld the figures of that sum. It was just before John came. It was when he was going about with Mary. To have saved a thousand pounds, all earned by yourself, when you were only thirty-five—that was something as things went in England nowadays! No! He could not, he must not, break into that thousand. But what could he do if he didn't break into it? Until the factory was really on a production basis he had to get on as best he could. His dinners at the Pilgrims' always cost him five shillings—that is, if he had two bottles of ale. And he must have ale. Ale to his meat. Ale to his pudding. It might not be a gentleman's taste, but it was his taste. He had been a fool to leave Philip. But there it was! How was he to know then, what he knew now, that he'd have this brute Robinson to work with?

He tried to imagine himself back again with Philip, but somehow, miserable though he was, those galling, rankling insults-^ no! they were worse than his present nervousness with Robinson. At any rate he could heartily despise Robinson—even while he recognised the man's infernal industry. And he couldn't despise

Philip! He hated them both, but it was better to live with what you loathed and despised, than with what you loathed and admired! God! how it was raining tonight and how the wind howled! He remembered the look of the old chimney-stack on this wretched house, as he came just now along those few yards of streaming pavement. It looked damnably shaky as the rain beat against it. He wouldn't wonder if one of these nights it didn't come down. And what room would it hit? His of course; his room. What a nice death that would be. Crushed under that filthy ceiling, covered with bricks, cement and wet mortar. Who would have my thousand then? One of those fourth-removed Warwickshire cousins? “I must certainly make my will,” thought Mr. Barter. “And I'll leave every penny of that thousand to Toss. God! these ricketty old houses, how they do shake in a storm.”

He began to hope that Tossie wasn't frightened by this high wind in her room at the back of that Benedict house. “I suppose if she got scared,” he said to himself, “she'd call out and Miss Crow would go to her.” And Barter's mind went through the process—it took less than half a second—of summoning up the image of Miss Elizabeth and giving this image his hearty commendation. He did not articulate this in the sort of words he would have spoken—such as, “Miss Crow's a decent sort,” or “Miss Crow's the only lady in the whole blooming family except Mary,” but it was as if towards the portly figure of Miss Crow he gave a sort of mental nod as a man entering the Salon Carre in the Louvre might give a nod towards the Mona Lisa, as much as to say, "So you are there still.55

His reflections were interrupted by an unusual noise and his heart gave a most unpleasant jump. Some door on the landing below—the house was let in single and double rooms—had been flung open and a voice was shrieking—“Call the doctor, someone! Who's there? Someone must go for a doctor at once!”

Mr. Barter was for a moment tempted to pull that cotton sheet and the two thin blankets tightly over his head. “If a person's fast asleep,” he thought, “they can't disturb a person.”

“Mrs. Smith! Betsy Burt!” screamed the voice on the landing below.

“It is extraordinary how fast I sleep—I was deep asleep then and never heard a sound.” These were the words that passed through Barter's head as his excuse on the following morning. But the curious thing was that even while he was completing this rigmarole he was already out of bed, striking matches, lighting the gas, and pulling on his trousers. Mr. Barter's arms and legs, it appeared, were more benevolent than his thoughts. Not only did he pull on his trousers but he hurriedly began putting on his boots. That done, he went to his door and threw it open. “One minute, down there!” he cried. “One minute, and I'll go.” He flung on his waistcoat, coat and overcoat, snatched up his cap, shut his door and ran downstairs.

It appeared that the child of a solitary and rather unpleasant woman who lived in the room parallel to his own on the floor below had been taken with some kind of fit. It was a little boy of six and the child was now, as Barter pushed Mrs. Carey and Betsy Burt aside, lying on the bed with a ghastly white face and his eyes tight shut.

“'Tis convulsions, Mr. Barter,” said Betsy Burt, when he pushed his way in.

