There is nothing for it. Tommy’s interest is on one side, a long life of seclusion in the asylum on the other. Tommy must go to the wall.
“I think I wouldn’t move him about, Jane,” you say. “If you will read to him and give him his tea he will be quite happy.” Then you escape with a heart of lead and ears of granite, and lay you down once more. You get hot and cold alternately as occasional faint screams reach you from the nursery. The coals fall, one by one, lower in the grate. The fire is nearly out. You see the cold, grey trees waving outside the window. The hot-bottle got chilled while you were in the nursery. The only warm thing in the room is your pillow which is boiling——
Pop-op-op-op-bang!
That is how Maggie always announces her presence. She staggers into the cold twilight, bearing an immense tray with tea sufficient for a school feast, and all the other items on her long menu are stale and tasteless. The butter is so shivering with cold that it is only able to clutch a few crumbs out of the bread, and these lie petrified on its chilly flakes. The sandwiches are too small, dry besides, and the jam inside them is an old enemy. The cake is last week’s: one of Jane’s failures, which, as she says, “seems to hang on a long time.” Maggie sweeps your book, your lamp, and everything you are likely to want off the table, and plants her horrid collection of uneatables in their place, lights a flaring gas immediately in front of your eyes and prepares to depart. “Maggie,” you say (how hatefully irksome it is to ask for the obvious when one is ill), “would you please draw the blinds, and make up the fire, and put out that gas, and bring me back my lamp and books.”
Oh, why did you ever let her go near the grate? It would have been chilly work making up the fire yourself, but next time—a thousand times Yes.
Banger, banger, banger, racker, racker, racker, PONG! racker, racker, racker, rack, rack, rack, PONG! PONG!! PONG!!! Your spinal cord splits in sympathy with the brave lump of coal which has held out so long against Maggie’s invincible poker, and which now retreats in a million fragments to the other end of the room. Shovel, ovel, ovel, ovel—shovel, ovel, ov—— “Surely that is enough, Maggie; you will make it so black,” you venture at last.
Down come the blinds with a sickening rattle, and you are left to take what comfort you can from the cold, strong tea (she has forgotten the hot water and the bell is at the other end of the room), the shivering butter, and the stern, unpopular cake. These sit on like unwelcome guests, hour after hour. There is no room for anything else on the table, and there they remain; that horrible cake staring into the fire, just like the kind of person who sits on and on after tea, and breaks your marked silence by asking, “Have you heard anything from Annie lately?” and futilities of that sort. The butter, perhaps, is prepared to leave, and says, “Well, we ought to be getting home, I suppose; we’ve paid you quite a visitation.” But the cake takes no notice whatever, and the sandwiches stand about on the tray, fingering things and asking, “That’s new, isn’t it? Who gave it you?” and so on. If Maggie had had the intuition of a louse she would have announced their cab—I mean she would have carried them away—ages and ages ago.
It is impossible to read with the cake looking like that. You doze—a feverish, thirsty doze. Dinner will have to be very tactfully presented. You wonder whether Jane will have thought of sweetbread or what. The bed is very crumby. Can that odious cake having been leaning over us to see whether we were asleep, whispering, perhaps, “Well, good-bye then, I won’t disturb you?” Probably the sandwiches giggled and said, “Don’t get up, we can let ourselves out.” The sandwiches’ names are Catherine and Agnes, and one is thirty-seven and the other thirty-one; both are unmarried and very fond of us.