The autumnal afternoon was creeping steadily on towards night; the sun after the morning’s rain was now – from behind thinning clouds – glinting down on the chimney pots and slate roofs of Mr Thripp’s suburb. And the day being a Saturday, across Europe, across England, an immense multitudinous stirring of humanity was in progress. It had begun in remote Australia and would presently sweep across the Atlantic into vast America, resembling the rustling of an ant-heap in a pine wood in sunny June. The Christian world, that is, was preparing for its weekly half-holiday; and Mr Thripp was taking his share.
As if time were of unusual importance to him, two clocks stood on his kitchen mantelpiece: one, gay as a peepshow in the middle, in a stained wood case with red and blue flowers on the glass front; the other an ‘alarm’ – which though it was made of tin had a voice and an appearance little short of the brazen. Above them, as if entirely oblivious to their ranting, a glazed King Edward VII stared stolidly out of a Christmas lithograph, with his Orders on his royal breast.
Mr Thripp’s kitchen table was at this moment disordered with the remains of a meal straggling over a tablecloth that had now gallantly completed its full week’s service. Like all Saturday dinners in his household, this had been a hugger-mugger dinner – one of vehement relays. Mr Thripp himself had returned home from his office at a quarter to two – five minutes after his daughter Millie and Mrs Thripp had already begun. Charlie Thripp had made his appearance a little before the hour; and James – who somehow had never become Jim or Jimmie – arrived soon afterwards. To each his due, kept warm.
But the hasty feeding was now over. Mr Thripp in his shirt-sleeves, and with his silver watch-chain disposed upon his front, had returned once more from the scullery with his empty tray. He was breathing heavily, for he inclined nowadays, as he would sometimes confess, to the ongbongpong. He had remarkably muscular arms for a man of his sedentary profession, that of ledger clerk in Messrs Bailey, Bailey and Company’s counting house. His small eyes, usually half-hidden by their plump lids, were of a bright, clear blue. His round head was covered with close-cut hair; he had fullish lips, and his ample jowl always appeared as if it had been freshly shaved – even on Saturday afternoons.
Mr Thripp delighted in Saturday afternoons. He delighted in housework. Though he never confessed it to a living soul (and even though it annoyed Tilda to hear him) he delighted too in imitating the waitresses in the tea-shops, and rattled the plates and dishes together as if they were made of a material unshatterable and everlasting. When alone at the sink he would hiss like a groom currying a full-grown mare. He packed the tray full of dirty dishes once more, and returned into the steam of the scullery.
‘You get along now, Tilda,’ he said to his wife who was drying up. ‘We shall have that Mrs Brown knocking every minute, and that only flusters you.’
Mrs Thripp looked more ill-tempered than she really was – with her angular face and chin, pitch-dark eyes, and black straight hair. With long damp fingers she drew back a limp strand of it that had straggled over her forehead.
‘What beats me is, you never take a bit of enjoyment yourself,’ she replied. ‘It isn’t fair to us. I slave away, morning, noon and night; but that’s just as things are. But other husbands get out and about; why not you? Let her knock! She’s got too much money to waste; that’s what’s the matter with her. I don’t know what you wouldn’t take her for in that new get-up she’s got.’
Then what the devil do you go about with her for? were the words that entered Mr Thripp’s mind; and as for slaving, haven’t I just asked you to give over? Have reason, woman! But he didn’t utter them. ‘That’ll be all right,’ he said instead, in his absurd genial way. ‘You get on along off, Tilda; I’ll see to all this. I enjoy myself my own way, don’t you fear. Did you never hear of the selfish sex? Well, that’s me!’
‘Oh yes, I know all about that,’ said his wife sententiously: ‘a pinch of salt on a bird’s tail! But there’s no need for sarcasms. Now do be careful with that dish, there. It don’t belong to us, but to next door. She gave me one of her pancakes on it – and nothing better than a shapeless bit of leather, eether. Just to show she was once in service as a cook-general, I suppose; though she never owns to it.’
A spiteful old mischief-maker, if you asked me, was Mr Thripp’s inward comment. But ‘Oh well, Tilda, she means all right,’ he said soothingly. ‘Don’t you worry. Now get along off with you; it’s a hard day, Saturday, but you won’t know yourself when you come down again.’ As if forced into a line of conduct she deprecated and despised, Tilda flung her wet tea-cloth over a chair, and, with heart beating gaily beneath her shrunken breast, hastened away.
Mr Thripp began to whistle under his breath as he turned on the hot water tap again. It was the one thing he insisted on – a lavish supply of hot water. He was no musician and only himself knew the tune he was in search of; but it kept him going as vigorously as a company of grenadiers on the march, and he invariably did his household jobs against time. It indulged a sort of gambling instinct in him; and the more he hated his job the louder he whistled. So as a small boy he had met the challenge of the terrors of the dark. ‘Keep going,’ he would say. ‘Don’t let things mess over. That’s waste!’
