CHAPTER XXI

Failure is bitter enough in itself to a man of energy and strength of purpose, but more bitter still are the humiliations and the sufferings that failure may impose on those he loves.

Reputation, resources, his very home, had been swallowed up, but in Murchison there was that dogged northern spirit, that stubborn uplift against odds, that is at its strongest when confronted with defeat. Like a man brought to the edge of a black cliff at night, he had looked down grimly into the depths, depths that waited not for him alone, but for the innocent children who held his hands.

As a cheap assistant in a colliery town, James Murchison had joined issue with his own unfitness for the ordeal of life. A tight-mouthed and rather silent man, he had entered upon the rebuilding of his self-respect with the dogged patience of a Titan. The little, red brick villa, with the dirty piece of waste land in front and the black canal behind, might have suggested no stage for heroic drama to the casual eyes of Murchison’s neighbors. The big, brown-faced man stalked to and fro to work, quiet and unobtrusive, a figure that was soon familiar to most of the middle-class people who lived on either side. He seemed one of those many mortals who move through life without a history, an ant in an ant world, busy, monotonously busy, earning his paltry pounds a week, without glamour, and without fame.

Man suffers most in seeing those dear to him in suffering, and the tragic tones of life are caught from the lips of those he loves. The wounds of a wife or of a child are open in the heart of the husband or father. Remorse or self-accusation, if there be cause for such a feeling, is as the vinegar on the sponge to the man crucified by his own sin. One has but to come in contact with the material side of civilization to discover how desperately sordid this twentieth-century life can be. How great the contrast was between Roxton lying amid its woods and meadows, and the dismal colliery town, Murchison, as a father, realized too soon. The one smelled of the fresh earth, primal and invigorating; the other of soap-works, soot, cabbage-water, and rancid oil. In Roxton the mortality was low; in the colliery town hundreds of infants died yearly before they were four weeks old.

Such realism, the vivid heritage of thousands, might well make a man go grimly through life, the burden of care very heavy on his shoulders.

To watch a wife’s face fade, despite her courage, poverty and sorrow bringing weariness to the serenest eyes.

To know that drudgery burdens the dear life of the home.

To watch the lapsing of a child from sheer health into sickness, the beautiful aliveness vanishing, the bloom marred like the bloom on handled fruit.

The consciousness of dependence and obligation, the receiving of brusque instructions from a man of cheap and vulgar fibre.

Sordid surroundings, sordid neighbors, an utter dearth of friends.

Work, eternal work, day in, day out; no Sabbath rest, no time for home life, no money to give joy to those most dear.

A vivid ghost past following, like a shadow.

A dim and unflattering future before the eyes, a future darkened by the prophetic dread of leaving wife and children alone in a selfish world.

Such were the realities that filled James Murchison’s sphere of consciousness, realities that were responsible for many a sleepless night.

It was the afternoon of a February day when Murchison stopped before the theatre in Wilton High Street, for the colliery town delighted in melodrama, and pulling out a pigskin purse, examined the contents with critical consideration. He had saved a few shillings by stinting himself in tobacco, and in his daily lunch at a cheap eating-house near Dr. Tugler’s surgery. The pantomime “Puss in Boots” was still running at the theatre, and at the box-office Murchison bought four tickets for the upper circle.

In the old days the children had gone up yearly to Drury Lane, and Master Jack had been making many allusions to the gaudy “posters” covering a hoarding near the row of red brick villas. More than once the boy’s thoughtless words had hurt the father’s heart. It was chiefly of Gwen that Murchison thought as he thrust the envelope with its yellow slips into his breast-pocket.

At Clovelly, Catherine, her sleeves turned up, stood in the little back kitchen making a suet-pudding. The Murchisons had dispensed with a servant because of the expense, for their income had practically no margin, and money had to be scraped together to pay the yearly dividend on the husband’s life-insurance. Catherine’s mother, a somewhat stern, pious, and bedridden old lady, living in a respectable south-coast town, allowed her daughter a small sum each year. Mrs. Pentherby was the possessor of a comfortable income, but suffered from a meanness of mind and a severity of prejudice that had made her rather merciless to Murchison in the hour of his misfortune. Such money as she sent was to be spent “solely on the children.” Catherine’s face had often reddened over the contents of her mother’s drastic and didactic letters. Her love and her loyalty were hurt by the old lady’s blunt and Puritanical advice. As for James Murchison, he had too much pride to ever dream of touching Mrs. Pentherby’s “ear-marked” donations to his children.

