The springs of affection, p.15
The Springs of Affection, page 15
There were worn patches in the stair carpet that had appeared suddenly after all these years, and the wallpaper around the hall door had begun to peel badly and something would have to be done about it. Even the dust seemed to have found new places to settle, or to be settling in different places, and it seemed to her that in sweeping up the dust, day in and day out, all she was doing was sweeping up the time since John had left — more dust every day, more time every day — and she began to think that all she would do for the rest of her life was sweep up the time since John left. The dust got on her nerves. It made her feel sick to see the way it was there every day, new dust, but looking just as old and dirty as the old dust her mother used to be always sweeping up and throwing away, long ago in the country town where she had been born and brought up. As surely as the clock ticked and had to be wound up again, the dust made its way around the house, and it got on her hands. It got on her hands and on her wrists, and no matter how hard she scrubbed her nails, there always seemed to be some of it left there under her nails. She told herself that she had the hands of a servant. Hubert’s hands were soft and neat, but hers were big and rough, as though she were a person who worked with her hands. She had often caught Hubert looking at her hands when she was dealing with the food on her plate and looking at her when she put food into her mouth. She always ate a lot of bread, and she thought he must sometimes wonder how she could eat so much bread or why she ate it so fast. She couldn’t help it — she felt there was something shameful about eating so much of bread or of any food, but she wanted it and she ate it quickly and there were times when she felt her face getting red with defiance and longing when she reached for the loaf to cut another slice. One thing, she had stopped putting jam on the table since John left. She and John both loved jam, but Hubert had no taste for it at all. When John was at home, she used to make jam — raspberry, damson, and gooseberry — but what they both liked best was the thick expensive jam that came in jars from England. It was best not to put the jar on the table. Hubert never questioned the expense, but he would sometimes take the jar in his hand and turn it around and read the label very slowly and then put the jar back again. Even if the jar was nearly full he would tip it and look into it. One time he had said, “It’s a good idea, having something to read on the table.” John had laughed out loud, and she had thought it heartless of him to laugh when he knew that his father was only looking for another way to make little of her.
Every day of the six months that had passed since John left to become a priest, Mrs. Derdon realized that he was gone and that he was not coming back, and every day she thought she was only realizing it for the first time. The realization was alive and it possessed her completely and directed all her actions, one minute telling her to sit down and the next minute telling her to stand up immediately without delay and without reason — except that the power of the realization was reason enough, because it directed her every minute now, and controlled her and kept her going and gave its own mysterious organization to everything she did. If it had not been for this realization, keeping at her all day, she would not have known what to do next and she would have done what she really wanted to do, which was to crawl in under the bed and put her face down on the floor and sleep. She kept wanting to lie down on the floor. The realization that John was gone and would not be back took different shapes inside her, but it always stayed in the same place, just under her chest, in the center, between her ribs. Sometimes it went away altogether and she felt empty, and then, at these moments, she would go and get herself something to eat, but almost always when she had the food before her, the realization would come back again and she would feel sick at the thought of eating. At times the realization would go away altogether, or seem to go away, and she would become terribly excited and run to the front windows knowing that John was coming home, that he was at this exact moment walking along the street carrying his suitcase, and that she would have to wait only a minute or so to get her first sight of him, coming around the corner from the main road. But of course he wasn’t coming, and he wouldn’t be coming, and the excitement inside her would flatten out and stupefy her with its weight, and her disappointment and humiliation at being made a fool of would be as cruel as though what she had felt had really been hope and not what it was, the delirium of loss.
Out of this recurrent delirium two daydreams had grown, long, peaceful, pleasant dreams, always expanding, always increasing in their progress and in their detail, alike in only two respects — in their soothing monotony and in their endings. Both dreams ended at the moment when John became her own again, only hers.
In the first dream, John came back. In this dream, she was watching for him at the front window, and when he turned the corner she went to open the front door for him, but then she wanted him to have his first glimpse of her framed in the window and she went back and stood in the window (holding the net curtain aside with her hand) until he saw her and smiled. When he got to the low gate that opened backward into her tiny front garden, she hurried into the hall to open the front door wide so that he could walk straight in and put his suitcase down in the hall, to get rid of the weight of it — he had never been very strong. Then they would look at each other and she would say, “I knew you’d be back, John.” Or she might put it this way: “I knew you’d come back to me, John.” And he would say, “You always knew what was best for me, Mother.” They would go down to the kitchen, where she would have the table set and ready, everything he liked on the table. He would eat something, and then he wouldn’t be able to hold it in any longer, what was bothering him, and he would say, “But Mother, didn’t you mind when I went away? Didn’t you miss me at all? You never said one word, not a word.” Those words would tell her what she wanted to know — that he had noticed her heroic silence, how she hadn’t said a word when she realized he was going off and leaving her, how she had kept back all the reminders and reproaches that she had been longing to let loose at him, and that he understood how brave and unselfish she had been, letting him go off free as she had done. There would be no end to the amount they would have to say to each other, once that point in their reunion had been reached. They would drink an awful lot of tea. She would tell him that she had missed him terribly. She would say that she had been dead lonely, even crying with the need of him (she would remind him that his father wasn’t much company), but that she had been only thinking of his own good, and only wanting the same thing that she had always wanted — what was best for him. And that she had never imagined not letting him go in peace, as long as his heart was set on it.
