Mr. Trimblerigg’s view was the social: Caroline’s was only the practical: trying to be resourceful, she said. ‘You might try brushing it.’
‘I might try cutting my head off,’ he retorted. ‘I wish you’d stop talking foolishly.’
Then Caroline, being a dutiful wife, and seeing how much he was put out, did her best to soothe him. ‘I don’t think people will notice it,’ she said; ‘not much if you don’t want them to.’
‘Then you’d better leave off thinking!’ he said. ‘Though I haven’t wanted them to, they have noticed: they’ve done nothing but notice! If you like, I’ll go and put my head into the kitchen now, and you’ll hear that charwoman of yours faint at the mere sight of me.’
‘No, she won’t,’ said Mrs. Trimblerigg, ‘she’s gone. She lays the table for supper and then goes home, and doesn’t wash up till she comes again in the morning. And it’s Jane’s evening out; so there’ll be nobody.’
These domestic details infuriated him; Caroline was so stupid. And she continued to be.
‘Don’t you think you ought to see a Doctor?’ she inquired.
‘I’ll see the Doctor damned first,’ replied Mr. Trimblerigg. Her suggestion of ice was no better received; it seemed as if she could only annoy him. And then one of the children outside shouted, ‘Mummy, when are we going to have supper?’
‘Go and give them their supper!’ he said; and his tone was very bitter; bitter against her, and against the children, and against the whole world wanting its supper, while on his head fate had laid this burden of a blessing, too grievous for the flesh to bear. Yes, the flesh; that was the trouble. He saw the spiritual side of it—the symbolic splendour beckoning clear from heights which he could realize but which the world could not. He saw that, but he saw the other side also! There was no public for it; and if no public, where was the good—what could he do with it? Live it down?—or so arrange matters that it should never show? That meant cutting his life in half, and concealing the best of it.
There he was, a furtive fugitive in the bosom of his own family; the children wanting their supper, and he avoiding it; yet surely—if this thing was from Heaven—children, his own children at least, ought to be trained to grow accustomed to it, and take a right view of it. Then why not begin?