Ultima Thule (3 page)

The reminder annoyed him. "Yes, yes, of course. But my thermometer. . . now where the dickens have I put that?" And testily he tapped pocket after pocket.

"Here . . . you've left it lying. Oh, by the way, Richard, I wonder if you'd mind leaving an order at the butcher's as you go past?"

But at this he flared up. "Now, Mary, is it fair to bother me with that kind of thing, when I've so much else to think of?"

"Well, it's only. . . the shop's so far off, and I can't spare cook. You've just to hand in a note as you pass the door."

"Yes, yes. A thousand and one reasons!"

"Oh well, never mind. Eliza and the children must go that way for their walk -- though it does take them down among the shops."

"And why not? Are the children everlastingly to be spared at my expense?"

He went off, banging the gate behind him. The latch did not hold; Mary stepped out to secure it. And the sight of him trudging down the road brought back her chief grievance against him. This was his obstinate refusal to keep a horse and trap. It stood to reason: if he would only consent to drive on his rounds, instead of walking, he would save himself much of the fatigue he now endured; and she be spared his perpetual grumbles. Besides, it was not the thing for a man of his age and appearance to be seen tramping the streets, bag in hand. But she might as well have talked to a post. The only answer she got was that he couldn't afford it. Now this was surely imagination. She flattered herself she knew something about a practice, and could tell pretty well what the present one was likely to throw off. . . if properly nursed. To the approximate three hundred a year which Richard admitted to drawing from his dividends, it should add another three; and on six, with her careful management, they could very well pull through to begin with. It left no margin for extravagances, of course; but the husbanding of Richard's strength could hardly be put down under that head. Since, however, he continued obdurate, she went her own way to work; with the result that, out of the money he allowed her to keep house on, she contrived at the end of three months to hand him back a tidy sum.

"Now if you don't feel you want to buy a horse and buggy, you can at least give a three months' order at the livery-stable."

But not a bit of it! More, he was even angry. "Tch! Do, for goodness' sake, leave me to manage my own affairs! I don't want a horse and trap, I tell you. I prefer to go on as I am." And, with that, her economics just passed into and were swallowed up in the general fund. She wouldn't do it again.

"Mamma!"

This was Cuffy, who had followed her out and climbed the gate at her side. He spoke in a coaxy voice; for as likely as not Mamma would say: "Run away, darling, and don't bother me. I've no time." But Cuffy badly wanted to know something. And, since Nannan left, there had never been any one he could ask his questions of: Mamma was always busy, Papa not at home.

"Mamma! Why does Papa poke his head out so when he walks?"

"That's stooping. People do it as they grow older." Even the child, it seemed, could see how tiresome Richard found walking.

"What's it mean growing old -- really, truly?"

"Why, losing your hair and your teeth, and not being able to get about as well as you used to."

"Does it hurt?"

"Of course not, little silly!"

"Does Papa lose his teeth? Does Eliza? And why has he always got a bag in his hand now?"

"What an inquisitive little boy! He carries things in it to make people well with."

"Why does he want to make them well?"

"To get money to buy you little folks pretty clothes and good things to eat. But come . . . jump down! And run and tell Eliza to get you ready for your walk."

"I don't like going walks with Eliza," said Cuffy and, one hand in his mother's, reluctantly dragged and shuffled a foot in the gravel. "Oh, I do wis' I had my little pony again."

"So do I, my darling," said Mary heartily, and squeezed his hand. "I'm afraid you'll be forgetting how to ride. I must talk to Papa. Then perhaps Santa Claus . . . or on your birthday . . ."

"Ooh! Really, truly, Mamma?"

"We'll see." -- At which Cuffy hopped from side to side up the length of the path.

And Mary meant what she said. It was unthinkable that her children should come short in any of the advantages other children enjoyed. And not to be able to ride, and ride well, too, in a country like this, might prove a real drawback to them in after life. Now she had pinched and screwed for Richard's sake, to no purpose whatever. The next lump sum she managed to get together should go to buying a pony.

