Brown on Resolution (7 page)

All this, though, was quite lost on young Albert when he was moved up from the infants’ school and entered Mr. Gold’s class in the boys’ school. If Mr. Gold had any effect at all upon Albert, it was a slight impression of neatness and dapperness; Albert had too great a respect for authority to dream that it might ever be possible for a master to have limbs of water and a heart of fear. And when, one evening, just after school, Albert fell down in the playground and cut his chin rather badly, Albert was quite grateful to Mr. Gold for the kindly manner in which he washed the cut and staunched the bleeding and inquired how he was feeling now; and finally Albert took it quite kindly that Mr. Gold should walk down Colchester Road with him in case he should feel ill on the way, and to explain to his mother that the bloodstains on his shirt and collar were not really his fault.

It was of course teatime when Mr. Gold and Albert reached No. 37 Colchester Road; the china gleamed upon the tablecloth and the kettle steamed beside the fire. What could be more natural than that Mr. Gold should be asked to have a cup? And nothing could be more natural than that Mr. Gold, landlady-ridden bachelor that he was, should yearn for the comfort of Mrs. Brown’s sitting-room and fireside, and should accept with alacrity—alacrity which warmed into well-being when Mr. Gold began to notice Mrs. Brown’s beautiful complexion and well-filled bodice.

Young Albert, of course, as soon as the novelty of having a schoolmaster to tea wore off, found the situation irksome and quietly made his way out of the room, but Mr. Gold lingered. He expanded in the grateful warmth of the fire and Agatha’s well-trained deference towards the superior sex. They chatted amicably enough for quite a while before at last Mr. Gold took himself off after having begged permission to come again, and Agatha at his departure found herself almost dreamy. Queenly she was, but she was of that type of queen which inclines towards a Prince Consort. Mr. Gold’s personified inadequacy made a very definite appeal to her. Why, he was almost shorter than she; she could pick him up and carry him if she wanted to. And he was so refined and gentlemanly too (as a matter of fact, ‘refined’ was the most frequent word on his lips), while he avoided being so terrifyingly of the public school class as Commander Saville-Samarez. Agatha actually began to calculate what effect a marriage with Mr. Gold might have upon her cherished ambition for Albert, and she decided it would be a good one.

And of course, Agatha having decided that, Mr. Gold’s career as a bachelor was as good as ended. Not that he was unwilling; he walked away from No. 37 through the dusky side streets with his mind full of rosy visions. Mr. Gold was not at all a man to think often about arms and legs, and certainly not about the other parts of the female body, but he caught himself doing so quite often that evening. The hang of the back of Agatha’s skirt, and her neat hands, and her sweet face and firm bosom all conspired to set him imagining. Next morning in class he treated Albert with such downright favouritism that Albert’s fellow nine-year-olds turned and rent him at playtime.

But one single moment of expansion sufficed to destroy all Mr. Gold’s chances. The pity of it was that he was never to know what it was which snatched from his reach all Agatha’s sweet charms, which deprived him of the encirclement of her round white arms, which barred him for ever from the paradise of her breast and the calm sweetness of her throat. It was at Mr. Gold’s third visit, or it may have been his fourth—it was his last, at any rate. Mr. Gold was sitting by the fire in the single armchair; he was comfortably inflated with tea and hot buttered toast and an extraordinary good opinion of himself; all three combined to bulge out his waistcoat.

Agatha, of course, as an inferior female ought to do, was sitting before the fire on a less comfortable chair, bent over her sewing. The charming femininity of the pose made a vast appeal to Mr. Gold; he admired the bent head and neck with the firelight playing upon them; whiteness and roundness combined to set little pink pictures moving at the back of his mind. He even visualized Agatha’s legs in their trim stockings—and of course, as the old vulgar saying has it, there was something in her stocking besides her leg! Agatha
and
a bit of money; an efficient housekeeper and a white-armed wife! The picture was far too irresistible. Mr. Gold puffed himself out a little more; soon he would propose, and he would taste the honeyed sweetness of those demure lips. Meanwhile, the present line of conversation was pleasant; he continued it, laying down the law to the accompaniment of Agatha’s dutiful ‘Reallys?’ and ‘Of courses’.

