Brown on Resolution (4 page)

Yet very soon she became actively aware that it was not a dream, could not have been a dream. For a time she thrust her fears behind her and went on grimly with her household affairs, but they continually recurred to her. She was worried about them, and uncertain of what she ought to do. She knew Samarez’s name and ship (of course she would!) and for a moment thought of writing to him, but she put the idea aside as unworthy. But as the symptoms became unmistakable and she began to fear discovery she grew more worried, and it was a positive relief when the storm broke. Mr. Brown came home one day at five—rather earlier than his usual time.

“No, I don’t want any tea,” he said, and there was that in his voice which told Agatha what he knew.

“Come here, my girl,” went on Mr. Brown, “I want to talk to you.”

“Well?” said Agatha, quite calm and steady now that the crisis had come.

“I met Burton this afternoon, quite by accident. And he said—he said he was sorry to hear about my sister, and what a pity it was you weren’t able to go over to Ealing and stay there the last time it was arranged.”

Mr. Brown stared at his daughter from under his heavy eyebrows. The thing was incredible to him—and yet—and yet—his doubts led him to work himself up into a rage.

“Didn’t you tell me last February you were going to stay there, and didn’t you come back and say you had?” he blared.

“Yes,” said Agatha.

“Well, where did you get to? Where the devil did you get to?”

Agatha made no reply.

“You made me look such a bleedin’ fool when Burton said that to me,” raved Mr. Brown—the adjective showed he was nearly beside himself. “Where the devil did you get to?”

The horrible and incredible doubts which had assailed him and which he had put aside as quite impossible renewed themselves and goaded him into frightful agitation.

“Was—was it a
man
?” he demanded. “Tell me this minute, girl.”

Agatha knew that it was no use telling Mr. Brown about Samarez. He wouldn’t understand. She didn’t understand herself.

“My God, it was!” said Mr. Brown. “Who was it? What filthy swine—?”

He mouthed and spluttered his rage.

“Who was it? Was it young Evans?”

Evans was the local roué, a greasy-haired young man whom Agatha hated. The suggestion was so comic that Agatha had to smile, and the smile increased her father’s frenzy.

“Who was it? Tell me, or I’ll—”

“It wasn’t anybody you know, Dad,” said Agatha.

“Damned if I care. Tell me his name and I’ll find him. I’ll teach him.”

“No you won’t Dad, I won’t tell you.”

“You won’t? We’ll see, my girl.”

“Yes, we’ll see,” said Agatha. Her old exalted mood was coming over her again, leaving her outwardly calm and placid and nunlike, but inwardly rejoicing. Mr. Brown stared at her serene face, and his rage simmered down into incredulous astonishment.

“Who the devil was it, if it wasn’t Evans?” he pleaded pitifully.

“It was someone else,” said Agatha quite calmly, looking over his head at something a thousand miles distant.

“But—but he didn’t do you any
harm
, Aggie, old girl, did he?” wheedled Mr. Brown.

Agatha met his eyes, and nodded with certitude.

“You would say he did, Dad,” said Agatha.

The flush of Mr. Brown’s anger gave way to a yellow pallor. His very bulk as he sat in his sacred chair seemed to diminish.

“You don’t mean that, do you, dear?” he asked quite unnecessarily, for he knew she did.

Later he gave way to pathetic helplessness.

“What am I to do?” he pleaded. “Whatever will the Chapel say?”

Upon Mr. Brown dawned the awful realization that despite his three shops, despite his wholesale connexion, despite his fine house and solid furniture, the Chapel would find huge stores of food for gossip in this terrible catastrophe. The finger of scorn would be pointed at him; he would never be able to hold up his head again. Never more would the proud privilege be his of passing round the plate at morning service.

The arrival of his two eldest sons prolonged the discussion. Will and Harry were brimful of the ferocious energy which had carried their father to such heights in the world of greengrocery, and, unlike him, they were still young and able to reach instant, Napoleonic decisions.

“People mustn’t know about it,” said Will positively, “that’s certain. Agatha will have to go away for the—as soon as it’s necessary. We’ll have to say she’s gone to stay with friends in Edinburgh or somewhere?

