2
For nearly a fortnight after the raid the Goslings lay snug in their little house in Wisteria Grove, for they, in company with the majority of English people at this time, had not yet fully appreciated the fact that women were almost immune from infection. In all, not more than eight per cent of the whole female population was attacked, and of this proportion the mortality was almost exclusively among women over fifty years of age. When the first faint rumours of the plague had come to Europe, this curious, almost unprecedented, immunity of women had been given considerable prominence. It had made good copy, theories on the subject had appeared, and the point had aroused more interest than that of the mortality among males—infectious diseases were commonplace enough; this new phase had a certain novelty and piquancy. But the threat of European infection had overwhelmed the interest in the odd predilection of the unknown bacterium, and the more vital question had thrown this peculiarity into the background. Thus the Goslings and most other women feared attack no less than their husbands, brothers and sons, and found justification for their fears in the undoubted fact that women had died of the plague.
The Goslings had always jogged along amiably enough; their home life would have passed muster as a tolerably happy one. The head of the family was out of the house from 8.15 a.m. to 7.15 p.m. five days of the week, and it was only occasionally in the evening of some long wet Sunday that there was any open bickering.
Now, confinement in that little house, aggravated by fear and by the absence of any interest or diversion coming from outside, showed the family to one another in new aspects. Before two days had passed the air was tense with the suppressed irritation of these four people, held together by scarcely any tie other than that of a conventional affection.
By the third day the air was so heavily charged that some explosion was inevitable. It came early in the morning.
Gosling had run out of tobacco, and he thought in the circumstances that it would be wiser to send Blanche or Millie than to go himself. So, with an air of exaggerated carelessness, he said:
“Look here, Millie, my gel, I wish you’d just run out and see if you can get me any terbaccer.”
“Not me,” replied Millie, with decision.
“And why not?” asked Gosling.
Millie shrugged her shoulders, and called her sister, who was in the passage. “I say, B., father wants us to go out shopping for him. Are you on?”
Blanche, duster in hand, appeared at the doorway.
“Why doesn’t he go himself?” she asked.
“Because,” replied her father, getting very red, and speaking with elaborate care, “men’s subject to the infection and women is not.”
“That’s all my eye,” returned Millie. “Lots of women have got it.”
“It’s well known,” said Gosling, still keeping himself in hand, “a matter of common knowledge, that women is comparatively immune.”
“Oh, that’s a man’s yarn, that is,” said Blanche, “just to save themselves. We all know what men are—selfish brutes!”
“Are you going to fetch me that terbaccer or are you not?” shouted Mr Gosling suddenly.
“No, we aren’t,” said Millie, defiantly. “It isn’t safe for girls to go about the streets, let alone the risk of infection.” She had heard her father shout before, and she was not, as yet, at all intimidated.
“Well, then, I say you are!” shouted her father. “Lazy, good-for-nothing creatures, the pair of you! ’Oose paid for everything you’ve eat or drunk or wore ever since you was born? An’ now you won’t even go an errand.” Then, seeing the ready retort rising to his daughters’ lips, he grew desperate, and, advancing a step towards them, he said savagely: “If you don’t go, I’ll find a way to make yer!”
This was a new aspect, and the two girls were a little frightened. Natural instinct prompted them to scream for their mother.
She had been listening at the top of the stairs, and she answered the call for help with great promptitude.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Gosling,” she said, on a high note. “The streets isn’t safe for gels, as you know well enough; and why should my gels risk their lives for the sake of your nasty, dirty, wasteful ’abit of smoking, I should like to know?”
Gosling’s new-found courage was evaporating at the attack of this third enemy. He had been incensed against his daughters, but he had not yet overcome the habit of giving in to his wife, for the sake of peace. She had managed him very capably for a quarter of a century, but on the occasions when she had found it necessary to use what she called the “rough side of her tongue” she had demonstrated very clearly which of the two was master.
“I should have thought I might ’a been allowed a little terbaccer,” he said, resentfully. “’Oo risked his life to lay in provisions, I should like to know? An’ it’s a matter o’ common knowledge as women is immune from this plague.”
“And Mrs Carter, three doors off, carried out dead of it the day before yesterday!” remarked Mrs Gosling, triumphantly.
“Oh, ’ere and there, a case or two,” replied her husband. “But not one woman to a thousand men gets it, as every one knows.”
“And how do you know I mightn’t be the one?” asked Millie, bold now under her mother’s protection.
For that morning, the matter remained in abeyance; but Gosling, muttering and grumbling, nursed his injury and meditated on the fact that his daughters had been afraid of him. Things were altered now. There was no convention to tie his hands. He would work himself into a protective passion and defy the three of them. Also, there was an unopened bottle of whisky in the sideboard.
Nevertheless, he would have put off the trial of his strength if he had had to seek an opportunity. He was, as yet, too civilized to take the initiative in cold blood.
The opportunity, however, soon presented itself in that house. The air had been little cleared by the morning’s outbreak, and before evening the real explosion came. A mere trifle originated it—a warning from Gosling that their store of provisions would not last for ever, and a sharp retort from Millie to the effect that her father did not stint himself, followed by a reminder from Mrs Gosling that the raid might be repeated.
“Oh! yes, you’d be willing enough for me to die of the plague, I’ve no doubt!” broke out Gosling. “I can walk six mile to get you pervisions, but you can’t go to the corner of the street for my terbaccer.”
“Pervisions is necessary, terbaccer ain’t,” said Mrs Gosling. She was not a clever woman. She judged this to be the right opportunity to keep her husband in his place, and relied implicitly on the quelling power of her tongue. Her intuitions were those of the woman who had lived all her life in a London suburb; they did not warn her that she was now dealing with a specimen of half-decivilized humanity.
“Oh! ain’t it?” shouted Gosling, getting to his feet. His face was purple, and his pale blue eyes were starting from his head. “I’ll soon show you what’s necessary and what ain’t, and ’oose master in this ’ouse. And I say terbaccer is necessary, an’ what’s more, one o’ you three’s goin’ to fetch it quick! D’ye ’ear—one—o’—you—three!”
This inclusion of Mrs Gosling was, indeed, to declare war.
Millie and Blanche screamed and backed, but their mother rose to the occasion. She did not reserve herself; she began on her top note; but Gosling did not allow her to finish. He strode over to her and shook her by the shoulders, shouting to drown her strident recriminations. “’Old your tongue! ’old your tongue!” he bawled, and shook her with increasing violence. He was feeling his power, and when his wife crumpled up and fell to the floor in shrieking hysterics, he still strode on to victory. Taking the cowed and terrified Millie by the arm, he dragged her along the passage, unlocked and opened the front door and pushed her out into the street. “And don’t you come back without my terbaccer!” he shouted.
“How much?” quavered the shrinking Millie.
“’Alf-a-crown’s worth,” replied Gosling fiercely, and tossed the coin down on the little tiled walk that led up to the front door.
After Millie had gone he stood at the door for a moment, thankful for the coolness of the air on his heated face. “I got to keep this up,” he murmured to himself, with his first thought of wavering. Behind him he heard the sound of uncontrolled weeping and little cries of the “first time in twenty-four years” and “what the neighbours’ll think, I don’t know.”
“Neighbours,” muttered Gosling, contemptuously, “there aren’t any neighbours—not to count.”
A distant sound of slow wheels caught his ear. He listened attentively, and there came to him the remote monotonous chant of a dull voice crying: “Plague! Plague!”
He stepped in quickly and closed the door.