THE CURTAINS
Your pair of muslin curtains, given time and place, may cost you anything in the region of four, eleven, three, as the shop will tell you; but if you add to that domestic calm, the amenities and a raw sconce they soon mount up. That was what they cost a man I know, and I say that they are not worth it. For, not to dwell for a moment upon his particular pair, muslin curtains don’t fulfil the whole duty of curtains, but only a part of it, and the wrong part. They prevent you from seeing out of the window, which is the last thing you want of them in the country; they don’t prevent other people from seeing into it—which is the first thing. Particularly when you have the lamp alight. For instance, the other evening the whole village was informed inside of an hour that Mrs. Hobday, a young and pretty woman, had been trying on a hat with one hand and powdering her nose with the other. She herself was the last to know it, and the last to be allowed to forget it.
The Hobdays’ neighbours are the Cosseys, and Mrs. Hobday and Mrs. Cossey from the first were bosom friends. That was very important if life were to be what you might call life, for the two front doors are under one lintel, and, said Mrs. Cossey, “’tis such close living that if you weren’t one thing you must be t’other.” But they were always the one thing until the affair of the curtains, though Mrs. Cossey was large and plain-faced, and Mrs. Hobday pretty and small; though Mrs. Cossey had two children and Mrs. Hobday was only expecting. However, from the very first we were told ’twas all as pleasant as pleasant. They lived in each other’s houses, listened to each other’s tales of courtship and marriage, admired each other’s washing, and shook sympathetic heads over the unreasonableness of each other’s husband. There were no clouds in the sky, nor the makings of them. The Cosseys had an Axminster, but the Hobdays a new drugget. Mrs. Cossey had a copper kettle, Mrs. Hobday a silver teapot. Things were “just so,” neck and neck, and nothing to choose between them, when you came to add things up. O sweet content! And then, one mild morning, Mrs. Cossey was offered a seat in a motor-car going into town, and accepted.
It was a fine day; she was elated by her drive. Market-day, too. She felt like going it, and she went it. Away flew five shillings on a pair of muslin curtains which were selling like hot cakes at a stall. Mrs. Cossey bought other things, but nothing to count. The curtains fair set her up, they did. She felt as though she were treading on air. Wherever she went about the town that day she had an eye for the windows, and saw nothing better anywhere. “I’ll make Fred put ’em up after dark,” she promised herself. “’Twill be a surprise for Mrs. Hobday in the morning.” It was.
When Mrs. Hobday saw her friend’s front-room window she felt her heart jump, then stand still. But she knew what was due to herself, and let not a sigh escape her. Mrs. Cossey found her busy on her knees over the doorstep, busier certainly than she had ever been before. It became necessary to call her attention to the curtains, which somehow took the edge off them. You can’t explain it, but so ’twas. Then, of course, Mrs. Hobday admired; and when she had admired enough, she was told all about it; and when she knew all about it she said no more, but excused herself for being busy, and withdrew. Nor, if you will believe Mrs. Cossey, was she seen again for two days and nights; never so much as put her head outside the door. But Mrs. Cossey did not know how she had wept on Hobday’s shoulder that evening of discovery, how she had pleaded (as they used to do at Assizes, poor things) her condition, and how Hobday had said she shouldn’t want for anything, if it cost him ten shillin’—which it did. She knew nothing of all that; but in two days’ time, when she stood at her front door, and, happening to look at her neighbour’s window, might, so she said, have been knocked down with a feather—then indeed she knew all the blackness of Mrs. Hobday’s heart.
Whatever she might have been knocked down with, she herself used a club, that is to say, most injurious words. The whole village heard them, at second-hand, from Tom Crewkomb, the sweep, who had been passing at the time. Warmed by eloquence, it seems, and her growing sense of triumphant suffering, Mrs. Cossey called Mrs. Hobday a saucy young piece; whereat Mrs. Hobday, as if whipped, struck out blindly and said that Mrs. Cossey was no better than she should be. It may have been true—it is true of most of us; but Mrs. Cossey took it to heart and, refusing all nourishment, could do nothing but repeat it to herself over and over again. The pair of cottages, resplendently curtained as they might be, became a house of lamentation. The breaking-point was reached when Hobday came home to tea, and being again wept upon, pushed fiercely into next door and called Mrs. Cossey to her face an old tantamount—a terrible word, whose implication no man could possibly know. For end thereof, not despondency but madness: for when Cossey understood that Hobday had called his wife a tantamount, he waited for him outside, and gave him what he called a pair of clippers over the ear. Hobday was a light-weight, and did his best, but he could not get near Cossey; and he went to grass. Mrs. Hobday had hysterics, and asked for the doctor; and then (such is human nature at its best) Mrs. Cossey ran in to her, called her a lamb, and put her to bed.
It is a boy.
Mrs. Cossey and Mrs. Hobday have better things to admire in each other now. But Mrs. Hobday knows that her curtains cost more. So also does Hobday.