The child plodded downstairs. Directly she returned, and as she passed into Vera’s room, she grumbled: ‘And now they’re not mended.’
Siegmund heard a sound that made his heart beat. It was the crackling of the sides of the crib, as Gwen, his little girl of five, climbed out. She was silent for a space. He imagined her sitting on the white rug and pulling on her stockings. Then there came the quick little thud of her feet as she went downstairs.
‘Mam,’ Siegmund heard her say as she went down the hall, ‘has dad come?’
The answer and the child’s further talk were lost in the distance of the kitchen. The small, anxious question, and the quick thudding of Gwen’s feet, made Siegmund lie still with torture. He wanted to hear no more. He lay shrinking within himself. It seemed that his soul was sensitive to madness. He felt that he could not, come what might, get up and meet them all.
The front door banged, and he heard Frank’s hasty call: ‘Good-bye!’ Evidently the lad was in an ill-humour. Siegmund listened for the sound of the train; it seemed an age; the boy would catch it. Then the water from the wash-hand bowl in the bathroom ran loudly out. That, he suggested, was Vera, who was evidently not going up to town. At the thought of this, Siegmund almost hated her. He listened for her to go downstairs. It was nine o’clock.
The footsteps of Beatrice came upstairs. She put something down in the bathroom — his hot water. Siegmund listened intently for her to come to his door. Would she speak? She approached hurriedly, knocked, and waited. Siegmund, startled, for the moment, could not answer. She knocked loudly.
‘All right,’ said he.
Then she went downstairs.
He lay probing and torturing himself for another half-hour, till Vera’s voice said coldly, beneath his window outside:
‘You should clear away, then. We don’t want the breakfast things on the table for a week.’
Siegmund’s heart set hard. He rose, with a shut mouth, and went across to the bathroom. There he started. The quaint figure of Gwen stood at the bowl, her back was towards him; she was sponging her face gingerly. Her hair, all blowsed from the pillow, was tied in a stiff little pigtail, standing out from her slender, childish neck. Her arms were bare to the shoulder. She wore a bodiced petticoat of pink flannelette, which hardly reached her knees. Siegmund felt slightly amused to see her stout little calves planted so firmly close together. She carefully sponged her cheeks, her pursed-up mouth, and her neck, soaping her hair, but not her ears. Then, very deliberately, she squeezed out the sponge and proceeded to wipe away the soap.
For some reason or other she glanced round. Her startled eyes met his. She, too, had beautiful dark blue eyes. She stood, with the sponge at her neck, looking full at him. Siegmund felt himself shrinking. The child’s look was steady, calm, inscrutable.
‘Hello!’ said her father. ‘Are you here!’
The child, without altering her expression in the slightest, turned her back on him, and continued wiping her neck. She dropped the sponge in the water and took the towel from off the side of the bath. Then she turned to look again at Siegmund, who stood in his pyjamas before her, his mouth shut hard, but his eyes shrinking and tender. She seemed to be trying to discover something in him.
‘Have you washed your ears?’ he said gaily.
She paid no heed to this, except that he noticed her face now wore a slight constrained smile as she looked at him. She was shy. Still she continued to regard him curiously.
‘There is some chocolate on my dressing-table,’ he said.
‘Where have you been to?’ she asked suddenly.
‘To the seaside,’ he answered, smiling.
‘To Brighton?’ she asked. Her tone was still condemning.
‘Much farther than that,’ he replied.
‘To Worthing?’ she asked.
‘Farther — in a steamer,’ he replied.
‘But who did you go with?’ asked the child.
‘Why, I went all by myself,’ he answered.
‘Twuly?’ she asked.
‘Weally and twuly,’ he answered, laughing.
‘Couldn’t you take me?’ she asked.
‘I will next time,’ he replied.
The child still looked at him, unsatisfied.
‘But what did you go for?’ she asked, goading him suspiciously.
‘To see the sea and the ships and the fighting ships with cannons —’
‘You might have taken me,’ said the child reproachfully.
‘Yes, I ought to have done, oughtn’t I?’ he said, as if regretful.
Gwen still looked full at him.
‘You are red,’ she said.
He glanced quickly in the glass, and replied:
‘That is the sun. Hasn’t it been hot?’
‘Mm! It made my nose all peel. Vera said she would scrape me like a new potato.’ The child laughed and turned shyly away.
‘Come here,’ said Siegmund. ‘I believe you’ve got a tooth out, haven’t you?’
He was very cautious and gentle. The child drew back. He hesitated, and she drew away from him, unwilling.
‘Come and let me look,’ he repeated.
She drew farther away, and the same constrained smile appeared on her face, shy, suspicious, condemning.
‘Aren’t you going to get your chocolate?’ he asked, as the child hesitated in the doorway.
She glanced into his room, and answered:
‘I’ve got to go to mam and have my hair done.’
Her awkwardness and her lack of compliance insulted him. She went downstairs without going into his room.
Siegmund, rebuffed by the only one in the house from whom he might have expected friendship, proceeded slowly to shave, feeling sick at heart. He was a long time over his toilet. When he stripped himself for the bath, it seemed to him he could smell the sea. He bent his head and licked his shoulder. It tasted decidedly salt.
‘A pity to wash it off,’ he said.
As he got up dripping from the cold bath, he felt for the moment exhilarated. He rubbed himself smooth. Glancing down at himself, he thought: ‘I look young. I look as young as twenty-six.’
He turned to the mirror. There he saw himself a mature, complete man of forty, with grave years of experience on his countenance.
‘I used to think that, when I was forty,’ he said to himself, ‘I should find everything straight as the nose on my face, walking through my affairs as easily as you like. Now I am no more sure of myself, have no more confidence than a boy of twenty. What can I do? It seems to me a man needs a mother all his life. I don’t feel much like a lord of creation.’
Having arrived at this cynicism, Siegmund prepared to go downstairs. His sensitiveness had passed off; his nerves had become callous. When he was dressed he went down to the kitchen without hesitation. He was indifferent to his wife and children. No one spoke to him as he sat to the table. That was as he liked it; he wished for nothing to touch him. He ate his breakfast alone, while his wife bustled about upstairs and Vera bustled about in the dining-room. Then he retired to the solitude of the drawing-room. As a reaction against his poetic activity, he felt as if he were gradually becoming more stupid and blind. He remarked nothing, not even the extravagant bowl of grasses placed where he would not have allowed it