Nocturne. Frank Swinnerton
Pa. No murders. …”
“Ah, they don’t have the murders they used to have,” grumbled the old man.
“That’s the police, Pa.” Jenny wanted to reassure him.
“I don’t know how it is,” he trembled, stiffening his body and rising from the chair.
“Perhaps they hush ’em up!” That was a shock to him. He could not move until the notion had sunk into his head. “Or perhaps people are more careful. … Don’t get leaving themselves about like they used to.”
Pa Blanchard had no suggestion. Such perilous ideas, so frequently started by Jenny for his mystification, joggled together in his brain and made there the subject of a thousand ruminations. They tantalised Pa’s slowly revolving thoughts, and kept these moving through long hours of silence. Such notions preserved his interest in the world, and his senile belief in Magic, as nothing else could have done.
Together, their pace suited to his step, the two moved slowly to the door. It took a long time to make the short journey, though Jenny supported her father on the one side and he used a stick in his right hand. In the passage he waited while she blew out his candle; and then they went forward to the meal. At the approach Pa’s eyes opened wider, and luminously glowed.
“Is there dumplings?” he quivered, seeming to tremble with excitement.
“One for you, Pa!” cried Emmy from the kitchen. Pa gave a small chuckle of joy. His progress was accelerated. They reached the table, and Emmy took his right arm for the descent into a substantial chair. Upon Pa’s plate glistened a fair dumpling, a glorious mountain of paste amid the wreckage of meat and gravy. “And now, perhaps,” Emmy went on, smoothing back from her forehead a little streamer of hair, “you’ll close the door, Jenny. …”
It was closed with a bang that made Pa jump and Emmy look savagely up.
“Sorry!” cried Jenny. “How’s that dumpling, Pa?” She sat recklessly at the table.
v
To look at the three of them sitting there munching away was a sight not altogether pleasing. Pa’s veins stood out from his forehead, and the two girls devoted themselves to the food as if they needed it. There was none of the airy talk that goes on in the houses of the rich while maids or menservants come respectfully to right or left of the diners with decanters or dishes. Here the food was the thing, and there was no speech. Sometimes Pa’s eyes rolled, sometimes Emmy glanced up with unconscious malevolence at Jenny, sometimes Jenny almost winked at the lithograph portrait of Edward the Seventh (as Prince of Wales) which hung over the mantelpiece above the one-and-tenpenny-ha’penny clock that ticked away so busily there. Something had happened long ago to Edward the Seventh, and he had a stain across his Field Marshal’s uniform. Something had happened also to the clock, which lay upon its side, as if kicking in a death agony. Something had happened to almost everything in the kitchen. Even the plates on the dresser, and the cups and saucers that hung or stood upon the shelves, bore the noble scars of service. Every time Emmy turned her glance upon a damaged plate, as sharp as a stalactite, she had the thought: “Jenny’s doing.” Every time she looked at the convulsive clock Emmy said to herself: “That was Miss Jenny’s cleverness when she chucked the cosy at Alf.” And when Emmy said in this reflective silence of animosity the name “Alf” she drew a deep breath and looked straight up at Jenny with inscrutable eyes of pain.
vi
The stew being finished, Emmy collected the plates, and retired once again to the scullery. Now did Jenny show afresh that curiosity whose first flush had been so ill-satisfied by the meat course. When, however, Emmy reappeared with that most domestic of sweets, a bread pudding, Jenny’s face fell once more; for of all dishes she most abominated bread pudding. Under her breath she adversely commented.
“Oh lor!” she whispered. “Stew and b.p. What a life!”
Emmy, not hearing, but second sighted on such matters, shot a malevolent glance from her place. In an awful voice, intended to be a trifle arch, she addressed her father.
“Bready butter pudding, Pa?” she inquired. The old man whinnied with delight, and Emmy was appeased. She had one satisfied client, at any rate. She cut into the pudding with a knife, producing wedges with a dexterous hand.
“Hey ho!” observed Jenny to herself, tastelessly beginning the work of laborious demolition.
“Jenny thinks it’s common. She ought to have the job of getting the meals!” cried Emmy, bitterly, obliquely attacking her sister by talking at her. “Something to talk about then!” she sneered with chagrin, up in arms at a criticism.
“Well, the truth is,” drawled Jenny. … “If you want it … I don’t like bread pudding.” Somehow she had never said that before, in all the years; but it seemed to her that bread pudding was like ashes in the mouth. It was like duty, or funerals, or … stew.
“The stuff’s got to be finished up!” flared Emmy defiantly, with a sense of being adjudged inferior because she had dutifully habituated herself to the appreciation of bread pudding. “You might think of that! What else am I to do?”
“That’s just it, old girl. Just why I don’t like it. I just hate to feel I’m finishing it up. Same with stew. I know it’s been something else first. It’s not fresh. Same old thing, week in, week out. Finishing up the scraps!”
“Proud stomach!” A quick flush came into Emmy’s cheeks; and tears started to her eyes.
“Perhaps it is. Oh, but Em! Don’t you feel like that yourself. … Sometimes? O-o-h! …” She drawled the word wearily. “Oh for a bit more money! Then we could give stew to the cat’s-meat man and bread to old Thompson’s chickens. And then we could have nice things to eat. Nice birds and pastry … and trifle, and ices, and wine. … Not all this muck!”
“Muck!” cried Emmy, her lips seeming to thicken. “When I’m so hot. … And sick of it all! You go out; you do just exactly what you like. … And then you come home and. …” She began to gulp. “What about me?”
“Well, it’s just as bad for both of us!” Jenny did not think so really; but she said it. She thought Emmy had the bread and butter pudding nature, and that she did not greatly care what she ate as long as it was not too fattening. Jenny thought of Emmy as born for housework and cooking—of stew and bread puddings. For herself she had dreamed a nobler destiny, a destiny of romance, of delicious unknown things, romantic and indescribably exciting. She was to have the adventures, because she needed them. Emmy didn’t need them. It was all very well for Emmy to say “What about me!” It was no business of hers what happened to Emmy. They were different. Still, she repeated more confidently because there had been no immediate retort:
“Well, it’s just as bad for both of us! Just as bad!”
“ ‘Tisn’t! You’re out all day—doing what you like!”
“Oh!” Jenny’s eyes opened with theatrical wideness at such a perversion of the facts. “Doing what I like! The millinery!”
“You are! You don’t have to do all the scraping to make things go round, like I have to. No, you don’t! Here have I … been in this … place, slaving! Hour after hour! I wish you’d try and manage better. I bet you’d be thankful to finish up the scraps some way—any old way! I’d like to see you do what I do!”
Momentarily Jenny’s picture of Emmy’s nature (drawn accommodatingly by herself in order that her own might be differentiated and exalted by any comparison) was shattered. Emmy’s vehemence had thus the temporary effect of creating a fresh reality out of a common idealisation of circumstance. The legend would re-form later, perhaps, and would continue so to re-form as persuasion flowed back upon Jenny’s egotism, until it crystallised hard and became unchallengeable; but at any rate for this instant Jenny had had a glimmer of insight into that tamer discontent and rebelliousness that encroached like a canker