THE OF SUFFERING
The old woman lay still another year, then she suddenly sank out of life. George ceased to write to me, but I learned his news elsewhere. He became more and more intimate with the Mayhews. After old Mayhew's , the two sons had remained on in the large dark house that stood off the Nottingham Road in Eberwich. This house had been bequeathed to the oldest daughter by the mother. Maud Mayhew, who was married and separated from her husband, kept house for her brothers. She was a tall, large woman with high cheek-bones and oily black hair looped over her ears. Tom Mayhew was also a handsome man, very dark and ruddy, with bright eyes.
The Mayhews' house was called the "." It was a solid building, of old red brick, fifty yards back from the Eberwich highroad. Between it and the road was an unkempt lawn, surrounded by very high black trees. The house seemed to be among the hollies. Passing through the large gate, one came immediately upon the bare side of the house and upon the great range of stables. Old Mayhew had in his day stabled thirty or more horses there. Now grass was between the red bricks, and all the doors were shut, save perhaps two or three which were open for George's horses.
The "Hollies" became a kind of club for the , "better-off" men of the district. The large dining-room was gloomily and furnished, the drawing-room was a desert, but the smaller morning-room was comfortable enough, with wicker arm-chairs, heavy curtains, and a large sideboard. In this room George and the Mayhews met with several men two or three times a week. There they discussed horses and made mock of the authority of women. George provided the whisky, and they all gambled timidly at cards. These bachelor parties were the source of great to the wives of the married men who attended them.
"He's quite when he's been at those Mayhews'," said Meg. "I'm sure they do nothing but cry us down."
Maud Mayhew kept apart from these meetings, watching over her two children. She had been very unhappily married, and now was reserved, silent. The women of Eberwich watched her as she went swiftly along the street in the morning with her basket, and they gloried a little in her , because she was too proud to accept , yet they were sorry in their hearts for her, and she was never touched with . George saw her frequently, but she treated him coldly as she treated the other men, so he was afraid of her.
He had more facilities now for his horse-dealing. When the grandmother died, in the October two years after the marriage of George she left him seven hundred pounds. To Meg she left the Inn, and the two houses she had built in Newerton, together with shares to the value of nearly a thousand pounds. George and Meg felt themselves to be people of property. The result, however, was only a little further coldness between them. He was very careful that she had all that was hers. She said to him once when they were quarrelling, that he needn't go feeding the Mayhews on the money that came out of her business. Thenceforward he kept strict accounts of all his affairs, and she must them, receiving her exact dues. This was a to her woman's capricious soul of and cruelty.
The Christmas after the grandmother's death another son was born to them. For the time George and Meg became very good friends again.
When in the following March I heard he was coming down to London with Tom Mayhew on business, I wrote and asked him to stay with me. Meg replied, saying she was so glad I had asked him: she did not want him going off with that fellow again; he had been such a lot better lately, and she was sure it was only those men at Mayhew's made him what he was.
He consented to stay with me. I wrote and told him Lettie and Leslie were in London, and that we should dine with them one evening. I met him at King's Cross and we all three drove west. Mayhew was a handsome, well-built man; he and George made a notable couple. They were both in breeches and gaiters, but George still looked like a yeoman, while Mayhew had all the of the stable. We made an impossible trio. Mayhew laughed and jested broadly for a short time, then he grew restless and fidgety. He felt restrained and awkward in my presence. Later, he told George I was a damned parson. On the other hand, I was content to look at his rather vulgar beauty—his teeth were blackened with smoking—and to listen to his ineffectual talk, but I could find absolutely no response. George was go-between. To me he was cautious and rather , to Mayhew he was careless, and his attitude was with contempt.
When the son of the horse-dealer at last left us to go to some of his father's old cronies, we were glad. Very uncertain, very sensitive and wavering, our old burned again like the fragile burning of alcohol. Closed together in the same blue flames, we discovered and watched the of life in the town revealed wonderfully to us. We laughed at the tyranny of old romance. We scorned the faded procession of old years, and made mock of the vast pilgrimage of by-gone romances travelling farther into the dim distance. Were we not in the midst of the bewildering pageant of modern life, with all its confusion of bannerets and colours, with its infinite interweaving of sounds, the of the modern toys of haste striking like keen spray, the heavy boom of busy mankind its bread, earnestly, forming the bed of all other sounds; and between these two the swiftness of songs, the of the joy of life, the oboes of privation, the drums of tragedy, and the eternal scraping of the two deep-toned of despair?
