Poor Relations Part 17

"No, sir, it's me," a grim voice replied. "And if you don't want us all to be drowned where we stand, it being a Sunday afternoon, and not a plumber to be got, and Maud in the hysterics, and those two young Tartars screaming like Bedlamites, and your dinner ruined and done for, and the feathers gone from Elsa's new hat, per-raps you could come upstairs, Mr. Touchwood. Gordon's head indeed, and the boy as naked as a st.i.tch!"

John jumped to his feet and hurried out on the landing; at the same moment Bertram with nothing to cover him except a pudding-shape on his head, a tea-tray on his arm, a Turkish scimitar at his waist, and the pinions of a blue and green bird tied round his ankles leapt six stairs of the flight above and alighting at his uncle's feet, thrust the calf's head into his face.

"You're turned to stone, Phineus," he yelled. "You can't move. You've seen the Gorgon."

"There he goes again with his Gordon and his Gladstone," said Mrs.

Worfolk. "How dare you be so daring?"

"The Gorgon's sister," cried Bertram lunging at her with the scimitar.

"Beware, I am invisible."

Whereupon he enveloped the calf's head in a napkin, held the tea-tray before his face, and darted away upstairs.

"I'm afraid he's a little over-excited," said John, doubtfully.

At this moment a stream of water began to flow past his feet and pour down upon him from the landing above.

"Why, the house is full of water," he gasped.

"It's what I'm trying to tell you, sir," Mrs. Worfolk fumed. "He's done something with that there cistern and burst it. I can't stop the water."

John followed Perseus on his wild flight up the stairs down which every moment water was flowing more freely. When he reached the cistern cupboard he discovered Maud bound fast to the disordered cistern, while Viola holding in her mouth a large ivory paper-knife and wearing what looked like Mrs. Worfolk's sealskin jacket that John had given her last Christmas was splas.h.i.+ng at full length in a puddle on the floor and clawing at Maud's skirts with ferocious growls and grunts.

"You dare try to undress me again, Master Bertram," the statuesque Maud was screaming.

"Well, Andromeda's got practically nothing on in the book, and you said you'd rather not be the sea-monster," Bertram was arguing. "Andromeda,"

he cried seeing by the manner of his uncle's advance that the curtain must now be rung down upon the play, "I have turned the monster to stone. Go on, V, you can't move from now on."

Viola stiffened and without a twitch let the stream of water pour down upon her, while Bertram planting his foot in the small of her back waved triumphantly the Gorgon's head, both of whose ears gave way under the strain, so that John's dinner was soon as wet as he was.

The cistern emptied itself at last; Maud was released; Bertram and Viola were led downstairs to be dried and on Mrs. Worfolk's recommendation sent instantly to bed.

"I told you," said Bertram, "that if Miss Coldwell had come, we couldn't have done anything decent."

What woman, John wondered, might serve as a comparable deterrent? The fantastic idea of appealing for aid to Doris Hamilton flashed through his mind, but on second thoughts he felt that there would be something undignified in asking her to come at such a moment. Then he remembered how often he had heard his sister-in-law Beatrice lament her childlessness. Why should he not visit James and Beatrice this very evening? He owed them a visit, and his domestics were all obviously too much agitated even to contemplate the preparation of dinner. Mrs.

Worfolk would perhaps be in a better temper when he got back and he would explain to her that the seal was a marine animal, the skin of which would not be injured by water.

"I think I'll ask Mrs. James to give us a helping hand this week," John suggested. "I shall be rather busy myself."

"Yes, sir, and so shall I, trying to get the house straight again which it looks more like Shooting the Chutes at Earl's Court than a gentleman's house, I'm bound to say."

"Still it might have been worse, Mrs. Worfolk. They might have played with another element. Fire, for instance. That would have been much more awkward."

"And it's thanks to me the house isn't on fire as well," Mrs. Worfolk shrilled in her indignation. "For if that young Turk didn't come charging down into the kitchen and trying to tell me that the kitchen-fire was a serpent and start attacking it tooth and nail. And there was poor Elsa shut up in the coal-cellar and hollering fit to break anyone's heart. 'She's Daniel in a tower of bra.s.s,' he says as bold as a tower of bra.s.s himself."

"And what were you, Mrs. Worfolk?" John asked.

"Oh, his lords.h.i.+p had the nerve to say I was an atlas. 'Yes,' I said, 'my lord, you let me catch hold of you and I'll make your behind look like an atlas before I've done with it.'"

"Do you think that Mrs. James could control them?" John asked.

"I wouldn't say as the Lord Mayor himself could control them, but it's not for me to give advice when good food can be turned into Gordon's heads. And whatever give them the idea, I don't know, for I'm sure General Gordon was a very handsome man to look at. Yaul excuse me, sir, but if you don't want to catch your death, you'd better change your things."

John followed Mrs. Worfolk's advice, and an hour later he was walking through the misty November night in the direction of St. John's Wood.

