At Sea View, Sundering-on-Sea

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AT SEA VIEW, SUNDERING-ON-SEA

In an uncomfortable armchair of slippery black horsehair, in a mean apartment at Sundering-on-Sea, sat a sick man staring dully out of the window. It was an oppressive day, hot under a leaden sky; there was scarcely a movement in the air save for the dull thudding of the gun practice at Shorehamstow. A multitude of flies crawled and buzzed fitfully about the room, and ever and again some chained-up cur in the neighbourhood gave tongue to its discontent. The window looked out upon a vacant building lot, a waste of scorched grass and rusty rubbish surrounded by a fence of barrel staves and barbed wire. Between the ruinous notice-board of some pre-war building enterprise and the gaunt verandah of a convalescent home, on which the motionless blue forms of two despondent wounded men in deck chairs were visible, 18came the sea view which justified the name of the house; beyond a wide waste of mud, over which quivered the heat-tormented air, the still anger of the heavens lowered down to meet in a line of hard conspiracy, the steely criminality of the remote deserted sea.

The man in the chair flapped his hand and spoke. “You accursed creature,” he said. “Why did God make flies?”

After a long interval he sighed deeply and repeated: “Why?”

He made a fitful effort to assume a more comfortable position, and relapsed at last into his former attitude of brooding despondency.

When presently his landlady came in to lay the table for lunch, an almost imperceptible wincing alone betrayed his sense of the threatening swish and emphasis of her movements. She was manifestly heated by cooking, and a smell of burnt potatoes had drifted in with her appearance. She was a meagre little woman with a resentful manner, glasses pinched her sharp red nose, and as she spread out the grey-white diaper and rapped down the knives and forks in their places she glanced at him darkly as if his inattention aggrieved her. Twice she was moved to speak and did not do so, but at length she could endure his indifference no 19longer. “Still feeling ill I suppose, Mr. ’Uss?” she said, in the manner of one who knows only too well what the answer will be.

He started at the sound of her voice, and gave her his attention as if with an effort. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Croome?”

The landlady repeated with acerbity, “I arst if you was still feeling ill, Mr. ’Uss.”

He did not look at her when he replied, but glanced towards her out of the corner of his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am. I am afraid I am ill.” She made a noise of unfriendly confirmation that brought his face round to her. “But mind you, Mrs. Croome, I don’t want Mrs. Huss worried about it. She has enough to trouble her just now. Quite enough.”

“Misfortunes don’t ever come singly,” said Mrs. Croome with quiet satisfaction, leaning across the table to brush some spilt salt from off the cloth to the floor. She was not going to make any rash promises about Mrs. Huss.

“We ’ave to bear up with what is put upon us,” said Mrs. Croome. “We ’ave to find strength where strength is to be found.”

She stood up and regarded him with pensive malignity. “Very likely all you want is a tonic of some sort. Very likely you’ve just let yourself go. I shouldn’t be surprised.”

20The sick man gave no welcome to this suggestion.

“If you was to go round to the young doctor at the corner—Barrack isnameis—very likely he’d put you right. Everybody says he’s very clever. Not that me and Croome put much faith in doctors. Nor need to. But you’re in a different position.”

The man in the chair had been to see the young doctor at the corner twice already, but he did not want to discuss that interview with Mrs. Croome just then. “I must think about it,” he said evasively.

“After all it isn’t fair to yourself, it isn’t fair to others, to sicken for—it might be anythink—without proper advice. Sitting there and doing nothing. Especially in lodgings at this time of year. It isn’t, well—not what I call considerate.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Huss weakly.

“There’s homes and hospitals properly equipped.”

The sick man nodded his head appreciatively.

“If things are nipped in the bud they’re nipped in the bud, otherwise they grow and make trouble.”

It was exactly what her hearer was thinking.

Mrs. Croome ducked to the cellarette of a 21gaunt sideboard and rapped out a whisky bottle, a bottle of lime-juice, and a soda-water syphon upon the table. She surveyed her handiwork with a critical eye. “Cruet,” she whispered, and vanished from the room, leaving the door, after a tormenting phase of creaking, to slam by its own weight behind her....

