“I don’t like anything of the sort. But I suppose a man has to do that sort of thing. It’s nature’s way. And now you go off to your bed, Mr Tewler, and have a good sleep, and don’t you say a word about this to me to-morrow; not a word, I see no sense in talking over such things. I hoped I’d done with it for good. And remember when Janet’s here, walls have ears, I’ve got to be careful. I’d get rid of her if I dared, but that might set her suspecting. Good night, Mr Tewler.”
“Just a kiss,” said her grateful lover.
She turned her cheek to him.
And when Edward Albert was safely in his room, Mrs Butter went to Master Henry Tewler and took him in her arms and hugged him and kissed him and sat still, and presently wept.
“What else was there to do, you poor little mite?” she whispered. “It had to be.”
XXII. Morningside Prospect
Edward Albert married Mrs Butter a month after the decree was made absolute. They were married in a Registry Office and Pip and Millie were witnesses. She would not be married in church. “That wouldn’t be right,” she said. “Not for us two. I’ve been married in church before thank you.”
And with this the frank record of our sample’s sex life comes to an end. Edward Albert Tewler had grown up by this time and arrived at man’s estate, and henceforth there was no more essential change for him in these matters. Many little things happened, they continue to happen to this day, in his sexual reactions, but they marked nothing novel in the rhythms of his being. His fundamental curiosities were allayed, and if he peeped now he peeped for satisfaction and not for knowledge. He had his flirtatious and knowing moments, he would smirk at anything attractively feminine, but henceforth his passions were on the whole satisfactorily assuaged. He allowed himself to forget many phases in his development that we have been able to recall. He hated the memory of Evangeline, but with a diminishing bitterness. She was a bad woman and he had got rid of her. His bitterer humiliations passed out of his memory except now and then in a dream. He reshaped his private autobiography until it seemed almost that Evangeline had divorced him. He had seen through her and got rid of her because he had fallen in love with a better woman.
By imperceptible degrees the simpler, stronger mind of the new Mrs Tewler came to dominate the general form of his life. It was she who broached the idea of going right out of London to live in the country. It was all very well, she said, to live in London if you were in society or business or anything like that, but why should they? They could live in some pleasant place, near the sea for instance, near some town but not in it, at half the cost. If they got a place near a golf links he could learn to play golf. There wasn’t much sense in hitting about an expensive little ball from place to place until you lost it, and then beginning all over again day after day, but men seemed to find something in it and some women even went so far in humouring them as to play the game with them, but she couldn’t imagine herself going as far as that. But it helped a man to get to know people and it took him out of himself, and Mrs Tewler No. 2 was very clear on the necessity of taking Edward Albert out of himself.
He might get a nice little car and learn to drive it. “Why not? Then he ought to look into his affairs more than he had been doing. He would be able to restore his overstrained resources by saving and finding suitable mortgages. He might get to friendly terms with his bank manager and find local opportunities. If they were to get near a big seaside town they would be able to run in and see cinemas and things, and there would be schools presently for Henry. And doctors.
All these possibilities floated into his mind from the second Mrs Tewler’s occasional remarks, and most of them he made his own, and expanded and reproduced for her always respectful approval. They sought a home according to her specifications and they found one near the golf links at Casing, twelve miles and a half from the borough boundary of Brighthampton on Sea. It stood in a row of kindred little villas, Morningside Prospect, fundamentally alike but varied by differences in their bow windows, gothic stone work, green slates or tiles, red brick or white roughcast, so that each had a certain individuality of its own.
Individuality, mitigated uniformity, was the ruling idea of the Casing Prospect Estate Company. Its leading director, seeking something a little different from the Avenues, Terraces, Roads, Gardens and Places that dominate building estate nomenclature, came one day on some mention of the Nevsky Prospekt and seized upon it with the decision of genius. Morningside Prospect faced the sunrise and its back gardens glowed in the afternoon. Sundown Prospect was back to back with it, separated from it by a great profusion of tamarisk and some wind-twisted pines. There was a Channel Prospect with a better view of the sea but rather windy and an Empire Prospect with no particular outlook; there was Brighthampton Prospect and St Andrews Prospect looking out on the links.
All the houses were as alike as pigs in a litter, but by the most sedulous exertions any exact repetition had been avoided. In only one instance had that directors imagination gone a little too far; he had found a stock of pseudo-Javanese figures, plinths and gateways, intended for a still-born Oriental Café” in Brighthampton which had failed to produce its capital; the stuff was offered at a knock-out price and he bought it up. Opportunity rather over-stimulated his imagination. He created Celestial Prospect, a name which many serious people thought either ominous or blasphemous, and with the idea of giving it a still more oriental flavour he turned all the little houses aslant, so that they were in echelon instead of line abreast. Celestial Prospect never let so well as its brothers. From the first it seemed to attract the wrong sort of people, people who brought banjos with them, women who wore trousers, people who lit up Chinese lanterns at night and had moonlight singsongs, flitters, tenants who kept the company’s agents alert at the end of every quarter. One man painted his Javanese plinths in a most objectionable manner. Happily Celestial was a good half mile away from Morningside, and for the Tewlers, there was no need to go that way; it was a mere intermittent nocturnal melodious disrespect not nearly so troublesome as the corncrakes beyond the links.
There was much in common among the tenants of Morningside Prospect. They were all living very easily. There were two types of them. There were two young couples who had come for the sun and air, one because the husband was tuberculous and one because the wife was so afflicted. They had “moans”; they never revealed what they were, and one of the husbands designed tessellated pavements in a geometrical manner that the world had so far failed to appreciate. The idea of a deep-seated and indefinite illness appealed to Edward Albert and as soon as he heard of his possible neighbours he told the agent that his health, too, wasn’t by any means as good as he liked. He had to take things easy for a time anyhow. “It’s something the doctor can’t quite make out,” he said. “But London’s no place for me.
“I get it there.” And he indicated the upper buttons of his waistcoat. “You can’t be too careful.”
Apart from these sun and air cases the tenants were quiet men of a certain maturity. They were “comfortably off.” Younger wives or unmarried sisters did for them, and there was a niece or so and a few children. Both types were agreed in eschewing strenuousness from all their living and doing, and everybody in the Prospect, except one man with a cork leg and the tessellationist, played golf.
The Prospect Club had only an eight hole course, but there were the Casing links halfway to Brighthampton and further along, close to the sea, the Brighthampton Borough links. So that the countryside was always dotted with little intent groups of baggy knickerbockered men and sympathetically attired women marching gravely with their instruments and attendants in the track of an elusive ball, occasionally overtaking it and pausing to do further execution upon it and then on again. Day after day and all round the earth the stern unsmiling golfers marched and smote and marched again, without haste or laughter. The game had been endemic in the east of Scotland for some centuries and had been supposed peculiar to Scotchmen. Then suddenly it had swept like a pestilence about the earth. No race, was found to be immune. It is calculated that the number of miles walked every day in the days of the Golf Age,.... But statistics will impair the severity of our narrative!