At that moment, his elder son, James, appeared in the scullery doorway. James took after his mother’s side of the family. In his navy-blue serge suit, light-brown shoes, mauve socks and spotted tie, he showed what careful dressing can do for a man. A cigarette sagged from his lower lip. His head was oblong, and flat-sided, and his eyes had a damp and vacant look. He thrust his face an inch or two into the succulent steam beyond the doorway.
‘Well, Dad, I’m off,’ he said.
Oh, my God! thought his father; if only you’d drop those infernal fags. Smoke, smoke, smoke, morning to night; and you that pasty-looking I can’t imagaine what the girl sees in you, with your nice superior ways. ‘Right you are, my son’, he said aloud, ‘I won’t ask you to take a hand! Enjoy yourself while you’re young, I say. But slow and steady does it. Where might you be bound for this afternoon?’
‘Oh, tea with Ivy’s people,’ said James magnanimously. ‘Pretty dull going, I can tell you.’
‘But it won’t be tea all the evening, I suppose?’ said his father, pushing a steaming plate into the plate-rack.
‘Oh, I dare say we shall loaf off to a Revoo or something,’ said James. He tossed his cigarette end into the sink, but missed the refuse strainer. Mr Thripp picked it up with a fork and put it into the receptacle it was intended for, while James ‘lit up’ again.
‘Well, so long,’ said his father, ‘don’t spoil that Sunday-go-to-Meeting suit of yours with all this steam. And by the way, James, I owe you five shillings for that little carpentering job you did for me. It’s on the sitting-room shelf.’
‘Right ho. Thanks, Dad,’ said James. ‘I thought it was six. But never mind.’
His father flashed a glance at his son – a glance like the smouldering of a coal. ‘That so? Well, make it six, then,’ he said. ‘And I’m much obliged.’
‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ replied James graciously. ‘Cheerio; don’t overdo it, Dad.’
Mr Thripp returned to his washing-up. He was thinking rapidly with an extraordinary medley of feeling – as if he were not one Mr Thripp, but many. None the less, his whistling broke out anew as though, like a canary, in rivalry with the gushing of the tap. After loading up his tray with crockery for the last time, he put its contents away in the cupboard, and on the kitchen dresser; cleansed the drain, swabbed up the sink, swabbed up the cracked cement floor, hung up his dish-clout, rinsed his hands, and returned into the kitchen.
Millie in a neat, tailor-made costume which had that week marvellously survived dyeing, was now posed before the little cracked square of kitchen looking-glass. She was a pale, slim thing. Her smooth hair, of a lightish brown streaked with gold and parted in the middle, resembled a gilded frame surrounding her mild angelic face – a face such as the medieval sculptors in France delighted to carve on their altar-pieces. Whatever she wore became her – even her skimpy old pale-blue flannel dressing-gown.
She turned her narrow pretty face sidelong under her hat and looked at her father. She looked at every human being like that – even at her own reflection in a shop window, even at a flower in a glass. She spent her whole life subtly, instinctively, wordlessly courting. She had as many young men as the White Queen has pawns: though not all of them remained long in her service.
It’s all very well to be preening yourself in that mirror, my girl, her father was thinking, but you’d be far better off in the long run if you did a bit more to help your mother, even though you do earn a fraction of your living. More thinking and less face, I say. And all that — But ‘Why, I never see such a girl as you, Millie,’ he greeted her incredulously, ‘for looking your best! And such a best, too, my dear. Which young spark is it to be this afternoon? Eh?’
‘Sparks! Dad; how you do talk. Why, I don’t hardly know, Dad. Sparks!’ Millie’s voice almost invariably ran down the scale like the notes of a dulcimer muted with velvet. ‘I wasn’t thinking of anybody in particular,’ she went on, continuing to watch her moving mouth in the glass, ‘but I promised Nellie Gibbs I … One thing, I am not going to stay out long on a day like this!’
‘What’s the matter with the day?’ Mr Thripp inquired.
‘The matter! Why, look at it! It’s a fair filthy mug of a day.’ The words slipped off her pretty curved lips like pearls over satin. A delicious anguish seemed to have arched the corners of her eyelids.
‘Well, ain’t there such a thing as a mackingtosh in the house, then?’ inquired her father briskly.
‘Mackingtosh! Over this? Oh, isn’t that just like a man! I should look a perfect guy.’ She stood gazing at him, like a gazelle startled by the flurry of a breeze across the placid surface of its drinking-pool.
