‘Finding fault’ was in Mrs Marble’s eyes a sort of vice to which the male sex was peculiarly prone at inconvenient moments. She suffered on account of it on occasions when Mr Marble’s temper was not all it should have been. Winnie seized the advantage conferred upon her by this dexterous tactical thrust.
‘I don’t see why he shouldn’t go home, if you ask me,’ she said. ‘He’d be company for father, and it’s only for a week, when all’s said and done.’
Her arguments were not particularly happy, for Mrs Marble remembered with a slight shudder the time when she had flung herself between her son and her husband. And she would be positively unhappy, whenever she remembered to be, at the thought of two helpless males alone in a house which cost her so much pains to run. But Winnie had her own reasons for wishing John away, reasons not unconnected with walks upon the pier and with visits to local cinematograph theatres.
‘I should let him go,’ said Winnie. ‘Then he can collect a few of the mouldy old books he wants to read. He’ll soon get fed up with being at home, and then he can come down here again. It’ll only be for a day or two. He won’t stand cooking his own breakfast longer than that. Then he’ll be able to tell you how father’s getting on.’
It was a wily move. Mrs Marble, in the intervals between being intimidated by waiters and chambermaids and enjoying the luxury they represented, was occasionally conscience-stricken about her deserted husband. She heard from him very little – only one or two straggling scrawls that told her nothing. More would have meant too much trouble to Mr Marble. Winnie’s suggestion was therefore well timed.
‘Well, do that then, dear,’ said Mrs Marble. ‘Go home just for the night and get all the books and things you want. Of course, if father doesn’t mind, you can stay longer if you like. But you mustn’t do anything that might make him cross.’
It was hardly the free-handed congé that Winnie would have liked her to give, but, still, it was something.
When John announced his intention of starting off at once Mrs Marble was shocked into protest. To her there was something unthinkable in changing one’s place of abode at ten minutes’ notice. She succeeded in persuading her son into postponing his departure until the next day – Saturday.
Even then she was full of instructions at the last moment.
‘You know where the clean sheets are, don’t you, dear?’ she said. ‘They’re in the lowest drawer in the big chest of drawers. Mind you air them before you put them on your bed. Oh, and when you come down again will you bring my white fur? It’s getting rather cold in the evenings now. You’re sure you know your way home all right? It’s rather a long way to go all by yourself.’
John had often before covered three times the distance in a single day, but he forbore saying so. He felt that it would be wiser to let his mother run on and have her full say out and then he would clear off without further argument. She continued, unmindful:
‘I shall be quite anxious to hear that you got home safely. Mind you write as soon as you’re there, and be sure you tell me how father is. And – and – don’t forget what I said about not doing anything to annoy father.’
That made John fidget uneasily in his chair. At long last Mrs Marble ended with:
‘Well, good-bye, dear. Have a good time. Have you got enough money? Then good-bye. Don’t forget what I said. We’re just going on the pier with Mr Horne. Good-bye, dear.’
And Winnie and Mrs Marble and Mr Horne were gone.
