Sir George Tressady (Vol.1&2). Mrs. Humphry Ward

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СКАЧАТЬ amused, half inquisitive—that the act seemed to invite. There was of course no surprise. Nothing surprises the London of to-day. Or if there were any, it was all Marcella's. In spite of her passionate sympathy with the multitude who live in disagreeable homes on about a pound a week, she herself was very sensitive to the neighbourhood of beautiful things, to the charm of old homes, cool woods, green lawns, and the rise and fall of Brookshire hills. Against her wish, she had thought of sacrifice in thinking of the Mile End Road in August.

      But there was no sacrifice. Frankly, these five months were among the happiest of her life. She and Maxwell were constantly together, from morning till night, doing the things that were congenial to them, and seeing the things that interested them. They went in and out of every factory and workshop in which certain trades were practised, within a three-mile radius; they became the intimate friends of every factory inspector and every trade-union official in the place. Luckily, Maxwell's shyness—at least in Mile End—was not of the sort that can be readily mistaken for a haughty mind. He was always ready to be informed; his diffident kindness asked to be set at ease; while in any real ardour of debate his trained capacity and his stores of knowledge would put even the expert on his mettle.

      As for Marcella, it was her idiosyncrasy that these tailors, furriers, machinists, shirtmakers, by whom she was surrounded in East London, stirred her imagination far more readily than the dwellers in great houses and the wearers of fine raiment had ever stirred it. And Marcella, in the kindled sympathetic state, was always delightful to herself and others. She revelled in the little house and its ugly, druggetted rooms; in the absence of all the usual paraphernalia of their life; in her undisturbed possession of the husband who was at once her lover and the best company she knew or could desire. On the few days when he left her for the day on some errand in which she could not share, to meet him at the train in the evening like any small clerk's wife, to help him carry the books and papers with which he was generally laden along the hot and dingy street, to make him tea from her little spirit kettle, and then to hear the news of the day in the shade of the little smutty back-garden, while the German charwoman who cooked for them had her way with the dinner—there was not an incident in the whole trivial procession that did not amuse and delight her. She renewed her youth; she escaped from the burdensome "glories of our birth, and state"; from that teasing "duty to our equals" on which only the wisest preachers have ever laid sufficient stress; and her one trouble was that the little masquerade must end.

      One other drawback indeed, one more blight upon a golden time, there was. Not even Marcella could make up her mind to transplant little Hallin, her only child, from Maxwell Court to East London. It was springtime, and the woods about the Court were breaking into sheets of white and blue. Marcella must needs leave the boy to his flowers and his "grandame earth," sadly warned thereto by the cheeks of other little boys in and about the Mile End Road. But every Friday night she and Maxwell said good-bye to the two little workhouse girls, and the German charwoman, and the village boy from Mellor, who supplied them with all the service they wanted in Mile End, took with them the ancient maid who had been Marcella's mother's maid, and fled home to Brookshire. So on Saturday mornings it generally happened that little Hallin went out to inform his particular friend among the garden boys, that "Mummy had tum ome," and that he was not therefore so much his own master as usual. He explained that he had to show mummy "eaps of things"—the two new kittens, the "edge-sparrer's nest," and the "ump they'd made in the churchyard over old Tom Collins from the parish ouses," the sore place on the pony's shoulder, the "ole that mummy's orse had kicked in the stable door," and a host of other curiosities. By way of linking the child with the soil and its people, Marcella had taken care to give him nursemaids from the village. And the village being only some thirty miles from London, talked in the main the language of London, a language which it soon communicated to the tongue of Maxwell's heir. Marcella tried to school her boy in vain. Hallin chattered, laughed, broadened his a's and dropped all his h's into a bottomless limbo none the less.

      What days of joy those Saturdays were for mother and child! All the morning and till about four o'clock, he and she would be inseparable, trailing about together over field and wood, she one of the handsomest of women, he one of the plainest of children—a little square-faced chubby fellow, with eyes monstrously black and big, fat cheeks that hung a little over the firm chin, a sallow complexion, and a large humorous mouth.

      But in the late afternoon, alas! Hallin was apt to find the world grow tiresome. For against all his advice "mummy" would allow herself to be clad by Annette, the maid, in a frock of state; carriages would drive up from the 5.10 train; and presently in the lengthening evening the great lawns of the Court would be dotted with strolling groups, or the red drawing-room, with its Romneys and Gainsboroughs, would be filled with talk and laughter circling round mummy at the tea-table; so that all that was left to Hallin was that seat on mummy's knee—his big, dark head pressed disconsolately against her breast, his thumb in his mouth for comfort—which no boy of any spirit would ever consent to occupy, so long as there was any chance of goading a slack companion into things better worth while.

      Marcella herself was no less rebellious at heart, and would have asked nothing better than to be left free to spend her weekly holiday in roaming an April world with Hallin. But our country being what it is, the plans that are made in Mile End or Shoreditch have to be adopted by Mayfair or Mayfair's equivalent; otherwise they are apt to find an inglorious tomb in the portfolios that bred them. We have still, it seems, a "ruling class"; and in spite of democracy it is still this "ruling class" that matters. Maxwell was perfectly aware of it; and these Sundays to him were the mere complements of the Mile End weekdays. Marcella ruefully admitted that English life was so, and she did her best. But on Monday mornings she was generally left protesting in her inmost soul against half the women whom these peers and politicians, these administrators and journalists, brought with them, or wondering anxiously whether her particular share in the social effort just over might not have done Aldous more harm than good. She understood vaguely, without vanity, that she was a power in this English society, that she had many warm friends, especially among men of the finer and abler sort. But when a woman loved her, and insisted, as it were, on making her know it—and, after all, the experience was not a rare one—Marcella received the overture with a kind of grateful surprise. She was accustomed, without knowing why, to feel herself ill at ease with certain types of women; even in her own house she was often aware of being furtively watched by hostile eyes; or she found herself suddenly the goal of some sharp little pleasantry that pricked like a stiletto. She supposed that she was often forgetful and indiscreet. Perhaps the large court she held so easily on these occasions beneath the trees or in the great drawing-rooms of the old house had more to do with the matter. If so, she never guessed the riddle. In society she was conscious of one aim, and one aim only. Its very simplicity made other women incredulous, while it kept herself in the dark.

      However, by dint of great pains, she had not yet done Aldous any harm that counted. During all the time of their East End sojourn, a Liberal government, embarrassed by large schemes it had not force enough to carry, was sinking towards inevitable collapse. When the crash came, a weak Conservative government, in which Aldous Maxwell occupied a prominent post, accepted office for a time without a dissolution. They came in on a cry of "industrial reform," and, by way of testing their own party and the country, adopted the Factory Bill for East London, which had now, by the common consent of all the workers upon it, passed into Maxwell's hands. The Bill rent the party in twain; but the Ministry had the courage to go to the country with a programme in which the Maxwell Bill held a prominent place. Trade-unionism rallied to their support; the forces both of reaction and of progress fought for them, in strangely mingled ways; and they were returned with a sufficient, though not large, majority. Lord Ardagh, the veteran leader of the party, became Premier. Maxwell was made President of the Council, while his old friend and associate, Henry Dowson, became Home Secretary, and thereby responsible for the conduct of the long-expected Bill through the Commons.

      When Maxwell came back to her on the afternoon of his decisive interview with Lord Ardagh, she was waiting for him in that same inner room where Tressady paid his first visit. At the sound of her husband's step outside, she sprang up, and they met half-way, her hands clasped in his, against his breast, СКАЧАТЬ