“I’m clearing out,” I said crudely. “I’m going back to Paris.”
“And what of Sophy and your children?” he demanded.
Some fiend in me prompted me to reply, “There’s yourself, sir, if other provision falls short.”
“I won’t give them a penny,” he shouted, and added that probably half the children weren’t even mine.
I retaliated that English law makes a man responsible for all his wife’s children, regardless of paternity, so long as she remains his wife, and added that he’d be liable for them all, should it come to a question of State support.
He leapt up in a towering rage, screaming abusively that he wouldn’t have anything to do with the bastards, and they could all die in a workhouse for all he cared. I said I didn’t suppose they knew they had a grandfather, as they’d never been allowed within a mile of the house, and my disappearance might be an advantage to them, inasmuch as it would give the whole lot of them a chance to meet one another.
He cried me down; he talked of cumberers and touts and leeches; he reminded me of the times he and Richard have helped me in the past. He orated on improvidence, dishonest improvidence.
What could I say? Of course he’s helped me. He knows my circumstances, and it would be instructive to see how he or Richard could bring up a family on something under five pounds a week. My only retort, that he’d spent precious little on my education and that, without investment, you can’t expect dividends, brought the rejoinder that I’d had my chance, and refused to take it, and had forfeited any further consideration. That was when my temper began to boil over, because he went on to compare the present with the roseate might-have-been—would-have-been according to him, if I’d accepted his judgment. And, of course, he couldn’t leave Sophy alone. He’s never met her, and he couldn’t probably, at any time, understand the peculiar effect she had on me a dozen years ago. She was one of those haggard-looking women who seem a well of suppressed passion, but are really like those cardboard moulds of butter that you see in the windows of dairy-shops. At the time, however, I pictured her as Héloïse or Laura. We drifted apart for a bit, and at first I forgot her, and then went mad for her again and made frantic efforts to find her out. It was then that I discovered she had borne my child. It sobered me considerably; I was just twenty, but I felt I had a wealth of experience, uncommon in men twice my age, behind me. When I saw little Hartley (she hadn’t troubled to have him christened, so I could please myself as to a name) I insisted on marrying his mother. From the first she occupied a secondary place; what that boy meant to me I couldn’t express, and, anyway, it doesn’t matter any more. It didn’t spring, my feeling for him, from any innate love of children. When Sophy began to breed them as thick as rabbits I ignored them as much as I could. Sophy didn’t seem to care about them, either, and she never showed them much attention, beyond feeding them in a haphazard manner and threatening to skin them alive if they weren’t quiet.
Each time a new baby came, I swore it should be the last, but living as we did, pigging it in small rooms on practically no money, I wearing myself out with work and anxiety that unmarried men don’t experience, I fairly naturally broke through my resolutions and took from Sophy any satisfaction I could get. Presently even I had to admit we couldn’t go on; I was making very little money, and one or other of the children was perpetually ill, wanting a doctor or needing medicine, or clamouring for warm clothes. Sophy’s complaints got more and more on my nerves. I couldn’t start work but she’d come plaintively up to the studio, whining that there was insufficient money in the house for the midday meal. I wrote home for money once or twice, and my father sent me a little of that and a great deal of advice and garnered wisdom. But life was becoming impossible for me, and at last, in a frenzy, I accepted an offer of work in a draughtsman’s office in England. I earned four pounds a week, and on the strength of this we took a house in a frowsy terrace in Fulham. Hartley was dead by this time, and in his place were three little girls, and another baby on the way. My job entailed drawing houses about three times their actual scale, so that my employers’ clients were deceived and swindled. I don’t pretend that the ethical position affected me much. What seemed to me unpardonable was that I should be spending the best years of my life in this futile way. I was twenty-seven, and I’ve been at it for five years. And a month ago I made up my mind that, at all costs, I would get out and get back to my own job.
And just as I didn’t concern myself with the men who were cheated by my