That was a most enjoyable day for John. For once he was neither the hotel prisoner nor yet was he at home with his father. It was the transition stage. He spent his time deliciously, luxuriously. He bathed by himself, at the far end of the town – his last bathe before starting out for home. That took time, for he wanted to make the most of it. Then he came back to the Grand Pavilion Hotel, took the Giant Twin from the garage, where it stood impatient and intolerant of all these domesticated saloons and limousines. The kickstarter swung obediently, and the engine broke into its sweet thunderous roar. John swung himself into the saddle, and the Giant Twin sprang impatiently forward as he let in the clutch. They climbed the steep ascent of the side street without an effort, nosed their way through the squalor of the slums at the back of the town, and in fifteen minutes were out on the free open downs. But John was determined not to waste a minute of his day’s happiness. He curbed the ardour of the Giant Twin down to a mere fourteen miles an hour – a Rosinante speed worthy of his quixotic mood, as he told himself. They ambled along the great high road in wonderful spirits. The wind blew past him gently, and he filled his lungs with it, sighing with pleasure. It was twelve o’clock when he started; by one o’clock not thirty miles – not half the way – had been covered. John lunched by himself at a big yet homely hotel by the roadside. It was a decided change from lunch at the Grand Pavilion Hotel, with a band blaring only ten feet away, and mother talking platitudes – she couldn’t help that, poor dear, but it grew wearisome after a week or two – and Winnie looking round discreetly at the men, or, worse, chattering away to some greasy-haired fellow she had wangled mother into inviting. They were all greasy-haired, somehow, and not one of them knew how to speak to a fellow, not even the young ones. And as for the old ones! There was one doddering old idiot who had asked him if he kept white mice! John stretched his legs in comforting fashion under the table and lit a cigarette. Thank God, that was over, anyway. He couldn’t have borne that place another day. He hoped he would be all right with father. Father was such an uncertain sort of fellow nowadays. But apparently all he wanted was to be left alone, and that was all he wanted, as well. So they ought to get on all right. If they didn’t – well, it couldn’t be as bad as the hotel, anyway, with mother fussing over him and Winnie scrapping all the time. There was a little bit of the boor and a little bit of the bear about John.
But he was light-hearted enough when he came down and started up the Giant Twin once more for the last run homeward. He still went slowly, partly of his own free will, partly because of the growing volume of Saturday traffic that he met. He turned away from Croydon, and the Giant Twin brought him triumphantly up the long hill to the Crystal Palace without an effort. Ten minutes later the motor-bicycle ran silently with the clutch out, down the slope of Malcolm Road, and pulled up gently outside Number 53. John dismounted slowly. It had been a glorious day. Even now it was not yet evening. There was nothing better than a late afternoon in August, at the end of a flaming day. The rather depressing little road looked positively heavenly to the exile after three weeks at the Grand Pavilion Hotel. There was just a touch of red in the sky, where the sun was beginning to sink. John was half smiling as he looked round him, while he fumbled in his pocket for his latch-key. He was even smiling as he put the key in the lock, and as he walked into the house.
Mr Marble had lately been looking forward to his Saturday afternoons. Following a lazy morning at the office, and a lazy lunch in town, he could travel quietly homeward after the rush. And at home, for in this case it was worth daring the watchfulness of the neighbours, especially considering that arriving as she did before he came back they might well think that she had come on some neighbourly errand bringing in shopping or to see that all was well in the house, there would be waiting for him Madame Collins, Marguerite – Rita, he called her nowadays. And they would have the whole afternoon and evening before them. She would not be leaving before dark. It would be a wonderful day. Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow you die. Mr Marble ate, and most decidedly he drank, and he was merry as well, if such a term can be applied to his nightmare feeling of wild abandon. And the abandon was only possible because he was at 53 Malcolm Road, and able to make sure that there was no chance of his dying suddenly yet awhile.
John came into the dining-room. There was no one there. But the sight of the room brought the first chill to his heart. The gilded furniture blazed tawdrily in the fading sunlight; the room was in an indescribable muddle: dirty dishes
and empty bottles were littered about it, and cigarette ash and cigarette ends were strewn over the floor. And in the room there was a subtle and distasteful blend of scents. Overlying the stale tobacco smell and the fustiness of unopened windows was the smell of spilt drink, and permeating the whole there was yet another odour, slight yet penetrating – a stale, unpleasant smell as of degraded hyacinths. John’s nose wrinkled in distaste as the vile reek assailed his nostrils. The drink, and the tobacco, and the fustiness, and the muddle he could account for, and he had been prepared for them on a smaller scale. But this other scent, irritating his clean boy’s palate, was different. It was more unclean even than the others.
He left the room hurriedly. He had already half decided that his father was not at present in the house. He set his foot on the stairs to go to his own room to open the windows, open them wide, so that the clean evening air would circulate there at any rate, but he withdrew it as a thought struck him. Most probably his father was in the back room – it had been his habit for a long time now to sit there on most occasions. If he were there, and if, as John reluctantly admitted to himself was most likely, he were drinking, it would be well for him to go in and report his arrival as soon as might be. His father would be furious if he were in the house without his knowledge. John walked back to the drawing-room, turned the handle of the door, and entered.