Now see you here, my girl, that see-saw voice inside her father was expostulating once more, what’s the good of them fine silly airs? I take you for an honest man’s daughter with not a ha’penny to spare on fal-lals and monkey-traps. That won’t get you a husband. But Mr Thripp once more ignored its interruption. He smiled almost roguishly out of his bright blue eyes at his daughter. ‘Ask me what I take you for, my dear? Why, I take you for a nice, well-meaning, though remarkably plain young woman. Eh? But there, there, don’t worry. What I say is, make sure of the best (and the best that’s inside) and let the other young fellows go.’
He swept the last clean fork on the table into the drawer and folded up the tablecloth.
‘Oh, Dad, how you do go on!’ breathed Millie. ‘It’s always fellows you’re thinking of. As if fellows made any difference.’ Her glance roamed a little startledly round the room. ‘What I can’t understand,’ she added quickly, ‘is why we never have a clean tablecloth. How can anybody ask a friend home to their own place if that’s the kind of thing they are going to eat off of?’ The faint nuance of discontent in her voice only made it the more enchanting and seductive. She might be Sleeping Beauty babbling out of her dreams.
A cataract of invective coursed through the channels of Mr Thripp’s mind. He paused an instant to give the soiled tablecloth another twist and the table another prolonged sweep of that formidable right arm which for twenty-three years had never once been lifted in chastisement of a single one of his three offspring. Then he turned and glanced at the fire.
‘I wouldn’t,’ he said, seizing the shovel, ‘I wouldn’t let Mother hear that, my dear. We all have a good many things to put up with. And what I say is, all in good time. You bring that Mr Right along! and I can promise him not only a clean tablecloth but something appetizing to eat off of it. A bit of a fire in the sitting-room too, for that matter.’
‘You’re a good sort, Dad,’ said Millie, putting up her face to be kissed – in complete confidence that the tiny powder-puff in her vanity bag would soon adjust any possible mishap to the tip of her small nose. ‘But I don’t believe you ever think I think of anything.’
‘Good-bye, my dear,’ said Mr Thripp; ‘don’t kiss me. I am all of a smother with the washing-up.’
‘Toodle-loo, Ma,’ Millie shrilled, as her father followed her out into the passage. He drew open the front door, secreting his shirt-sleeves well behind it in case of curious passers-by.
‘Take care of yourself, my dear,’ he called after her, ‘and don’t be too late.’
‘Late!’ tossed Millie, ‘any one would think I had been coddled up in a hot-house.’
Out of a seething expense of spirit in Mr Thripp’s mind only a few words made themselves distinct. ‘Well, never mind, my precious dear. I’m with you for ever, whether you know it or not.’
He returned into the house, and at once confronted his younger son, Charlie, who was at that moment descending the stairs. As a matter of fact he was descending the stairs like fifteen Charlies, and nothing so much exasperated his father as to feel the whole house rock on its foundations at each fresh impact.
‘Off to your Match, my boy?’ he cried. ‘Some day I expect you will be taking a hand in the game yourself. Better share than watch!’
Every single Saturday afternoon during the football season Mr Thripp ventured to express some such optimistic sentiment as this. But Charlie had no objection; not at all.
‘Not me, Dad,’ he assured him good-humouredly. ‘I’d sooner pay a bob to see other fellows crocked up. You couldn’t lend me one, I suppose?’
‘Lend you what?’
‘Two tanners; four frippenies; a twelfth of a gross of coppers.’
Good God! yelled Mr Thripp’s inward monitor, am I never to have a minute’s rest or relief ? But it yelled in vain.
‘Right you are, my son,’ he said instead, and thrusting his fleshy hand into his tight-fitting trouser-pocket he brought out a fistful of silver and pence. ‘And there,’ he added, ‘there’s an extra sixpence, free, gratis, and for nothing, for the table d’hôte. All I say is, Charlie, better say “give” when there isn’t much chance of keeping to the “lend”. I don’t want to preach; but that’s always been my rule; and kept it too, as well as I could.’
Charles counted the coins in his hand, and looked at his father. He grinned companionably. He invariably found his father a little funny to look at. He seemed somehow to be so remote from anything you could mean by things as they are, and things as they are now. He wasn’t so much old-fashioned, as just a Gone-by. He was his father, of course, just as a jug is a jug, and now and then Charlie was uncommonly fond of him, longed for his company, and remembered being a little boy walking with him in the Recreation Ground. But he wished he wouldn’t be always giving advice, and especially the kind of advice which he had himself assiduously practised.
‘Ta, Dad,’ he said; ‘that’s doing me proud. I’ll buy you a box of Havanas with what’s over from the table d’hôte. And now we’re square. Good-bye, dad.’ He paused as he turned to go. ‘Honour bright,’ he added, ‘I hope I shall be earning a bit more soon, and then I shan’t have to ask you for anything.’
A curious shine came into Mr Thripp’s small lively eyes; it seemed almost to spill over on to his plum cheeks. It looked as if those cheeks had even paled a little.
