But even while he was thinking this Mrs. Marble was turning those notes over with fear in her heart. At that time her husband would have given her more pleasure by an unexpected gift of five shillings. For five shillings does not set one thinking of police and prisons. Besides, Mrs. Marble hardly knew what to do with fifty pounds, and lastly she had too great a fear for the future to spend it all at once. Muddleheaded she may have been, but in her life Mrs. Marble had learned one lesson, and that very thoroughly; it was to the effect that there is nothing as nice as money, nothing that goes so quickly, and nothing that is so hard to obtain. Mrs. Marble went and locked it into the one private drawer she had in all the house.
She went slowly through her morning’s work—she still had no help—making the beds, turning out one room, peeling potatoes for the children’s dinner, and then she put her hat on to do her usual day’s shopping. In the hall she hesitated for a moment, and then she yielded. Hurrying upstairs, she unlocked the drawer and guiltily peeled off one single pound note and thrust it into her purse.
Mr. Marble returned home in time to join his children at their tea. As he came in he was obviously in good spirits, and Mrs. Marble brightened as she saw that this all-too-rare mood was on him. Mr. Marble looked round the room inquiringly; he put his head out into the hall again and peered up and down it. Then with much elaboration he began to search under the table and in all sorts of impossible places.
“What are you looking for, Will?” asked Mrs. Marble. She could hardly help laughing at his antics.
“I’m looking for all the things you bought today,” was the reply.
Mrs. Marble looked guiltily at her husband.
“With that money you gave me this morning?” she asked.
“That’s right. I gave it to you to spend.”
“I didn’t like to spend it all, dear. I only used a little of it.”
Mr. Marble took a gold cigarette case out of his pocket, chose a gold-tipped cigarette, lighted it with a match from a gold matchbox, and looked across at her with half-concealed amusement.
“Well, what did you buy, then? Come on, let’s hear all about it.”
Mrs. Marble fumbled nervously with her dress.
“I—I bought one or two little things for the kitchen—”
“What were they?”
“A—a mop, dear, and two new pie-dishes—”
Mr. Marble yelled with laughter.
“Splendid!” he said. “And what else?”
“A new china pot for the aspidistra, such a nice one, dear, but, of course, they’re sending that. And a wing for my other hat, the black one, you know. And—and—I don’t think there’s anything else. Oh, don’t laugh like that. I couldn’t help it.”
But Mr. Marble only laughed the more. He rocked with merriment.
He turned to the children, and gasped out between his outbursts, “I give your mother fifty pounds to go out and spend, and that’s what she does with it! A mop and some pie-dishes! Oh, Annie, you’ll be the death of me one of these days.”
Even the children realized that it was vague bad taste on his part to hold their mother up to ridicule before them, and poor Mrs. Marble grew more and more flustered.
“Oh, don’t laugh, Will, don’t. How was I to know that you really wanted me to spend all that?”
But Mr. Marble did not continue the argument.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” he said, “and I’m not going to the office. We’ll go out together and then I’ll show you how to spend the money I give you. What about it?”
“Oh, that would be nice, dear.”
Little Mrs. Marble was happily flustered now. It was perhaps a year since she had been out with her husband; it was probably three since she had been north of the Thames with him.
And yet that morning to which she looked forward so happily through the night was not wholly successful. It was rather like a wild nightmare. They began in Tottenham Court Road at ten o’clock in the morning. Mr. Marble began by making arrangements for having “some old furniture” removed from 53 Malcolm Road. Then he began an orgy of buying. Clearly he was acting on some already-matured plan of his own, for he went straight to the “period rooms” to make his purchases. But he did not want modest Queen Anne or beautiful Chippendale. That sort of thing was not in his line. Instead, he demanded Empire furniture. They gave it to him. In addition they gave him furniture of the period following close after the Empire, massively gilt, and showing evident traces of the debasement of taste that flooded the world from the forties onward. He bought over-gilded, over-florid chairs and couches. He bought an unsightly Empire bed ornamented with gilt Cupids in hideous taste. His crowning purchase was a massive table, the frame carved and chased and tortured into a monstrosity of design and then flamingly gilded; the body of the table was of marble mosaic, crudely arranged in feeble classical design. That table probably weighed between nine and ten hundredweight, and it looked like it.
The manager of the department rubbed his hands as the bargain was concluded. He could not remember a morning like this since the palmy days of the war. He foisted a few more white elephants on to Mr. Marble, and then led them off in the direction of pictures and picture-frames. And yet that manager did not feel altogether happy while making these arrangements. The business was too simple. It was too like taking advantage of the feebleminded. He had only to offer the thing, name its price, and book the order. Even he, skilled as he was in the mentality of the furniture-buyer, did not appreciate the fact that Mr. Marble was buying what he wanted to buy, not what the manager wanted him to buy. Mr. Marble was thoroughly enjoying himself. Those vast expanses of gilt, those
