There were explanations to be made about this Mrs Butter. She wasn’t to be called by her Christian name; she was to be Mrs Butter, and her title was to be housekeeper-general. These points conceded she was all complaisance.
“You see,” said Millie Chaser, “she just wants to be alone. She’s had a tragic time. She wants work, she says, to occupy her mind, and she does not want to have to talk to people. She has to make a living. She was an orphan or something and lived with an aunt who wanted her out of the way because she had daughters of her own. So when a fellow turned up and wanted to many her, she married him, and he turned out the most frightful blackguard. Frightful, my dear, Took her bit of property, every penny, drank, beat her. Actually beat her. Kicked her and beat her when she was going to have a child. She was taken to hospital. The poor little baby died in a month, he had injured it in some way, and she went out of her mind about it and tried to kill herself. When she began to recover, she found this husband of hers was in jail. He wasn’t her husband; he was a bigamist. He’d just married her to get hold of her poor little bit of money. But that disposed of him. She’s a sort of stunned woman. Very nice, very gentle.”
“And what’s her real name?”
“Still Butter. That was her maiden name and that’s why she’s Mrs and not Miss.”
Mrs Butter appeared in due course. She was young, younger than Evangeline, very plainly dressed in brown, pale, brown-haired, broad-faced and quietly good-looking, She surveyed the house and discussed her duties with her mistress.
Evangeline had been warned not to be too searching in her questions and so she talked about herself. “You see—there’s a baby coming.”
Mrs Butter winced but remained calm. “When?” she asked. Evangeline estimated.
“It will be well for you to have a married woman about,”
“It’s what I’ve wanted. It’s what I want dreadfully. How good of you, Mrs Butter, to see that. Just now I’m splendid, but sometimes—oh, I’m afraid.”
“Why we go through with it....” said Mrs Butter, and left her sentence incomplete.
“That’s what I ask myself.”
“If there was any pleasure to be found in it,” said Mrs Butter....
“On Sundays if you want to go to church—”
“I don’t go to church,” said Mrs Butter, and added, “It’s a mockery.”
“We don’t go so very much,” said Evangeline.
“You’d like me to move in—when? I’m quite free.”
Edward Albert discovered Mrs Butter after some days. She looked young and amenable and she regarded him with calm respect. But he had learnt that she was a woman and had begun. He watched her discreetly. He spent a week and a half trying to catch her eye. The atmosphere of the flat improved; things were put in their places; the rooms seemed brighter. Then Mrs Butter, surveying her handiwork in the drawing-room, remarked to Evangeline, “It would look better with a cat.”
They discussed pet animals. “They make things homey,” Mrs Butter thought. Dogs she did not like, they fawned upon you and tried to lick your face, but cats, nice cats, had dignity. They knew their place. “But they have a lot of kittens,” said Evangeline. “Not the cat I know,” said Mrs Butter. And presently a mitigated young Tom, glossy black with yellow eyes, reposed upon the Tewler hearthrug and blinked at Mrs Butter putting the buttered tea-cake on the brass trivet, which was another of her helpful suggestions.
One afternoon a little later she was kneeling in the same place, tickling the cat’s throat and fighting his claws. Her crouching figure looked very pleasantly feminine. Evangeline was in her own room lying down. Suddenly Mrs Butter found Edward Albert pressing himself against her. “Pussy, pussy,” he said.
She could feel his body trembling. He slid a caressing hand down her shoulder and the line of her hips. He gave her a pat and the beginning of a pinch.
She shook herself away from him and rose to her feet. She faced him, regarding him steadily. She did not appear to be in the least excited or angry.
She spoke calmly and almost as if she had had her little speech prepared for some days.
“I don’t want to seem wanting in respect, Mr Tewler, but if you do anything of that sort again I’ll smack you face hard and-march right out of this house. I’ve had enough jiggery-pokery from one man to last me a lifetime. I don’t want to be a bit disagreeable. I know what men are, they don’t seem able to help it, but the less I have to do with them the better. You keep your place and I’ll keep mine and we’ll get along nicely. I don’t want to make no upset here. I like the missus somehow and I’m sorry for her. Else I wouldn’t stay. She’s awake. That’s her little table bell.”
She stepped round him as one steps round something unpleasant on the carpet.
“Coming,” she cried to Evangeline.
Edward Albert attempted an ironical whistle, but Mrs Butter held her position, intacta. There was no mistaking her sincerity. He decided henceforth to treat her with cold disdain—and be damned to her!
He wished he knew some chaps, some really fast chaps, who would give him just the hints he needed for a real man’s life in London. He had heard of clubs but he did not know anyone who could introduce him to one. There you get together with fellows in the know....
That dream common to your Homo Tewler Anglicanus and Americanus of getting together with fellows in the know, of conniving together in clubs, was soon to spin fraternally in rotaries about the world, A great brotherly idea.
XVII. Henry Tewler Begins
Evangeline had a bad time in the nursing home. Bitter pangs rushed upon her, filled with violent futile effort, and receded. “Try now.”
“Bear down,” and so on. But at last with a feeble cackle, a new Tewler was born into the world, and presented in due course wiped and washed to his exhausted mother.
Evangeline regarded her offspring with a hostile eye, over the corner of the sheet. She made no movement to touch it. “I knew it would look like Aim,” she said. “I knew.”
The eye closed.
The nurse looked at her colleague. Both were slightly shocked.
“He’ll look prettier to-morrow,” said the nurse, Evangeline turned her head over to clear her mouth and spoke deliberately with her eyes shut. “I don’t care.... I don’t care how it looks,” she said. “Take the thing away. I’m glad—glad to be rid of it.”
Such was the welcome of Henry Tewler to the mystery of conscious existence.
XVIII. Tewler Defied
Evangeline came back from the maternity hospital in the charge of a protective, hygienic nurse with a hard, bright, pink-cheeked face and a naturally hostile and altogether too understanding eye, who seemed to enjoy saying: “You have to keep out of here, Mr Tewler. You can’t come near her for a bit. You can say ‘Good deavning’ from the door if you like. But we must take care of her still. She’s not out of her trouble yet.”
A month of enforced chastity passed and was followed by a second month. Master Henry Tewler ceased to look like a flayed monkey in the course of twenty-four hours and began to be attractive. He ceased to squint and produced real brown hair of very great fineness. He lost any personal resemblances and passed into that phase when babies can be freely exchanged and no one the wiser. He fattened under a carefully regimented bottle-feeding, for Evangeline was neither willing nor able to undertake that task. He gurgled and waved his arms about and won a smile from his mother and so became the household darling.
“He’s getting artful,” said the proud father. “Think he’s like me, nurse?”