‘Why, that’s all right, Charlie, me boy,’ he mumbled, ‘I’d give you the skin off me body if it would be of any use. That’s all right. Don’t stand about too long but just keep going. What I can’t abide is these young fellows that swallow down their enjoyments like so much black draught. But we are not that kind of a family, I’m thankful to say.’
‘Not me!’ said Charles, with a grimace like a good-humoured marmoset, and off he went to his soccer match.
Hardly had the sound of his footsteps ceased – and Mr Thripp stayed there in the passage, as if to listen till they were for ever out of hearing – when there came a muffled secretive tap on the panel of the door. At sound of it the genial podgy face blurred and blackened.
Oh, it’s you, you cringing Jezebel is it? – the thought scurried through his mind like a mangy animal. Mr Thripp indeed was no lover of the ultrafeminine. He either feared it, or hated it, or both feared and hated it. It disturbed his even tenor. It was a thorn in the side of the Mr Thripp who not only believed second thoughts were best, but systematically refused to give utterance to first. Any sensible person, he would say, ought to know when he’s a bit overtaxed, and act accordingly.
The gloved fingers, Delilah-like, had tapped again. Mr Thripp tiptoed back into the kitchen, put on his coat, and opened the door.
‘Oh, it’s you, Mrs Brown,’ he said. ‘Tilda won’t be a moment. She’s upstairs titivating. Come in and take a seat.’
His eyes meanwhile were informing that inward censor of his precisely how many inches thick the mauvish face-powder lay on Mrs Brown’s cheek, the liver-coloured lipstick on her mouth, and the dye on her loaded eyelashes. Those naturally delicate lashes swept down in a gentle fringe upon her cheek as she smiled in reply. She was a graceful thing, too, but practised; and far more feline, far far more body-conscious than Millie. No longer in the blush of youth either; though still mistress of the gift that never leaves its predestined owner – the impulse and power to fascinate mere man. Still, there were limitations even to Mrs Brown’s orbit of attraction, and Mr Thripp might have been the planet Neptune, he kept himself so far out in the cold.
He paused a moment at the entrance to the sitting-room, until his visitor had seated herself. He was eyeing her Frenchified silk scarf, her demure new hat, her smart high-heeled patent-leather shoes, but his eyes dropped like stones when he discovered her own dark languishing ones surveying him from under that hat’s beguiling brim.
‘Nice afternoon after the rain,’ he remarked instantly. ‘Going to the pictures, I suppose? As for meself, these days make me want to be out and in at the same time. It’s the mustry, fusty, smoky dark of them places I can’t stand.’
Mrs Brown rarely raised her voice much above a whisper. Indeed it appeared to be a physical effort to her to speak at all. She turned her face a little sidelong, her glance on the carpet. ‘Why, it’s the dark I enjoy, Mr Thripp,’ she said. ‘It’ – and she raised her own – ‘it rests the eyes so.’
For an instant Mr Thripp’s memory returned to Millie, but he made no comment.
‘Here’s Mrs Brown, Tilda,’ he called up the staircase. Good heavens, the woman might as well be the real thing, the voice within was declaring. But the words that immediately followed up this piece of news were merely, ‘You’ll be mighty surprised to hear, Tilda, Mrs Brown’s got a new hat.’ A faint catcall of merriment descended the stairs.
‘Oh, now, Mr Thripp, listen to that!’ whispered the peculiar voice from out of the little airless sitting-room, ‘you always did make fun of me, Mr Thripp. Do I deserve it, now?’
A gentle wave of heat coursed over Mr Thripp as he covertly listened to these accents, but he was out of sight.
‘Fun, Mrs Brown? Never,’ he retorted gallantly; ‘it’s only my little way:’ and then to his immense relief, on lifting his eyes, discovered Tilda already descending the stairs.
He saw the pair of them off. Being restored to his coat, he could watch them clean down the drying street from his gatepost. Astonishing, he thought, the difference there can be between two women’s backs! Tilda’s, straight, angular, and respectable, as you might say; and that other – sinuous, seductive, as if it were as crafty a means of expression as the very smile and long-lashed languishments upon its owner’s face. ‘What can the old woman see in her!’ he muttered to himself; ‘damned if I know!’ On this problem Mr Thripp firmly shut his front door. Having shut it he stooped to pick up a tiny white feather on the linoleum; and stooping, sighed. At last his longed-for hour had come – the hour for which his very soul pined throughout each workaday week. Not that it was always his happy fate to be left completely alone like this. At times, indeed, he had for company far too much housework to leave him any leisure. But to-day the dinner things were cleared away, the washing-up was over, the tables fair as a baker’s board, the kitchen spick and span, the house empty. He would just have a look round his own and Tilda’s bedroom (and, maybe, the boys’ and Millie’s). And then the chair by the fire; the simmering kettle on the hearth; and the soft tardy autumnal dusk fading quietly into night beyond the window.
