For, although the books assumed her to be an invalid, they offered some compensation at least in the array of garments they prescribed as necessary for the ‘little stranger’—that horrible expression of which they made such free use. It was not a horrible expression to Agatha; she would have called it a genteel necessary circumlocution if it had ever occurred to her to employ such an exotic phrase. The ‘little stranger’, then, had to have a myriad garments—binders yards and yards long, matinée jackets, veils and shawls and a christening gown, socks and gloves, daygowns and nightgowns of flannel exquisitely embroidered in silk—and Agatha made every blessed thing herself, stitching away patiently by the window. She stitched and stitched, but of the dreams she wove in with the silk it would not be right to tell.
She came to know that side street and its habitués so well. There were rag-and-bone men, each chanting his call in his own particular manner; there were the milkmen on the eleven o’clock round, and the smart baker’s cart, and the butcher’s dog-cart drawn by a showy chestnut sadly over-driven by the butcher’s greasy-haired son; there was the insurance agent, frock-coated and bowler·hatted, and the fruitsellers and knife-grinders. On three afternoons a week organ grinders came, one of them with a shivering monkey in a red coat, and another, who was a real Italian, bronzed and handsome with marvellously white teeth, who sang ‘O Sole Mio’ so sentimentally that Agatha always opened the window and threw him a penny. And besides all these there were the children—oh, the children! Every house had its two or three, who came trotting home to dinner at twelve and back again to school at two, and down the street once more at half past four. Agatha knew them all, the big ones and the little ones, the late ones and the early ones, the good ones and the naughty ones. Big sisters often had one or two to escort, and more than once during those six months Agatha watched the rise of a new independence when some baby boy would suddenly decide that big sisters were no longer of use to him and would find his own way to school, not quite sure of himself either, with an occasional look round to see that the sister was not unattainably out of reach. Agatha could not have watched with greater interest the beginning of a new planet.
Some there were to whom the grim flagstones of the pavement were friendly and sociable, for it was a great game to walk to school entirely on the lines between them; and just outside No. 37 there were three successive very wide flagstones, much wider than the ordinary six-year-old could stride, and Agatha would find herself leaning forward in great excitement to see whether this little boy or that little girl would accomplish the perilous passage in safety. There were naughty little boys who played ‘knocking down ginger’—knocking at nearly every door in the street and running away before they opened. Agatha’s heart used to beat quite fast in case they were caught, but they never were. Tops were all the rage when Agatha first came to No. 37, and they were succeeded by marbles and skipping-ropes (according to sex), and cherrystones and little balls and one or two cricket bats made their appearance before football came into its own again. There was one dreadful incident when a prized tennis ball rolled down a drain, and Agatha watched palpitating while the grating was prised up and two small urchins of seven hung on to the legs of another small urchin of nine while he lowered three-quarters of himself head downwards down the hole and reached the ball by a convulsive stretching which threatened every moment to precipitate him upside down into the horrible hole.
It was the little boys in whom Agatha took most interest, although the little girls claimed a good share. She knew the tidy ones and the untidy ones, and the prim ones and the tomboyish ones, and, with typical partiality, she liked the tidy ones best. Her heart was really wrung with agony when a disaster occurred to the primmest and tidiest of them all, when that self-satisfied, smug ten-year-old found her drawers slipping down there in the road with a whole lot of people about. It was into the front garden of No. 37 that she retired, and Agatha, with yearning sympathy, watched her putting matters right while cowering behind the stunted privet bushes.
Strange that children should thus hold her fascinated. Agatha had never before thought about children; she had been too preoccupied with two maids and a house to look after, and the little she had known about the method of arrival selected by children had displeased her. She had felt a sort of contempt for the shapeless, helpless wives upon whom she had sometimes called—Mr. Brown’s fellow-Nonconformists were prolific fathers—and she despised wailing babies, and wet babies, and sick babies. All the babies she knew fell into one of these three categories, and children were always quarrelsome, or stupid, or self-assertive. It was all different now; Agatha, stitching a thousand tucks into one ridiculous nightgown, or implanting wonderful embroidery into the corners of a flannel day-gown, thought of few things besides children. But then of course she was a prisoner for the time, and prisoners, by common report, take interest in spiders and mice and things like that, just as Agatha did.
