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_ In the year 1893 there was a new and strange man living at No. 4,
St. Luke's Square. Many people remarked on the phenomenon. Very
few of his like had ever been seen in Bursley before. One of the
striking things about him was the complex way in which he secured
himself by means of glittering chains. A chain stretched across
his waistcoat, passing through a special button-hole, without a
button, in the middle. To this cable were firmly linked a watch at
one end and a pencil-case at the other; the chain also served as a
protection against a thief who might attempt to snatch the fancy
waistcoat entire. Then there were longer chains, beneath the
waistcoat, partly designed, no doubt, to deflect bullets, but
serving mainly to enable the owner to haul up penknives,
cigarette-cases, match-boxes, and key-rings from the profundities
of hip-pockets. An essential portion of the man's braces, visible
sometimes when he played at tennis, consisted of chain, and the
upper and nether halves of his cuff-links were connected by
chains. Occasionally he was to be seen chained to a dog.
A reversion, conceivably, to a mediaeval type! Yes, but also the
exemplar of the excessively modern! Externally he was a
consequence of the fact that, years previously, the leading tailor
in Bursley had permitted his son to be apprenticed in London. The
father died; the son had the wit to return and make a fortune
while creating a new type in the town, a type of which multiple
chains were but one feature, and that the least expensive if the
most salient. For instance, up to the historic year in which the
young tailor created the type, any cap was a cap in Bursley, and
any collar was a collar. But thenceforward no cap was a cap, and
no collar was a collar, which did not exactly conform in shape and
material to certain sacred caps and collars guarded by the young
tailor in his back shop. None knew why these sacred caps and
collars were sacred, but they were; their sacredness endured for
about six months, and then suddenly--again none knew why--they
fell from their estate and became lower than offal for dogs, and
were supplanted on the altar. The type brought into existence by
the young tailor was to be recognized by its caps and collars, and
in a similar manner by every other article of attire, except its
boots. Unfortunately the tailor did not sell boots, and so imposed
on his creatures no mystical creed as to boots. This was a pity,
for the boot-makers of the town happened not to be inflamed by the
type-creating passion as the tailor was, and thus the new type
finished abruptly at the edges of the tailor's trousers.
The man at No. 4, St. Luke's Square had comparatively small and
narrow feet, which gave him an advantage; and as he was endowed
with a certain vague general physical distinction he managed,
despite the eternal untidiness of his hair, to be eminent among
the type. Assuredly the frequent sight of him in her house
flattered the pride of Constance's eye, which rested on him almost
always with pleasure. He had come into the house with startling
abruptness soon after Cyril left school and was indentured to the
head-designer at "Peel's," that classic earthenware manufactory.
The presence of a man in her abode disconcerted Constance at the
beginning; but she soon grew accustomed to it, perceiving that a
man would behave as a man, and must be expected to do so. This
man, in truth, did what he liked in all things. Cyril having
always been regarded by both his parents as enormous, one would
have anticipated a giant in the new man; but, queerly, he was
slim, and little above the average height. Neither in enormity nor
in many other particulars did he resemble the Cyril whom he had
supplanted. His gestures were lighter and quicker; he had nothing
of Cyril's ungainliness; he had not Cyril's limitless taste for
sweets, nor Cyril's terrific hatred of gloves, barbers, and soap.
He was much more dreamy than Cyril, and much busier. In fact,
Constance only saw him at meal-times. He was at Peel's in the day
and at the School of Art every night. He would dream during a
meal, even; and, without actually saying so, he gave the
impression that he was the busiest man in Bursley, wrapped in
occupations and preoccupations as in a blanket--a blanket which
Constance had difficulty in penetrating.
Constance wanted to please him; she lived for nothing but to
please him; he was, however, exceedingly difficult to please, not
in the least because he was hypercritical and exacting, but
because he was indifferent. Constance, in order to satisfy her
desire of pleasing, had to make fifty efforts, in the hope that he
might chance to notice one. He was a good man, amazingly
industrious--when once Constance had got him out of bed in the
morning; with no vices; kind, save when Constance mistakenly tried
to thwart him; charming, with a curious strain of humour that
Constance only half understood. Constance was unquestionably vain
about him, and she could honestly find in him little to blame. But
whereas he was the whole of her universe, she was merely a dim
figure in the background of his. Every now and then, with his
gentle, elegant raillery, he would apparently rediscover her, as
though saying: "Ah! You're still there, are you?" Constance could
not meet him on the plane where his interests lay, and he never
knew the passionate intensity of her absorption in that minor part
of his life which moved on her plane. He never worried about her
solitude, or guessed that in throwing her a smile and a word at
supper he was paying her meagrely for three hours of lone rocking
in a rocking-chair.