It was a curious thing that a man who loved his family so much, who was as desperately loyal to every member of it as a she-wolf is to her cubs, should yet find this few minutes’ weekly solitude a luxury such as only Paradise, one would suppose, would ever be able to provide.
Mr Thripp went upstairs and not only tidied up his own and Tilda’s bedroom, and went on to Millie’s and the boys’, but even gave a sloosh to the bath, slid the soap out of the basin where Charlie had abandoned it, and hung up the draggled towels again in the tiny bathroom. What a place looks like when you come back to it from your little enjoyment – it’s that makes all the difference to your feelings about a home. These small chores done, Mr Thripp put on an old tweed coat with frayed sleeves, and returned to the kitchen. In a quarter of an hour that too more than ever resembled a new pin.
Then he glanced up at the clocks; between them the time was a quarter to four. He was amazed. He laid the tea, took out of his little old leather bag a pot of jam which he had bought for a surprise on his way home, and arranged a bunch of violets in a small jar beside Tilda’s plate. But apart from these family preparations, Mr Thripp was now depositing a demure little glossy-brown teapot all by itself on the kitchen range. This was his Eureka. This was practically the only sensual secret luxury Mr Thripp had ever allowed himself since he became a family man. Tilda’s cooking was good enough for him provided that the others had their little dainties now and then. He enjoyed his beer, and could do a bit of supper occasionally with a friend. But the ritual of these solitary Saturday afternoons reached its climax in this small pot of tea. First the nap, sweet as nirvana in his easychair, then the tea, and then the still, profound quarter of an hour’s musing before the door-knocker began again.
Having pulled down the blind a little in order to prevent any chance of draught, Mr Thripp eased his bootlaces, sat himself in his chair, his cheek turned a little away from the window, his feet on the box that usually lay under the table, and with fingers clasped over his stomach composed himself to sleep. The eyelids closed; the lips set; the thumbs twitched now and again. He breathed deep, and the kettle began a whispered anthem – as if a myriad voices were singing on and on without need of pause or rest, a thousand thousand leagues away.
But now there was none to listen; and beyond, quiet hung thick in the little house. Only the scarce-perceptible hum of the traffic at the end of the narrow side street was audible on the air. Within, the two clocks on the chimney-piece quarrelled furiously over the fleeting moments, attaining unanimity only in one of many ticks. Ever and again a tiny scutter of dying ashes rejoined those that had gone before in the pan beneath the fire. Soon even these faint stirrings became inaudible and in a few moments Mr Thripp’s spirit would have wafted itself completely free awhile from its earthly tenement, if, suddenly, the image of Millie – more vivid than even the actual sight of her a few minutes before – had not floated up into the narrow darkness of her father’s tight-shut eyes.
But this was not the image of Millie as her father usually saw her. A pathetic earthly melancholy lay over the fair angelic features. The young cheek was sunken in; the eye was faded, dejected, downcast; and that cheek was stubbornly turned away from her father, as if she resented or was afraid of his scrutiny.
At this vision a headlong anxiety darted across Mr Thripp’s half-slumbering mind. His heart began heavily beating: and then a pulse in his forehead. Where was she now? What forecast, what warning was this? Millie was no fool. Millie knew her way about. And her mother if anything was perhaps a little too censorious of the ways of this wicked world. If you keep on talking at a girl, hinting of things that might otherwise not enter her head – that in itself is dangerous. Love itself even must edge in warily. The tight-shut lids blinked anxiously. But where was Millie now? Somewhere indoors, but where? Who with?
Mr Thripp saw her first in a tea-shop, sitting opposite a horrid young man with his hair greased back over his low round head, and a sham pin in his tie. His elbows were on the marble-top table, and he was looking at Millie very much as a young but experienced pig looks at his wash-trough. Perhaps she was at the Pictures? Dulcet accents echoed into the half-dreaming mind – ‘But I enjoy the dark, Mr Thripp … It rests the eyes.’ Why did the woman talk as if she had never more than half a breath to spare? Rest her eyes! She never at any rate wanted to rest the eyes of any fool in trousers who happened to be within glimpse of her own. It was almost unnaturally dark in the cinema of Mr Thripp’s fancy at this moment, yet he could now see his Millie with her pale, harmless, youthful face, as plainly as if she were the ‘close-up’ of some star from Los Angeles on the screen. And now the young man in her company was almost as fair as herself, with a long-chinned sheepish face and bolting eyes; and the two of them were amorously hand in hand.