There was another matter in which she took an interest, though. One day while casually glancing through the newspaper a name caught her eye, and with a slight sense of shock she looked again. The name was that of Lieutenant-Commander R. E. S. Saville-Samarez, and it occurred half-way down a list headed ‘Naval Appointments’. Agatha may perhaps have seen that column before, but it had conveyed nothing to her. She had not realized before that by its aid she would be able to follow Samarez’s professional career, and the discovery stimulated her attention. She found there was another column which sometimes appeared, headed ‘Movements of HM Ships’, and with the aid of these two she could trace Samarez hither and thither wherever the Lords of Admiralty might send him. After that Agatha always bought her own newspaper instead of depending on casual readings of Mrs. Rodgers’s, and it was for these items that she always looked first. It became her hobby, just as children had become her main interest.
Day passed after day, and week after week. The chair by the first-floor front window had become a second nature to her, just as had her evening walks by side streets. It had almost begun to seem as if she had done nothing else all her life than await the arrival of the son she so confidently expected, and as if she would do anything else. It called for quite an effort to make herself realize that her time was at hand. Doctor Walters of course treated the affair in a far more matter-of-fact manner, and it was the businesslike solemnity of his visits which did most to impress Agatha with the need to complete her arrangements.
Within the last few weeks a new portent had appeared in Salisbury Road, next to Colchester Road. A board had spread itself with wide-open welcoming arms there, bearing the legend ‘Nursing Home—Surgical, General, Maternity’. Until that era nursing homes in the suburbs had been almost non-existent. Suburban people, if they were ill, went into hospitals; if they were only not quite so ill they struggled back to life or on to death in their own rabbit hutches of houses; nine hundred and ninety-nine suburban babies out of a thousand were born in the suburban beds which had seen their engendering. The average wife would never have dreamed of going cold-bloodedly elsewhere for her confinement, especially when domestic servants were still common. Suburban nursing homes and restaurants and all the other insidious wreckers of home life were only to burgeon into full blossom with the lack of domestic servants. The Salisbury Nursing Home was a little before its time; its ‘Surgical’ and ‘General’ departments were merely heroic gestures, and even its ‘Maternity’ side never flourished. The venture came to a disastrous end after a year’s struggle, but that year saw the arrival of Agatha’s child.
Agatha made her arrangements with Doctor Walters’s full approval, for the doctor, with lingering happy memories of hospital experience and trained assistance and proper appliances, was thoroughly dissatisfied with the makeshifts he usually had to employ in practice, with curtained rooms and feather beds and all the other hideously unhygienic arrangements with which mothers could find no fault. So it was with a strange excited feeling that one day Agatha walked round to the Salisbury Nursing Home with Mrs. Rodgers at
her side, carrying the historic suitcase, the suitcase which was accompanying her for the third successive occasion on a great adventure. Agatha liked it all: she liked the bare, clean rooms and the trim, efficient nurses and the cheerfully unsympathetic aspect of the place; for Agatha was of a Spartan turn of mind mostly.
She looked on pain as a necessary part of life; she had been imbued since childhood with notions about ‘the curse of Eve’ and similar predestinate ideas; she knew (and it tortured her) that she had ‘sinned’, and she went unshrinkingly forward. The grit that had carried her father from errand-running to wholesaling took her into maternity without a tremor or a regret. The slight pains came, and she was packed away into bed; Doctor Walters called, was unhesitatingly cheerful, and went away again. And then the real pains came, wave after wave of them, so that she found herself flung into a sea of pain of an intensity she had not believed possible. The smooth, efficient face of the nurse, and Doctor Walters’s, with its kindly detachment, floated into her consciousness and out again through a grey mist. She caught a whiff of ether, but at the time she had no idea that it was being used on her. Then it was all over (Agatha, looking back, would have said that it had only taken half an hour or so) and she was free to hold her child on her arm for a few wonderful minutes. The delights of motherhood were very obvious and none the less pleasant. It was a boy of course. Agatha had been quite certain of it from the first. Nothing else could have been possible. Agatha to her dying day never realized that it was only a successful even chance, and not a fixed, settled certainty.
