New Grub Street · Chapter 18 (2/2)

“This is a woman’s way of talking,” replied John. “I want to know what is to be the end of it all? I’ve no doubt it’s uncommonly pleasant for Reardon to shift his responsibilities on to our shoulders. At this rate I think I shall get married, and live beyond my means until I can hold out no longer, and then hand my wife over to her relatives, with my compliments. It’s about the coolest business that ever came under my notice.”

“But what is to be done?” asked Mrs. Yule. “It’s no use talking sarcastically, John, or making yourself disagreeable.”

“We are not called upon to find a way out of the difficulty. The fact of the matter is, Reardon must get a decent berth. Somebody or other must pitch him into the kind of place that suits men who can do nothing in particular. Carter ought to be able to help, I should think.”

“You know very well,” said Amy, “that places of that kind are not to be had for the asking. It may be years before any such opportunity offers.”

“Confound the fellow! Why the deuce doesn’t he go on with his novel-writing? There’s plenty of money to be made out of novels.”

“But he can’t write, Jack. He has lost his talent.”

“That’s all bosh, Amy. If a fellow has once got into the swing of it he can keep it up if he likes. He might write his two novels a year easily enough, just like twenty other men and women. Look here, I could do it myself if I weren’t too lazy. And that’s what’s the matter with Reardon. He doesn’t care to work.”

“I have thought that myself;” observed Mrs. Yule. “It really is too ridiculous to say that he couldn’t write some kind of novels if he chose. Look at Miss Blunt’s last book; why, anybody could have written that. I’m sure there isn’t a thing in it I couldn’t have imagined myself.”

“Well, all I want to know is, what’s Amy going to do if things don’t alter?”

“She shall never want a home as long as I have one to share with her.”

John’s natural procedure, when beset by difficulties, was to find fault with everyone all round, himself maintaining a position of irresponsibility.

“It’s all very well, mother, but when a girl gets married she takes her husband, I have always understood, for better or worse, just as a man takes his wife. To tell the truth, it seems to me Amy has put herself in the wrong. It’s deuced unpleasant to go and live in back streets, and to go without dinner now and then, but girls mustn’t marry if they’re afraid to face these things.”

“Don’t talk so monstrously, John!” exclaimed his mother. “How could Amy possibly foresee such things? The case is quite an extraordinary one.”

“Not so uncommon, I assure you. Someone was telling me the other day of a married lady⁠—well educated and blameless⁠—who goes to work at a shop somewhere or other because her husband can’t support her.”

“And you wish to see Amy working in a shop?”

“No, I can’t say I do. I’m only telling you that her bad luck isn’t unexampled. It’s very fortunate for her that she has good-natured relatives.”

Amy had taken a seat apart. She sat with her head leaning on her hand.

“Why don’t you go and see Reardon?” John asked of his mother.

“What would be the use? Perhaps he would tell me to mind my own business.”

“By jingo! precisely what you would be doing. I think you ought to see him and give him to understand that he’s behaving in a confoundedly ungentlemanly way. Evidently he’s the kind of fellow that wants stirring up. I’ve half a mind to go and see him myself. Where is this slum that he’s gone to live in?”

“We don’t know his address yet.”

“So long as it’s not the kind of place where one would be afraid of catching a fever, I think it wouldn’t be amiss for me to look him up.”

“You’ll do no good by that,” said Amy, indifferently.

“Confound it! It’s just because nobody does anything that things have come to this pass!”

The conversation was, of course, profitless. John could only return again and again to his assertion that Reardon must get “a decent berth.” At length Amy left the room in weariness and disgust.

“I suppose they have quarrelled terrifically,” said her brother, as soon as she was gone.

“I am afraid so.”

“Well, you must do as you please. But it’s confounded hard lines that you should have to keep her and the kid. You know I can’t afford to contribute.”

“My dear, I haven’t asked you to.”

“No, but you’ll have the devil’s own job to make ends meet; I know that well enough.”

“I shall manage somehow.”

“All right; you’re a plucky woman, but it’s too bad. Reardon’s a humbug, that’s my opinion. I shall have a talk with Carter about him. I suppose he has transferred all their furniture to the slum?”

“He can’t have removed yet. It was only this morning that he went to search for lodgings.”

“Oh, then I tell you what it is: I shall look in there the first thing tomorrow morning, and just talk to him in a fatherly way. You needn’t say anything to Amy. But I see he’s just the kind of fellow that, if everyone leaves him alone, he’ll be content with Carter’s five-and-twenty shillings for the rest of his life, and never trouble his head about how Amy is living.”

