第82章

The cabby turned at him his enormous and inflamed countenance truculently.

`Don't you go for trying this silly game again, young fellow.'

After delivering himself thus in a stern whisper, strained almost 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 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 kerbstone.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 hide 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, to his profound disappointment, Mrs Verloc's mother wept some more with an augmented vehemence.

The tears of that large female in a dark, dusty wig, and ancient silk dress festooned with dingy white cotton lace, were the tears of genuine distress.She had wept because she was heroic and unscrupulous and full of love for both her children.Girls frequently get sacrificed to the welfare of the boys.In this case she was sacrificing Winnie.By the suppression of truth she was slandering her.Of course, Winnie was independent, and need not care for the opinion of people that she would never see and who would never see her; whereas poor Stevie had nothing in the world he could call his own except his mother's heroism and unscrupulousness.