CHAPTER SIX
SHE CALLED HIM Albert; goodness knows why. She would not have ‘Dick’, which one might have thought her natural choice. Somewhere within her she realized that Richard Saville-Samarez did not possess quite as much brain as she would like her child to have, and she would take no chances. She had hesitated over ‘George’, but had put it aside in case she ever encountered her family again, for ‘George’ was her father’s name as well as her favourite brother’s, and she would not have them think that the child was called after them; for it might give them a feeling of proprietary interest, and she did not want that; Albert was all her own. So she chose Albert’. She knew personally no one of that name at all, which satisfied her jealous desire for possession, while about the name there clung a flavour of association with the Royal Family which endeared it to her rather bourgeois little heart.
And Albert Brown grew up and developed just as other babies did, although Agatha would have indignantly denied any similarity. He took his food manfully. He played with his toys at first with feeble, fumbling fingers of helpless babyhood, and later with the more purposeful action of growing muscle sense. He cut his teeth and fretted over them just as much as one would expect of a healthy child of healthy parents. He achieved his first sitting up and his first straggling attempt to kick. Once or twice he allowed his digestion to become upset. Soon he achieved the miracle of an erect attitude, and eventually came the glorious day when he first addressed Agatha as ‘Mummy’, and not long after Mrs. Rodgers developed into Miss Ozzes.
For Agatha had returned to No. 37 Colchester Road from the Salisbury Nursing Home. It was comfortable and she did not want to seek out a new resting place, and Mrs. Rodgers had found no new satisfactory tenant, and—those six months of approaching motherhood had endeared even that unromantic, unambitious little street to Agatha. Moreover, Agatha soon began to establish a business connexion in the locality. Albert’s marvellous garments were the admiration of all who saw them, and the tale of them was told round about. It was not long before Agatha received tentative inquiries as to whether she would mind making similar things for other Peckham babies, newly arrived or expected shortly. Agatha had found that even the labour of looking after the finest baby in England left her with much free time, and idleness was abhorrent to her. She accepted commissions eagerly, and it was not long before she found that she had little spare time left; those firm decisive fingers of hers were busy most of the day (when they were not occupied by Albert Brown) stitching away at marvellous embroidery on pelisses and christening robes and, by a natural extension, on wedding dresses and trousseau under-clothing. There was not much profit to be made, but still there was a little, and Agatha, although she had found that it was easy enough to live on a hundred pounds a year, was eager to increase her income and accumulate savings. Mr. Deane, the solicitor, had looked at her incredulously when she had told him it was her intention to make Albert an officer in the Navy; he had even hinted as tactfully as he might that perhaps admission to the Britannia might not easily be obtained for the illegitimate son of a greengrocer’s daughter, and he had declaimed in his soft-spoken way at the expense as a waste of money, but Agatha cherished the ambition none the less. If foresight and money and good training could gain the King’s commission for Albert, she was going to leave no stone unturned to provide that foresight and money and good training. Agatha set her round chin firmer still and bent to her sewing with renewed forcefulness.
