Ultima Thule (6 page)

"To the depths of my soul, child!" Then, fearing lest he had startled her with his violence, he added: "I've had -- and still have -- great worries, my dear . . . business worries."

"Is it the practice, Uncle? Doesn't it do well?"

"That, too. But I have made a sad fool of myself, Emmy -- a sad fool. And now here I sit, puzzling how to repair the mischief."

Alone again, he let himself fall back into the limp attitude in which she had surprised him. It was well-being just to lie back, every muscle relaxed. He came home from tramping the streets dog-tired, and all of a sweat: as drained of strength as a squeezed lemon.

No one else appeared to disturb him. Emmy, bless her! had done her work well, and Mary might now reasonably be expected to leave him in peace. Let them jig and dance to the top of their bent, provided he was not asked to join in. He washed his hands of the whole affair. From the outset, the elaborate preparations for this party had put his back up. It was not that he wanted to act the wet-blanket on his children's enjoyment. But the way Mary went about things stood in absolutely no relation to his shrunken income. She was striving to keep pace with people who could reckon theirs by the thousand. It was absurd. Of course she had grown so used, in the latter years, to spending royally, that it was hard for her now to trim her sails. Just, too, when the bairns were coming to an age to appreciate the good things of life. Again, his reason nudged him with the reminder that any ultra-extravagance on her part was due, in the first place, to her ignorance of his embarrassments. He had not enlightened her . . . he never would. He felt more and more incapable of standing up to her incredulous dismay. In cold blood, it seemed impossible to face her with the tidings: "The house we live in is not our own. I have run myself -- run you and the children -- into debt to the tune of hundreds of pounds!" At the mere thought of it he might have been a boy once more, standing before his mother and shaking in his shoes over the confession of some youthful peccadillo. A still further incentive to silence was the queer way his gall rose at the idea of interference. And it went beyond him to imagine Mary not interfering. If he knew her, she would at once want to take the reins: to manage him and his affairs as she managed house and children. And to what was left of his freedom he clung as if his life depended on it.

Excuse enough for meddling she would have; he had regularly played into her hands. Had he only never built this accursed house! It, and it alone, was the root of all the trouble. Had he contented himself with a modest weatherboard, they might still have been upsides with fate. Mary would not have been led to entertain beyond their means -- for the very good reason that she would not have had room for it -- and he have enjoyed the fruits of a quiet mind. Instead of which, for the pleasure of sitting twirling his thumbs in a house that was far too large for him, he had condemned himself to one of the subtlest forms of torture invented by man: that of being under constraint to get together, by given dates, fixed sums of money. The past three months had been a nightmare. Twenty times a day he had asked himself: shall I be able to do it? And when, by the skin of his teeth, he had contrived to foot his bill and breathe more freely, behold! the next term was at the door, and the struggle had all to begin anew. And so it would go on, month after month; round and round in the same vicious circle. Or with, for sole variety, a steadily growing embarrassment. As it was, he could see the day coming when he would be able to pay no more than the bare interest on the loan. And the humiliation this spelt for him only he knew. For, on taking up the mortgage, he had airily intimated that he intended, for a start, making quarterly repayments of fifty pounds: while later on . . . well, only God knew what hints he had dropped for later on: his mind had been in haste to forget them. Did he now fall into arrears, his ignominious financial situation would be known to every one, and he become a marked man.