But he went no farther than just beyond the threshold. There he stopped, for a sickening, hellish two seconds, while the hyacinth scent rushed in greater volume upon him, its presence now explained, and while the sight that met his eyes struck him dazed, as might a club. It was sickening, bestial, abominable. He fled in a staggering run, fumbling in dazed haste at the handle of the door. To blend with the tumult of horrible remembrance came the sight, just as he reached free air again, of his father lurching after him, mumbling some wild words which he could not catch, but whose import clearly was for him not to go away, but to stay while he could explain. But John fled.
There was nothing else he could do. Every cell of his body called for air, air, air. Air to flood away that loathsome reek of hyacinths; air to flood his brain and blot away that memory of beastly, drunken nudity; air, air, air!
At the edge of the pavement stood his one trusty friend, the Giant Twin, who never would betray him. He leaned upon the friendly saddle for a second, while his whirling mind recovered itself to the slight degree possible. Air, air, air! He flung himself into the saddle, hands going automatically to ignition and throttle. The engine was still hot, and broke into its old friendly roar as he thrust at the kickstarter. Next second he was gone, wheeling wildly in the road, with the engine bellowing jubilantly as he forced the throttle wider.
The sunset was spreading over the sky, blood-red and tawny, as the sun vanished behind the houses, but it was still stiflingly hot. The air that raced past John’s cheeks might as well have come straight from a blast-furnace. It raced past his cheeks, tugged at his hair, filled his lungs to bursting, and yet it gave no relief. Wider and wider went the throttle, and now the Giant Twin was hurtling along the roads as though they were a race-track. John did not know where he was going, nor did he care. Air was what he wanted, air, more air. He sat well back in the saddle, while the tornado of his own begetting wrenched at him with a myriad fingers. Yet as he did so he shuddered at the recollection of the reek of hyacinth scent. The throttle was wide open now, and they were swirling round corners at an acute angle amid a shower of flying grit. Air, more air! John’s hand moved to a forbidden lever, and the Giant Twin leaped forward even faster as the exhaust roared in thunder past the cutout.
It could not last. Not even the Giant Twin, ever loyal, could hold on those glassy roads at that speed. One last corner, and then the tyres lost their grip on the hardly noticeable camber. The Giant Twin leaped madly, plunging across the road, across the pavement. A cruel brick wall awaited them, in one rending crash of ruin.
11
There was misery, misery undisguised and rampant, at 53 Malcolm Road. There were only two people living there now. Winnie had gone back to school, glad to escape from her mother’s helpless unhappiness and her father’s brooding gloom. But Mr Marble and Mrs Marble were there all the time. The blow of Mr Marble’s dismissal from the new firm had fallen almost at once. He did not mind. He did not need the money, and it was such a terrible trouble to have to go up to the office every day. Unhappiness or no unhappiness, he preferred to be at home, with his eye on the backyard and his pet books on crime and medical jurisprudence round him, to hanging about at the office all day, worrying about what was happening at home. And the sombre life of sitting solitary at home began to have a hideous fascination for him. There was no effort about it, no call for original thought or talent, and absence of effort was grateful to a man who habitually drank more than he should do, and whose mind was continually wandering down dark avenues, often traversed but always new. His wife was a nobody now, a phantom less real than the squint-eyed hangman that so often came tapping him on the shoulder; she was a soft-footed ghost that wandered about the house, coping ineffectually with the work that awaited her, and usually weeping, but so quietly that it did not disturb him. Sometimes Mrs Marble wept at the memory of her dead son; sometimes she wept because her back hurt her. But she wept at other times, too, and she did not know why she did; actually she was weeping because her husband had ceased to love her. Very grey, very frail and very, very unhappy was Mrs Marble at this time.