So Albert Brown grew up in a world of many sections. Upstairs there was his mother, who spoke to him softly and clearly, and whom he knew by continual experience it was best to obey promptly. On the other hand, he knew that if he could manage the perilous descent of the stairs there would be a warm welcome for him from Mrs. Rodgers, who was always ready with a word, or a piece of bread and butter covered with brown sugar, or an unimaginative although ready part in whatever game he chose to devise or some other equally welcome contribution to his routine. Yet Mrs. Rodgers, with all her honeyed or brown-sugared endearments, did not bulk one half as large in Albert’s imagination, and most certainly not in his affection, as did his mother, who played games really well, and who read entrancing books to him, and whose voice, with its sweetness and purity of intonation, was worth a thousand times as much as Mrs. Rodgers’s hoarse utterance. Outside the house there was the Street with its myriad mighty attractions—the carts with their big straining horses, mightily feathered about the fetlocks, hugely hoofed and grandly quartered, hides glistening and nosebags tossing; and errand boys and sweeps and buses and road-mending gangs, and toyshop windows and little boys and girls; and beyond the Street was the Park, where little boys with a high internal pressure of energy could run madly up and down and hoot and screech and scream and look at the boats on the pond and make friends with stray dogs and gallop back to where Mother was sitting and gallop away again at a gait alternating between that consonant with a horseman in a hurry and a locomotive with its whistle in full blast. The Park and the Street and Upstairs and Downstairs were all exceedingly splendid places most times, and if the earthrending unhappiness of childhood ever got a grip on you then there was always Mother’s sweet-scented breast on which to pour out your woes and Mother’s soft, round arms to go round you, and her nice hands to pat you on the back until your sorrows were inconsequently forgotten. Soon the world had a fifth quarter, which was School, presided over by an omnipotent deity called Miss Farrow, who knew everything, and who was so supremely great that you never realized her smiles might be intended for you, and who on terrible occasions wielded the cane with dreadful results upon such small boys as dared to be naughty. That cane was much more to be feared than any possible smacking Mummy might give.
In fact, Agatha, watching the development of her child with all the terrible detachment of a mother born to be gushingly affectionate and restrained by a hot ambition, came early to the conclusion that her son was not a genius, not greatly above the average brains, and much more amenable to discipline than ever she could picture Nelson or Drake to be in their childhood. He was an orderly and law-abiding sprig of modern civilization; school rules and home rules meant something to him unless the temptation to break them was of an unusually compelling nature. Agatha felt a little twinge of disappointment; surely a child so lawlessly conceived ought to be vastly different from the ordinary herd! But those plans, so often revised and lovingly re-revised during the six months at Colchester Road before Albert?
??s arrival, were easily capable of covering even this state of affairs. The calm foresight of a woman with only herself and her child to consider began to plan a new system of training aimed at carrying young Albert’s foot-steps with security along the thorny road of Admiralty.
Perhaps if Albert’s father had been a stockbroker Agatha’s thoughts would have been directed towards stocks and shares. If he had been an artist Agatha would have begun to study art; as it was, the fact that he was an officer in the Royal Navy gave her the first necessary impetus towards adopting the Navy as her hobby. The beginnings were small of course—it is not often that we are so fortunate as to be able to trace eventual vast enterprises from their earliest germ—but they blossomed speedily, and their fruit is recorded in the pages of history. Chance showed her how to study Naval appointments and movements in newspapers; and chance settled the matter by guiding her to the Navy List in the Free Library, where she could study the whole commissioned personnel of the Navy and watch the weary climb of Lieutenant-Cornmander R. E. S. Saville-Samarez up the heights of Seniority with the ogre of the age limit continually in pursuit. From this it was but a step to those books of reference which described every fighting ship in the world, and in which she could study each successive ship to which Samarez was appointed. It was not long before Agatha had quite a developed knowledge of armaments and tonnages and displacements. She could read about protective decks without bewilderment; she could even follow arguments on the burning question of ‘Should Armoured Cruisers take their Place in the Line?’ It was an extraordinary hobby for a woman to take up; but no one ever dare predict in what direction a woman cut off and isolated from the world will expend her energies. The Library found all sorts of books on its shelves to interest Agatha; she had no use for fiction of course, as became her upbringing, and she read Lives of various admirals, and Naval Histories, and the ‘Letters of Lord Nelson’. If essay writing had been in her line she could have written quite a fair essay on Howe’s Tactics on the First of June, or on Nelson’s refusal in defiance of orders to expose Sicily. Innumerable references in the books led her on to the study of Mahan and his classic studies of Sea Power, and from thence she was lured inevitably to deep and solemn consideration of the immense sombre inliuence of maritime supremacy, of the doctrine of the Fleet in Being, and other things which other people do not think twice about. With pathetic cunning she began to lead young Albert’s thoughts in the same direction. If Albert had no genius, then orderly training and astute education of taste might serve the same purpose.