They were not entirely tears of mourning, but they quelled Winnie effectively. Even she felt a little shy and embarrassed at sight of her mother crying. So she relaxed her inquiry, just when a little more pressing would have forced from her mother the astonishing facts that Mr. Marble was prepared for her to spend ten pounds a week on her housekeeping while she actually only spent two—hardly as much as she had spent before they attained to riches.
But Winnie was at least persistent. After her mother she approached her father, daring even to break in upon his whisky-sodden reverie in the drawing-room.
“Father,” said Winnie, “are we dreadfully poor since you left off going to the City?”
Mr. Marble rolled a maudlin eye upon her. Then pride reasserted itself—pride in his achievement all those months ago, which was still mentioned with bated breath by City clerks, but which had never received its meed of recognition in his own home.
“No,” he said. “We’ve got plenty.”
“That’s good. It’s Christmas tomorrow. I want some money. Lots of it. Mother hasn’t done anything about it yet.”
Far back in Mr. Marble’s dulled memory ghosts began to stir. He remembered those times—they seemed ages ago now—when he wanted his wife to spend money, and had had all the difficulty in the world to induce her to do so.
He rolled obediently out of his chair and walked almost steadily across to the ridiculous gilt bureau in the corner of the room. He fumbled it open; fumbled out his chequebook; fumblingly signed a cheque.
“Banks shut at half-past three,” he said. “Better be quick.”
Winnie only had to give a fleeting glance at the cheque. It was for one hundred pounds.
“Thank you,” she said, and before she had left the room she was calling to her mother to put her hat on.
Mrs. Marble had never been so hurried and flurried in her life before as she was that Christmas eve.
There was the rush to get the bus to Rye Lane. Then there was the rush to the bank to cash the cheque. Winnie put the money in her handbag as if she was accustomed to having a hundred pounds there every day of her life. Then there was a series of rushes up and down Rye Lane, crowded with Christmas shoppers, buying everything which Mrs. Marble had omitted to buy, which comprised a good many necessities as well as the inevitable luxuries of Christmas. She was almost dropping with unaccustomed fatigue when Winnie hailed a heaven-sent taxicab that appeared and piled her and the myriad parcels they had accumulated into it.
Yet even this did not satisfy Winnie. She was not even satisfied with bullying her mother next day into cooking turkey and reheating the ready-made Christmas puddings they had bought. She was not satisfied with insisting on having a clean cloth on the table and all the silver displayed thereon. She was not satisfied with giving presents—bought with the money obtained yesterday—to her father and mother, and with showing them what they had bought for her from the same source. She was not satisfied with hanging holly and mistletoe all over the house. Even when Christmas Day was over and her parents thought they had suffered all they could, she began to go systematically through the house “putting things straight.” That Berkshire school prided itself on the domestic training it gave its girls—domestic training on a scale calculated for women who would not be likely ever to have dealings with the economics of a house of thirty pounds a year rateable value into which no servant or even charwoman was allowed ever to set foot. Winnie’s ideas were on the grand scale.
She succeeded in upsetting Mrs. Marble, and by natural reaction she upset her father as well. Mr. Marble had been unhappy before, but it was a negative and inactive unhappiness. He had settled down into a groove, and a groove, with all its suggestion of permanency, was grateful to a man in the shadow of the gallows. Any disturbance of that groove was annoying. He had grown used to being badly fed, and he never noticed the other details of household management. He had even ceased long since from having any pride in his Empire furniture. But Winnie with her bustle and hustle disturbed him. Without realizing it, he had taken comfort from his wife’s inaction, knowing that that meant there was less chance of her giving away the secret he knew she held in her bosom. And now Winnie had descended upon them to alter all this. He did not like it. He liked it still less when he found that Winnie had her eye upon his drinking habits and was meditating interfering with them as well.
But happily Winnie was not of the stuff that carries things through to the bitter end in face of all opposition. She was like her father in that she was able to make one big effort which achieved much but left her incapable of more for a considerable time. Her activity died down, and in a brief time she found herself actually acquiescing in some of Mrs. Marble’s shiftless methods of housekeeping. And in a flash she found that she was incredibly bored.
She had once more got her mother’s wardrobe into some sort of order, and she had bullied and cajoled her into wearing the good clothes that were heaped untidily about her bedroom. By the time she had made her mother smart again, and had rearranged everything in accordance with the system that even only two terms at the school had ingrained into her, Winnie found that her interest in housekeeping was waning, and that life at 53 Malcolm Road was decidedly dull.
So she wrote off one or two letters, to friends of hers at school. It hardly matters what she put into them, whether it was fact or fiction, whether she wrote about illness—of course not infectious—at home, or about domestic unhappiness. Whatever it