For a moment Mr Thripp sat immovable, as if a bugle had sounded in his ear. Then he deliberately opened his eyes and glanced about him. The November daylight was already beginning to fade. Yes, he would have a word with Millie – but not when she came home that evening. It is always wiser to let the actual coming-home be pleasant and welcoming. Tomorrow morning, perhaps; that is, if her mother was not goading at her for being late down and lackadaisical when there was so much to be done. Nevertheless, all in good time he would have a little quiet word with her. He would say only what he would not afterwards regret having said. He had meant to do that ages ago; but you mustn’t flood a house with water when it’s not on fire. She was but a mere slip of a thing – like a flower; not a wild flower, but one of those sweet waxen flowers you see blooming in a florist’s window – which you must be careful with and not just expose anywhere.
And yet how his own little place here could be compared with anything in the nature of a hot-house he could not for the life of him understand. Delicate-looking! Everybody said that. God bless me, perhaps her very lackadaisicalness was a symptom of some as yet hidden malady. Good God, supposing! … He would take her round to see the doctor as soon as he could. But the worst of it was you had to do these things on your own responsibility. And though Mr Thripp was now a man close on fifty, sometimes he felt as if he could no longer bear the burden of all these responsibilities. Sometimes he felt as if he couldn’t endure to brood over them as he was sometimes wont to do. If he did, he would snap. People looked old; but nobody was really old inside; not old at least in the sense that troubles were any the lighter, or forebodings any the more easily puffed away; or tongues easier to keep still; or tempers to control.
And talking of tempers reminded him of Charlie. What on earth was going to be done with Charlie? There was no difficulty in conjuring up, in seeing Charlie – that is if he really did go every Saturday to a football match. But Charlie was now of an age when he might think it a fine manly thing to be loafing about the counter of a pub talking to some flaxen barmaid with a tuppeny cigar between his teeth. Still, Mr Thripp refused to entertain more than a glimpse of this possibility. He saw him at this moment as clearly as if in a peepshow, packed in with hundreds of other male creatures close as sardines in a tin, with their check caps and their ‘fags’, and their staring eyes revolving in consort as if they were all attached to one wire, while that idiotic ball in the middle of the arena coursed on its helpless way from muddy boot to muddy boot.
Heaven knows, Mr Thripp himself was nothing much better than a football! You had precious small chance in this life of choosing which boot should give you the next kick. And what about that smug new creeping accountant at the office with his upstart airs and new-fangled book-keeping methods!
Mr Thripp’s mouth opened in a yawn, but managed only to achieve a fraction of it. He rubbed his face; his eyes now shut again. It was not as if any of your children were of much practical help. Why should they be when they could never understand that what you pined for, what you really needed was not only practical help but some inward grace and clearness of mind wherewith they could slip in under your own thoughts and so share your point of view without all that endless terrifying argumentation. He didn’t always give advice to suit his own ends; and yet whenever he uttered a word to James, tactfully suggesting that in a world like this – however competent a man may be and however sure of himself – you had to push your way, you had to make your weight felt, James always looked at him as if he were a superannuated orang-outang in a cage – an orang-outang with queer and not particularly engaging habits.
He wouldn’t mind even that so much if only James would take his cigarette out of his mouth when he talked. To see that bit of stained paper attached to his son’s lower lip wagging up and down, up and down, beneath that complacent smile and those dark helpless-looking eyes, all but sent Mr Thripp stark staring mad at times. Once, indeed, he had actually given vent to the appalling mass of emotion hoarded up like water in a reservoir in his mind. The remembrance of the scene that followed made him even at this moment tremble in his chair. Thank God, thank God, he hadn’t often lost control like that.
Well, James would be married by this time next year, he supposed. And what a nice dainty pickle he was concocting for himself! Mr Thripp knew that type of young woman, with the compressed lips, and the thin dry hair, and the narrow hips. She’d be ‘a good manager’, right enough, but there’s a point in married life where good managing is little short of being in a lunatic asylum between two iron-faced nurses and yourself in a strait waistcoat. The truth of it was, with all his fine airs and neat finish, James hadn’t much common sense. He had a fair share of brains; but brains are no good if you are merely self-opinionated and contemptuous on principle. James was not like anybody in Mr Thripp’s own family. He was a Simpkins.
And then suddenly it was as if some forgotten creature in Mr Thripp’s mind or heart had burst out crying; and the loving look he thereupon cast on his elder son’s face in his mind was almost maudlin in its sentimentality. He would do anything for James within reason: anything. But then it would have to be within James’s reason – not his own. He knew that. Why he would himself marry the young woman and exult in being a bigamist if only he could keep his son out of her way. And yet, and yet; maybe there were worse women in the world than your stubborn, petulant, niggardly, half-sexed nagger. Mr Thripp knew a nagger of old. His brother’s wife, Fanny, had been a nagger. She was dead now, and George was a free man – but drinking far too much.