The invalid raised his hand to his forehead and found it wet with perspiration. His hand was trembling violently. “My God!” he whispered.

22§ 2

This man’s name was Job Huss. His father had been called Job before him, and so far as the family tradition extended the eldest son had always been called Job. Four weeks ago he would have been esteemed by most people a conspicuously successful and enviable man, and then had come a swift rush of disaster.

He had been the headmaster of the great modern public school at Woldingstanton in Norfolk, a revived school under the Papermakers’ Guild of the City of London; he had given himself without stint to its establishment and he had made a great name in the world for it and for himself. He had been the first English schoolmaster to liberate the modern side from the entanglement of its lower forms with the classical masters; it was the only school in England where Spanish and Russian were honestly taught; his science laboratories were the best school laboratories in Great Britain and perhaps in the world, and his new methods in the teaching of history and politics brought a steady 23stream of foreign inquirers to Woldingstanton. The hand of the adversary had touched him first just at the end of the summer term. There had been an epidemic of measles in which, through the inexplicable negligence of a trusted nurse, two boys had died. On the afternoon of the second of these deaths an assistant master was killed by an explosion in the chemical laboratory. Then on the very last night of the term came the School House fire, in which two of the younger boys were burnt to death.

Against any single one of these misfortunes Mr. Huss and his school might have maintained an unbroken front, but their quick succession had a very shattering effect. Every circumstance conspired to make these events vividly dreadful to Mr. Huss. He had been the first to come to the help of his chemistry master, who had fallen among some carboys of acid, and though still alive and struggling, was blinded, nearly faceless, and hopelessly mangled. The poor fellow died before he could be extricated. On the night of the fire Mr. Huss strained himself internally and bruised his foot very painfully, and he himself found and carried out the charred body of one of the two little victims from the room in which they had been trapped by the locking of a door during some “last 24day” ragging. It added an element of exasperating inconvenience to his greater distresses that all his papers and nearly all his personal possessions were burnt.

On the morning after the fire Mr. Huss’s solicitor committed suicide. He was an old friend to whom Mr. Huss had entrusted the complete control of the savings that were to secure him and Mrs. Huss a dignified old age. The lawyer was a man of strong political feelings and liberal views, and he had bought roubles to his utmost for Mr. Huss as for himself, in order to demonstrate his confidence in the Russian revolution.

All these things had a quite sufficiently disorganizing effect upon Mr. Huss; upon his wife the impression they made was altogether disastrous. She was a worthy but emotional lady, effusive rather than steadfast. Like the wives of most schoolmasters, she had been habitually preoccupied with matters of domestic management for many years, and her first reaction was in the direction of a bitter economy, mingled with a display of contempt she had never manifested hitherto for her husband’s practical ability. Far better would it have been for Mr. Huss if she had broken down altogether; she insisted upon directing everything, and doing 25so with a sort of pitiful vehemence that brooked no contradiction. It was impossible to stay at Woldingstanton through the vacation, in sight of the tragic and blackened ruins of School House, and so she decided upon Sundering-on-Sea because of its nearness and its pre-war reputation for cheapness. There, she announced, her husband must “pull himself together and pick up,” and then return to the rebuilding of School House and the rehabilitation of the school. Many formalities had to be gone through before the building could be put in hand, for in those days Britain was at the extremity of her war effort, and labour and material were unobtainable without special permits and great exertion. Sundering-on-Sea was as convenient a place as anywhere from which to write letters, but his idea of going to London to see influential people was resisted by Mrs. Huss on the score of the expense, and overcome when he persisted in it by a storm of tears.

On her arrival at Sundering Mrs. Huss put up at the Railway Hotel for the night, and spent the next morning in a stern visitation of possible lodgings. Something in the unassuming outlook of Sea View attracted her, and after a long dispute she was able to beat down Mrs. Croome’s demand from five to four and a half 26guineas a week. That afternoon some importunate applicant in an extremity of homelessness—for there had been a sudden rush of visitors to Sundering—offered six guineas. Mrs. Croome tried to call off her first bargain, but Mrs. Huss was obdurate, and thereafter all the intercourse of landlady and her lodgers went to the unspoken refrain of “I get four and a half guineas and I ought to get six.” To recoup herself Mrs. Croome attempted to make extra charges for the use of the bathroom, for cooking after five o’clock, for cleaning Mr. Huss’s brown boots with specially bought brown cream instead of blacking, and for the ink used by him in his very voluminous correspondence; upon all of which points there was much argument and bitterness.

