to extinction, he drove on, ruminating solemnly. To his mind the
incident remained somewhat obscure. But his intellect, though it
had lost its pristine vivacity in the benumbing years of sedentary
exposure to the weather, lacked not independence or sanity.
Gravely he dismissed the hypothesis of Stevie being a drunken young
nipper.
Inside the cab the spell of silence, in which the two women had
endured shoulder to shoulder the jolting, rattling, and jingling of
the journey, had been broken by Stevie’s outbreak. Winnie raised
her voice.
“You’ve done what you wanted, mother. You’ll have only yourself to
thank for it if you aren’t happy afterwards. And I don’t think
you’ll be. That I don’t. Weren’t you comfortable enough in the
house? Whatever people’ll think of us – you throwing yourself like
this on a Charity?”
“My dear,” screamed the old woman earnestly above the noise,
“you’ve been the best of daughters to me. As to Mr Verloc – there
– ”
Words failing her on the subject of Mr Verloc’s excellence, she
turned her old tearful eyes to the roof of the cab. Then she
averted her head on the pretence of looking out of the window, as
if to judge of their progress. It was insignificant, and went on
close to the curbstone. Night, the early dirty night, the
sinister, noisy, hopeless and rowdy night of South London, had
overtaken her on her last cab drive. In the gas-light of the low-
fronted shops her big cheeks glowed with an orange hue under a
black and mauve bonnet.
Mrs Verloc’s mother’s complexion had become yellow by the effect of
age and from a natural predisposition to biliousness, favoured by
the trials of a difficult and worried existence, first as wife,
then as widow. It was a complexion, that under the influence of a
blush would take on an orange tint. And this woman, modest indeed
but hardened in the fires of adversity, of an age, moreover, when
blushes are not expected, had positively blushed before her
daughter. In the privacy of a four-wheeler, on her way to a
charity cottage (one of a row) which by the exiguity of its
dimensions and the simplicity of its accommodation, might well have
been devised in kindness as a place of training for the still more
straitened circumstances of the grave, she was forced to hid from
her own child a blush of remorse and shame.
Whatever people will think? She knew very well what they did
think, the people Winnie had in her mind – the old friends of her
husband, and others too, whose interest she had solicited with such
flattering success. She had not known before what a good beggar
she could be. But she guessed very well what inference was drawn
from her application. On account of that shrinking delicacy, which
exists side by side with aggressive brutality in masculine nature,
the inquiries into her circumstances had not been pushed very far.
She had checked them by a visible compression of the lips and some
display of an emotion determined to be eloquently silent. And the
men would become suddenly incurious, after the manner of their
kind. She congratulated herself more than once on having nothing
to do with women, who being naturally more callous and avid of
details, would have been anxious to be exactly informed by what
sort of unkind conduct her daughter and son-in-law had driven her
to that sad extremity. It was only before the Secretary of the
great brewer M. P. and Chairman of the Charity, who, acting for his
principal, felt bound to be conscientiously inquisitive as to the
real circumstances of the applicant, that she had burst into tears
outright and aloud, as a cornered woman will weep. The thin and
polite gentleman, after contemplating her with an air of being
“struck all of a heap,” abandoned his position under the cover of
soothing remarks. She must not distress herself. The deed of the
Charity did not absolutely specify “childless widows.” In fact, it
did not by any means disqualify her. But the discretion of the
Committee must be an informed discretion. One could understand
very well her unwillingness to be a burden, etc. etc. Thereupon,