“ 'Tis Apocalypse, Mister,” cried old Mrs. Carey, “for I do know how it takes 'em. 'Twere 'pocalypse that thee own blood-brother died of, Miss Burt; so you oughtn't to be the one to talk of convulsions. But I do know! I've a seed un and handled un in many a corpsy, and they was all took just as this child be. He's gone already—looks so to I. First they gets red and then they gets turble white. 'Pocalypse takes them i' the heart, 's know, and that's what do make their colour fly!”

The woman whose screams in the middle of that night had brought nobody out of bed but Mr. Barter and these two crones, was kneeling on the floor frantically chafing the hands of her child.

“I'll bring the doctor here in five minutes,” Barter said, touching her on the shoulder, but the woman did not turn round; did not, as a matter of fact, take any notice at all.

“She were whoam late last night, Mister,” said old Mrs. Carey, tugging at his coat as he hurried out. “Don't tell doctor I said it! Don't bring no inquest tales on I!” she called after him, as he went downstairs.

It didn't take him long, for he ran fast all the way, butting against the deluging rain like a Norfolk gamekeeper, to reach Dr. Fell's house at the corner of Northload Street. Luckilv— though it was long past twelve—the doctor was still “reading” the “Enchiridion” in his study. In other words, his favourite book was open on his knees and his broad low forehead, with the grizzled hair sticking out of it like the bristles of an aged hog, was nodding above the book. He opened the street-door himself and let Mr. Barter in.

He agreed to go at once, but when they opened the door again to make a start the rain was so terrific that he begged his sum-moner to wait till he got back. “Then I can send anything by you, Barter, that they may want. Besides, no use your getting wetter than you are. It can't go on like this. I know the house. There's whiskey on my table, man, and a glass somewhere. Take a good pull. It'll do 'ee good.”

It was an incredible comfort to Mr. Barter to pour himself out a half-and-half tumbler of whiskey and water, and to draw in his chair close to the red coals. He made towards his friend, the doctor, the same sort of mental nod of inarticulate approval that he had made towards Miss Crow. A warm glow of the first unadulterated pleasure he had had since he last saw Miss Stickles, ran through his veins as he gulped down the good drink and dried his wet boots at the fire. “I believe I'll give up my dinners at the Pilgrims',” he thought, “and buy whiskey with that money! Drink's better than the best cooking, when a man's got the doldrums.”

Half an hour passed. Barter went to the doctor's table and poured himself out half a glass more, which he now proceeded to sip, without putting in any water. He moved to- the doctor's big leather chair and placed his glass upon the floor. A delicious drowsiness began to flow through him like a ripple of warm etherealised honey.

In an hour the doctor entered. “He'll be all right—the little lad,” he said cheerfully. “It was that kind of mock-epilepsy that children sometimes get. He's asleep now, and so I hope is the mother. There's no hurry for you to go, my boy. Wait till the rain's subsided. Let's make a night of it. I've got plenty more of this stuff. It's good, isn't it? . . . That woman will kill thsi child with her drunken ways, unless I get the Society to take him away from her,” he went on when they had settled down. “Do you know that I know at this moment one, two—five mothers that are killing their children in this town?”

“Well, they'll be out of it when they're dead,” said Thomas Barter.

“And do you realise, my good friend, that Tittie Petherton's cancer is following a track that won't kill her for months and months—maybe not for six months! I made sure it would finish her off in a week or two, when I examined her in August, but not at all!”

“Well! in a year, anyway, she will be dead and all that pain wiped out.”

"Wiped out, Barter? What are you talking about? Are you such a happy man as really to believe that in the whole sweep and surge and swing of things pain like that is iviped out? I read a Russian book once, Barter, by that man whose name begins with D, and a character there says he believes in God but rejects God's World. Now I feel just the opposite! I think the whole of God's World is infinitely to be pitied—tortured and torturers alike—but 1 think that God Himself, the great Living God, responsible for it all, the powerful Creator who deliberately gave such reptiles, such sharks, such hyasnas, such jackals as we are,

this accursed gift of Free Will, ought to have such a Cancer------"