So, for three days of blinding labor, Aggie applied herself to the propitiation of Mammon, the sending forth of her sacrificial lamb properly decked for the sacrifice. There never had been such a hauling and overhauling of clothes, such folding and unfolding, such stitching and darning and cleansing and pressing, such dragging out and packing of heavy portmanteaus, such a getting up of shirts that should be irreproachable.
Aggie did it all herself; she would trust no one, least of all the laundress. She had only faint old visions of John Hurst’s collars to guide her; but she was upheld by an immense relief, born of her will to please, and Arthur, by a blind reliance, born of his utter weariness. At times these preparations well-nigh exasperated him. “If going meant all that fuss,” he said, “he’d rather not go.” But if he had been told that anything would happen to prevent his going, he would have sat down and cursed or cried. His nerves clamored for change now—any change from the office and the horrible yellow villa in Camden Town.
All of a sudden, at the critical moment, Aggie’s energy showed signs of slowing down, and it seemed to both of them that she would never get him off.
Then, for the first time, he woke to a dreary interest in the packing. He began to think of things for himself. He thought of a certain suit of flannels which he must take with him, which Aggie hadn’t cleaned or mended, either. In his weak state, it seemed to him that his very going depended on that suit of flannels. He went about the house inquiring irritably for them. He didn’t know that his voice had grown so fierce in its quality that it scared the children; or that he was ordering Aggie about like a dog; or that he was putting upon her bowed and patient back burdens heavier than it should have borne. He didn’t know what he was doing.
And he did not know why Aggie’s brain was so dull and her feet so slow, nor why her hands, that were incessantly doing, seemed now incapable of doing any one thing right. He did not know, because he was stupefied with his own miserable sensations, and Aggie had contrived to hide from him what Susie’s sharp eyes had discovered. Besides, he felt that, in his officially invalid capacity, a certain license was permitted him.
So, when he found his flannels in the boot cupboard, he came and flung them onto the table where Aggie bent over her ironing-board. A feeble fury shook him.
“Nobody but a fool,” he said, “would ram good flannels into a filthy boot cupboard.”
“I didn’t,” said Aggie, in a strange, uninterested voice. “You must have put them there yourself.”
He remembered.
“Well,” he said, placably, for he was, after all, a just man, “do you think they could be made a little cleaner?”