“I am glad to hear that,” he replied. “The Perkin Warbecks can now resume their normal occupations.”
“Who are they?” she said.
“I don’t know who they were, but I remember being sent to bed because I didn’t know that they aspired to the throne. I’ve remembered their beastly names ever since.”
“They are staying with Mr. Manley,” Teresa went on, “at least she is, and David is going there next week. I promised to go to dinner one evening, so I can tell them about the Perkin Warbecks. It is nice to think how pleased the farmers will be, isn’t it?” She felt some pride in the way she was conducting this affair.
“Very nice, dear,” said Susie quietly. “Do you know at all how he got on in the Argentine?”
“No, she didn’t say,” Teresa answered.
“I thought perhaps you might have heard sometimes,” said Susie. “So often out in those lonely places people are so glad of posts, and they write and tell one all sorts of things about themselves, just with the idea of getting an answer. I remember I had a cousin who used to write dreadfully dull letters all about the country and then strings and strings of questions.”
Teresa need not have been afraid. Her mother did, as Evangeline had pointed out, achieve what seemed like conjuring tricks in the lives of other people, but she only prepared spiritual omelets in places where no omelet was likely to be made in the ordinary way. Having satisfied herself now that Teresa had been completely cut off from David while he was away and was full of suppressed excitement at his return, she was too great an artist in mystery to use apparatus when the laws of nature were already operating in the direction she wished.
Three days after this was Christmas Day, and both Susie and Teresa had a busy day before them. Susie was to attend a tea and distribution of useful Christmas presents to the inmates of the Mary Popley Home, and Teresa was to help serve dinner to some hundreds of street urchins, members of one of the many organisations with which Emma’s devoted band worked ceaselessly and hopefully, undeterred by rumours of class war or theories about the reconstruction of the State. Emma’s workers got on with the business of cleaning the city as best they could, while Fisk, the people’s friend, raved of blood and destruction, and then went home to tend his dormice. Teresa’s post was at the end of a trestle table with nearly fifty boys on each side. She was buttoned up to the neck in an overall; her face was hot from the stove beside her and from the crowded atmosphere; her head felt bursting from the smell of poor homes and the clapper of voices; her feet were icy from the draught along the wooden floor which was only separated from the street by an open door and a long stone passage. In front of her was a gigantic hot-pot, replaced by another as soon as empty. She held in her hand a long iron spoon, greasy from top to bottom and heavy to wield. At her elbow were a pile of plates, which were snatched up and borne away by other helpers as fast as she filled them. There were three tables altogether, and the same thing was happening at both ends of each. Other people, visitors and members of the committee, stood about the room and looked on, giving a hand with any extra job that was needed. When the last plate was filled Teresa had a moment in which to look at the faces down the table. They were all faces from behind the fog, but they were young, and the Great Depression (as she called the public expression of countenance when she first came to Millport) had not yet reached them. Many of them were pale and pinched, many were apple-faced, some fat and white, but they were all young and as free as squirrels. They bore marks of cold and hunger, some of them of cruelty and disease, every single one of them had a cold in the head and took no notice of it. “The plum pudding, Miss——. May I pass?” said a voice beside her, and, as she moved, a monstrous pudding was put before her and the helpers pawed the ground in their impatience to be off with the plates. Teresa doled out great helpings of the stuff as fast as she could, grasping her heavy spoon with both hands. Once more she had time to look at the boys. They were not talking now; they were stuffing, and they had said all they had to say to their neighbours. She saw one of them deposit a large tablespoonful of the pudding in a pocket of his little age-worn waistcoat, and in the horror of the moment she exclaimed, “Child! what on earth are you doing?”
“It’s for me granny,” he said, “she’s sick.” Teresa experienced the upheaval of mind and body that used to shake her with a general sense of topsy-turvydom when she first took up Emma’s work, and which she had nearly lost during the last years. She remembered Ivor as she had left him that morning, happily engaged in discussion on seasonable topics of revelry, she thought of dirty little faces assembled outside toyshops lighted up early on account of the penetrating fog; she had a vision of the Price family in paper caps seated among a débris of hothouse dessert and wine and coffee and expensive trifles in leather and gold, recently unwrapped from parcels, each “novelty” designed to save small discomforts, such as the lighting of a match or the turn of a head to see the time; she thought of Evan’s sisters, giggling happily beneath banners that advertised Peace and Goodwill, and of Fisk at the other end of the Christmas dinner-table, gloomily contemplating his father’s mésalliance, the Gainsboroughs’ old cook who never could cook anything decently, and who had now become the last straw on all that an unjust government had heaped upon him at his birth. Teresa’s mind, which had by now established David in its background as a referee in all debated questions, recalled at this moment her first visit to Aldwych and her self-reproach for having eaten the price of Albert Potter’s splints. “I have been along that road,” David had said, “and it leads nowhere except to a maze where you lose yourself and die for want of a new argument.” “David!” she cried now, in her heart, “David! get me out of this and take me with you, if you know where you are going.”