But this was not all. Besides riding, the children ought to be having dancing-lessons. She did so want her chicks to move prettily and gracefully; to know what to do with their hands and feet; to be able to enter a room without awkwardness; and they were just at their most impressionable age: what they now took in they would never forget, what they missed, never make good. But she could hope for no help from Richard; manlike, he expected graces and accomplishments to spring up of themselves, like wild flowers from the soil. Everything depended on her. And she did not spare herself. Thanks to her skill with her needle, they were still, did they go to a party, the best-dressed children in the room; and the best-mannered, too, Nannan's strict upbringing still bearing fruit. None of her three ever grabbed, or gobbled, or drank with a full mouth; nor were they either lumpishly shy or over-forward, like the general ruck of colonial children.

But they were getting big; there would soon be more serious things to think of than manners and accomplishments. If only Richard did not prove too unreasonable! So far, except for music-lessons, they had had no teaching at all, one of his odd ideas being that a child's brain should lie fallow till it was seven or eight years old. This meant that she had sometimes to suffer the mortification of seeing children younger than Cuffy and his sisters able to answer quite nicely at spelling and geography, while hers stood mutely by. In the Dumplings' case it did not greatly matter: they were still just Dumplings in every sense of the word; fat and merry play-babies. But Cuffy was sharp for his age; he could read his own books, and knew long pieces of poetry by heart. It seemed little short of absurd to hold such a child back; and, after she had once or twice seen him put publicly to shame, Mary took, of a morning, when she was working up a flake-crust or footing her treadle-machine, to setting him a copy to write, or giving him simple lessons in spelling and sums. (Which little incursions into knowledge were best, it was understood, not mentioned to Papa.)

Her thoughts were all for her children. Herself she needed little; and was really managing without difficulty to cut her coat to suit her cloth. In the matter of dress, for instance, she still had the rich furs, the sumptuous silks and satins she had brought with her from home -- made over, these things would last her for years -- had all her ivory and mother-o'-pearl ornaments and trifles. True, she walked where she had driven, hired less expensive servants, rose betimes of a morning, but who shall say whether these changes were wholly drawbacks in Mary's eyes, or whether the return to a more active mode of life did not, in great measure, outweigh them? It certainly gave her a feeling of satisfaction to which she had long been a stranger, to know that not a particle of waste was going on in her kitchen; that she was once more absolute monarch in her own domain. Minor pleasures consisted in seeing how far she could economise the ingredients of pudding or cake and yet turn it out light and toothsome. Had Richard wished to entertain, she would have guaranteed to hold the floor with anyone, at half the cost.

But there was no question of this. They lived like a pair of hermit crabs; and, in spite of the size of the house, might just as well have been buried in the bush. For, having talked herself hoarse in pointing out the harm such a mode of life would do the practice, she had given way and made the best of things; as long, that was, as Richard's dislike of company had only to do with the forming of new acquaintances. When he began his old grumbles at the presence of her intimate friends and relatives, it was more than she could stand. In the heated argument that followed her perplexed: "Not ask Lizzie? Put off the Devines?" she discovered, to her amazement, that it was not alone his morbid craving for solitude that actuated him: the house, if you please, formed the stumbling-block! Because this was still unpapered and rather scantily furnished, he had got it into his head that it was not fit to ask people to; that he would be looked down on, because of it. Now did anyone ever hear such nonsense? Why, half the houses in Melbourne were just as bare, and nobody thought the worse of them. People surely came to see you, not your furniture! But he had evidently chafed so long in silence over what he called the "poverty-stricken aspect of the place," that there was now no talking him out of the notion. So Mary shrugged and sighed; and, silently in her turn, took the sole way left her, which was an underground way; so contriving matters that her friends came to the house only when Richard was out of it . . . a little shift it was again wiser not to mention to Papa. She also grew adept at getting rid of people to the moment. By the time the gate clicked at Richard's return, all traces of the visit had been cleared away.

THUS she bought peace. -- But when the day came for putting up a guest in the house, for making use of the unused spare room, finesse did not avail; and a violent dispute broke out between them. To complicate matters, the guest in question was Richard's old bugbear, Tilly.