“That’s it,” chimed in Harry, “and the—the child will have to be boarded out when she comes back. It ought to be easy enough.”

The three of them looked to Agatha for agreement, and found none. Her face was as though cut in stone. The bare thought of having her child ‘boarded out’, the child for whom she was ready, even anxious to endure so much, was like a savage blow in the face.

“No,” she said, “I won’t have him boarded out. I’m going to be with him, always.”

The pronoun she used displayed her silly, baseless hope that her child would be a son, but it passed unnoticed and uncommented upon.

“Don’t be silly,” said Harry, with immense scorn. “Of course we must board the child out—if it lives.”

The thought and the wish that fathered it tore at Agatha’s heart-strings.

“Oh, how I hate you!” she burst out. “Of course he’s going to live. And I’m going to keep him too. Don’t you dare say anything else!”

“Pooh!” sneered Will. “You’ll have to do what you’re told. Beggars can’t be—”

Will’s speech broke off short as he caught sight of a flash of triumph in Agatha’s face, and was reminded by it of a forgotten factor in the argument. He met the eyes of his father and his brother with some uneasiness.

For fifteen years ago, when Mr. Brown had just begun to be successful in business, he had followed the prudent example of thousands of others by investing his savings in house property and deeding it over to his wife. That, of course, had been in the days before limited liability, and was a wise precaution ensuring the possession of capital and the necessaries of life even if bankruptcy were to strip Mr. Brown nominally of all he possessed. Mr. Brown had seen to it that his wife made a will in his favour, and had thought no more about it. Until his wife’s death, for then, as soon as Mrs. Brown was in her grave, a wretched pettifogging lawyer from the purlieus of Deptford, had produced a will of recent date (made, in fact, as soon as Mrs. Brown was aware that she was suffering from the cancer which caused her death) by which all her property, real and personal, was left to her daughter Agatha. It had been Mrs. Brown’s one exceptional action in life (corresponding to that one of Agatha’s whose results they were just discussing) and had been undoubtedly inspired by the desire to render Agatha free of that dependence upon mankind which even Victorian ladies found so exasperating on occasion. Dad and the boys, as soon as they had recovered from their astonishment, had tried to laugh the matter off. Dad had gone on collecting the weekly rents of the six houses in Beaconsfield Terrace as usual, and as usual had devoted them to his own purposes without rendering account. But those houses were Agatha’s all the same, as was the hundred pounds a year clear which they brought in. Will and Harry and Mr. Brown looked at each other with an uneasy suspicion of defeat.

“I’m not a beggar,” said Agatha, “so I
can
be a chooser if I like. And I’m going to choose. I’m going to live with my boy wherever I like. So there!”

Will did not know when he was beaten, and he tried to continue the argument.

“Don’t be a fool, Aggie,” he said, “you can’t do that. You can’t manage property and—and—have a baby and all that sort of thing. You’ll be cheated right and left and you’ll come whining back to us for help before the year’s out. And then—”

His tone and expression made it unpleasantly clear what would happen then. Agatha only shrugged her shoulders and turned away; she sniffed with contempt as if she had been fourteen instead of twenty-nine and a budding mother. And that sniff completed Will’s exasperation. He boiled over with rage at being thus contemptuously treated by a mere woman—and especially at the thought of all that goodly money being taken out of the family.

“Come here!” he said, and sprang across and seized her wrist.

For a second or two the brother and sister stood and glared at each other. But Agatha rallied all her waning moral strength, and continued her amazing rebellion against the godlike male.

“Let me go!” she said.

