V

So that at midsummer, 1893, a pleasant-faced widow, Mrs. Agatha Brown, attired in all the hideous panoply of mourning for a newly-dead husband which the Queen’s example had made nearly compulsory, came to live in lodgings at Peckham. Her sympathetic landlady soon knew all about her⁠—about the husband, rather a bad lot, seemingly, who had been in the greengrocery trade and had died suddenly of some rather vague disease, but leaving his widow well provided for by the standards of that simple place and time; about the happy event which was to be expected shortly; about her general friendlessness and the dislike with which her late husband’s family regarded her for intercepting the legacies they had come to look upon as their due. Mrs. Rodgers became a great admirer of Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Brown was so evidently a lady, yet withal she had so sound a knowledge of practical affairs, and, most important, she had round her that tremendous aura of “independent means” which implies so much to a working-class dependent for its daily bread upon the whim of an employer. Mrs. Brown paid splendidly regular money for her furnished rooms, but she paid only a tiny amount more than the lowest market value, so that contempt could not creep in to adulterate Mrs. Rodgers’s admiration. Mrs. Brown knew all about the prices of things and how long they ought to last, and she always knew how much of her little joints and of her butter and tea and other supplies she had left, so that Mrs. Rodgers’s first tentative stealings were calmly checked, and she bore no ill will⁠—quite the contrary. She was soon a very subservient ally.

Mr. Deane, too, who had drawn up that astonishing will of Agatha’s mother which had enabled Agatha to become Mrs. Brown of Peckham, was very helpful and kind. He shook his head sympathetically when Agatha, calling upon him, told him about family trouble which had led her to leave home, and of course, seeing that such was his business, he readily consented to take upon himself the management of Agatha’s “estate”⁠—the six houses of Beaconsfield Terrace. He looked up curiously and sharply when Agatha explained that at her new address she was known as Mrs. Brown, and when he noticed the expression on her face he pulled his white whiskers and looked down at his notes again in embarrassed fashion. After all, he was a solicitor, and solicitors should not be shocked at encountering family skeletons.

Colchester Street, Peckham, was a brief road of a hundred houses a side, nearly similar but not quite, the pavements grimly flagged, the rest grimly macadamized. At one end was the main road, along which poured a volume of traffic considered large for those times⁠—horse trams and horse buses predominating⁠—and at the other end was a public house, the Colchester Arms; but despite this latter handicap Colchester Street was very respectable and at that time very few of the houses accommodated more than one family. Just here and there widows or widowers or maiden-ladies (school teachers) occupied one or two rooms, but that was a very different matter from other possible developments. Agatha had drifted to 37 Colchester Street as a result of a brief examination of the small advertisements of the local paper; it was the first address she had called at, and she was satisfied. She settled in, and settled down, to a life which was an odd blend of the strictly orderly and logical and nightmarishly fantastic. It was quite orderly and logical of course that she should pay her weekly bills promptly and keep a close eye on her expenditure and exact respect from those whom she encountered, but it was wildly fantastic that she should have no exacting daily duties, that time should hang idly on her hands, that she should have no calls to make nor callers to receive, that she should be addressed as “Mrs.,” that she should go to the local doctor and surrender her sweet private body to him for examination and decision on her condition.

The doctor’s verdict, of course, was only in agreement with her own. He, too, looked at her sharply; he knew her for a widow and a newcomer, and he guessed shrewdly that there was more in her history than she was likely to tell him, although⁠—although⁠—her sedate costume and sedate, assured manner and placid purity of expression made him doubt his doubts, only to have them return in renewed strength when he found that she was friendly with no woman⁠—that, seemingly, she was without a friend in the world. But he did all his duty and more; he prescribed a regimen for her, gave her information on points of which she was quite ignorant, and finally obtained for her two or three books, written in the genteel round-the-corner style in which such books were then written, which more or less gave her guidance towards the approaching great event.

In the ’nineties expectant mothers were real invalids; they must not do this and they must not do that, and it were better if they did not do the other; the books hedged in Agatha with all sorts of restrictions and prescriptions, and they took it for granted that she would be really unwell, whereas, if the truth must be told, she never felt better in her life. At times she was puzzled about it, but she took the written word for Gospel⁠—that and the manifold hints and suggestions of Mrs. Rodgers⁠—because, after all, she knew no more about it than what they told her. So now she rose late, only when the children were passing whistling to each other under her bedroom window on their way to school, and she breakfasted in her dressing-gown, and she sat by a closed window (with a fire until summer was indubitably come) and watched the petty pageant of the streets while she stitched and stitched and dreamed in all the unreality of occupied idleness.