Well, as soon as he could get a chance, Mr Thripp sitting there in his chair decided, he would have another good think; but that probably wouldn’t be until next Saturday, if then. You can’t think to much purpose – except in a worried disjointed fashion – when you are in the noise of an office or keeping yourself from saying things you have no wish to say. The worst of it was it was not much good discussing these matters with Tilda. Like most women, she always went off at a tangent. And when you came down to it, and wanted to be reasonable, there was so little left to discuss. Besides, Tilda had worries enough of her own.
At this moment Mr Thripp once more opened his eyes wide. The small kitchen loomed beatifically rosy and still in the glow of the fire. Evening had so far edged on its way now that he could hardly see the hands of his two clocks. He could but just detect the brass pendulum – imperturbably chopping up eternity into fragments of time. He craned forward; in five minutes he ought to be brewing his little private pot of tea. Even if he nodded off now, he would be able to wake in time, but five minutes doesn’t leave much margin for dropping off. He shifted a little on his chair, and once more shut his eyes. And in a moment or two his mind went completely blank.
He seemed to have been suddenly hauled up helpless with horror into an enormous vacancy – to be dangling unconfined and motionless in space. A scene of wild sandy hills and spiky trees – an illimitable desert, came riding towards him out of nothingness. He hung motionless, and was yet sweeping rapidly forward, but for what purpose and to what goal there was not the smallest inkling. The wilderness before him grew ever more desolate and menacing. He began to be deadly afraid; groaned; stirred – and found himself with fingers clenched on its arms sitting bolt upright in his chair. And the hands of the clock looked to be by a hair’s breadth precisely in the same position as when he had started on that ghastly nightmare journey. His face blanched. He sat appalled, listening to an outrageous wauling of voices. It was as though a thousand demons lay in wait for him beneath his window and were summoning him to his doom.
And all this nightmare horror of mind was due solely to a conversazione of cats! Yet, as with flesh still creeping he listened on to this clamour, it was so human in effect that it might be multitudinous shades of the unborn that were thronging about the glass of his window. Mr Thripp rose from his chair, his face transfigured with rage and desire for revenge. He went out into the scullery, opened the back door, and at sound of him the caterwauling instantly ceased.
And almost as instantly his fury died out in him. The cold evening air fanned his forehead. He smiled quixotically, and looked about him. There came a furtive rustle in the bushes. ‘Ah, there you are!’ he sang out gently into the dark. ‘Have your play while you can, my fine gentlemen! Take it like your betters, for it’s a sight too soon over.’
Above the one cramped leafless elder-tree in his yard a star was pricking the sky. A ground mist, too, was rising, already smelling a little stale. Great London and its suburbs appeared to be in for one of its autumnal fogs. A few of the upper windows opposite loomed dim with light. Mr Thripp’s neighbours, it seemed, were also preparing to be off to the pictures or the music-halls. It was very still, and the air was damp and clammy.
As he stood silent there in the obscurity a deepening melancholy crept over his mind, though he was unaware into what gloomy folds and sags his face had fallen. He suddenly remembered that his rates would have to be paid next week. He remembered that Christmas would soon be coming, and that he was getting too old to enter into the fun of the thing as he used to do. His eyes rolled a little in their sockets. What the … ! his old friend within began to suggest. But Mr Thripp himself did not even enunciate the missing ‘hell’. Instead, he vigorously rubbed his face with his stout capable hand. ‘Well, fog anyhow don’t bring rain,’ he muttered to himself.
And as if at a signal his own cat and his next-door neighbour’s cat and Mrs Brown’s cat and the cat of the painter and decorator whose back garden abutted his own, together with the ginger-and-white cat from the newsvendor’s beyond, with one consent broke out once more into their Sabbath eve quintette. The many-stranded strains of it mounted up into the heavens like the yells of demented worshippers of Baal.
‘And, as I say, I don’t blame ye neether,’ Mr Thripp retorted, with a grim smile. ‘If you knew, my friends, how narrowly you some of you escaped a bucket of cold water when you couldn’t even see out of your young eyes you’d sing twice as loud.’
He shut the door and returned to his fireside. No more hope of sleep that afternoon. He laughed to himself for sheer amusement at his disappointment. What kids men were! He stirred the fire, it leapt brightly as if intent to please him. He pushed the kettle on; lit the lamp; warmed his little privy glossy-brown tea-pot, and fetched out a small private supply of the richest Ceylon from behind some pots in the saucepan cupboard.
Puffs of steam were now vapouring out of the spout of the kettle with majestic pomposity. Mr Thripp lifted it off the coals and balanced it over his tea-pot. And at that very instant the electric bell – which a year or two ago in a moment of strangest caprice Charles had fixed up in the corner – began jangling like a fire-alarm. Mr Thripp hesitated. If this was one of the family, he was caught. Caught, that is, unless he was mighty quick in concealing these secret preparations. If it was Tilda – well, valour was the better part of discretion. He poured the water into the pot, replaced the lid, and put it on to the oven-top to stew. With a glance of satisfaction at the spinster-like tidiness of the room, he went out, and opened the door.