Tilly, whose dearest wish had been fulfilled some six months back by the birth of a child, but who since then had remained strangely silent, now wrote, almost beside herself with grief and anxiety, that she was bringing her infant, which would not thrive, to town, to consult the doctors there. And Mary straightway forgot all her schemes and contrivances, forgot everything but a friend in need, and wrote off by return begging Tilly, with babe and nurse, to make their house her own.

Mahony was speechless when he heard of it. He just gave her one look, then stalked out of the room and shut himself up in the surgery, where he stayed for the rest of the evening. While Mary sat bent over her needlework, with determined lips and stubborn eyes.

Later on, in the bedroom, his wrath exploded in bitter abuse of Purdy, ending with: "No one belonging to that fellow shall ever darken my doors again!"

At this she, too, flared up. "Oh . . . put all the blame for what happened on somebody else. It never occurs to you to blame yourself, and your own rashness and impatience. Who but you would ever have trusted a man like Wilding? -- But Tilly being Purdy's wife is nothing but an excuse. It's not only her. You won't let a soul inside the doors."

"Why should my wishes alone be disregarded? The very children's likes and dislikes are taken more account of. You consider every one . . . only not me!" "And you consider no one but yourself!"

"Well, this is my house, and I have the right to say who shall come into it."

"It's no more yours than mine. And Tilly's my oldest friend, and I'm not going to desert her now she's in trouble. I've asked her to come here, and come she shall!"

"Very well then, if she does, I go!" -- And so on, and on.

In the adjoining dressing-room, the door of which stood ajar, Cuffy sat up in his crib and listened. The loud voices had wakened him and he couldn't go to sleep again. He was frightened; his heart beat pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat. And when he heard somebody begin to cry, he just couldn't help it, he had to cry, too. Till a door went and quick steps came running; and then there were Papa's hands to hold to, and Papa's arms round him; and quite a lot of Hambelin Town and Handover City to make him go to sleep.

The knot was cut by Tilly choosing, with many, many thanks, to stay at an hotel in town. There Mary sought her out one late autumn afternoon, when the white dust was swirling house-high through the white streets, and the south wind had come up so cold that she regretted not having worn her sealskin. Alighting from the train at Prince's Bridge, she turned a deaf ear to the shouts of: "Keb, Keb!" and leaving the region of warehouses -- poor John's among them -- made her way on foot up the rise to Collins Street. This was her invariable habit nowadays, if she hadn't the children with her: was one of the numerous little economies she felt justified in practising. . . and holding her tongue about. Richard, of course, would have snorted with disapproval. His wife to be tramping the streets! But latterly she had found her tolerance of his grandee notions about what she might and might not do, wearing a little thin. In the present state of affairs they seemed, to say the least of it, out of place. She had legs of her own, and was every bit as well able to walk as he was. If people looked down on her for it . . . well, they would just have to, and that was all about it!

These brave thoughts notwithstanding, she could not but wish -- as she sat waiting in a public coffee-room, the door of which opened and shut a dozen times to the minute, every one who entered fixing her with a hard and curious stare -- wish that Tilly had picked on a quieter hotel, one more suitable to a lady travelling alone. She was glad when the waiter ushered her up the red-carpeted stairs to her friend's private sitting-room.

Tilly was so changed that she hardly knew her. Last seen in the first flush of wifehood, high-bosomed, high-coloured, high-spirited, she seemed to have shrunk together, fallen in. Her pale face was puffy; her eyes deeply ringed.

"You poor thing! What you must have suffered!"

Mary said this more than once as she listened to Tilly's tale. It was that of a child born strong and healthy -- "As fine a boy as ever you saw, Mary!" -- with whom all had gone well until, owing to an unfortunate accident, they had been forced to change the wet-nurse. Since then they had tried one nurse after another; had tried handfeeding, goat's milk, patent mixtures; but to no purpose. The child had just wasted away. Till he was now little more than a skeleton. Nor had he ever sat up or taken notice. The whole day long he lay and wailed, till it nearly broke your heart to hear it.