Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

It was about this time that he took to criticising Mrs. Neaves. He found himself constantly watching her, speculating on her. Once, when he went into the kitchen on a Saturday afternoon to wash out an ink pot, he noticed how white her fat neck was. She was cleaning the lid of a tin saucepan with a bit of emery paper. Her head was bent and her fist circled energetically. Her face was streaming with perspiration and her flat toper’s nose glowed like a poppy. Her bodice was open at the throat, and he saw that her neck, beneath the line of exposure, was delicately fine. It reminded him of Clarissa’s milky skin. He stood swilling out the ink pot, taking more pains than was necessary and staring at fat, frowsy Mrs. Neaves and wondering how she would look with a finely-chiseled nose in place of the comical, red, flat one, which seemed to have been roughly trodden into her face by a careless foot. She looked up at him rather curiously, rather resentfully--evidently suspecting that he was spying on her. He noticed that her blue eyes were pensive, not twinkling. It was absurd to think of Clarissa in connection with that dirty, gin-drinking woman--her face all coarse rolls of flesh, her dress gaping, and her greasy bonnet-strings streaming back from her triple chin. Yet, when he went to Clapham that night, he amused himself by trying to fit Clarissa with a flat, blossom-like nose. And he was prepared to swear that her blue eyes were twin eyes to those pensive ones which were set in the laundress’ head.

He couldn’t for the life of him help watching Mrs. Neaves--in every attitude. He watched her as she rubbed the brush across his boots, swinging her big arm easily from the shoulder; as she knelt on the rug to coax the fire, her great, spread body bunched out and her pouch-like cheeks inflated. And in the evening when he sat in the widow’s house he used to compare her with that porcelain slip of a girl Clarissa. At fifty--Mrs. Neaves couldn’t be more--would Clarissa have such haunches, such pendulous cheeks!

He idealized the laundress--quite unconsciously; he was the most matter-of-fact little chap in the world. Yet, in spite of himself, he became imaginative, degenerate. He took to engaging Mrs. Neaves in long conversations--about the lady at the cats’-meat shop in Red Lion Passage, who had just given birth to twins, and whose husband was doing three months for stamping on her (“a nice beast,” as Mrs. Neaves said righteously); about the other lady who got mad drunk regularly every Saturday night and threw all the household china out of the window--about anything, or anyone, for the mere sake of seeing her talk, of watching the changes on her coarse face, and the quick movement of her mouth, which could only boast three front teeth.

Every wrinkle, every deeply-scored line on that woman’s face, every watery light in her blue eyes, meant to Arnold the track of some youthful charm. Was Mrs. Neaves like Clarissa at eighteen? Would Clarissa be like Mrs. Neaves at fifty? I really think that he would have ended by marrying Mrs. Neaves, out of pure, involuntary fascination, if Clarissa had not been a woman and inquisitive.

She kept bothering him to take her to see his rooms. He was to leave them very soon, had sublet them to another man. He had taken a house at Clapham, a stone’s throw from the Common, and with a back garden a little bigger than usual--but only for Sol’s sake, Clarissa said. It was the first time she had shown a tinge of rebellion.

“A great dog like that will make an awful mess in a nice house with his dirty feet. Can’t you keep him chained up?”

“Chain a deerhound!” cried Arnold, in holy horror. Sol was a religion to him. “You’d spoil his legs.”

He arranged to bring Clarissa up to the Inn some Saturday afternoon. She was to have tea with him in his rooms, and go out to dine somewhere afterward. He gave Mrs. Neaves an extra shilling to stay late and get the tea. At least, he said it was to get tea; he tried to persuade himself that it was to get tea; but I’m certain that his real reason for keeping her was his odd desire to see those two together, to compare notes. He said to her with deprecating apology--she was the sort of voluble, violent woman to compel respect from a man of his character:

“I’ve a young lady coming here this afternoon to tea; the young lady--hum, hum--that I am going to marry. Can you stay a couple of hours later? I’ll make it worth your while.”

Mrs. Neaves said condescendingly that she’d come back in time to get the tray ready, after she’d “done for the gent at 6.” As for Arnold’s remark about marrying the young lady visitor, no doubt she put her own valuation on it--being seasoned to remarks of that sort from giddy tenants. The laundress is a true skeptic. She does not believe in married couples in the Inn--this land of ephemeral affections--doesn’t approve of them. I knew a sensitive fellow who had his marriage certificate framed and hung up in the sitting room.

At four o’clock Arnold and Clarissa came in. Mrs. Neaves had just arrived. She was in a state of much disorder, as a protest against Clarissa. There was a warm, sour smell of dishwater; a dustpan half full of flue tripped Arnold up on the threshold.

“This is my bedroom,” he said to Clarissa. “And that is my sitting room. And here’s a little den for Sol--he’s allowed to have bones there--and there’s the kitchen.”