But a heavier blow than any they had hitherto experienced was now to fall upon Mr. and Mrs. Huss. Job in the ancient story had seven sons and three daughters, and they were all swept away. This Job was to suffer a sharper thrust; he had but one dear only son, a boy of great promise, who had gone into the Royal Flying Corps. News came that he had been shot down over the German lines.

Unhappily there had been a conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Huss about this boy. Huss had 27been proud that the youngster should choose the heroic service; Mrs. Huss had done her utmost to prevent his joining it. The poor lady was now ruthless in her anguish. She railed upon him as the murderer of their child. She hoped he was pleased with his handiwork. He could count one more name on his list; he could add it to the roll of honour in the chapel “with the others.” Her baby boy! This said, she went wailing from the room.

The wretched man sat confounded. That “with the others” cut him to the heart. For the school chapel had a list of V.C.’s, D.C.M.’s and the like, second to none, and it had indeed been a pride to him.

For some days his soul was stunned. He was utterly exhausted and lethargic. He could hardly attend to the most necessary letters. From dignity, hope, and a great sheaf of activities, his life had shrunken abruptly to the compass of this dingy lodging, pervaded by the squabbling of two irrational women; his work in the world was in ruins; he had no strength left in him to struggle against fate. And a vague internal pain crept slowly into his consciousness.

His wife, insane now and cruel with sorrow, tried to put a great quarrel upon him about 28wearing mourning for their son. He had always disliked and spoken against these pomps of death, but she insisted that whatever callousness he might display she at least must wear black. He might, she said, rest assured that she would spend no more money than the barest decency required; she would buy the cheapest material, and make it up in her bedroom. But black she must have. This resolution led straight to a conflict with Mrs. Croome, who objected to her best bedroom being littered with bits of black stuff, and cancelled the loan of her sewing machine. The mourning should be made, Mrs. Huss insisted, though she had to sew every stitch of it by hand. And the poor distraught lady in her silly parsimony made still deeper trouble for herself by cutting her material in every direction half an inch or more short of the paper pattern. She came almost to a physical tussle with Mrs. Croome because of the state of the carpet and counterpane, and Mrs. Croome did her utmost to drag Mr. Huss into an altercation upon the matter with her husband.

“Croome don’t interfere much, but some things he or nobody ain’t going to stand, Mr. ’Uss.”

For some days in this battlefield of insatiable 29grief and petty cruelty, and with a dull pain steadily boring its way to recognition, Mr. Huss forced himself to carry on in a fashion the complex of business necessitated by the school disaster. Then in the night came a dream, as dreams sometimes will, to enlighten him upon his bodily condition. Projecting from his side he saw a hard, white body that sent round, wormlike tentacles into every corner of his being. A number of doctors were struggling to tear this thing away from him. At every effort the pain increased.

He awoke, but the pain throbbed on.

He lay quite still. Upon the heavy darkness he saw the word “Cancer,” bright red and glowing—as pain glows....

He argued in the face of invincible conviction. He kept the mood conditional. “If it be so,” he said, though he knew that the thing was so. What should he do? There would have to be operations, great expenses, enfeeblement....

Whom could he ask for advice? Who would help him?...

Suppose in the morning he were to take a bathing ticket as if he meant to bathe, and struggle out beyond the mud-flats. He could behave as though cramp had taken him suddenly....

30Five minutes of suffocation he would have to force himself through, and then peace—endless peace!

“No,” he said, with a sudden gust of courage. “I will fight it out to the end.”

But his mind was too dull to form plans and physically he was afraid. He would have to find a doctor somehow, and even that little task appalled him.

Then he would have to tell Mrs. Huss....

