A Poor Man's House Part 26

The Perkinses went at the end of last week into a jerry-built villa up on land. To escape the brunt of moving in, probably, Perkins took Tony to a football match at Plymouth. It was not so much that they drank a great deal, as that they came home, singing, in a very overcrowded and smoky railway carriage. "I s'pose I got exzited like," Tony says. He was all right until they got out into the fresh air, and then ...

Perkins brought him in house and laid him along the pa.s.sage. "Here's your husband, Mrs Widger." Being rather afraid of Mrs Widger, because she always speaks her mind, Perkins disappeared quickly.

[Sidenote: _TONY ON DRINK_]

_In vino veritas_, no doubt. When Tony is drunk he becomes most affectionate, and begins 'slatting things about'--not violently or maliciously, but simply out of joyous devilment and a desire to feel that he is doing something. Mrs Widger neither wept nor upbraided him.

"Yu silly gert fule!" she said. "Yu silly gert fule! Shut up, or yu'll wake they chil'ern."

"Be glad tu see yer Tony?"

"G'out! Git yer butes off."

Tony made the chairs skip round the room and thought he'd like to see the table (with the lamp) upside down. The window curtains annoyed him.

Mrs Widger took steps.

Luckily, she is not with child, or otherwise delicate, and can therefore stand a deal of rough and tumble. She pushed him headlong into a chair and took off his boots. (Those two, there alone, for Under Town was asleep.) Then she shouldered him upstairs, like a heavy piece of luggage, and laid him on their bed. Poor Tony was more than leery.

He swam. He moaned. He was sick. He could neither lie down nor get up.

"Sarve thee d.a.m.n well right!" said Mam Widger.

"_I_ can't help o'it...."

"_Yu can't help o'it!_"

Between three and four in the morning, she went downstairs, relighted the fire and made him and herself a cup o' tay. After that, not so very long before daylight, they slept.

To-day Tony is ill and subdued, if not repentant. He reckons he will do the same again ("What chap don't, 'cept they mump-headed long-faced beggars?"), but at present he turns from liquor; he always does for a day and a half after 'going on the bust.' "Didn' ought never to drink more'n one gla.s.s," he says; "no, n'eet none at all!" Seeing what it would mean for the family if Tony took to drink, Mrs Widger is, and was at the time, wonderfully calm and cheerful--how far from reliance in herself, or from trust in Tony, is not plain. I asked her what she would do if he became a drunkard and brought no money home.

"Oh," she said carelessly, "I s'pose I should turn tu and get some work to du and keep things going somehow."

"Would you let him have any pocket-money?"

"Ay, I 'spect I should--enough for his pint."

There's not a shadow of doubt but she would do both.

15

Tony has always been a man for the girls; so much so, and so naively, that whatever he might do would seem quite innocent; as innocent as the love-play of animals. Along the Front, of an evening, he calls out, "How be 'ee, my dear?" to any girl he chooses, and perhaps takes her arm for a few steps. Given half a chance, he s.n.a.t.c.hes a playful kiss.

They never seem to turn rusty with him. He has the primitive quality of knocking their conventionality to bits at one blow.

[Sidenote: _FLIRTATIONS_]

Just before the Perkinses left, he turned out at five in the morning to see if the high long tide was flowing up to the boats. At six he made tea and went with it to bed again. When he came downstairs at eight o'clock (in his pants, darning the seat of his trousers), Mrs Widger and Mrs Perkins both had breakfasts frying on the fire. Mrs Widger, very loud-voiced that morning, was packing the children off to school; Mrs Perkins was bent over the pan, browning sausages. Tony crept up behind her, seized her by the waist, and kissed her.

"Oh, you naughty man!" said Mrs Perkins, who was married out of a drapery establishment and has the drapery style of talking to perfection. "If my dear hubby knew...."

"Tell him!" retorted Tony. "I be ready for 'en. I feels lively this morning. I'll gie 'ee another if yu'll darn thees yer trousers for me.

Thic Mam 'Idger there won't du nort. You wuden' think I'd had two nights o'it, wude 'ee? I went to bed last night, an' then I got up, five o'clock, and 'cause there weren't nort doing I went to bed again an' had an hour or an hour an' a half's more sleep."

"Oh, you sleepy man!"

"I didn' want to sleep. I wanted the missis here to cuddle me, on'y her 'ouldn't. Her turned away from me that cold.... I went off to sleep.