For, although the books assumed her to be an invalid, they offered some compensation at least in the array of garments they prescribed as necessary for the “little stranger”⁠—that horrible expression of which they made such free use. It was not a horrible expression to Agatha; she would have called it a genteel necessary circumlocution if it had ever occurred to her to employ such an exotic phrase. The “little stranger,” then, had to have a myriad garments⁠—binders yards and yards long, matinee jackets, veils and shawls and christening gowns, socks and gloves, daygowns and nightgowns of flannel exquisitely embroidered in silk⁠—and Agatha made every blessed thing herself, stitching away patiently by the window. She stitched and stitched, but of the dreams she wove in with the silk it would not be right to tell.

She came to know that side street and its habitués so well. There were rag-and-bone men, each chanting his call in his own particular manner; there were the milkmen on the eleven o’clock round, and the smart baker’s cart, and the butcher’s dogcart drawn by a showy chestnut sadly overdriven by the butcher’s greasy-haired son; there was the insurance agent, frock-coated and bowler-hatted, and the fruit-sellers and knife-grinders. On three afternoons a week organ grinders came, one of them with a shivering monkey in a red coat, and another, who was a real Italian, bronzed and handsome with marvellously white teeth, who sang “O Sole Mio” so sentimentally that Agatha always opened the window and threw him a penny. And besides all these there were the children⁠—oh, the children! Every house had its two and three, who came trotting home to dinner at twelve and back again to school at two, and down the street once more at half-past four. Agatha knew them all, the big ones and the little ones, the late ones and the early ones, the good ones and the naughty ones. Big sisters often had one or two to escort, and more than once during those six months Agatha watched the rise of a new independence when some baby boy would suddenly decide that big sisters were no longer of use to him and would find his own way to school, not quite sure of himself either, with an occasional look round to see that the sister was not unattainably out of reach. Agatha could not have watched with greater interest the beginning of a new planet.

Some there were to whom the grim flagstones of the pavement were friendly and sociable, for it was a great game to walk to school entirely on the lines between them; and just outside No. 37 there were three successive very wide flagstones, much wider than the ordinary six-year-old could stride, and Agatha would find herself leaning forward in great excitement to see whether this little boy or that little girl would accomplish the perilous passage in safety. There were naughty little boys who played “knocking down ginger”⁠—knocking at nearly every door in the street and running away before they opened. Agatha’s heart used to beat quite fast in case they were caught, but they never were. Tops were all the rage when Agatha first came to No. 37, and they were succeeded by marbles and skipping ropes (according to sex), and cherry stones and little balls and one or two cricket bats made their appearance before football came into its own again. There was one dreadful incident when a prized tennis ball rolled down a drain, and Agatha watched palpitating while the grating was prised up and two small urchins of seven hung on to the legs of another small urchin of nine while he lowered three-quarters of himself head downwards down the hole and reached the ball by a convulsive stretching which threatened every moment to precipitate him upside down into the horrible hole.

It was the little boys in whom Agatha took most interest, although the little girls claimed a good share. She knew the tidy ones and the untidy ones, and the prim ones and the tomboyish ones, and, with typical partiality, she liked the tidy ones best. Her heart was really wrung with agony when a disaster occurred to the primmest and tidiest of them all, when that self-satisfied, smug ten-year-old found her drawers slipping down there in the road with a whole lot of people about. It was into the front garden of No. 37 that she retired, and Agatha, with yearning sympathy, watched her putting matters right while cowering behind the stunted privet bushes.

Strange that children should thus hold her fascinated. Agatha had never before thought about children; she had been too preoccupied with two maids and a house to look after, and the little she had known about the method of arrival selected by children had displeased her. She had felt a sort of contempt for the shapeless, helpless wives upon whom she had sometimes called⁠—Mr. Brown’s fellow-Nonconformists were prolific fathers⁠—and she despised wailing babies, and wet babies, and sick babies. All the babies she knew fell into one of these three categories, and children were always quarrelsome, or stupid, or self-assertive. It was all different now; Agatha, stitching a thousand tucks into one ridiculous nightgown, or implanting wonderful embroidery into the corners of a flannel daygown, thought of few things besides children. But then of course she was a prisoner for the time, and prisoners, by common report, take interest in spiders and mice and things like that, just as Agatha did.