For a time he lay quite still as if he listened to the alternative swell and diminuendo of his pain.

“Oh! if I had someone to help me!” he whispered, and was overcome by the lonely misery of his position. “If I had someone!”

For years he had never wept, but now tears were wrung from him. He rolled over and buried his face in the pillow and tried to wriggle his body away from that steady gnawing; he fretted as a child might do.

The night about him was as it were a great watching presence that would not help nor answer.

31§ 3

Behind the brass plate at the corner which said “Dr. Elihu Barrack” Mr. Huss found a hard, competent young man, who had returned from the war to his practice at Sundering after losing a leg. The mechanical substitute seemed to have taken to him very kindly. He appeared to be both modest and resourceful; his unfavourable diagnosis was all the more convincing because it was tentative and conditional. He knew the very specialist for the case; no less a surgeon than Sir Alpheus Mengo came, it happened, quite frequently to play golf on the Sundering links. It would be easy to arrange for him to examine Mr. Huss in Dr. Barrack’s little consulting room, and if an operation had to be performed it could be managed with a minimum of expense in Mr. Huss’s own lodgings without any extra charge for mileage and the like.

“Of course,” said Mr. Huss, “of course,” with a clear vision of Mrs. Croome confronted with the proposal.

32Sir Alpheus Mengo came down the next Saturday, and made a clandestine examination. He decided to operate the following week-end. Mr. Huss was left at his own request to break the news to his wife and to make the necessary arrangements for this use of Mrs. Croome’s rooms. But it was two days before he could bring himself to broach the matter.

He sat now listening to the sounds of his wife moving about in the bedroom overhead, and to the muffled crashes that intimated the climax of Mrs. Croome’s preparation of the midday meal. He heard her calling upstairs to know whether Mrs. Huss was ready for her to serve up. He was seized with panic as a schoolboy might be who had not prepared his lesson. He tried hastily to frame some introductory phrases, but nothing would come into his mind save terms of disgust and lamentation. The sullen heat of the day mingled in one impression with his pain. He was nauseated by the smell of cooking. He felt it would be impossible to sit up at table and pretend to eat the meal of burnt bacon and potatoes that was all too evidently coming.

It came. Its progress along the passage was announced by a clatter of dishes. The door was opened by a kick. Mrs. Croome put the feast upon the table with something between defence 33and defiance in her manner. “What else,” she seemed to intimate, “could one expect for four and a half guineas a week in the very height of the season? From a woman who could have got six!”

“Your dinner’s there,” Mrs. Croome called upstairs to Mrs. Huss in tones of studied negligence, and then retired to her own affairs in the kitchen, slamming the door behind her.

The room quivered down to silence, and then Mr. Huss could hear the footsteps of his wife crossing the bedroom and descending the staircase.

Mrs. Huss was a dark, graceful, and rather untidy lady of seven and forty, with the bridling bearing of one who habitually repels implicit accusations. She lifted the lid of the vegetable dish. “I thought I smelt burning,” she said. “The woman is impossible.”

She stood by her chair, regarding her husband and waiting.

He rose reluctantly, and transferred himself to a seat at table.

It had always been her custom to carve. She now prepared to serve him. “No,” he said, full of loathing. “I can’t eat. I can’t.”

She put down the tablespoon and fork she had just raised, and regarded him with eyes of dark disapproval.

34“It’s all we can get,” she said.

He shook his head. “It isn’t that.”

“I don’t know what you expect me to get for you here,” she complained. “The tradesmen don’t know us—and don’t care.”

“It isn’t that. I’m ill.”

“It’s the heat. We are all ill. Everyone. In such weather as this. It’s no excuse for not making an effort, situated as we are.”

“I mean I am really ill. I am in pain.”

She looked at him as one might look at an unreasonable child. He was constrained to more definite statement.

“I suppose I must tell you sooner or later. I’ve had to see a doctor.”

“Without consulting me!”

“I thought if it turned out to be fancy I needn’t bother you.”

“But how did you find a doctor?”