‘Why, it’s Millie!’ he said, looking out at the slim-shouldered creature standing alone there under the porch; ‘you don’t mean to say it’s you, my dear?’
Millie made no reply. Her father couldn’t see her face, partly because the lamp-post stationed in front of the house three doors away gave at best a feeble light, and partly because her features were more or less concealed by her hat. She pushed furtively past him without a word, her head still stooping out of the light.
Oh, my God, what’s wrong now? yelled her father’s inward monstrous monitor, frenziedly clanging the fetters on wrist and ankle. ‘Come right in, my pretty dear,’ said Mr Thripp seductively, ‘this is a pleasant surprise. And what’s more, between you and me and the gatepost, I have just been making myself a cup of tea. Not a word to Mother; it’s our little secret. We’ll have it together before the others come in.’
He followed his daughter into the kitchen.
‘Lor, what a glare you are in, Pa!’ she said in a small muffled voice. She turned the wick of the lamp down so low that in an instant or two the flame flickered and expired, and she seated herself in her father’s chair by the fire. But the flamelight showed her face now. It was paler even than usual. A strand of her gilded pale-brown hair had streaked itself over her blue-veined temple. She looked as if she had been crying. Her father, his hands hanging down beside him as uselessly as the front paws of a performing bear, watched her in an appalling trepidation of spirit. This then was the secret of his nightmare; for this the Cats of Fate had chorused!
‘What’s wrong, Millie love? Are you overtired, my girl? There! Don’t say nothing for a minute or two. See, here’s my little pot just meant for you and me!’
Millie began to cry again, pushing her ridiculous little handkerchief close to her eyes. Mr Thripp’s hand hovered awkwardly above her dainty hat and then gently fumbled as if to stroke her hair beneath. He knelt down beside her chair.
For heaven’s sake! for heaven’s sake! for heaven’s sake! a secret voice was gabbling frenziedly in his ear. ‘Tell your old dad, lovey,’ he murmured out loud, softly as the crooning of a wood-pigeon.
Millie tilted back her pretty hat and dropped her fair head on his shoulder. ‘It’s nothing, Dad,’ she said, ‘It’s only that they are all the same.’
‘What are all the same?’
‘Oh, fellows, Dad.’
‘Which one, precious?’ Mr Thripp lulled wooingly. God strike him dead! muttered his monster.
‘Oh, only young Arthur. Like a fool I waited half an hour for him and then saw him with – with that Westcliff girl.’
A sigh as voluminous as the suspiration of Niagara swept over Mr Thripp; but it made no sound. Half a dozen miraculous words of reassurance were storming his mind in a frenzy of relief. He paused an instant, and accepted the seventh.
‘What’s all that, my precious?’ he was murmuring. ‘Why, when I was courting your mother, I saw just the same thing happen. She was a mighty pretty young thing, too, as a girl, though not quite so trim and neat in the figure as you. I felt I could throttle him where he stood. But no, I just took no notice, trusting in my own charms!’
‘That’s all very well,’ sobbed Millie, ‘but you were a man, and we have to fight without seeming to. Not that I care a fig for him; he can go. But —’
‘Lord, Millie!’ Mr Thripp interrupted, smoothing her cheek with his squat forefinger, ‘you’d beat twenty of them Westcliffs, with a cast in both eyes and your hands behind your back. Don’t you grieve no more, my dear; he’ll come back safe and sound, or he’s less of a – of a nice young feller than I take him for.’
For a moment Mr Thripp caught a glimpse of the detestable creature with the goggling eyes and the suede shoes, but he dismissed him sternly from view.
‘There now,’ he said, ‘give your poor old dad a kiss. What’s disappointments, Millie; they soon pass away. And now, just take a sip or two of this extra-strong Bohay! I was hoping I shouldn’t have to put up with a lonely cup and not a soul to keep me company. But mind, my precious, not a word to your ma.’
So there they sat, father and daughter, comforter and comforted, while Mr Thripp worked miracles for two out of a tea-pot for one. And while Millie, with heart comforted, was musing of that other young fellow she had noticed boldly watching her while she was waiting for her Arthur, Mr Thripp was wondering when it would be safe and discreet to disturb her solacing daydream so that he might be busying himself over the supper.
It’s one dam neck-and-neck worry and trouble after another, his voice was assuring him. But meanwhile, his plain square face was serene and gentle as a nestful of halcyons, as he sat sipping his hot water and patting his pensive Millie’s hand.
1 As printed in BS (1942).