On several occasions a five-pound note had reached Clovelly anonymously from another quarter. Murchison had suspected Porteus Carmagee of this noiseless generosity, but he had been unable to discover whence the money came. The little lawyer of Lombard Street alone knew how the phenomenal damages accorded to Mrs. Baxter by a sentimental jury had swept away all Murchison’s savings, and even the money realized by the sale of his furniture and his car. Yet these five-pound notes were always placed in Catherine’s hands, to be deposited in the post-office savings-bank in Gwendolen Murchison’s name. At Christmas a huge hamper had reached them from Roxton, a hamper whose bulk had symbolized the abundant kindness of Miss Carmagee’s virgin heart. Friends in adversity are friends worthy of honor, and Miss Carmagee, good woman, had packed the hamper with her own fat and generous hands.

Catherine, her fore-arms white with flour, stood in the little back kitchen, tying a piece of cloth over the pudding-bowl before sinking it in the steaming saucepan on the fire. The winter day was drawing towards twilight. Mists hung over the black canal. Through the windows could be seen the zinc roofs of a number of storage sheds attached to the buildings of a steam-mill.

In the front parlor the horse-hair sofa had been drawn beneath the window, and Gwen, her golden head on a faded blue cushion, lay, trying a new frock on a great wax doll. The child’s eyes looked big and strange in her pale face, and the blue veins showed through the pearly skin. Apathy in a child is pathetic in its unnaturalness, the more so when the sparkle of health has but lately left the eager eyes. Gwen had whitened like a plant deprived of life. Her black-socked legs were no longer brown and chubby. She had the unanimated and drooping look of a child languid under the spell of some insidious disease.

The garden gate closed with a clash as Master Jack came crunching up the gravel-path, swinging his ragged school-books at the end of a strap. He grimaced at Gwen, and rang the bell with the cheerful verve of youth, for John Murchison was a sturdy ragamuffin, capable of adapting himself to changed surroundings. The young male is a creature of mental resilience and resource. Toys were fewer, puddings plainer, parties unknown. But a boy can find treasures in a rubbish heap and mystery in the dirty waters of a canal.

Master Jack’s return from school was usually a noisy incident. He appeared loud and emphatic, an infallible autocrat of eight.

“I say—I’m hungry.”

Bang went the books into a corner of the hall. For the hundredth time Catherine reproved her son, and insisted on Master Jack’s “primers” being put in order on the proper shelf. The boy, much under compulsion, stooped for those battered symbols of civilization, disclosing in the act a disastrous rent in his blue serge knickers.

“Jack, dear, what have you been doing to your clothes?”

“What clothes, mother?”

The boy’s innocent yet subtle obtuseness did not save him from further catechisation.

“I only mended your knickers yesterday, Jack, and they were new last month.”

“My knickers, mother!”

“What have you been doing?”

Master Jack passed a hypocritical hand over a certain region.

“Lor!”

“Don’t say ‘lor,’ dear.”

“Well, I never! I was only climbin’ with Bert Smith.”

“You don’t think, Jack, that clothes cost money.”

It was perfectly plain that no such thought ever entered Jack Murchison’s head. Children are serenely insensible to the worries of their elders, and, moreover, Master Jack had at the moment a grievance of his own.

“Bert Smith’s going to the pantomime,” and he pushed past his mother into the front room; swinging his books.

“Jack, be careful!”

“Why don’t we go to the pantomime? It’s a beastly shame!”

Catherine’s lips quivered almost imperceptibly. The blatant self-assertiveness of boyhood hurt her, as the thoughtless grumblings of a child must often hurt a mother.

