Mrs. Craddock - W. Somerset Maugham (top books to read txt) 📗

Craddock’s interest in the stage was unflagging; he always wanted to know what was going to happen, and he was able to follow with the closest attention even the incomprehensible plot of a musical comedy. Nothing bored him. Even the most ingenuous find a little cloying the humours and the harmonies of a Gaiety burlesque; they are like toffee and butterscotch, delicacies for which we cannot understand our youthful craving. Bertha had learnt something of music in lands where it is cultivated as a pleasure rather than as a duty, and the popular melodies with obvious refrains sent cold shivers down her back; but they stirred Craddock to the depths of his soul. He beat time to the swinging, vulgar tunes, and his face was transfigured when the band played a patriotic march with a great braying of brass and beating of drums. He whistled and hummed it for days afterwards. “I love music,” he told Bertha in the entracte. “Don’t you?”

With a tender smile she confessed she did, and for fear of hurting Edward’s feelings did not suggest that the music in question made her almost vomit. What mattered it if his taste in that respect were not beyond reproach; after all there was something to be said for the honest, homely melodies that touched the people’s heart. It is only by a convention that the Pastoral Symphony is thought better art than Tarara-boom-deay. Perhaps, in two or three hundred years, when everything is done by electricity and every one is equal, when we are all happy socialists, with good educations and better morals, Beethoven’s complexity will be like a mass of wickedness, and only the plain, honest homeliness of the comic song will appeal to our simple feelings.

“When we get home,” said Craddock, “I want you to play to me; I’m so fond of it.”

“I shall love to,” she murmured. She thought of the long winter evenings which they would spend at the piano, her husband by her side to turn the leaves, while to his astonished ears she unfolded the manifold riches of the great composers. She was convinced that his taste was really excellent.

“I have lots of music that my mother used to play,” he said. “By Jove, I shall like to hear it again—some of those old tunes I can never hear often enough—The Last Rose of Summer, and Home, Sweet Home, and a lot more like that.”

“By Jove, that show was ripping,” said Craddock, when they were having supper; “I should like to see it again before we go back.”

“We’ll do whatever you like, my dearest.”

“I think an evening like that does you good. It bucks me up; doesn’t it you?”

“It does me good to see you amused,” replied Bertha, diplomatically.

The performance had appeared to her vulgar, but in the face of her husband’s enthusiasm she could only accuse herself of a ridiculous squeamishness. Why should she set herself up as a judge of these things? Was it not somewhat vulgar to find vulgarity in what gave such pleasure to the unsophisticated? She was like the nouveau riche who is distressed at the universal lack of gentility; but she was tired of analysis and subtlety, and all the concomitants of decadent civilisation.

“For goodness’s sake,” she thought, “let us be simple and easily amused.”

She remembered the four young ladies who had appeared in flesh-coloured tights and nothing else worth mentioning, and danced a singularly ungraceful jig, which the audience, in its delight, had insisted on having twice repeated.

With no business to do and no friends to visit, there is some difficulty in knowing how to spend one’s time in London. Bertha would have been content to sit all day with Edward in the private sitting-room, contemplating him and her extreme felicity. But Craddock had the fine energy of the Anglo-Saxon race, that desire to be always doing something which has made the English athletes, and missionaries, and members of Parliament.

After his first mouthful of breakfast he invariably asked, “What shall we do to-day?” And Bertha ransacked her brain and a Baedeker to find sights to visit, for to treat London as a foreign town and systematically to explore it was their only resource. They went to the Tower of London and gaped at the crowns and sceptres, at the insignia of the various orders; to Westminster Abbey and joined the party of Americans and country folk who were being driven hither and thither by a black-robed verger; they visited the tombs of the kings and saw everything which it was their duty to see. Bertha developed a fine enthusiasm for the antiquities of London; she quite enjoyed the sensations of bovine ignorance with which the Cook’s tourist surrenders himself into the hands of a custodian, looking as he is told and swallowing with open mouth the most unreliable information. Feeling herself more stupid, Bertha was conscious of a closer connection with her fellow-men. Edward did not like all things in an equal degree; pictures bored him (they were the only things that really did), and their visit to the National Gallery was not a success. Neither did the British Museum meet with his approval; for one thing, he had great difficulty in directing Bertha’s attention so that her eyes should not wander to various naked statues which are exhibited there with no regard at all for the susceptibilities of modest persons. Once she stopped in front of a group that some shields and swords quite inadequately clothed, and remarked on their beauty. Edward looked about uneasily to see whether any one noticed them, and agreeing briefly that they were fine figures, moved rapidly away to some less questionable object.

“I can’t stand all this rot,” he said, when they stood opposite the three goddesses of the Parthenon; “I wouldn’t give twopence to come to this place again.”

Bertha felt somewhat ashamed that she had a sneaking admiration for the statues in question.

“Now tell me,” he said, “where is the beauty of those creatures without any heads?”

Bertha could not tell him, and he was triumphant. He was a dear, good boy and she loved him with all her heart!

The Natural History Museum, on the other hand, aroused Craddock to great enthusiasm. Here he was quite at home; no improprieties were there from which he must keep his wife, and animals were the sort of things that any man could understand. But they brought back to him strongly the country of East Kent and the life which it pleased him most to lead. London was all very well, but he did not feel at home, and it was beginning to pall upon him. Bertha also began talking of home and of Court Leys; she had always lived more in the future than in the present, and even in this, the time of her greatest happiness, looked forward to the days to come at Leanham, when complete felicity would indeed be hers.

She was contented enough now—it was only the eighth day of her married life, but she ardently wished to settle down and satisfy all her anticipations. They talked of the alterations they must make in the house, Craddock had already plans for putting the park in order, for taking over the Home Farm and working it himself.

“I wish we were home,” said Bertha. “I’m sick of London.”

“I don’t think I should mind much if we’d got to the end of our fortnight,” he replied.

Craddock had arranged with himself to stay in town fourteen days, and he could not alter his mind. It made him uncomfortable to change his plans and think out something new; he prided himself, moreover, on always doing the thing he had determined.

But a letter came from Miss Ley announcing that she had packed her trunks and was starting for the continent.

“Oughtn’t we to ask her to stay on?” said Craddock. “It seems a bit rough to turn her out so quickly.”

“You don’t want to have her live with us, do you?” asked Bertha, in some dismay.

“No, rather not; but I don’t see why you should pack her off like a servant with a month’s notice.”

“Oh, I’ll ask her to stay,” said Bertha, anxious to obey her husband’s smallest wish; and obedience was easy, for she knew that Miss Ley would never dream of accepting the offer.

Bertha wished to see no one just then, least of all her aunt, feeling confusedly that her bliss would be diminished by the intrusion of an actor in her old life. Her emotions also were too intense for concealment, and she would have been ashamed to display them to Miss Ley’s critical instinct. Bertha saw only discomfort in meeting the elder lady, with her calm irony and polite contempt for the things which on her husband’s account Bertha most sincerely cherished.

But Miss Ley’s reply showed perhaps that she guessed her niece’s thoughts better than Bertha had given her credit for.