Who could have thought this place would turn out so poorly? -- become a jogtrot little suburban affair that just held together, and no more. Such an experience was something new to him, and intolerable. In the early days it was always he who had given up his practices, not they him. He had abandoned them, one after the other, no matter how well they were doing. Here, the pages of his case-book remained but scantly filled. A preternaturally healthy neighbourhood. Or was that just a polite fiction of his own making? More than once recently it had flashed through his mind that, since putting up his plate, he had treated none but the simplest cases. Only the A B C of doctoring had been required of him. The fact was, specialists were all too easy to get at. But no! that wouldn't hold water either. Was it not rather he himself who, at first hint of a complication, was ready to refer a patient? . . . to shirk undue worry and responsibility? Yes, this was his own share in the failure; this, and the fact that his heart was not in the work. But indeed how should it be? When he recalled the relief with which, the moment he was able, he had forsaken medicine . . . where could the joy come in over taking it up again, an older, tireder man, and, as it were, at the point of the sword? And with the heart went the will, the inclination. Eaten up by money-troubles, he had but faint interest to spare for the physicking of petty ailments. Under the crushing dread lest he should find himself unable to pay his way, he had grown numb to all else. Numb. . . cold . . . indifferent.

What did not leave him cold but, on the contrary, whipped him to a fury of impatience and aversion, was the thought of going on as he was: of continuing to sit, day after day, as it were nailed to the spot, while his brain, the only live part of him, burnt itself out in maddening anxieties and regrets. Oh, fool that he had been! . . . fool and blind. To have known himself so ill! Never was he the man to have got himself into this pitiable tangle . . . with its continual menace of humiliation . . . disgrace. What madness had possessed him? Even in his youth, when life still seemed worth the pother, he had avoided debt like the plague. And to ask himself now, as an old man and one grown weary of effort, to stand the imposition of so intolerable a strain, was nothing short of suicidal. Another half-year like the last, and he would not be answerable for himself.

He began to toy with the idea of flight. And over the mere imagining of a possible escape from his torments, he seemed to wake to life again, to throw off the deadly lethargy that paralysed him. Change . . . movement . . . action: this it was he panted after! It was the sitting inactive, harried by murderous thoughts over which he had lost the mastery, that was killing him. If once he was rid of these, all might again be well. And now insidious fancies stole upon him: fancies which, disregarding such accidents of the day as money and the lack of money, went straight to the heart of his most urgent need. To go away -- go far away -- from everything and every one he had known; so that what happened should happen to him only -- be nobody's business but his own! Away from the crowd of familiar faces, these cunning, spying faces, which knew all, and which Mary could yet not persuade herself to forbid the house. Somewhere where she would be out of reach of the temptations that here beset her, and he free to exist in the decent poverty that was now his true walk in life. Oh, for privacy! -- privacy and seclusion . . . and freedom from tongues. To be once more a stranger among strangers, and never see a face he knew again!

He had not yet found courage, however, for the pitched battle he foresaw, when something happened that fairly took his breath away. As it were, overnight, he found himself the possessor of close on two hundred and fifty pounds. Among the scrip he still held were some shares called "Pitman's," which till now had been good for nothing but to make calls. Now they took a sudden upward bound, and, at a timely hint from a grateful patient who was in the swim, Mahony did a little shuffle -- selling, buying and promptly re-selling -- with this result. True, a second venture, unaided, robbed him of the odd fifty. None the less there he stood, with his next quarter's payments in his hand. He felt more amazed than anything else by this windfall. It certainly did not set his mind at rest; it came too late for that. Try as he would, he could not now face the idea of remaining at Hawthorn. He had dwelt too much by this time on the thought of change; taken too fixed an aversion to this room where he had spent so many black hours; to the house, the practice, the neighbourhood. Something within him, which would not be silenced, never ceased to urge: free yourself. . . escape -- while there is still time.

In these days Mary just sighed and went about her work. Richard had hardly a word even for the children: on entering the house he retired at once to the surgery and shut himself in. What he did there, goodness only knew. But it was not possible nowadays for her to sit and worry over him, or to take his moods as seriously as she would once have done. And any passing suspicion of something being more than ordinarily amiss was apt, even as it crossed her mind, to be overlaid by, say, the size of the baker's bill, or the fact that Cuffy had again outgrown his boots. But she had also a further reason for turning a blind eye. Believing, as she truly did, that Richard's moroseness sprang mainly from pique at having to take up work again, she was not going to risk making matters worse by talking about them. Richard was as suggestible as a child. A word from her might stir up some fresh grievance, the existence of which he had so far not imagined. -- But when the crash came, it seemed as if a part of her had all along known and feared the worst.

