________________________________________________
_ The holiday in the Isle of Man was of course ruined for her. She
could scarcely walk because of the weight of a lump of lead that
she carried in her bosom. On the brightest days the lump of lead
was always there. Besides, she was so obese. In ordinary
circumstances they might have stayed beyond the month. An
indentured pupil is not strapped to the wheel like a common
apprentice. Moreover, the indentures were to be cancelled. But
Constance did not care to stay. She had to prepare for his
departure to London. She had to lay the faggots for her own
martyrdom.
In this business of preparation she showed as much silliness, she
betrayed as perfect a lack of perspective, as the most superior
son could desire for a topic of affectionate irony. Her
preoccupation with petty things of no importance whatever was
worthy of the finest traditions of fond motherhood. However,
Cyril's careless satire had no effect on her, save that once she
got angry, thereby startling him; he quite correctly and sagely
laid this unprecedented outburst to the account of her wrought
nerves, and forgave it. Happily for the smoothness of Cyril's
translation to London, young Peel-Swynnerton was acquainted with
the capital, had a brother in Chelsea, knew of reputable lodgings,
was, indeed, an encyclopaedia of the town, and would himself spend
a portion of the autumn there. Otherwise, the preliminaries which
his mother would have insisted on by means of tears and hysteria
might have proved fatiguing to Cyril.
The day came when on that day week Cyril would be gone. Constance
steadily fabricated cheerfulness against the prospect. She said:
"Suppose I come with you?"
He smiled in toleration of this joke as being a passable quality
of joke. And then she smiled in the same sense, hastening to agree
with him that as a joke it was not a bad joke.
In the last week he was very loyal to his tailor. Many a young man
would have commanded new clothes after, not before, his arrival in
London. But Cyril had faith in his creator.
On the day of departure the household, the very house itself, was
in a state of excitation. He was to leave early. He would not
listen to the project of her accompanying him as far as Knype,
where the Loop Line joined the main. She might go to Bursley
Station and no further. When she rebelled he disclosed the merest
hint of his sullen-churlish side, and she at once yielded. During
breakfast she did not cry, but the aspect of her face made him
protest.
"Now, look here, mater! Just try to remember that I shall be back
for Christmas. It's barely three months." And he lit a cigarette.
She made no reply.
Amy lugged a Gladstone bag down the crooked stairs. A trunk was
already close to the door; it had wrinkled the carpet and deranged
the mat.
"You didn't forget to put the hair-brush in, did you, Amy?" he
asked.
"N--no, Mr. Cyril," she blubbered.
"Amy!" Constance sharply corrected her, as Cyril ran upstairs, "I
wonder you can't control yourself better than that."
Amy weakly apologized. Although treated almost as one of the
family, she ought not to have forgotten that she was a servant.
What right had she to weep over Cyril's luggage? This question was
put to her in Constance's tone.
The cab came. Cyril tumbled downstairs with exaggerated
carelessness, and with exaggerated carelessness he joked at the
cabman.
"Now, mother!" he cried, when the luggage was stowed. "Do you want
me to miss this train?" But he knew that the margin of time was
ample. It was his fun!
"Nay, I can't be hurried!" she said, fixing her bonnet. "Amy, as
soon as we are gone you can clear this table."
She climbed heavily into the cab.
"That's it! Smash the springs!" Cyril teased her.
The horse got a stinging cut to recall him to the seriousness of
life. It was a fine, bracing autumn morning, and the driver felt
the need of communicating his abundant energy to some one or
something. They drove off, Amy staring after them from the door.
Matters had been so marvellously well arranged that they arrived
at the station twenty minutes before the train was due.
"Never mind!" Cyril mockingly comforted his mother. "You'd rather
be twenty minutes too soon than one minute too late, wouldn't
you?"
His high spirits had to come out somehow.
Gradually the minutes passed, and the empty slate-tinted platform
became dotted with people to whom that train was nothing but a
Loop Line train, people who took that train every week-day of
their lives and knew all its eccentricities.
And they heard the train whistle as it started from Turnhill. And
Cyril had a final word with the porter who was in charge of the
luggage. He made a handsome figure, and he had twenty pounds in
his pocket. When he returned to Constance she was sniffing, and
through her veil he could see that her eyes were circled with red.
But through her veil she could see nothing. The train rolled in,
rattling to a standstill. Constance lifted her veil and kissed
him; and kissed her life out. He smelt the odour of her crape. He
was, for an instant, close to her, close; and he seemed to have an
overwhelmingly intimate glimpse into her secrets; he seemed to be
choked in the sudden strong emotion of that crape. He felt queer.
"Here you are, sir! Second smoker!" called the porter.
The daily frequenters of the train boarded it with their customary
disgust.
"I'll write as soon as ever I get there!" said Cyril, of his own
accord. It was the best he could muster.
With what grace he raised his hat!
A sliding-away; clouds of steam; and she shared the dead platform
with milk-cans, two porters, and Smith's noisy boy!
She walked home, very slowly and painfully. The lump of lead was
heavier than ever before. And the townspeople saw the proudest
mother in Bursley walking home.
"After all," she argued with her soul angrily, petulantly, "could
you expect the boy to do anything else? He is a serious student,
he has had a brilliant success, and is he to be tied to your
apron-strings? The idea is preposterous. It isn't as if he was an
idler, or a bad son. No mother could have a better son. A nice
thing, that he should stay all his life in Bursley simply because
you don't like being left alone!"
Unfortunately one might as well argue with a mule as with one's
soul. Her soul only kept on saying monotonously: "I'm a lonely old
woman now. I've nothing to live for any more, and I'm no use to
anybody. Once I was young and proud. And this is what my life has
come to! This is the end!"
When she reached home, Amy had not touched the breakfast things;
the carpet was still wrinkled, and the mat still out of place.
And, through the desolating atmosphere of reaction after a
terrific crisis, she marched directly upstairs, entered his
plundered room, and beheld the disorder of the bed in which he had
slept. _
Read next: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER I - THE ELOPEMENT: PART I
Read previous: BOOK II CONSTANCE: CHAPTER VIII - THE PROUDEST MOTHER: PART II
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