She tore herself free, and shrank aside from his renewed attempt to grab hold of her. She evaded his grip, and forgetful of all decorum she brought her hand round in a full swing so that it landed with an echoing slap upon Will’s pudgy cheek. He staggered back with his ear singing and his heart appalled at this frightful rebellion. Then Agatha turned away and walked slowly from the room, and slowly upstairs to her bedroom, where, with calm, unthinking deliberation she packed the suitcase which had accompanied her on that wonderful trip to London nearly three months before. She included her jewel-case with her few petty pieces of jewellery; then, struck by a sudden thought, she opened it again, took out the wedding ring Samarez had bought her, and slipped it on to the third finger of her left hand. Then, suitcase in hand, she descended the stairs and walked slowly to the front door. The dining-room stood half open as she passed it, and her glance within showed her Dad huddled spiritlessly in his armchair, and Will and Harry collapsed and despondent in two chairs by the table. Perhaps if George, her favourite brother, had been there too, Agatha might even then have stayed her steps. But he had not yet returned from work, and the others hardly looked up as she went by. She opened the door and walked out down the pretentious, tiny carriage drive to the road, and turned to the left towards the station. Somehow as she walked thither panic came over her and she hastened her steps more and more until she was almost running. When she reached the station and found there was no up train for half an hour she could not bring herself to wait; instead she boarded the down train and travelled on it for a couple of stations, and then changed trains and returned back through Greenwich. And so Harry and George, sent out to make peace at any price by a despairing Dad ten minutes after she had left the house, quite missed her.

S
O THAT AT
midsummer, 1893, a pleasant-faced widow, Mrs. Agatha Brown, attired in all the hideous panoply of mourning for a newly-dead husband which the Queen’s example had made nearly compulsory, came to live in lodgings at Peckham. Her sympathetic landlady soon knew all about her—about the husband, rather a bad lot, seemingly, who had been in the greengrocery trade and had died suddenly of some rather vague disease, but leaving his widow well provided for by the standards of that simple place and time; about the happy event which was to be expected shortly; about her general friendlessness and the dislike with which her late husband’s family regarded her for intercepting the legacies they had come to look upon as their due. Mrs. Rodgers became a great admirer of Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Brown was so evidently a lady, yet withal she had so sound a knowledge of practical affairs, and, most important, she had round her that tremendous aura of ‘independent means’ which implies so much to a working-class dependent for its daily bread upon the whim of an employer. Mrs. Brown paid splendidly regular money for her furnished rooms, but she paid only a tiny amount more than the lowest market value, so that contempt could not creep in to adulterate Mrs. Rodgers’s admiration. Mrs. Brown knew all about the prices of things and how long they ought to last, and she always knew how much of her little joints and of her butter and tea and other supplies she had left, so that Mrs. Rodgers’s first tentative stealings were calmly checked, and she bore no ill will—quite the contrary. She was soon a very subservient ally.

Mr. Deane, too, who had drawn up that astonishing will of Agatha’s mother which had enabled Agatha to become Mrs. Brown of Peckham, was very helpful and kind. He shook his head sympathetically when Agatha, calling upon him, told him about family trouble which had led her to leave home, and of course, seeing that such was his business, he readily consented to take upon himself the management of Agatha’s ‘estate’—the six houses of Beaconsfield Terrace. He looked up curiously and sharply when Agatha explained that at her new address she was known as Mrs. Brown, and when he noticed the expression on her face he pulled his white whiskers and looked down at his notes again in embarrassed fashion. After all, he was a solicitor, and solicitors should not be shocked at encountering family skeletons.

Colchester Street, Peckham, was a brief road of a hundred houses a side, nearly similar but not quite, the pavements grimly flagged, the rest grimly macadamized. At one end was the main road, along which poured a volume of traffic considered large for those times—horse trams and horse buses predominating—and at the other end was a public house, the Colchester Arms; but despite this latter handicap Colchester Street was very respectable and at that time very few of the houses accommodated more than one family. Just here and there widows or widowers or maiden-ladies (school teachers) occupied one or two rooms, but that was a very different matter from other possible developments. Agatha had drifted to 37 Colchester Street as a result of a brief examination of the small advertisements of the local paper; it was the first address she had called at, and she was satisfied. She settled in, and settled down, to a life which was an odd blend of the strictly orderly and logical and nightmarishly fantastic. It was quite orderly and logical of course that she should pay her weekly bills promptly and keep a close eye on her expenditure and exact respect from those whom she encountered, but it was wildly fantastic that she should have no exacting daily duties, that time should hang idly on her hands, that she should have no calls to make nor callers to receive, that she should be addressed as ‘Mrs.’, that she should go to the local doctor and surrender her sweet private body to him for examination and decision on her condition.