But it was all a dream. He wasn’t coming back at all, and she bitterly regretted having let him go as easily as she had done. She had been so sure he would come back that she hadn’t said a word, getting her sacrifice ready for him to admire. There were many things she could have said to him, the evening when he finally spoke to her, telling her that it was all settled and that his mind was made up and he was going. At that point, his mind wasn’t made up at all. She could have stopped him with a word. She could have reminded him that he was an only child and that his duty was to his father and mother. And he had no faith at all in himself; it was only because of her prayers and encouragement that he had got through his examinations his last year in school. She had carried him all his life, and now he imagined he was going to be able to get along without her. And how did he think he was going to be able to get along in a house full of men — priests and students — all better ready for the priesthood than he was, and all better up on the world than he would ever be. They would look down on him. He would be very glad to get away out of that place and come back to her.
But he wasn’t coming back, there was the realization of that stirring in her again, and it would start giving her orders again, taking charge, and she would obey it, getting up and sitting down and walking here and there and never easy anywhere, because the only ease that could come to her would come if she could just get down on the floor and put her face in the corner and let her mind wander away into sleep, but into a different, roomy kind of sleep, very deep and distant, where there was no worry and where her mind would not be confined in dreams but could float and become vague and might even break free and sail off up like a child’s balloon, taking her burden of memory with it.
There was not only nothing nice, there was nothing definite at all to remember, only a great many years that had passed along and were now finished, leaving only the remnants of themselves — herself, Hubert, the furniture; even the plants in the garden only seemed to hold their position in order to mark the shabbiness of time. All the things that she had collected together and arranged about the house could blow away, or fall into a pitiful heap, if it were not that the walls of the house were attached on both sides to the walls of the neighboring houses. There was nothing in sight that rested her eyes and nothing in her mind except the realization that John was gone, and the necessity of obeying the dictates of that realization in order to continue, even for a little while longer, her flight from it. The realization badgered her, and she had to obey it and at the same time pretend she didn’t notice it. There was only one time of day when she ignored it, when it was weakest and she was strongest, when they first woke up in the morning, she and it, and it barely stirred, and what it told her then was that she should go back to sleep at once and not wake up at all. But she ignored it then, because it was a matter of pride with her to be up and dressed and downstairs before Hubert opened his eyes, and to have his breakfast ready and waiting for him and part of her housework done by the time he came down to the kitchen.
It was terrible having nobody to complain to; not that she had anything actual to complain about, but it was terrible having no one to talk to. John had always been a great confidant, and the Blessed Virgin had been a great consolation to Mrs. Derdon all her life, the One she had always turned to for help and advice and understanding, but she could hardly turn to the Blessed Virgin now, when it was the Blessed Virgin who had taken John away. It was not the Blessed Virgin herself who had taken John away but his own devotion to the Blessed Virgin, but it all amounted to the same thing in the end, and between the two of them she felt she was left out and left behind.
John had always been a very holy little boy. He was always going over his collection of holy pictures and sorting them out and looking at the holy medals he had and strewing his little saints’ relics all over the house. He had a habit when he was small of wandering into the kitchen with a holy picture in his hand and standing looking at it until she asked him to tell her what he was thinking, and it was always some holy thought, surprising in such a young child. Sometimes he would prop a holy picture in front of his father’s place at tea, prop it against the sugar bowl or the milk jug so that his father would see it when he was sitting down to the table. But Hubert put a stop to that one evening by putting the holy picture — it was of St. Sebastian being tortured — on his bread and smoothing it with his knife as though it were butter and then biting it. He tore off a corner of it, along with some bread, and he sat there chewing it and smiling what he called his happy-family-man smile. John cried, and Hubert pretended he didn’t know what he had done wrong, and she said, “Hubert, I’m scandalized at you.” Then she cried, too, because Hubert said, “I’m fed up with the two of you.”
The second dream she had of John was a very simple one. It was more a vision than a daydream, and all that really happened in it was that she saw his grave. In the second dream, he had not gone away at all, he had died. It had not been his fault, after all. He had not wanted to leave her. In the second dream she visited his grave every day, and sat beside it for hours, and wore black, like a widow. When she cried, everybody sympathized with her, because who has a better right to cry than a woman who has lost her only son. Everyone marveled at her devotion when they saw her going to the grave every day, rain, hail, sleet, or snow, no matter how she felt, bringing flowers and leaves and ferns according to the season of the year. She would mourn John constantly, and even Hubert would hardly have the heart to reproach her for her long face.