“Put those books down, dear, and go and change your knickers.”

Jack obeyed, if swinging the books into a corner could be called obedience. Catherine restrained a gesture of impatience. Gwen, lying on the sofa, winced at the clatter as though morbidly sensitive to sounds.

“You are silly, Jack!”

“Shut up.”

“Muvver’s tired.”

Reproof from a supposed inferior is never particularly welcome. Jack made a clutch at his sister’s doll, landed it by one leg, and proceeded to dangle it head downward before the fire.

“Jack—Jack—don’t!”

The boy chuckled like a tyrant as Gwen, peevish and hypersensitive, burst into a flood of tears. Catherine, who had turned back into the kitchen, reappeared in time to rescue the doll from being melted.

“Jack, I am ashamed of you.”

She took the doll from him, and went to the window to comfort Gwen. John Murchison, conscious of humiliation, adopted an attitude of aggressive scorn.

“Silly old doll.”

“Jack, go up to the nursery.”

“Sha’n’t.”

His courage melted rather abruptly, however, before the look upon his mother’s face. He retreated at his leisure, climbed the stairs slowly, whistling as he went, and kicking the banisters with the toes of his boots.

A grieved voice reached Catherine from the half-dark landing.

“Mother?”

“Yes.”

“Why can’t we go to the pantomime?”

“Go into the nursery, dear, and don’t grumble.”

“Bert Smith’s going. I call it a beastly shame.”

“Jack, if you say another word I shall send you to bed.”

Five minutes had hardly elapsed before Catherine heard her husband’s footsteps on the path, and the rattle of his latch-key in the lock. In the front room he found poor Gwen still sobbing spasmodically in her mother’s arms.

The sight damped the glow on Murchison’s face.

“Hallo, what’s the matter?” and the anxious lines came back in his forehead.

“Nothing, dear, nothing.”

“Why, little one, what is it?”

Catherine surrendered her place to him. Murchison’s arms went round the child. Gwen, though struggling to be brave, broke out again into uncontrollable and helpless weeping.

“I—I’s tired, father.”

“Tired! there, there! You must not cry like this,” and the big man’s face was a study in troubled tenderness.

“What has upset her, Kate?”

He looked at his wife.

“Jack has been teasing her.”

“The young scoundrel.”

“The boy’s in one of his trying moods.” And she could find no more to say against her son.

Gwen grew comforted in her father’s arms. Yet to this man who had learned to watch the faces of the sick, there was something ominous in the child’s half-fretful eyes, in the way she flushed, and in the hurrying of her heart. He felt her hands; they were hot and feverish.

Husband and wife looked at each other.

“Tired, little one, eh?”

“Yes, very tired.”

She lay with her head on her father’s shoulder, looking with large, languid eyes up into his face.

“By-bye time for little girls who are going to see ‘Puss in Boots’ to-morrow.”

Gwen’s eyes brightened a little; her hands held the lappets of her father’s coat-collar.

“Oh—daddy!”

Murchison felt in his pocket and drew out the envelope with the yellow tickets.

“So you would like to see ‘Puss in Boots’?”

“Yes, oh yes.”

“Little girls who go to pantomimes must go to bed early. Shall daddy carry you up-stairs?”

A tired but ecstatic sigh accepted the condition. Murchison lifted the child, kissed her, and smiled sadly at his wife.

“What about your unregenerate son?”

Catherine turned, and called to Jack, who was listening at the nursery door.

“Jack, dear, you may come down.”

A clatter of feet pounded down the stairs.

“Quiet, dear, quiet.”

“Daddy, Bert Smith’s going to the pantomime.”

“He is, is he? Well, so are we.”

“To ‘Puss in Boots’?”

“Yes, if a certain young gentleman is good.”

Jack gave a shout of triumph, kissed Gwen, and skipped round the room as Murchison went out with his daughter in his arms.

The boy ran to Catherine, and jumped up to her embrace.

“I’m sorry, mother,” and his bright face vanquished her.

“Sorry, Jack?”

“I tore my knickers.”

And Catherine took the confession in the spirit that it was given.