CHAPTER VI
SUNDAY
On no day of the year—spring, summer, autumn, or winter, did any inhabitant of Garth House rise before Rebekah. Grimly complete, starch and stiff and taciturn, she would be about the dim house, feeling nothing of the cold blackness of a winter morning, finding apparently no pleasure in the beauty of a summer dawn. Her business was with the House—human beings (yes, Trenchards as well as the rest) she despised—for Houses she could feel reverence ... they were stronger than she.
Upon the Sunday morning that followed the “Feast” at Rafiel, very early indeed, she was moving about the passages. Looking out on to the lawn and bushes, wet with mist, she knew that it would be a bad day.... Weather mattered to her nothing: people (although the Trenchards might think otherwise) mattered to her nothing. Her business was with the House....
That Sunday began badly for Aunt Aggie—and, therefore, for everyone else. Before she woke—in the dusty labyrinth of her half-waking dreams—she knew that her tooth was aching. In her dreams this tooth was of an enormous size, holding, although it was in form and figure a veritable tooth, a huge hammer that it brought down, with a regular beat, upon Aunt Aggie’s jaw. She screamed, struggled, fought, awoke—to find that the tooth had receded to its proper place and size, was still faintly beating, but not aching—only threatening. This threat was, in its way, more terrible than a savage ache. When would the ache begin? Ah, here it was!... no, only the throb.... Would hot or cold food irritate it? Would the wind?... She got out of bed and drew her blind. Her clock told her that the hour was seven. Why had Annie not called her? Annie had overslept herself—what was it to Annie if Aunt Aggie were late for Early Service? But it must be something to Annie. Annie must be warned. Annie ... Aunt Aggie was conscious that she had a headache, that the weather was abominable, and that crossing through the wood to the church would certainly start the tooth. But she was resolved. Very grimly, her mouth tightly closed, her heart beating because she was expecting that, at every moment, that tooth.... Aunt Aggie had her bath, dressed, informed Annie, who came, very greatly agitated, at half-past seven, that this would not be the last she heard of it, walked off to church. During the singing of the collection hymn her tooth leapt upon her.... It came to her like some malign and secret enemy, who would influence her not so deeply through actual pain as through his insistence on what, please God, he would do afterwards. She hurried home to breakfast through the wet, grey morning, saying to herself: “It shall not ache! I forbid it to ache! You hear me! You shall not!” and always that sinister whisper replied in her ear: “Wait. Just see what I’ll do to you in a moment.”
In her bedroom some iodine, which she applied to her gum, reduced the inside of her mouth to sawdust; through the dried discomfort of it all her enemy still beat at her heart ironically.
She was determined that the tooth should not alter her day. She knew how easily ordinary human beings succumbed—such weakness should not be hers. Nevertheless her love of honesty compelled her to admit that, this morning, the house looked horrible. It had, as she had often told Harriet, been always overcrowded with ‘things’—with mats and jars and pots and photographs, old books, magazines, ink-bottles, china ornaments, stones and shells, religious emblems, old calendars, and again photographs, photographs, photographs.... It was not that the house was definitely untidy, but that once a thing was there, there it remained. The place looked like home, because it was filled with properties that any newcomer would instantly discard. Everything was dim and faded—carpets, curtains, books, pictures; Katherine, Millie, Henry could remember how the water-colour of “Rafiel Beach,” the photograph of Trezent Head, the dining-room marble clock, surmounted by the Goddess Diana minus her right leg, the book-case in the drawing-room, with rows and rows of the novels of Anthony Trollope (each in three volumes), the cuckoo clock in the dark corner on the first landing, the glass case with sea shells in the hall near the hat-rack, the long row of faded Trenchard and Faunder photographs in the drawing-room, the little corner cupboard with the Sunday games in it—Bible Lotto, puzzle map of Palestine, Bible Questions and Bible Answers—all these things had been “first there” since the beginning of time, even as the oak on the lawn, the rough grass meadows that ran to the very posts of the house, the little wood and the tennis lawn with the brown hole in the middle of it had always been ‘there.’ Aunt Aggie herself had grown profoundly accustomed to it all—in her heart she would not have had a shell nor a photograph removed from its place. Nevertheless, upon this grey Sunday morning she was oppressed, almost triumphantly, about her sense of the dinginess and confusion of the house. It was as though she said to herself: “There! it’s not my tooth at all that makes me feel out of sorts with things. It’s simply Harriet’s inability to put things straight.” She found then that everyone was very quiet at breakfast—‘sulky’ one could be justified in calling it. Moreover, there were ‘sausages again!’ Harriet knew perfectly well that Aggie hated sausages—nevertheless she persisted, with the devotion of a blind slave to an august ritual, in having, always, sausages for Sunday breakfast. Aggie was, in spite of her tooth, hungry this morning, but when, with an unconscious self-consciousness, during a silence, she said: “No sausage for me, thanks. You know, Betty, that I never care for them.” No one said: “Have an egg, Aggie: it can be boiled in a moment.”
Only Harriet, with her attention obviously elsewhere, remarked carelessly: “We can have the ham in, Aggie, if you like”—to which Aggie could only reply: “You know I dislike cold ham, Harriet.”
But, indeed, Sunday breakfast was never a very jolly meal—how could it be? The hour was throbbing with a consciousness of the impending difficulties and problems of the day. There was Church, there was Sunday School, there were callers in the afternoon: there were meals, the very heavy midday meal with roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, tea with a great deal of stiff conversation, something in the manner of Ollendorff, supper, when the chill on the food typified the exhausted spirits of the tired company. During too many years had Henry, Millie, Katherine, and still more Aggie, Betty and Mrs. Trenchard worn Sunday clothes, eaten Sunday meals, suffered Sunday restraint, known Sunday exhaustion for it to be possible for any of them to regard Sunday in a normal, easy fashion. Very right and proper that they should so regard it. I would only observe that if there is to be a thorough explosion of Trenchard, of Faunder tempers—if there is to be, in any kind of way, a “family scene” Sunday will be, almost certainly, the background selected for it. Aunt Aggie, looking around her, on this morning, at her assembled friends and relations, ‘thought them all very sulky indeed. Wrapped up entirely in their own selfish thoughts’.... The day began badly.