This evening, getting the tea for herself and Hubert, she was arranging Christmas holly and ivy on John’s grave when she heard Hubert’s key in the lock, and then the closing of the front door. Now Hubert would go into the back sitting room and light the fire there and sit beside it until she called him to tea. Sometimes she lighted the fire in the back sitting room and sat there herself. This afternoon she had hardly left the kitchen. They burned coal. They kept the coal and the firewood, together with her garden things, in a small wooden shed that was attached to the back of the house. Every day she carried in two scuttles of coal, one made of iron, for the kitchen stove, and one made of brass, for the sitting room. She sometimes wondered, when she lifted the coal, if Hubert had any idea how heavy it was. Now, crossing the kitchen to turn the gas from low to high under the kettle, she saw the brass scuttle standing alongside the stove, filled and ready. She had carried it in and then forgotten to carry it up to the sitting room. She was irritated with herself for forgetting to bring it up and leave it ready for him when he came in. It was a bad sign — to start to be forgetful, to start forgetting things that ought to be done. Well, she wouldn’t give him the chance to come down and ask for it, or to watch her clamber with it up the three steps that led to the hall and the sitting room. He said his heart was bad and that that was why he couldn’t do much of anything that would exert him. But it had been the same when he was forty and thirty and younger. He loved to be waited on.
She took the handle of the brass scuttle in both hands and carried it with difficulty across the kitchen and up the stairs and into the back sitting room. She found that Hubert had already put a match to the fire, which she had laid ready with paper and wood and a few bits of coal that she had dotted across the top of it. He was fanning the small blaze with his open newspaper, his evening paper. He turned when she came in, and the newspaper billowed toward the fire and then blazed up. Hubert dropped the newspaper in his fright. Mrs. Derdon ran and got the poker and pushed the newspaper into the grate. Scraps of the blazing newspaper floated out and around the room. While she was stamping them out, Hubert raced off to the kitchen shouting, “That’s all right, that’s all right. I’ll get some water!” and then he came dashing in with the hot kettle that he had snatched off the stove and poured a stream of water all over the fireplace. The fire, already tamed, gave up at once and turned into black soup, which streamed out between the bars of the grate and down onto the tiles of the hearth, where it settled into puddles of various sizes and shapes.
Mrs. Derdon sat down in a chair and began to cry helplessly. She hid her face behind her hands and then she pushed her hands into her hair and pushed her hair about and then she wrapped her arms about herself and rocked in grief. Disorder had finally prevailed against her, and there was nothing further she could do. She could kill herself over this room now and it would never look the same. This was the worst thing Hubert had ever done, and John had not been here to see it, and she would never be able to find the words to describe it to him. She glared at Hubert, who was watching her with dislike and alarm.
“Oh, what will I do!” she cried.
“Oh, for God’s sake, pull yourself together,” Hubert cried. “What ails you? No harm done.”
“What ails me?” she cried. “It’s what ails you coming in here and setting fire to the grate with nothing in it but paper. You couldn’t come down to the kitchen and ask me for the coal. Oh, no, not you. You’ll wait till it’s brought up to you and burn down the house in the meantime.”
“You shut up!” Hubert shouted. “Do you hear me? Shut up before I say something you won’t want to hear.”
“First you drive my son out of the house and then you try to burn the place down around my ears, around my ears!” Mrs. Derdon screamed.
“I suppose I should have tried to burn the place down while he was still in it!” Hubert shouted. “It was you gave me a fright, clumping in here with your Mother of Mercy face and banging the coal down on the floor so that I dropped the paper. It was you did it, with your spite and your bad temper.”
She sat forward in her chair and spoke, but Hubert could not catch her words through the storm of hatred that blinded, deafened, and choked her, and that shook her so that when she leaned forward to fling her accusations more heavily toward him, she tumbled out of her chair and onto her hands and knees on the floor. She dragged herself back up into the chair as though she were dragging herself up onto a rock out of the sea, and then she sent Hubert a look of terrified appeal that vanished at once under a witless, imploring, craven smile.
Hubert saw the smile and knew that she was silenced. “Well, now you’ve made a proper fool of yourself!” he cried, “falling and flopping all over the room and crying over a few spots on the linoleum. Come on now and cheer up and stop making a show of yourself over nothing.”
“Over nothing is it!” she cried. “If John was here, he’d tell you. John would stand up for me. John knew how hard I worked. Working and slaving to keep the place nice and you call it nothing. But what do you care! You never cared about me and you never cared about him and you ended up driving him out of the house.” She stopped because Hubert had leaned back in his chair and was smiling at her.
“I’m going to tell you something, Rose,” said Hubert. “You won’t like it, but I think it’s time you learned. Do you know who really drove John out of the house?”
Mrs. Derdon said nothing.
“Answer me,” said Hubert.
“I thought you did,” Mrs. Derdon said.
“You thought what it suited you to think,” Hubert said. “No, I didn’t drive John out. We never got along, but that was because you made it your business to see that we didn’t get along. You drove him out yourself,” Hubert said. “It was to get away from you. That was all he wanted. You wouldn’t even let him go to school by himself. He couldn’t go on the tram by himself like the other boys until the priests told you to leave him alone. And when he went to work, you were down there at lunchtime half the time, weren’t you? He got so that he was ashamed to be seen with you. A month before he left, he told me he was leaving, but he didn’t tell you till the very last minute, because he knew you’d find some way to stop him, and he was bound and determined to go. How do you like that? Tell me, how do you like that little piece of information? He told me first.”
