he said enquiringly.
“I beg your pardon,” said Mark.
“Ah?” said the man again. And then, “Foreigners, eh?”
“You do speak English, then?” said Mark.
“Ah!” said the man. After a pause of several seconds he said, “Guv’ner!” Mark looked at him. “Guv’ner,” repeated the patient with great energy, “you ha’nt got such a thing as a bit of baccy about you? Ah?”
II
“I think that’s all we can do for the present,” said Mother Dimble. “We’ll do the flowers this afternoon.” She was speaking to Jane and both were in what was called the Lodge—a little stone house beside the garden door at which Jane had been first admitted to the Manor. Mrs. Dimble and Jane had been preparing it for the Maggs family. For Mr. Maggs’s sentence expired to-day and Ivy had gone off by train on the previous afternoon to spend the night with an aunt in the town where he was imprisoned and to meet him at the prison gates.
When Mrs. Dimble had told her husband how she would be engaged that morning, he had said, “Well, it can’t take you very long just lighting a fire and making a bed.” I share Dr. Dimble’s sex and his limitation. I have no idea what the two women found to do in the Lodge for all the hours they spent there. Even Jane had hardly anticipated it. In Mrs. Dimble’s hands the task of airing the little house and making the bed for Ivy Maggs and her jail-bird husband became something between a game and a ritual. It woke in Jane vague memories of helping at Christmas or Easter decorations in church when she had been a small child. But it also suggested to her literary memory all sorts of things out of sixteenth-century epithalamions—age-old superstitions, jokes, and sentimentalities about bridal beds and marriage bowers, with omens at the threshold and fairies upon the hearth. It was an atmosphere extraordinarily alien to that in which she had grown up. A few weeks ago she would have disliked it. Was there not something absurd about that stiff, twinkling archaic world—the mixture of prudery and sensuality, the stylised ardours of the groom and the conventional bashfulness of the bride, the religious sanction, the permitted salacities of fescennine song, and the suggestion that everyone except the principals might be expected to be rather tipsy? How had the human race ever come to imprison in such a ceremony the most unceremonious thing in the world? But she was no longer sure of her reaction. What she was sure of was the dividing line that included Mother Dimble in that world and left her outside. Mother Dimble, for all her nineteenth-century propriety, or perhaps because of it, struck her this afternoon as being herself an archaic person. At every moment she seemed to join hands with some solemn yet roguish company of busy old women who had been tucking young lovers into beds since the world began with an incongruous mixture of nods and winks and blessings and tears—quite impossible old women in ruffs or wimples who would be making Shakespearean jokes about codpieces and cuckoldry at one moment and kneeling devoutly at altars the next. It was very odd: for, of course, as far as their conversation was concerned the difference between them was reversed. Jane, in a literary argument, could have talked about codpieces with great sang-froid, while Mother Dimble was an Edwardian lady who would simply have ignored such a subject out of existence if any modernised booby had been so unfortunate as to raise it in her presence. Perhaps the weather had some bearing on Jane’s curious sensations. The frost had ended and it was one of those days of almost piercingly sweet mildness which sometimes occur in the beginning of winter.
Ivy had discussed her own story with Jane only the day before. Mr. Maggs had stolen some money from the laundry that he worked for. He had done this before he met Ivy and at a time when he had got into bad company. Since he and Ivy had started going out together he had gone “as straight as straight”; but the little crime had been unearthed and come out of the past to catch him, and he had been arrested about six weeks after their marriage. Jane had said very little during the telling of this story. Ivy had not seemed conscious of the purely social stigma attaching to petty theft and a term of imprisonment, so that Jane would have had no opportunity to practise, even if she had wished, that almost technical “kindness” which some people reserve for the sorrows of the poor. On the other hand she was given no chance to be revolutionary or speculative—to suggest that theft was no more criminal than all wealth was criminal. Ivy seemed to take traditional morality for granted. She had been “ever so upset” about it. It seemed to matter a great deal in one way, and not to matter at all in another. It had never occurred to her that it should alter her relations with her husband—as though theft, like ill health, were one of the normal risks one took in getting married.
“I always say, you can’t expect to know everything about a boy till you’re married, not really,” she had said.
“I suppose not,” said Jane.
“Of course it’s the same for them,” added Ivy. “My old dad used often to say he’d never have married mum not if he’d known how she snored. And she said herself, ‘No, dad, that you wouldn’t.’”
“That’s rather different, I suppose,” said Jane.
“Well, what I say is, if it wasn’t that it’d be something else. That’s how I look at it. And it isn’t as if they hadn’t a lot to put up with, too. Because they’ve sort of got to get married if they’re the right sort, poor things, but, whatever we say, Jane, a woman takes a lot of living with. I don’t mean what you’d call a bad woman. I remember one day—it was before you came—Mother Dimble was saying something to the Doctor; and there he was sitting reading something—you know the way he does—with his fingers under some of the pages and a pencil in his hand—not the way you or I’d read—and he just said ‘Yes, dear,’ and we both of us knew he hadn’t been listening. And I said, ‘There you are, Mother Dimble,’ said I. ‘That’s how they treat us once they’re married. They don’t even listen to what we say,’ I said. And do you know what she said? ‘Ivy Maggs,’ said she, ‘Did it ever come into your mind to ask whether anyone could listen to all we say?’ Those were her very words. Of course I wasn’t going to give in to it, not before him, so I said, ‘Yes, they could.’ But it was a fair knock-out. You know often I’ve been talking to my husband for a long time and he’s looked up and asked me what I’ve been saying and, do you know, I haven’t been able to remember myself!”
“Oh, that’s different,” said Jane. “It’s when people drift apart—take up quite different opinions—join different sides. . . .”
“You must be ever so anxious about Mr. Studdock,” replied Ivy. “I’d never be able to sleep a wink if I were in your shoes. But the Director’ll bring it all right in the end. You see if he don’t.”
Mrs. Dimble went back to the house presently to fetch some little nicety which would put the finishing touch to the bedroom in the Lodge. Jane, feeling a little tired, knelt on the window-seat and put her elbows on the sill and her chin in her hands. The sun was almost hot. The thought of going back to Mark if Mark were ever rescued from Belbury was one which her mind had long accepted; it was not horrifying to her, but flat and insipid. It was not the less so because at this moment she fully forgave him for his conjugal crime of sometimes apparently preferring her person to her conversation and sometimes his own thoughts to both. Why should anyone be particularly interested in what she said? This new humility would even have been pleasant to her if it had been directed to anyone more exciting than Mark. She must, of course, be very different with him when they met again. But it was that “again” which so took the savour out of the good resolution—like going back to a sum one had already got wrong and working it out afresh on the same scrawled page of the exercise book. “If they met again . . .” she felt guilty at her lack of anxiety. Almost at the same moment she found that she was a little anxious. For hitherto she had always somehow assumed that Mark would come back. The possibility of his death now presented itself. She had no direct