An' when I woke up again, thinkin' her'd cuddle me then, her gave me a kick an' got out bed. I never see'd ort like it. Her ain't what her used to be, for all her ain't a bad li'l thing, thee's know."

"G'out!" said Mrs Widger. "I be older--and wiser."

"Don' know about that. I shall go into Plymouth an' git a nice li'l girl there.... Oh, I've know'd plenty on 'em. All the li'l girls likes ol' Tony."

"I know they do," remarked Mrs Perkins sententiously, while Mrs Widger laughed rather proudly.

"Iss; us was to Plymouth once, an' a nice li'l girl wi' a white bow roun' her neck came up an' spoke to me when I was a-looking into a shop window, an' her said, 'I lives jest here,' an' I said, 'Do 'ee, my dear? I'll be 'long in a minute....'"

"Where was Mrs Widger then?"

"Oh, her was 'bout ten yards in front."

"Well?"

"Iss; if her won't be nice to me when I wants her tu, I shall go into Plymouth an' find out my li'l girl there...."

"Garn then, yu fule! I can du wi'out 'ee. I shall hae thic divorce.

Thee's think, I s'pose, as I can't get 'long wi'out 'ee? Thee's much mistaken!"

"Well...."

"Git 'long out wi' 'ee!" repeated Mrs Widger, laughing and very proudly. "Git 'long out an' let me clear these yer breakfast things."

"What have yu got for dinner, me dear? Then I'll remain with 'ee an'

not go out at all."

"G'out!"

Amid loud laughter, Tony s.n.a.t.c.hed a kiss from both ladies, and pranced out.

16

[Sidenote: _MRS WIDGER_]

"'Tisn't no use to be jealous," Mrs Widger says. "I used to be a bit taken that way once, but I ain't now, an' 'twuden' make no difference if I was." Doubtless she is quite right, and she certainly succeeds in never showing what jealousy she may feel when, for instance, she catches sight of Tony strolling in through the Gut with his arm half round another woman's waist, as his playful way is. If Tony speaks of his first wife she does not, like most second wives, stop talking. If she hears of a woman unhappily married, she usually dismisses the affair with a "Well, her shuden't ha' married 'en: her must put up wi'

'en now her's got 'en." The goings-on of unmarried people do not easily scandalise her. "I reckon," she says, "yu can du as yu like afore yu'm married, but after that yu'm fixed." She is so confident of the fastness of the marriage tie (it is, of course, much more indissoluble for poor people who cannot travel, have no servants, and cannot afford lawyers for divorce proceedings) that she can afford to give Tony plenty of rope in small things. Her trust in his faithfulness is absolute, and justified. She has him; he cannot get along without her; she knows that. Her att.i.tude is founded on experience and common-sense; not on some abstract system of morality that never controlled men's lives, and never will.

When I used to look upon fishermen as picturesque common objects of the seash.o.r.e, I thought their womenfolk rather dreadful. Now, however, the more I see of this household the more I admire Mrs Widger's management of it. I know of few other women who could direct it better and with less friction. Indeed, I am acquainted with no middle-cla.s.s woman at all who could direct any of these poor men's households as their own wives so noisily and so cleverly do. Mrs Widger does not attempt to gain her own way by sheer force and hardness, not even with the children; she bends to every current; but she never breaks, and finally prevails. Like most West-country people, she has more staying power than visible energy. By going not straight over the hills, like a Roman road, but round by the valleys and level paths, she arrives at her journey's end just as quickly and with much less disturbance and fatigue. She does nothing quite perfectly; neither cooking, mending, cleaning nor child-rearing; but she does everything as well as is practicable, as well as is advisable. Tony would often like things a little better done, but if he had to do them they would be done a little worse. Some people here greatly pride themselves on keeping their homes spotlessly clean, and their front doors locked so that no dirty boot shall soil the oilcloth in the pa.s.sage. Mrs Widger says that her house is for living in. Children run in and out of it, laughing and shouting.

In some respects, she and Tony remind one of a French bourgeois couple.

He has the sentiment, the expressed ideality, the sensitiveness. He perceives a great deal, but perceives much of it vaguely. He seldom makes up his mind--then unalterably. He is like the little man in Blake's drawing, who stands at the foot of a long ladder reaching up to the moon, and cries, "I want!" What he wants, he does not precisely know. Summut or other. Mrs Widger, on the other hand, knows what she wants very exactly; so exactly that she is content to bide her opportunity. When they were married, Tony had neither boats nor gear.

He has them now.

[Sidenote: _A STEADY HEAD_]