CHAPTER VI

If a taxi had lurked in any of the melancholy streets through which John was making his way to Hill Road he would have taken refuge in it gratefully, for there was no atmosphere that preyed upon his mind with such a sense of desolation as the hour of evening prayer in a respectable Northern suburb. The occasional footsteps of uninspired lovers dying away into by-streets; the occasional sounds of stuffy wors.h.i.+p proceeding from church or chapel; the occasional bark of a dog trying to obtain admittance to an empty house; the occasional tread of a morose policeman; the occasional hoot of a distant motor-horn; the occasional whiff of privet-shrubberies and of damp rusty railings; the occasional effusions of chlorotic gaslight upon the raw air, half fog, half drizzle; the occasional shadows that quivered upon the dimly luminous blinds of upper windows; the occasional mutterings of housemaids in bas.e.m.e.nts--not even John's buoyant spirit could rise above such a weight of depressing adjuncts to the influential Sabbath gloom.

He began to accuse himself of having been too hasty in his treatment of Bertram and Viola; the scene at Church Row viewed in retrospect seemed to him cheerful and, if the water had not reached his Aubusson rug, perfectly harmless. No doubt, in the boarding-house at Earl's Court such behavior had been considered impossible. Had not the children talked of finis.h.i.+ng Robinson Crusoe and alluded to his own lack of suitable fur rugs? Evidently last week the drama had been interrupted by the landlady because they had been spoiling her fur rugs. John was on the point of going back to Church Row and inviting the children to celebrate his return in a jolly impromptu supper, when he remembered that there were at least five more Sundays before Christmas. Next Sunday they would probably decide to revive the Argonauts, a story that, so far as he could recall the incidents, offered many opportunities for destructive ingenuity. Then, the Sunday after, there would be Theseus and the Minotaur; if there were another calf's head in the larder, Bertram might easily try to compel Mrs. Worfolk to be the Minotaur and wear it, which might mean Mrs. Worfolk's resignation from his service, a prospect that could not be faced with equanimity. But would the presence of Beatrice exercise an effective control upon this dressing up, and could he stand Beatrice for six weeks at a stretch? He might, of course, engage her to protect him and his property during the first few days, and after that to come for every week end. Suppose he did invite Doris Hamilton, but, of course, that was absurd--suppose he did invite Beatrice, would Doris Hamilton--would Beatrice come? Could it possibly be held to be one of the duties of a confidential secretary to a.s.sist her employer in checking the exuberance of his juvenile relations? Would not Miss Hamilton decide that her post approximated too nearly to that of a governess? Obviously such a woman had never contemplated the notion of becoming a governess. But had she ever contemplated the notion of becoming a confidential secretary? No, no, the plan was fantastic, unreal ... he must trust to Beatrice and hope that Miss Coldwell would presently recover, or that Eleanor's tour would come to a sudden end, or that George would have paid what he owed his landlady and feel better able to withstand her criticism of his children. If all these hopes proved unfounded, a schoolboy, like the rest of human nature, had his price--his noiselessness could be bought in youth like his silence later on. John was turning into Hill Road when he made this reflection; he was within the area of James' cynical operations.

John's eldest brother was at forty-six an outwardly rather improved, an inwardly much debased replica of their father. The old man had not possessed a winning personality, but his energy and genuine powers of accomplishment had made him a successful general pract.i.tioner, because people overlooked his rudeness in the confidence he gave them and forgave his lack of sympathy on account of his obvious devotion to their welfare. He with his skeptical and curious mind, his pa.s.sion for mathematics and hatred of idealism, and his unaffected contempt for the human race could not conceive a worse h.e.l.l in eternity than a general practice offered him in life; but having married a vain, beautiful, lazy and conventional woman, he could not bring himself to spoil his honesty by blaming for the foolish act anything more tangible than the scheme of creation; and having made himself a d.a.m.ned uncomfortable bed with a pretty quilt, as he used to say, he had decided that he must lie on it.

No doubt, many general pract.i.tioners go through life with the conviction that they were intended to devote themselves to original research; but Dr. Robert Touchwood from what those who were qualified to judge used to say of him had reason to feel angry with his fate.

James, who as a boy had shown considerable talent, was chosen by his father to inherit the practice. It was typical of the old gentleman that he did not a.s.sume this succession as the right of the eldest son, but that he deliberately awarded it to James as the most apparently adequate of his offspring. Unfortunately James, who was dyspeptic even at school, chose to imitate his father's mannerisms while he was still a student at Guy's and helping at odd hours in the dispensary. Soon after he had taken his finals and had seen his name engraved upon the bra.s.s plate underneath his father's, old Dr. Touchwood fell ill of an incurable disease and James found himself in full charge of the practice, which he proceeded to ruin, so that not long after his father's death he was compelled to sell it for a much smaller sum than it would have fetched a few years before. For a time he played alternately with the plan of setting up as a specialist in Harley Street or of burying himself in the country to write a monograph on British dragon-flies--for some reason these fierce and brilliant insects touched a responsive chord in James.

He finally decided upon the dragon-flies and went down to Ockham Common in Surrey to search for _Sympetrum Fonscolombii_, a rare migrant that was reported from that locality in 1892. He could not prove that it was any more indigenous than himself to the sophisticated county, but in the course of his observations he met Beatrice Pyrke, the daughter of a prosperous inn-keeper in a neighboring town, and married her.