“There’s a fellow at the corner. Oh! it’s no good making a long story of it. I have cancer.... Nothing will do but an operation.” Self-pity wrung him. He controlled a violent desire to cry. “I am too ill to eat. I ought to be lying down.”

She flopped back in her chair and stared at him as one stares at some hideous monstrosity. “Oh!” she said. “To have cancer now! In these lodgings!”

35“I can’t help it,” he said in accents that were almost a whine. “I didn’t choose the time.”

“Cancer!” she cried reproachfully. “The horror of it!”

He looked at her for a moment with hate in his heart. He saw under her knitted brows dark and hostile eyes that had once sparkled with affection, he saw a loose mouth with downturned corners that had been proud and pretty, and this mask of dislike was projecting forward upon a neck he had used to call her head-stalk, so like had it seemed to the stem of some pretty flower. She had had lovely shoulders and an impudent humour; and now the skin upon her neck and shoulders had a little loosened, and she was no longer impudent but harsh. Her brows were moist with heat, and her hair more than usually astray. But these things did not increase, they mitigated his antagonism. They did not repel him as defects; they hurt him as wounds received in a common misfortune. Always he had petted and spared and rejoiced in her vanity and weakness, and now as he realized the full extent of her selfish abandonment a protective pity arose in his heart that overcame his physical pain. It was terrible to see how completely her delicacy and tenderness of mind had been broken down. She had neither 36the strength nor the courage left even for an unselfish thought. And he could not help her; whatever power he had possessed over her mind had gone long ago. His magic had departed.

Latterly he had been thinking very much of her prospects if he were to die. In some ways his death might be a good thing for her. He had an endowment assurance running that would bring in about seven thousand pounds immediately at his death, but which would otherwise involve heavy annual payments for some years. So far, to die would be clear gain. But who would invest this money for her and look after her interests? She was, he knew, very silly about property; suspicious of people she knew intimately, and greedy and credulous with strangers. He had helped to make her incompetent, and he owed it to her to live and protect her if he could. And behind that intimate and immediate reason for living he had a strong sense of work in the world yet to be done by him, and a task in education still incomplete.

He spoke with his chin in his hand and his eyes staring at the dark and distant sea. “An operation,” he said, “might cure me.”

Her thoughts, it became apparent, had been travelling through some broken and unbeautiful 37country roughly parallel with the course of his own. “But need there be an operation?” she thought aloud. “Are they ever any good?”

“I could die,” he admitted bitterly, and repented as he spoke.

There had been times, he remembered, when she had said and done sweet and gallant things, poor soul! poor broken companion! And now she had fallen into a darkness far greater than his. He had feared that he had hurt her, and then when he saw that she was not hurt, and that she scrutinized his face eagerly as if she weighed the sincerity of his words, his sense of utter loneliness was completed.

Over his mean drama of pain and debasement in its close atmosphere buzzing with flies, it was as if some gigantic and remorseless being watched him as a man of science might hover over some experiment, and marked his life and all his world. “You are alone,” this brooding witness counselled, “you are utterly alone. Curse God and die.”

It seemed a long time before Mr. Huss answered this imagined voice, and when he answered it he spoke as if he addressed his wife alone.

“No,” he said with a sudden decisiveness. “No. I will face that operation.... We are 38ill and our hearts are faint. Neither for you, dear, nor for me must our story finish in this fashion. No. I shall go on to the end.”

“And have your operation here?”

“In this house. It is by far the most convenient place, as things are.”

“You may die here!”

“Well, I shall die fighting.”

“Leaving me here with Mrs. Croome.”

His temper broke under her reply. “Leaving you here with Mrs. Croome,” he said harshly.

He got up. “I can eat nothing,” he repeated, and dropped back sullenly into the horsehair armchair.

There was a long silence, and then he heard the little, almost mouselike, movements of his wife as she began her meal. For a while he had forgotten the dull ache within him, but now, glowing and fading and glowing, it made its way back into his consciousness. He was helpless and perplexed; he had not meant to quarrel. He had hurt this poor thing who had been his love and companion; he had bullied her. His clogged brain could think of nothing to set matters right. He stared with dull eyes at a world utterly hateful to him.

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