[CHAPTER XXXVIII]
THE EMPTY HERMITAGE. A COMPROMISE ABOUT BOB. HOW MRS. STEPTOE HAD NOTHING TO CONCEAL. HOW CINTILLA CAUGHT MR. CHALLIS. CALYPSO'S RUG ISLAND. GOOD-BYE! PROMISE NOT TO COME TO BIARRITZ! THE SKEIN WOUND
The unhappy author hung on persistently at the Hermitage, in the face of the candid neglect of every duty by the servant who had given warning, and the uncandid pretences of Mrs. Steptoe that, in the absence of her mistress, which she treated as a thing de die in diem, the one object of her life, deep-rooted in her heart of hearts, was the comfort and well-being of her master. Her catering took the form so common in the British household, of a joint twice a week, twice re-incarnate as hash and mince, and a nice little bit of rump-steak on the odd day out. Her potatoes were hygrometric, owing to their being the wrong sort—there was great latitude for physical defect in that! Her other vegetables—lettuce, cabbage, what not!—had all lost their hearts, whatever was not stalk being flamboyant exfoliation. Even her brockilo sprouts were diffuse, and her cauliflowers wept. The bread was always second-hand—owing to the price of flour, said the baker's man, and he knew—and The Cheese was an affliction, a nightmare, which was supposed to be American or Cheddar, but whose days in the States or in Somersetshire were long, long ago.
Why did Challis endure it, when he might have thrown off all disguise and lived at his Club, where there is a capital library to write in, which nobody ever uses? Simply because of a pleasant dream he flattered his mind with, of a cab with luggage atop, and a sort of revised Marianne alighting, and the voices of his children. He was lying low for the fulfilment of this dream, without ever saying aloud to his heart that it was a possibility. Or, rather, he was fending against her return to the damper of an empty house. That would be altogether too sickening.
It was horribly dreary in the empty house. How he would have rejoiced to hear but one short torrent of unruly fury, but one complaining whimper, from the unrevised Marianne of the past! But he was given over to the Silences and the intermittent sounds that drive them home—the tradesmen's boys—the postmen's knocks. This could not last for ever, though! Bob would be back from school—was overdue, in fact—and then he would keep watch and ward in his father's absence. Challis favoured an image in his mind of a hospitable Bob, welcoming his revised step-mother, and risking statements about his father's return in fabulously short periods. He devised a plan for Bob to ring him up at the Club from the call-station at East Putney.
He had a bad half-hour when Bob did return, knowing nothing, and found him the sole tenant of the Hermitage. He thought it best to take his stand on Mrs. Steptoe's security of indefinite to-morrows, treat the matter lightly, and assure Bob that his mater and sisters would come back in the course of a few days. Bob accepted the statement in view of the fact that he didn't know yet that his phonograph, reluctantly forsaken when he returned to school, had not suffered from neglect. Presently Challis heard the diseased voice of the hideous instrument, dwelling on the fascinations of a yellow girl; and, for once, felt grateful to its inventor. But it was only a short respite. Bob soon suspected something seriously wrong, and had to be told. Not the whole!—that was impossible; what could his father have told him? But he had to have his painful experience of a first family disruption, and to understand that the sort of thing that might happen in other chaps' homes was also possible in his own.
Challis, who was still writing disheartened letters to his wife, addressing them through the Tulse Hill house-agency, told of Bob's return, and earnestly begged her to make it possible for the boy to see his little sisters again. He received an answer, reposted by the agent, with only the Tulse Hill postmark. It was written by her mother, and contained a proposal for a sort of truce as far as Bob was concerned. Subject to a written guarantee that he himself would keep his distance, Bob might come. Then he wrote earnestly and at length, dwelling on the cruelty of his wife's misjudgment of his actions, reproaching her with meanly taking advantage of a legal pretext to deprive him of his children, and imploring her, for their sake and his, only to consent to one interview. He was horribly embarrassed in writing this letter by the unwritten law—so his mind named it as he wrote—which dictates that every word that is written or spoken on this odious subject of men and women must be an equivocation or a shuffle. How could he formulate a phrase that would convey the truth to Marianne; acknowledge his aberration, and define its extent, without letting loose the whole gutter-brood of Charlotte Eldridges to point the finger of denunciation at him; and, worst of all, to squirt at Judith, skunk-wise, and run away? And if he assumed what so many would be ready to accept as a sound view, that an attack of amorous intoxication didn't count, and denied fully and roundly that he had ever been guilty of any transgression at all—why, then, in the first place it would be a lie, in the second, the troop of skunks would only resort to another secretion. "You know, dear, a man always holds himself bound to deny, for the woman's sake." It was characteristic of Challis that he all but heard these words from the image his mind made of Charlotte Eldridge on a sofa, shading its eyes from the light with that confounded pretty hand of hers. "I see no way out of Charlotte Eldridge," said he in despair. He ended his letter by an ill-chosen phrase, which put his head in the lion's mouth. "Is a man never to be forgiven," it said, "because he is momentarily overtaken by passion for a lady under exceptional circumstances?" Mrs. Eldridge made her teeth meet over that expression, be sure of that!