There was another matter in which she took an interest, though. One day while casually glancing through the newspaper a name caught her eye, and with a slight sense of shock she looked again. The name was that of Lieutenant-Commander R. E. S. Saville-Samarez, and it occurred halfway down a list headed “Naval Appointments.” Agatha may perhaps have seen that column before, but it had conveyed nothing to her. She had not realized before that by its aid she would be able to follow Samarez’s professional career, and the discovery stimulated her attention. She found there was another column which sometimes appeared, headed “Movements of H.M. Ships,” and with the aid of these two she could trace Samarez hither and thither wherever the Lords of Admiralty might send him. After that Agatha always bought her own newspaper instead of depending on casual readings of Mrs. Rodger’s, and it was for these items that she always looked first. It became her hobby, just as children had become her main interest.

Day passed after day, and week after week. The chair by the first-floor front window had become a second nature to her, just as had her evening walks by side streets. It had almost begun to seem as if she had done nothing else all her life than await the arrival of the son she so confidently expected, and as if she would do nothing else. It called for quite an effort to make herself realize that her time was at hand. Doctor Walters of course treated the affair in a far more matter-of-fact manner, and it was the businesslike solemnity of his visits which did most to impress Agatha with the need to complete her arrangements.

Within the last few weeks a new portent had appeared in Salisbury Road, next to Colchester Road. A board had spread itself with wide-open welcoming arms there, bearing the legend “Nursing Home⁠—Surgical, General, Maternity.” Until that era nursing homes in the suburbs had been almost nonexistent. Suburban people, if they were ill, went into hospitals; if they were only not quite so ill they struggled back to life or on to death in their own rabbit hutches of houses; nine hundred and ninety-nine suburban babies out of a thousand were born in the suburban beds which had seen their engendering. The average wife would never have dreamed of going cold-bloodedly elsewhere for her confinement, especially when domestic servants were still common. Suburban nursing homes and restaurants and all the other insidious wreckers of home life were only to burgeon into full blossom with the lack of domestic servants. The Salisbury Nursing Home was a little before its time; its “Surgical” and “General” departments were merely heroic gestures, and even its “Maternity” side never flourished. The venture came to a disastrous end after a year’s struggle, but that year saw the arrival of Agatha’s child.

Agatha made her arrangements with Doctor Walters’s full approval, for the doctor, with lingering happy memories of hospital experience and trained assistance and proper appliances, was thoroughly dissatisfied with the makeshifts he usually had to employ in practice, with curtained rooms and feather beds and all the other hideously unhygienic arrangements with which mothers could find no fault. So it was with a strange excited feeling that one day Agatha walked round to the Salisbury Nursing Home with Mrs. Rodgers at her side, carrying the historic suitcase, the suitcase which was accompanying her for the third successive occasion on a great adventure. Agatha liked it all; she liked the bare, clean rooms and the trim, efficient nurses and the cheerfully unsympathetic aspect of the place; for Agatha was of a Spartan turn of mind mostly.

She looked on pain as a necessary part of life; she had been imbued since childhood with notions about “the curse of Eve” and similar predestinate ideas; she knew (and it tortured her) that she had “sinned,” and she went unshrinkingly forward. The grit that had carried her father from errand running to wholesaling took her into maternity without a tremor or a regret. The slight pains came, and she was packed away into bed; Doctor Walters called, was unhesitatingly cheerful, and went away again. And then the real pains came, wave after wave of them, so that she found herself flung into a sea of pain of an intensity she had not believed possible. The smooth, efficient face of the nurse, and Doctor Walters’s, with its kindly detachment, floated into her consciousness and out again through a grey mist. She caught a whiff of ether, but at the time she had no idea that it was being used on her. Then it was all over (Agatha, looking back, would have said that it had only taken half an hour or so) and she was free to hold her child on her arm for a few wonderful minutes. The delights of motherhood were very obvious and none the less pleasant. It was a boy of course. Agatha had been quite certain of it from the first. Nothing else could have been possible. Agatha to her dying day never realized that it was only a successful even chance, and not a fixed, settled certainty.