To this proposal Mrs. Yule readily assented. On going upstairs she found that Amy had all but fallen asleep upon a settee in the drawing-room.

“You are quite worn out with your troubles,” she said. “Go to bed, and have a good long sleep.”

“Yes, I will.”

The neat, fresh bedchamber seemed to Amy a delightful haven of rest. She turned the key in the door with an enjoyment of the privacy thus secured such as she had never known in her life; for in maidenhood safe solitude was a matter of course to her, and since marriage she had not passed a night alone. Willie was fast asleep in a little bed shadowed by her own. In an impulse of maternal love and gladness she bent over the child and covered his face with kisses too gentle to awaken him.

How clean and sweet everything was! It is often said, by people who are exquisitely ignorant of the matter, that cleanliness is a luxury within reach even of the poorest. Very far from that; only with the utmost difficulty, with wearisome exertion, with harassing sacrifice, can people who are pinched for money preserve a moderate purity in their persons and their surroundings. By painful degrees Amy had accustomed herself to compromises in this particular which in the early days of her married life would have seemed intensely disagreeable, if not revolting. A housewife who lives in the country, and has but a patch of back garden, or even a good-sized kitchen, can, if she thinks fit, take her place at the washtub and relieve her mind on laundry matters; but to the inhabitant of a miniature flat in the heart of London anything of that kind is out of the question.

When Amy began to cut down her laundress’s bill, she did it with a sense of degradation. One grows accustomed, however, to such unpleasant necessities, and already she had learnt what was the minimum of expenditure for one who is troubled with a lady’s instincts.

No, no; cleanliness is a costly thing, and a troublesome thing when appliances and means have to be improvised. It was, in part, the understanding she had gained of this side of the life of poverty that made Amy shrink in dread from the still narrower lodgings to which Reardon invited her. She knew how subtly one’s self-respect can be undermined by sordid conditions. The difference between the life of well-to-do educated people and that of the uneducated poor is not greater in visible details than in the minutiae of privacy, and Amy must have submitted to an extraordinary change before it would have been possible for her to live at ease in the circumstances which satisfy a decent working-class woman. She was prepared for final parting from her husband rather than try to effect that change in herself.

She undressed at leisure, and stretched her limbs in the cold, soft, fragrant bed. A sigh of profound relief escaped her. How good it was to be alone!

And in a quarter of an hour she was sleeping as peacefully as the child who shared her room.

At breakfast in the morning she showed a bright, almost a happy face. It was long, long since she had enjoyed such a night’s rest, so undisturbed with unwelcome thoughts on the threshold of sleep and on awaking. Her life was perhaps wrecked, but the thought of that did not press upon her; for the present she must enjoy her freedom. It was like a recovery of girlhood. There are few married women who would not, sooner or later, accept with joy the offer of some months of a maidenly liberty. Amy would not allow herself to think that her wedded life was at an end. With a woman’s strange faculty of closing her eyes against facts that do not immediately concern her, she tasted the relief of the present and let the future lie unregarded. Reardon would get out of his difficulties sooner or later; somebody or other would help him; that was the dim background of her agreeable sensations.

He suffered, no doubt. But then it was just as well that he should. Suffering would perhaps impel him to effort. When he communicated to her his new address⁠—he could scarcely neglect to do that⁠—she would send a not unfriendly letter, and hint to him that now was his opportunity for writing a book, as good a book as those which formerly issued from his garret-solitude. If he found that literature was in truth a thing of the past with him, then he must exert himself to obtain a position worthy of an educated man. Yes, in this way she would write to him, without a word that could hurt or offend.

She ate an excellent breakfast, and made known her enjoyment of it.

“I am so glad!” replied her mother. “You have been getting quite thin and pale.”

“Quite consumptive,” remarked John, looking up from his newspaper. “Shall I make arrangements for a daily landau at the livery stables round here?”

“You can if you like,” replied his sister; “it would do both mother and me good, and I have no doubt you could afford it quite well.”

“Oh, indeed! You’re a remarkable young woman, let me tell you. By the by, I suppose your husband is breakfasting on bread and water?”

“I hope not, and I don’t think it very likely.”

“Jack, Jack!” interposed Mrs. Yule, softly.

Her son resumed his paper, and at the end of the meal rose with an unwonted briskness to make his preparations for departure.