Of course Mother could, if Will wanted her to. Discussion began in a more animated form, as they warmed to the subject.
Even John was in the end lured into joining in. Suggestions were bandied back and forth—furniture for the house, motorcars, theatres, chicken for dinner on Sundays. But somehow they all avoided the crying need the house was in for redecoration, and none of them suggested obtaining the assistance of a jobbing gardener to put some beauty into the backyard. Three of those present didn’t know why. It was instinctive.
As Mr. Marble recovered his good spirits, he became more jovial and friendly than the children could remember his being for years. They chuckled when he produced a big notebook and made a show of noting down all the suggestions offered.
“But your tea’s getting cold, Will,” said Mrs. Marble. “Why don’t you have it now and go on with the game after?”
The children looked anxiously at their father. Was it after all just a game? It would be too bad if it were. But he reassured them at once.
“It isn’t a game, mother,” he said, “it isn’t, really.”
But still Mrs. Marble looked her unbelief. Half buried in her tangled memory there were one or two recollections of times when her husband had cruelly taken advantage of her dimness of thought. And she was sensitive about it, and shrank from having it exposed once more.
“It isn’t a game, mother,” said John and Winnie, encouraged.
“I’ve just made a pot of money in the City,” said Mr. Marble.
“Father’s just made a pot of money in the City,” repeated Winnie.
Gradually she came to believe them.
“How much?” she asked, astonishingly more practical than her children.
“More than you could guess,” said Mr. Marble, adhering firmly to his article of faith that under no conditions should one’s wife know anything about one’s income—although this had once before brought him to the verge of ruin. “Enough to keep us all our lives,” added Mr. Marble, rubbing it in.
“But you’re not—you’re not going to give up the Bank?” said Mrs. Marble, aghast. You could feel that capital letter as she spoke. Awe for the vast institution which gave them their daily bread, and terror of the Damocles’ sword of dismissal which dangled always over their heads were ingrained into her being from the early days of marriage.
“I don’t know yet,” said Mr. Marble easily. “I may and I may not.”
“Oh, Will, you mustn’t, you mustn’t really. Supposing anything went wrong.”
“Wrong? What’s going to go wrong?” Marble could not keep a suspicion of a sneer out of his voice. He was nettled at the suggestion that anything should “go wrong” with financial affairs under his control, after his astonishing feat of manipulation of the franc. He did not make full allowance for the fact that Mrs. Marble knew nothing of this. That was perhaps characteristic, and equally so was his annoyance that she should interfere in the slightest with his control of their joint lives.
“I don’t know, but—oh, Will, you can’t have made as much money as all that?”
“Can’t I! I have.”
To children it seems perfectly natural that their father should come home one day and say that he has made all their fortunes; but to a woman nothing seems more unlikely than that the husband should say the same thing. It took a long time to convince Mrs. Marble. Indeed, by the time that this was done, Mr. Marble had lost all enjoyment. Nobody had been very enthusiastic; nobody had told Mr. Marble what a very wonderful man he was; John, indeed, had seemed positively sorry that it had happened. And Mrs. Marble had said the deplorably wrong thing—as of course was only to be expected. Poor Marble’s long-stretched nerves gave way, and he ended by losing his temper rather badly.
“You’re a lot of fools,” he snapped. “As for you, Annie—”
Annie wept, and as always when that happened Mr. Marble could bear things no longer. He uttered an inarticulate noise which only inadequately conveyed his disgust, and rose indignantly from his chair. Then he went through a series of actions which Annie and the children had come to know all too well. He roamed round the room and picked up a couple of the eternal books on crime that lay about; then he felt in his pocket for the sideboard key; he brought from the sideboard the decanter, the siphon, and the glass; and then with his arms full he passed out of the room. The children and their mother heard him go into the drawing-room at the back, and they heard the door shut with unnecessary violence.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” wailed Mrs. Marble, handkerchief to her eyes. Then she rallied. It was still an article of faith with the Marble family that the head of the house did not drink, never had drunk, and a thousand times never had been the worse for drink. And at the same time another article of faith had grown up lately. That was that Mr. Marble did not sit all those hours in the drawing-room for any particular purpose. It was just a little whim of his, unaccountable, but not to be commented upon.
“Now, children,” said Mrs. Marble, determined at all costs—although she did not know why—to enforce these beliefs, and at the same time to hold up the prestige of her husband, “get on quietly with your homework and don’t make a noise to disturb father. Perhaps he’ll tell us more about it when he’s not so tired.”
She rose from the table and gathered up the tray on which still lay her husband’s untasted tea. She went out quietly, tiptoeing past the drawing-room door. A good part of the evening she spent in washing up. The rest she spent in ironing.
When at last she had done her work, and had seen the children off to bed she