“Oh! that’s the kitchen.”

Clarissa looked in and Mrs. Neaves looked up.

“I’ll go and take my hat off,” the girl said suddenly, slipping in at the open bedroom door--it was exactly opposite the kitchen.

Arnold went into the sitting room at the end of the passage. There was a cupboard. He used it as a hanging closet. At the back of this cupboard there was a tiny window which looked into the kitchen. The sets are full of oddities, surprises like that; windows, ledges, steps, in the most unlikely places.

Some sets have a dunscope. It is a little grating, opening out of a cupboard in the passage. You steal into the cupboard, shut the door, and peep onto the staircase. The same idea is carried out in places where polite people live. In that case it is a looking-glass which reflects into the dining room the figure of the caller on the door-step. When people have a good balance at the bank, and no particular skeleton, the idea is snobbish; when a man in the Inn hasn’t a penny it is pathetic. He looks out, sees his washerwoman, the tax collector, the man who lent him a fiver--and keeps the oak rigorously sported.

The dunscope was often used by industrious students, who looked out to see if the visitor would be helpful to their studies or the reverse.

No doubt the man who put in that little window at the back of Arnold’s cupboard chuckled as he did it--recognizing that it also had dramatic possibilities.

Where was I? Oh! Arnold was changing his coat. As he felt for the loop at the neck, he heard someone say softly--it was a whisper of terrified recognition:

“Mother!”

Then he heard another voice, which seemed to come thickly through layers of flesh.

“Law! Then it reely _is_ you, Clara.”

That was all. But you’ll admit that the square, dusty window at the back of the cupboard had justified its existence--doubtless not for the first time, if the paneled walls had been capable of crying out.

Arnold put his eye cautiously to that dim pane of glass. He saw Clarissa in her spring finery; dainty, fresh, from the jaunty little lace hat, with the trembling cornflowers, which was perched on her elaborately dressed hair, to the pointed, shiny shoe sticking out from the frill of her skirt. He saw her beautiful, classic face; her blue eyes, a trifle frightened and guilty and disgusted, but not in the least affectionate. He saw her frown and make a warning movement with her gloved fingers and jerk her head toward the sitting room.

Mrs. Neaves had her dirty hands on her spread hips; her dreadful working dress of brownish-gray wool was slopped with dish water and patched with grease. It had parted from its lining under the arms, at the waist, at the back--everywhere, as her exuberant rolls of flesh broke through. She wasn’t a woman; she was an unsavory bundle of rags which you would take gingerly by one corner and pitch onto a dust heap. And she was Clarissa’s mother. The likeness was unmistakable, even if he had not heard the girl’s quick, frightened word, which gave away the situation. He understood now the uncanny attraction which had lately impelled him to observe Mrs. Neaves. The two pairs of blue eyes, one looking out from a delicate frame of chalk, the other from a shiny band of perspiration, were the same. One pair a little bleared by gin, by labor and years--but that was the only difference.

He didn’t catch the rest of their conversation; he did not want to. He watched them; their gestures (Clarissa’s tragic, the mother’s amazed) were enough. He sneaked away from the cupboard at last and sat down by the window. Sol, understanding, put his damp nose into his master’s loosely doubled palm. His brown eyes said wistfully, “I could have told you so. Why want a woman? Isn’t my devotion enough?”

Arnold wasn’t angry with Clarissa, wasn’t contemptuous of her. He didn’t see the humor of the situation, nor the degradation of it. He didn’t want to put on his hat and get out of the place, leaving the women to squabble over him as they liked. He had none of the sensations that I should have had, that you would have had if you were a man. I know your womanly sensations; boiling wrath and contempt for Clarissa, mingled with intense sympathy and a little irritation with her for being fool enough to give away everything by that one nervous word.

He felt, as every sensible man would, that it was not her fault; the poor girl could not help having a dirty trull of a mother. He rather admired her for her independence. He saw the whole thing; the natural transition from Clara Neaves to Clarissa Eve, the genteel tastes instilled by the board school and kept up by the dainty dressing insisted on by the bar. Two rooms in North Street off Theobalds Road, gin and onions for supper, fist fights with other lady lodgers on the smallest pretext, frequent black eyes, noisy troops of dirty children--all the things which were part of her mother’s daily life--would speedily become intolerable to the daughter. He thought it very creditable in Clarissa to have thrown the old woman overboard. And he sat and waited patiently for Clarissa to come in, stroking the deerhound’s long head and giving affectionate looks back to those sad, brown eyes. Clarissa entered. Almost immediately behind her came Mrs. Neaves with the tray. Arnold pulled the deerhound’s ears rather nervously and looked at the two women. Clarissa was as cool as an ice pail; she seemed to sit a little more upright than usual, seemed to display her left hand with the engagement ring blazing on it--nothing more. The way in which she said:

“Thank you. I shall want a little more milk,” to her mother, was superb.