It was a strange, mad life that the two of them led nowadays. There was money in plenty, and very little use for it. The walls of the sitting-room were by now completely lined with Mr Marble’s collection of books on crime; all the other rooms were crowded with massive and incredibly costly furniture, whose elaborate carvings were a source of woe to Mrs Marble when she came to dust them. The tradespeople had left off calling, nearly all of them, and all the shopping was done by Mrs Marble in hurried little excursions to the poverty-stricken shops near. There was money for servants, money for expensive and delightful foods, money for comfortable and manageable furniture. But no servant ever entered 53 Malcolm Road; the elaborate furniture was Mrs Marble’s most weary burden, and for food they began to depend more and more upon ready-cooked food bought as each meal came round in turn to augment the neglected store of the empty larder. Mrs Marble had begun to neglect her duty of housekeeping long ago. But she had only begun to show incapacity of this order since John’s death.
In point of fact, Mrs Marble had an idea, and was worrying over it. And when Mrs Marble wanted to work anything out by sheer force of brain-power she was compelled to abandon all her other labours in order to devote all her time to the task. She was working something out slowly, but, as is always the case when mentalities of that sort are once bent upon completing a task, very, very surely. Yet even now she could not have expressed her suspicions in words, so obscure were they. But they were not connected with Madame Collins, strange to relate.
Stranger still, it was this latter, dexterous though she was, who was the cause of the breakdown of the unstable state of affairs then prevailing. Those sums of money which she had received from Mr Marble had only whetted her appetite for more. They had made a wonderful difference to the bank balance over which she gloated in private. Yet that bank balance was not nearly large enough yet for her purpose, increased though it was by sums wrung from the allowance made her by her husband for housekeeping. Madame Collins took it very ill that Mrs Marble should continue to stand in the way of her obtaining more.
For Mrs Marble did. No more would Mr Marble leave his house unguarded; no more could he be induced to relax his straining attention over that barren ten square yards of soil at the back of 53 Malcolm Road. For his obsession had grown upon him naturally as he gave it more play. In the days when it had been natural for him to go up to town every day it had been natural for his garden to take care of itself, but as soon as he had got into the comforting habit of watching over it continually he was
unable to break himself of it. So he could not see her outside of his house, and in the house there was always his wife.
Madame Collins fretted and fumed. That bank balance of hers was mounting only by shillings a week when it ought to be mounting by pounds. She played desperately hard for fortune. She was as sweet as honey always to Mrs Marble. Yet it was not easy to gain Mrs Marble’s good graces. Anxiety about her husband occupied such of her attention as was not busy working out the problem she had set herself. And she resented bitterly any display of sympathy, for that might indicate that the sympathizer understood her trouble better than she did herself. Besides, Mrs Marble had been ‘respectably brought up’, in a world where it was a serious social slur to have a drunken husband, and any reference to her husband’s failing had her up in arms at once.
And Madame Collins had indiscreetly – though she herself had thought at the time that it was a good stroke of tactics – let it be known that she understood what was the matter with Mr Marble, to find to her surprise that Mrs Marble hotly resented her knowledge. To this cause for dissension must be added the fact that now that Mrs Marble had admitted to herself her failure to live the life of a rich woman, and her inability to wear good clothes as if she had always been accustomed to them, she had a bitter envy of those who were more successful. She disliked Madame Collins for her opulence of figure and good looks, for the way in which she wore her clothes, for the very clothes she wore. But Mrs Marble’s dislikes were as unremarkable as everything else about her, and she was unable to show them except by a faint and rather bewildered hostility, which Madame Collins was able to sweep aside. It was more than Mrs Marble was capable of to be actively rude to anyone. So Madame Collins continued to call at rather frequent intervals, to talk in honey-sweet fashion to Mrs Marble, and sometimes to penetrate into that well-remembered sitting-room, if Mr Marble was not too fuddled, and to leave there a haunting scent of hyacinths and a clinging memory of rich flesh which sometimes penetrated into Mr Marble’s drink-sodden mind. Generally, however, it roused little fresh longing in him; he was at the moment amply content with his books and his drink and the knowledge that he was guarding that garden.