“Such men understand women.”
“Ah, they understand each other.”
“It’s true we have the eternal disadvantage.”
“So ingeniously disguised.”
“I am sure doctor, you will do very well indeed here.
“So you really persuade me that such an experiment would not end in calamity?”
“Calamity — but not in that particular calamity you might expect.”
“Yet — criminals?”
“With what you have to offer him, who would ever dream of crime? And there is one rule in heredity, dear lady, that is invariable. The impulse of the child is towards the negation of the parent. You cannot tell me you have never noticed this? — — In yourself — ?”
“We never take for granted the things we prove. — — Yes, I am, I admit it, only charitable because I wished from the first to supersede my mother’s frivolity, my father’s gree — ”
The doctor reprovingly,
“He amassed a very great fortune, Mrs. Bates.”
“Why yes, one should only assess people at what they are worth.”
“Which has made the experiment you are about to make, possible for you.”
“Criminals.” She harped plaintively,
“He might, you know, inherit the desire — ”
“ ‘The desire’ is money. With that and an exaggeration of bad manners. The solution of the criminal may occur to you. There is no ‘criminology.’ ”
“But when ‘they’ have small heads and — — violate?”
“Ah, that’s a different thing — pathology.”
“Of course,” said Mrs. Bates. “These parents have not killed—”
“—and murder is merely bad temper, given a cranium of normal proportions.”
“Doctor you are a terrible man. What you must think of humanity! And yet you cure us.”
“There you have it. That is indeed, in many cases, criminal. See, we are not so terrible after all, we criminals. Good night— And don’t take things so scrupulously. There is only one duty, and it has never been done — ”
“You have made me feel so much brighter, doctor. It’s stopped raining? Good night!”
+
Mrs. Bates, reacting from the doctor’s philosophy, did consult a criminologist.
He was old, and the last bright patch had faded from his expectations.
He showed her charts. He shook his head.
He hoped for less than nothing of thieves’ progeny.
The exasperation, that being a plain woman she always felt when choosing a hat, kindled her.
She had chanced on one more beautiful thing she coveted. It seemed as usual unsuitable. Again she renounced the idea of adoption.
Only, the next time she visited the mission house, Hyde was singing in the choir. It was an unfair ordeal for her: they had put him in a surplice.
The sight was too reassuring.
She gave orders for the records to be searched for his forbears.
A sexton was discovered on the distaff side, and this she felt justified her in taking the risk.
The parson regretted having been perhaps over persuasive, for Hyde Park Hinderman passed altogether into the hands of Mrs. Bates, to be known henceforth as Hyde Bates.
+
When the ego detaches itself from its surroundings, it leaves those surroundings littered about, waiting to regain significance from a revaluation.
So much disorderly building material, so much unfashionable stuff from which to select something fitting for the construction of the visible edifice of a personality, from which to shape the circumstantial garments of the spirit.
To the sensibility of Jacky Sider feeling of the stuff of his surroundings, it asserted itself to a grimly gloomy drop-curtain to the theatre of his future. Which it was urgent that he should lift.
It was jagged and faded, disintegrated and cubistic, it hung over him, pressed upon him, knocked against him.
His entourage of the ragman’s shop fluttered dustily across his mind like a shredded fabric.
Rusted, twisted metals, battered rectangular inanimate — tables and chairs— The violated surface of the sawed-up corpses of trees, the denuded lewdness of pawned bed sheets: his father and mother counted them, fingered them, stacked them up with a sullen kind of joy. It appeared as if for them, these things were permits for the entrance to a shrine.
In the little back room where the clock ticked, there was a big bed and a candlestick of a youth and maiden under a big white china convolvulus dashed with gilt. In the back room there lingered in the day-time a certain volcanic peace.
Always after the day’s haggling, the man and woman went to bed as early as they could. Yet this was the only hour their movements did not drag. After the meal of sausage and lettuce, they drew in the trestles which lurched under their soiled treasures outside the shop, with a febrile despatch.
They became like people about to go to the theatre.
All day long Jack saw them as animals who had learned to count. Sometimes when his mother said softly
“C’mon Jim, I’ve seen to the shutters,” he saw them as angels, in the evening, on their way back to Heaven.
Jack “knew” what there is to be known, yet in the light of actual life, he did not know.
He was not bewildered by the strange convulsion of his breath when certain women passed him in the street.
But then they shone.
Their powder and their rouge seemed only the scintillating pulveresence in the radius of an arc-light.
They could not be covered. Their clothes were only added to them for the same purpose as the dog’s feathers in the unsolvable riddle.
He knew of desire, and its promise of appeasement. The flesh of these women was of iridescent substance.
The man and the woman who had — most negligible of all the actualities, to the child — begotten him, were grey of hue and scrubby.
He could conceive of no magic that might spread a light on his mother’s dusty curls.
They were there poor beasts, obviously, to feed him, that must be all.
And yet without realising, he knew their poverty to be blessed.
The neighbours sold more sightly goods, their shops were bright with paint.
But there were nowhere, among them, such concerted eyes, such irkless silences between a husband and wife, as in the rag-shop.
The rickety sort of balcony-attic in which Jack slept seemed to him the platform of a visionary railway station at which the express of the future was always overdue. He did not, like his parents to their room, retire to it; he was always starting out from it after blank uncalculated interims of sleep, sparsely sequined with dreams of what his ego had alone selected as compatible for his building stuff, from among the provisions of the rag shop: coins.
Dreams of coins.
Except for this, “home” merely tripped him into black pools of unconsciousness punctuating his hurry of life.
He must make up for his parents’ lost time.
+
“Now you be off to school!”
“Aw rot! That man stuck up in the desk there, ’es ’arf a corpse a’ready. If I’m to look at ’im any longer, I’ll grow like ’im. ’Es underpaid, that’s wot ’e is.”
“ ’Es doin’ ’is duty.”
“Aw, paw, ’e ain’t doin ’is duty. ’Es ’avin’ me on. Wot th’great ’ell d’yer think I can learn from a man wots underpaid? Don’t it prove ’e knows nothing? Would ’e stand for it if ’e ’ad any wits?”
“Well me boy, we can’t hoil be millionhairs.”
“Aw can’t we? An’ oo sez we can’t I’d like ter know? Not nobody didn’t. Oo is it ’as ’angs the little labels on the babies wot is allowed? Jus’ so’s nobody won’t interfere with ’em, I serpose.
“Not ’arf! Hinglands’ a free country hain’t it? Or hain’t it?”