Mrs. Neaves had made no attempt to dress for the occasion; she hadn’t even taken off the sacking apron which was strained tightly across her big waist; her down-at-heel shoes went flip-flap as she crossed the room. Both Arnold and Clarissa could see, as the hem of the skirt kicked up, a circle of discolored skin where the stocking was torn. But Clarissa’s face remained cold and unmoved, like the cameo, as usual. Her expression rarely altered. She was the most apathetic, the most impenetrable-looking girl in the world. Her cheeks had never flushed and her eye had never faltered when men in the bar made doubtful remarks; she never flushed nor faltered now, with her poor, degraded old mother’s bare heel under her eyes.

“You needn’t wait, Mrs. Neaves,” said Arnold, as Clarissa, with a charming young-matron air, began to pour out tea.

Then he remembered that he hadn’t paid her, and feeling very uncomfortable he put his hand in his pocket, brought out a loose heap of gold and silver, and dropped eight shillings in the moist palm. He hated to pay her before her daughter. But he hesitated at going outside the door with her and doing it there, for fear Clarissa should take fright and think he had found out. But Clarissa never lifted her white lids. She only said, with an airy laugh and the milk jug poised affectedly from her dainty wrist with the jangling bangle, “Milk?”

“Thank you, sir.”

Mrs. Neaves bent her head to count the shillings and he saw again the line of pure, fair flesh below the collar of her bodice.

“Good-afternoon, sir. Good-afternoon, miss.”

She scuttled away. Clarissa mumbled a very haughty and patronizing “_Good_-afternoon.”

Of course Arnold knew that he must do something. He couldn’t have his wife’s mother working in the Inn. She must be provided for. He thought of many things; a cottage in the country, a little business--something genteel in the sweetstuff and tobacco way, an almshouse, a home for incurables.

“For she is incurable,” he remarked next day. “She was as drunk as Chloe for three days running last week. I wouldn’t have Clarissa know I knew for a fortune. I wouldn’t hurt a fly if I could help it, Groome. But if someone would take Mrs. Neaves out in a pleasure boat on Sunday, or for an excursion down to Southend, or--you know accidents do happen. Don’t you think you might take her down to Epping Forest and lose her? Or Regent’s Canal with a brick round her----”

“Don’t be a fool. There’s only one way out, and that is to give up Clarissa. A girl who would treat her mother like that----”

“If I had a mother like that I’d choke her,” he said violently.

Then, cooling down, he added, digging the ash out of his pipe with a scrooping scrape of the pocket knife:

“The thing would be a country cottage. When people get old, nature is soothing to them. She could keep a pig and a few hens.”

“She wouldn’t stay there a week. You are making a tremendous trouble out of a trifle. Ask her. Find out what she wants and give it her.”

“That’s not a bad idea. I never thought of it.”

He went back to his set. Mrs. Neaves was making his bed. She was looking very heavy after her three-days’ indulgence. Her black eye had reached the green-and-purple stage. It was a lovely color study. Arnold, who was a kind-hearted little chap, felt sorry for her. Perhaps it was grief that had made her get drunk. He sat down on the window ledge and stared at her thoughtfully as she doubled down to tuck in the blanket.

“What do you think of doing when you get old?” he asked carelessly. “Charring is hard work, I should say.”

She stopped bed-making, put her hands on her hips,--it was her favorite conversational attitude,--and looked at him plaintively.

“The workus, I s’pose,” she said tersely. “Now, if I could get that five ’underd pound the perlice is offerin’, it’s visitin’ yer I’d be, an’ not doin’ yer dirty work.”

“Five hundred pounds?”

“Five ’underd pound. Arf that ’ud make a lady of me. I was a lady born and bred; my father ’ad a jeweler’s business in the Strand. But we none of us knows what we may come to. Five ’underd pound for information as ’ull lead to the conviction of----”

“Oh, yes, I know. The Hackney Wick murderer. But you’ll never get him. He committed suicide, there’s very little doubt about that.”

“Aint there, now? The mean ’ound! And five ’underd pound ’angin’ on it--which would ’a’ bin a godsend to many a poor person. To think of ’im a-skulkin’ off in that ’ole-and-corner way, with five ’underd pound on ’im.”

“What would you like to set you up in life, supposing you had the chance of choosing?” Arnold persisted.

She thought a little. Then she said longingly:

“There’s a nice shirt-and-collar business goin’ cheap in the Lane--Leather Lane. The laidy’s got a young family and can’t see to the laundry. Fifty pound ’ud buy it. An’ I’m used to clear starchin’.”