None the less it was a shattering blow: one of those that left you feeling ten years older than the moment before. And in the scene that followed his blunt announcement and lasted far into the night, she strove with him as she had never yet striven, labouring to break down his determination, to bring him back to sanity. For more, much more than themselves and their own prosperity was now at stake. What happened to them happened equally to the three small creatures they had brought into the world.

"It's the children, Richard! Now they're there, you haven't the right to throw up a fixed position, as the fancy takes you . . . as you used to do. It didn't matter about me. But it's different now -- everything's different. Only have patience! Oh! I can't believe you really mean it. It seems incredible . . . impossible."

Mahony was indignant. "And do you think no one considers the children but you? When their welfare is more to me than anything on earth?"

"But if that's true, how can you even think of giving up this place? . . . the house -- our comfortable home! You know quite well you're not a young man any more. The openings would be so few. You'd never get a place to suit you better."

"I tell you I cannot stop here!"

"But why? Give me a single convincing reason. -- As to the idea of going up-country . . . that's madness pure and simple. How often did you vow you'd never again take up a country practice, because of the distances . . . and the work? How will you be able to stand it now? . . . when you're getting on for fifty. You say there's nothing doing here; but, my opinion is, there's just as much as you're able for."

This was so exactly Mahony's own belief that he grew violently angry. "Good God, woman! is there no sympathy in you? . . . or only where your children are concerned? I tell you, if I stop here I shall end by going demented!"

"I never heard such talk. The practice may be slow to move -- I think a town-practice always would be -- but it'll come right, I'm sure it will, if you'll only give it the chance." Here, however, another thought struck her. "But what I don't understand is, why we're not able to get on. What becomes of the money you make? There must be something very wrong somewhere. Hand over the accounts to me; let me look into your books. With no rent to pay, and three or four hundred coming in . . . besides the dividends . . . oh, would any one else -- any one but you -- want to throw up a certainty and drag us off up-country, just when the children are getting big and need decent companions . . . and schooling -- what about their education? -- have you thought of that? . . . or thought of anything but your own likes and dislikes?" And as he maintained a stony silence, she broke out: "I think men are the most impossible creatures God ever made!" and pressing her face into the pillow burst into tears.

Mahony set his teeth. If she could not see for herself that it was a case, for once, of putting him and his needs first, then he could not help her. To confide in her still went beyond him. Mary had such a heavy hand. He could hope for no tenderness of approach; no instinctive understanding meeting him half-way. She would pounce on his most intimate thoughts and feelings, drag them out into daylight and anatomise them; would put into words those phantom fears, and insidious evasions, which he had so far managed to keep in the twilight where they belonged. He shuddered at the thought.

But Mary had not finished. Drying her eyes she returned to the charge. "You say this place is a failure. I deny it, and always shall. But if it hasn't done as well as it might, there's a reason for it. It's because you haven't the way with you any longer. You've lost your manner -- the good, doctor's manner you used to do so much with. You're too short with people nowadays; and they resent it; and go to some one who's pleasanter. I heard you just the other day with that lawyer's wife who called . . . how you blew her up! She'll never come again. -- A morbid hypochondriac? I daresay. But in old days you'd never have told a patient to her face that she was either shamming or imagining."

"I'm too old to cozen and pander."

"Too old to care, you mean. -- Oh, for God's sake, think what you're doing! Try to stop on here a little longer, and if it's only for six months. Listen! I've got an idea." She raised herself on her elbow. "Why shouldn't we take in boarders? . . . just to tide us over till things get easier. This house is really much too big for us. One nursery would be enough for the children; and there's the spare room, and the breakfast-room . . . . I could probably fill all three; and make enough that way to cover our living expenses."