Notwithstanding such a catch--he used to vow that she was more resplendent than even _Anax Imperator_--he continued to take an interest in dragon-flies, until his monograph was unluckily forestalled a few years later. It was owing to an article of his in one of the entomological journals that he encountered Daniel Curtis--a meeting which led to Hilda's marriage. In those days--John had not yet made a financial success of literature--this result had seemed to the embittered odonatist a complete justification of the many hours he had wasted in preparing for his never-to-be written monograph, because his sister's future had for some time been presenting a disagreeable and insoluble problem. Besides observing dragon-flies, James spent one year in making a clock out of fishbones, and another year in perfecting a method of applying gold lacquer to poker-work.

A more important hobby, however, that finally displaced all the others was foreign literature, in the criticism of which he frequently occupied pages in the expensive reviews, pages that gradually grew numerous enough to make first one book and then another. James' articles on foreign literature were always signed; but he also wrote many criticisms of English literature that were not signed. This hack-work exasperated him so much that he gradually came to despising the whole of English literature after the eighteenth century with the exception of the novels of George Meredith. These he used to read aloud to his wife when he was feeling particularly bilious and derive from her nervous bewilderment a savage satisfaction. In her the critic possessed a perpetual incarnation of the British public that he so deeply scorned, and he treated his wife in the same way as he fancied he treated the larger ent.i.ty: without either of them he would have been intellectually at a loose end. For all his admiration of French literature James spoke the language with a hideous British accent. Once on a joint holiday John, who for the whole of a channel-crossing had been listening to his brother's tirades against the rottenness of modern English literature and his paeans on behalf of modern French literature, had been much consoled when they reached Calais to find that James could not make himself intelligible even to a porter.

"But," as John had said with a chuckle, "perhaps Meredith couldn't have made himself intelligible to an English porter."

"It's the porter's fault," James had replied, sourly.

For some years now the critic with his wife and a fawn-coloured bulldog had lived in furnished apartments at 65 Hill Road, a creeper-matted house of the early 'seventies which James characterized as quiet and Beatrice as handy; in point of fact it was neither, being exposed to barrel-organs and remote from busses. A good deal of the original furniture still incommoded the rooms; but James had his own chair, Beatrice had her own footstool, and Henri Beyle the bulldog his own basket. The fire-place was crowned by an overmantel of six decorative panels, all that was left of James' method of applying gold lacquer to poker-work. There were also three or four family portraits, which John for some reason coveted for his own library, and a drawer-cabinet of faded and decrepit dragon-flies. Some bookshelves filled with yellow French novels gave an exotic look to the drab room, which, whenever James was not smoking his unusually foul pipes, smelt of gravy and malt vinegar except near the window, where the predominant perfume was of ferns and oilcloth. Between the living-room and the bedroom were double-doors hidden by brown plush curtains, which if opened quickly revealed nothing but a bleak expanse of bed and a gray window fringed with ragged creepers. When a visitor entered this room to wash his hands he used to look at James' fishbone clock under its bell-gla.s.s on a high chest of drawers and s.h.i.+ver in the dampness; the fireplace was covered by a large wardrobe, and one of Beatrice's hats was often on the bed, the counterpane of which was stenciled with Beyle's paws. John, who loathed this bedroom, always said he did not want to wash his hands, when he took a meal at Hill Road.

The depression of his Sunday evening walk had made John less critical than he usually was of James' rooms, and he heard the gate of the front-garden swing back behind him with a sense of pleasurable expectation.

"There will be cold mutton for supper," he said to himself, thinking rather guiltily of the calf's head that he might have eaten and to partake of which he had not invited his brother and Beatrice. "Cold mutton and a very wet salad, with either tinned pears or tinned pineapple to follow--or perhaps stewed figs."

When John entered, James was deep in his armchair with Beyle snoring on his lap, where he served as a rest for the large book that his master was reading.

"Hullo," the critic exclaimed without attempting to rise. "You are back in town then?"

"Yes, I came back on Friday."

"I thought you wouldn't be able to stand the country for long. Remember what Horry Walpole said about the country?"

"Yes," said John, quickly. He had not the least idea really, but he had long ago ceased to have any scruples about preventing James first of all from trying to remember a quotation, secondly from trying to find it, thirdly from asking Beatrice where she had hidden the book in which it was to be found, and finally from not only reading it when the book was found, but also from reading page after page of irrelevant matter in the context. "Though Ambles is really very jolly," he added. "I'm expecting you and Beatrice to spend Christmas with me, you know."

James grunted.

"Well, we'll see about that. I don't belong to the d.i.c.kens Fellows.h.i.+p and I shall be pretty busy. You popular authors soon forget what it means to be busy. So you've had another success? Who was it this time--Lucretia Borgia, eh?" he laughed, bitterly. "Good lord, it's incredible, isn't it? But the English drama's in a sick state--a very sick state."

"All contemporary art is in a sick state according to the critics," John observed. "Critics are like doctors; they are not prejudiced in favor of general good-health."