Arnold was delighted at being let off so lightly. He said, trying hard to smooth the complacent grin from his face, and lying glibly, as we all can in emergency:

“I’ve always had a great regard for you, Mrs. Neaves. You’ve done my work well, and you’ve been very good to Sol. I’m going to be married shortly, as I told you----”

“Yes, sir. And how’s the young lady, sir? if I make so bold.”

“The young lady is very well, thank you,” he returned with hurried stiffness. “I should like to see you settled in a comfortable little business of your own before I leave the Inn. And if fifty pounds will buy the shirt-and-collar business, I shall be very pleased to make you a present of it.”

When she had a little recovered from her astonishment, she gasped out:

“Thank you, sir, thank you kindly, I’m sure. I’ll do the same for you some day; one good turn deserves another, don’t it? An’ I’ll be proud to do your collars and cuffs for sixpence a dozen; the usual price bein’ a shillin’.”

That night Arnold went down to Clapham in the best of spirits. As he put it to himself triumphantly, he had saved a couple of hundred pounds and more, for he had quite reckoned on ten shillings a week at least, and these drunken old women live forever. Clarissa was on the platform. She ran up to him, through the hustle of weary-looking City men with tall hats and evening newspapers.

“Sol’s gone!” she burst out hysterically. “I took him for a run on the Common. I let him off the lead when we got to the water--you always told me to. And I--I missed him. They run so fast, those deerhounds, don’t they? There were a couple of roughs a little way back. I heard them say what a beauty he was.”

You may imagine what a blow this was to Arnold; Sol was a great deal more to him than Clarissa was. Clarissa had never been a woman; she was a barmaid at first and a pretty face afterward. But Sol had been his companion for ten years. Sol had saved his life. All the salt was off his palate; his daily life was dull, without savor.

He left off going to Clapham; Clarissa must have had a dull time. Whenever she hinted at marriage, he put her off peevishly.

“She never cared for Sol,” he said sadly. “She wanted to chain him up. Women haven’t got brains enough to appreciate a good dog.”

He was very miserable. He hadn’t even got Mrs. Neaves to bully and to study. She was settled in the Lane and deep in the shirt-and-collar business. His new laundress helped herself to the whisky and took away his loaves of bread and his rolls of fresh butter.

Of course he kept in touch with Clarissa, wrote her polite letters, and went down to Clapham occasionally. One Sunday afternoon he was walking across the Common. He went to Clapham partly by omnibus and partly on his legs; he no longer flustered to catch a particular train.

Do you know these suburban commons? They are most melancholy. One feels really grateful to the jerry builder for creeping up so closely to them, as closely as he dares. No doubt they are lungs for the people--but that is not a particularly interesting point. The people! They play cricket on the Common, leaving it bare in patches, like a giant head beset by a parasite. They throw paper on it; screws of paper, fluttering ends of paper, strips of orange peel, empty bottles. The Common! It is sacred to the people. No builder will ever be allowed to devirginate it. Arnold was fond of talking like that. He used to swell out proudly when he said it, as if that stretch of sad brown grass and cracking earth belonged to him. The sanctity of the people! Preserve me from it! Give me the stately gardens of the Inn, with elms, rooks, the terrace, and memories.

Well, he was walking on the Common, sorrowfully and slowly, not caring a rush whether Clarissa was waiting for him or not. Suddenly he saw a long, grayish-blue something shoot straight toward him like an arrow. Have you seen these deerhounds run? Head down, paws out--it is a charming sight. Arnold very nearly infected me with his enthusiasm for Sol. Yes, it was Sol. He kept bounding shoulder high on his master, breaking over him like a wave. Sol! Arnold--soft-hearted little chap--never denied that a lump came into his throat and left him standing dizzy on the Common. But he was collected enough to grab Sol’s collar--not at all a necessary precaution, as he ought to have known. The beast would have gone straight for the throat of anyone who tried to take him from the master that he had just found.

A rough-looking customer with a hoarse voice and a voluminous yellow neckerchief came up and began to be abusive, in the most picturesque language.

Have you guessed? Clarissa sold Sol. Sold him for five pounds, with which to bribe her mother. Mrs. Neaves, who was most accommodating, took it with the shirt-and-collar business. Clarissa’s beauty brought the old woman luck.

“A good-looking gal she wur,” said the thick-voiced man. “Brought him down to my place in the Borough and I give ’er five quid.”

Arnold was fifty-five pounds and a wife to the bad. But he got his dog back.

Clarissa! She hadn’t wasted her time. When Arnold threw her over she promptly married another fellow--a City man; in the wholesale fruit way, I fancy. He had lodged next door to the widow lady, and those back gardens offer opportunities.

Arnold went on a six-weeks’ walking tour, for Sol’s sake.

“They haven’t been giving him half enough exercise,” he said indignantly. “These pure-bred deerhounds get paralyzed in the hind legs if they don’t get enough exercise.”

WHY?