The worst of it was that she was quite incurable. No experience
would suffice to cure her trick of continually expecting him to
notice things which he never did notice. One day he said, in the
midst of a silence: "By the way, didn't father leave any boxes of
cigars?" She had the steps up into her bedroom and reached down
from the dusty top of the wardrobe the box which she had put there
after Samuel's funeral. In handing him the box she was doing a
great deed. His age was nineteen and she was ratifying his
precocious habit of smoking by this solemn gift. He entirely
ignored the box for several days. She said timidly: "Have you
tried those cigars?" "Not yet," he replied. "I'll try 'em one of
these days." Ten days later, on a Sunday when he chanced not to
have gone out with his aristocratic friend Matthew Peel-
Swynnerton, he did at length open the box and take out a cigar.
"Now," he observed roguishly, cutting the cigar, "we shall see,
Mrs. Plover!" He often called her Mrs. Plover, for fun. Though she
liked him to be sufficiently interested in her to tease her, she
did not like being called Mrs. Plover, and she never failed to
say: "I'm not Mrs. Plover." He smoked the cigar slowly, in the
rocking-chair, throwing his head back and sending clouds to the
ceiling. And afterwards he remarked: "The old man's cigars weren't
so bad." "Indeed!" she answered tartly, as if maternally resenting
this easy patronage. But in secret she was delighted. There was
something in her son's favourable verdict on her husband's cigars
that thrilled her.
And she looked at him. Impossible to see in him any resemblance to
his father! Oh! He was a far more brilliant, more advanced, more
complicated, more seductive being than his homely father! She
wondered where he had come from. And yet ...! If his father had
lived, what would have occurred between them? Would the boy have
been openly smoking cigars in the house at nineteen?
She laboriously interested herself, so far as he would allow, in
his artistic studies and productions. A back attic on the second
floor was now transformed into a studio--a naked apartment which
smelt of oil and of damp clay. Often there were traces of clay on
the stairs. For working in clay he demanded of his mother a smock,
and she made a smock, on the model of a genuine smock which she
obtained from a country-woman who sold eggs and butter in the
Covered Market. Into the shoulders of the smock she put a week's
fancy-stitching, taking the pattern from an old book of
embroidery. One day when he had seen her stitching morn, noon, and
afternoon, at the smock, he said, as she rocked idly after supper:
"I suppose you haven't forgotten all about the smock I asked you
for, have you, mater?" She knew that he was teasing her; but,
while perfectly realizing how foolish she was, she nearly always
acted as though his teasing was serious; she picked up the smock
again from the sofa. When the smock was finished he examined it
intently; then exclaimed with an air of surprise: "By Jove! That's
beautiful! Where did you get this pattern? "He continued to stare
at it, smiling in pleasure. He turned over the tattered leaves of
the embroidery-book with the same naive, charmed astonishment, and
carried the book away to the studio. "I must show that to
Swynnerton," he said. As for her, the epithet 'beautiful' seemed a
strange epithet to apply to a mere piece of honest stitchery done
in a pattern, and a stitch with which she had been familiar all
her life. The fact was she understood his 'art' less and less. The
sole wall decoration of his studio was a Japanese print, which
struck her as being entirely preposterous, considered as a
picture. She much preferred his own early drawings of moss-roses
and picturesque castles--things that he now mercilessly contemned.
Later, he discovered her cutting out another smock. "What's that
for?" he inquired. "Well," she said, "you can't manage with one
smock. What shall you do when that one has to go to the wash?"
"Wash!" he repeated vaguely. "There's no need for it to go to the
wash." "Cyril," she replied, "don't try my patience! I was
thinking of making you half-a-dozen." He whistled. "With all that
stitching?" he questioned, amazed at the undertaking. "Why not?"
she said. In her young days, no seamstress ever made fewer than
half-a-dozen of anything, and it was usually a dozen; it was
sometimes half-a-dozen dozen. "Well," he murmured, "you have got a
nerve! I'll say that." Similar things happened whenever he showed
that he was pleased. If he said of a dish, in the local tongue: "I
could do a bit of that!" or if he simply smacked his lips over it,
she would surfeit him with that dish. _
Read next: BOOK II CONSTANCE: CHAPTER VIII - THE PROUDEST MOTHER: PART II
Read previous: BOOK II CONSTANCE: CHAPTER VII - BRICKS AND MORTAR: PART III
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