Agatha too, as she sewed, had little pictures, only not nearly as defined, at the back of her mind. Not, of course, that she visualized any normally clothed portion whatever of Mr. Gold’s anatomy. Agatha did not have that sort of imagination. But she had vague ideas of feeling Mr. Gold’s weak little face pressing upon her breast, and of clasping him in her arms, and of spending every evening as a wife should in the less comfortable of the two chairs by the fire while a tired husband told her what she ought to think about the world in general. But she suddenly stopped sewing, aghast, when the import of Mr. Gold’s latest remarks penetrated to her active intelligence.

“And all this money we spend on unproductive things too,” Mr. Gold was saying. “I don’t believe in it. A one-and-six-penny income tax will ruin this country before very long. Look at the money we spend on the Army and the Navy. Millions. This
Dreadnought
that they speak about. Twelve-inch guns and all. To my mind it’s only an excuse for spending money so that there will be more places for people’s nephews and cousins. What do we want a Navy
for
? Who’s going to attack us, and what good would they get by it, and what harm would it do, anyway? A Navy doesn’t do any good to anyone except the people who get good jobs in it. Germany’s getting just as bad, apparently. It’s all a lot of silly dangerous nonsense. Look at the last war. What right had we got in South Africa? None at all. We were wrong to fight, and it was the hotheads who forced us into it. I said so all along, although of course it made me unpopular. That was why I had to change my school and come to Colchester Road. They called me a pro-Boer, and all that sort of thing. But I stuck it out. I’m a man of peace, I am.”

Mr. Gold only ceased when he noticed the look on Agatha’s face. That so alarmed him that he got up from his chair.

“Good gracious, Mrs. Brown, whatever’s the matter? Are you unwell?”

“No,” said Agatha, shrinking away from him. “No.”

She was merely appalled by the heresies she had heard enunciated. That Mr. Gold, whom she thought she liked, should be a Little Englander, an advocate of disarmament, a pro-Boer, a scoffer at the
Dreadnought
! It was far too terrible for words. At the same moment she realized what a terribly narrow escape she had had. She dreaded to think what the result upon Albert might have been had he had Mr. Gold as a stepfather. Fancy a world without a British Navy! It was dreadful. Mr. Gold, try as he would, could have thought of nothing to say that could have hurt her more..

“No,” said Agatha. “I’m quite well.”

Quite unconsciously she was imitating the heroines of the novels she had read in the dead old days before the British Navy took hold of her. She ‘drew herself up to her full height’, her eyes ‘flashed fire’, she ‘made an imperious gesture’.

“Please—” said Mr. Gold.

“I—I think it is time for you to go,” said Agatha.

Poor Mr. Gold simply could not understand it.

“But, Mrs. Brown—”

All Agatha did was to walk across the room and open the door, and it would have taken someone of stronger personality than Mr. Gold to have withstood the implied command. He crept out crestfallen, and Agatha shut the parlour door decisively behind him. Nothing remained for Mr. Gold to do except to take his hat and coat from the pegs on the landing, stumble downstairs, and let himself out.

“Now listen, Mrs. Rodgers,” said Agatha that evening, “if that—man ever comes again, tell him I’m not at home. You understand?”

And she looked so queenly and her eyes flashed so bright as she said it that Mrs. Rodgers could only say, “Lor, mum, yes, mum,” and gaze at her with admiration and without a thought of asking questions. Moreover, when Mr. Gold, inevitably, came calling again, she conveyed Agatha’s message to him with such force and unction as simply to infuriate the unfortunate little man. He had written to her already, and Agatha had simply ignored his letter. He made up for it in the end by calling Albert out of class and giving him a good hiding for no reason whatever.

When Albert told his mother about it later Agatha merely nodded and offered no consolation. She did not mind at all if antipathy sprang up between Albert and the heretical Mr. Gold. Quite on the contrary. Besides, Agatha knew, without even Albert telling her, that hidings from Mr. Gold were not of much account.

Mr. Gold eventually solaced his puzzled exasperation by convincing himself that Agatha was mad.