We watched the taxicabs coursing with their noses down to the street, we watched the rocking hansoms, and the stateliness of buses. In the silent green of the park we stood and listened to the surging of the ocean of life. We watched a girl with streaming hair go down the Row, a dark man, laughing and showing his white teeth, galloping more heavily at her elbow. We saw a of life-guards enter the gates of the park, and glittering with silver and white and red. They came near to us, and we thrilled a little as we watched the muscles of their white smooth answering the movement of the horses, and their cheeks and their chins bending with proud to the rhythm of the march. We watched the rhythm of the body of men moving in and silver further down the leafless avenue, like a slightly wavering spark of red life blown along. At the Marble Arch Corner we listened to a little who was fiercely under a plane tree. The hot stream of his words flowed over the old wounds that the knowledge of the unending of the poor had given me, and I . For him the world was all East-end, and all the East-End was as a pool from which the waters are drained off, leaving the water-things to in the wet mud under the sun, till the whole of the city seems a heaving, shuddering struggle of black-mudded objects deprived of the elements of life. I felt a great terror of the little man, lest he should make me see all mud, as I had seen before. Then I felt a breathless pity for him, that his eyes should be always filled with mud, and never brightened. George listened intently to the speaker, very much moved by him.
At night, after the theatre, we saw the outcasts sleep in a rank under the Waterloo bridge, their heads to the wall, their feet lying out on the pavement: a long, black, heap at the foot of the wall. All the faces were covered but two, that of a peaked, pale little man, and that of a woman. Over these two faces, floating like uneasy pale dreams on their obscurity, swept now and again the trailing light of the tram cars. We picked our way past the line of abandoned feet, shrinking from the sight of the thin bare ankles of a young man, from the draggled edge of the skirts of a bunched-up woman, from the pitiable sight of the men who had wrapped their legs in newspaper for a little warmth, and lay like worthless parcels. It was raining. Some men stood at the edge of the causeway in , finding no room to sleep. Outside, on a seat in the blackness and the rain, a woman sat sleeping, while the water and hung heavily at the ends of her loosened of hair. Her hands were pushed in the of her jacket. She lurched forward in her sleep, started, and one of her hands fell out of her bosom. She sank again to sleep. George gripped my arm.
"Give her something," he whispered in panic. I was afraid. Then suddenly getting a florin from my pocket, I my nerves and slid it into her palm. Her hand was soft, and warm, and curled in sleep. She started violently, looking up at me, then down at her hand. I turned my face aside, terrified lest she should look in my eyes, and full of shame and grief I ran down the embankment to him. We hurried along under the plane trees in silence. The shining cars were drawing tall in the distance over Westminster Bridge, a fainter, yellow light running with them on the water below. The wet streets were spilled with golden liquor of light, and on the deep blackness of the river were the restless yellow of the lamps.
Lettie and Leslie were staying up at Hampstead with a friend of the Tempests, one of the largest in the firm of Tempest, Wharton & Co. The Raphaels had a substantial house, and Lettie preferred to go to them rather than to an hotel, especially as she had brought with her her infant son, now ten months old, with his nurse. They invited George and me to dinner on the Friday evening. The party included Lettie's host and hostess, and also a Scottish poetess, and an Irish musician, composer of songs and pianoforte rhapsodies.
Lettie wore a black lace dress in mourning for one of Leslie's aunts. This made her look older, otherwise there seemed to be no change in her. A subtle observer might have noticed a little hardness about her mouth, and hanging slightly on her eyes. She was, however, excited by the company in which she found herself, therefore she with clever speeches and rapid, brilliant observations. Certainly on such occasions she was admirable. The rest of the company formed, as it were, the orchestra which accompanied her.
George was exceedingly quiet. He a few words now and then to Mrs Raphael, but on the whole he was altogether silent, listening.
"Really!" Lettie was saying, "I don't see that one thing is worth doing any more than another. It's like dessert: you are equally indifferent whether you have grapes, or pears, or pineapple."
"Have you already dined so far?" sang the Scottish poetess in her musical, manner.
"The only thing worth doing is producing," said Lettie.
", that is what all the young folk are saying nowadays!" sighed the Irish musician.
"That is the only thing one finds any pleasure in—that is to say, any satisfaction," continued Lettie, smiling, and turning to the two artists.
"Do you not think so?" she added.
"You do come to a point at last," said the Scottish poetess, "when your work is a real source of satisfaction."
"Do you write poetry then?" asked George of Lettie.
"I! Oh, dear no! I have tried to make up a Limerick for a competition, but in vain. So you see, I am a failure there. Did you know I have a son, though?—a marvellous little fellow, is he not, Leslie?—he is my work. I am a wonderful mother, am I not, Leslie?"
"Too ," he replied.
"There!" she exclaimed in triumph—"When I have to sign my name and occupation in a visitor's book, it will be '——Mother'. I hope my business will flourish," she concluded, smiling.
There was a touch of in her now. She was, at the bottom, quite sincere. Having reached that point in a woman's career when most, perhaps all of the things in life seem worthless and , she had to put up with it, to ignore her own self, to empty her own potentialities into the of another or others, and to live her life at second hand. This abnegation of self is the resource of a woman for the escaping of the responsibilities of her own development. Like a , she puts over her living face a veil, as a sign that the woman no longer exists for herself: she is the servant of God, of some man, of her children, or may be of some cause. A............