S
O YEARS FOLLOWED
years and each succeeding year dragged more heavily and more painfully than did the one before; To Agatha’s tortured conscience it seemed as if retribution was being exacted from her for her vile sin. To her it was natural that a lifetime of pain and squalor should be the consequence of a five days’ madness. Fine sewing sank steadily in value; private customers fell away—the economic causes of a falling birth-rate and marriage-rate broke her on their wheel. There was not so much demand nowadays for baby clothes or wedding dresses, and simplicity was creeping into fashion even in such garments as were ordered of her. The shops which had first bought her output had grown larger and had amalgamated, and obscurely she was squeezed out from supplying them. Competition was growing fiercer, and money was scarcer in the 1900s than it had been in the 1890s. Agatha’s earnings grew smaller, and there were often weeks when she had to draw upon her hoarded capital to meet Mrs. Rodgers’s weekly bill. She was finding less work and smaller pay for what she did.

Nor was this all. Physical pain, that last exaction by a relentless deity in payment for her sin, had come into her life: Sometimes it was slight, and Agatha could seemingly set it aside unnoticed. But at the other times it was sharper, more intense, drastic. It was not a fair pain. It did not come upon her when she was expecting it and braced against it. When she stood up from her chair and held herself ready for it, it did not come, but the instant she relaxed to go on with what she was doing it fell upon her and rent her with agony. It was a fierce, horrible pain.

It had begun to come upon her when Albert was eleven, when he had grown into a thickset freckled boy with unruly hair just like his father’s. He had done more than his masters had expected of him by winning a scholarship and proceeding from the Council School to a Secondary School. Agatha’s careful supervision of his studies thus bore its first fruit. She was maternally proud of his progress even while she had to reconcile herself to the fact that he was only an ordinary little boy—just like what his father must have been. Agatha, with a growing obsession of sin, tried hard not to think of Albert’s father, but Albert reminded her of him at every turn, overwhelming her with conscience-stricken yearning for something unknown—certainly not for further contact with the Commander, even though she had followed his progress step by step up the Navy List, and had watched apprehensively the reports of the combined expedition in China in 1900 (wherein Commander Saville-Samarez had led a portion of the Naval Brigade), and had even prayed that he would not be damagingly involved in the great Fisher-Beresford feud which was then threatening the Navy with disruption.

Agatha still was up to date in naval affairs. She followed all the twists and turns of the controversy between Lord Charles and Sir John; she appreciated the trend of the new construction so that the details of the
Dreadnought
, when they were published, roused no surprise in her; she thoroughly understood the import of Fisher’s new policy at the Admiralty whereby ships were scrapped in scores and the Navy recalled to home waters until nine of its guns out of ten were pointing at Germany.

But all that, of course, was before pain came upon her. Pain, and the pressing need of seeking more and more work, began to distract her from this life study. She tried to accept the pain in the philosophic spirit with which she had accepted all the other buffetings of Fate. Pain was all a woman should expect, especially a woman who had sinned as grievously and unrepentantly as she. Pain was natural to a woman at her time of life. Pain—the grinding, lacerating spasms of agony brought sweat down her drawn face and made her gasp and choke even as she was trying to explain it to herself. She lost her smooth, placid good looks. Her cheeks fell inwards and her mouth compressed itself into a harder line. Wrinkles came between her eyebrows as a result of the continual distortion of her forehead during the agonizing bursts of pain.

Young Albert, full of the pressing and immediate interests of a new school, and a Secondary School at that, did not notice the gradual change which came over his mother—nor is it specially surprising, seeing that Agatha always managed to raise a smile for him on his entrance, and continued, with a fervour more vivid than ever, to impress upon him the great tradition of Duty and the magnificence of England upon the seas, rousing his limited imagination to heights one would have thought unscalable to such a combination of the solemn and matter-of-fact. He did not even notice at first his mother’s unaccountable fits of sudden abstraction and convulsive gripping of the arms of her chair.

But there came a time when even Agatha could no longer endure the torment, nor explain it to herself as natural in a woman of forty-three. For the second time in her life she yielded up her body to Doctor Walters’s anxious examination and for the second time listened to his verdict. A different verdict this time, delivered sadly instead of jovially, with regret instead of hope. Even as he spoke Agatha realized that what he was saying was not news to her—it only voiced a fact she had refused to admit to herself. Doctor Walters’s heart was wrung with pity, as only a heart can be upon which pity makes continual demands, the while he told her what he had found, told her of the operation which would be necessary—and strove to keep from his voice any hint of what he knew would be the end even after the operation. Agatha looked him in the face as he spoke; she was not of the stuff that flinches. It was Doctor Walters instead who avoided a meeting of the eyes. He was sick at heart the while he chafed to himself about the cursed suffering obstinacy of womankind which postpones action until action is too late.