Jacobs Room | Page 4

sitting-room. Mr. Pearce had
extinguished the lamp. The garden went out. It was but a dark patch.
Every inch was rained upon. Every blade of grass was bent by rain.
Eyelids would have been fastened down by the rain. Lying on one's
back one would have seen nothing but muddle and confusion--clouds
turning and turning, and something yellow-tinted and sulphurous in the
darkness.
The little boys in the front bedroom had thrown off their blankets and
lay under the sheets. It was hot; rather sticky and steamy. Archer lay
spread out, with one arm striking across the pillow. He was flushed;
and when the heavy curtain blew out a little he turned and half-opened
his eyes. The wind actually stirred the cloth on the chest of drawers,
and let in a little light, so that the sharp edge of the chest of drawers
was visible, running straight up, until a white shape bulged out; and a
silver streak showed in the looking-glass.
In the other bed by the door Jacob lay asleep, fast asleep, profoundly
unconscious. The sheep's jaw with the big yellow teeth in it lay at his
feet. He had kicked it against the iron bed-rail.
Outside the rain poured down more directly and powerfully as the wind
fell in the early hours of the morning. The aster was beaten to the earth.
The child's bucket was half-full of rainwater; and the opal- shelled crab
slowly circled round the bottom, trying with its weakly legs to climb

the steep side; trying again and falling back, and trying again and again.


CHAPTER TWO
"MRS. FLANDERS"--"Poor Betty Flanders"--"Dear Betty"--"She's
very attractive still"--"Odd she don't marry again!" "There's Captain
Barfoot to be sure--calls every Wednesday as regular as clockwork, and
never brings his wife."
"But that's Ellen Barfoot's fault," the ladies of Scarborough said. "She
don't put herself out for no one."
"A man likes to have a son--that we know."
"Some tumours have to be cut; but the sort my mother had you bear
with for years and years, and never even have a cup of tea brought up
to you in bed."
(Mrs. Barfoot was an invalid.)
Elizabeth Flanders, of whom this and much more than this had been
said and would be said, was, of course, a widow in her prime. She was
half- way between forty and fifty. Years and sorrow between them; the
death of Seabrook, her husband; three boys; poverty; a house on the
outskirts of Scarborough; her brother, poor Morty's, downfall and
possible demise-- for where was he? what was he? Shading her eyes,
she looked along the road for Captain Barfoot--yes, there he was,
punctual as ever; the attentions of the Captain--all ripened Betty
Flanders, enlarged her figure, tinged her face with jollity, and flooded
her eyes for no reason that any one could see perhaps three times a day.
True, there's no harm in crying for one's husband, and the tombstone,
though plain, was a solid piece of work, and on summer's days when
the widow brought her boys to stand there one felt kindly towards her.
Hats were raised higher than usual; wives tugged their husbands' arms.

Seabrook lay six foot beneath, dead these many years; enclosed in three
shells; the crevices sealed with lead, so that, had earth and wood been
glass, doubtless his very face lay visible beneath, the face of a young
man whiskered, shapely, who had gone out duck-shooting and refused
to change his boots.
"Merchant of this city," the tombstone said; though why Betty Flanders
had chosen so to call him when, as many still remembered, he had only
sat behind an office window for three months, and before that had
broken horses, ridden to hounds, farmed a few fields, and run a little
wild-- well, she had to call him something. An example for the boys.
Had he, then, been nothing? An unanswerable question, since even if it
weren't the habit of the undertaker to close the eyes, the light so soon
goes out of them. At first, part of herself; now one of a company, he
had merged in the grass, the sloping hillside, the thousand white stones,
some slanting, others upright, the decayed wreaths, the crosses of green
tin, the narrow yellow paths, and the lilacs that drooped in April, with a
scent like that of an invalid's bedroom, over the churchyard wall.
Seabrook was now all that; and when, with her skirt hitched up, feeding
the chickens, she heard the bell for service or funeral, that was
Seabrook's voice--the voice of the dead.
The rooster had been known to fly on her shoulder and peck her neck,
so that now she carried a stick or took one of the children with her
when she went to feed the fowls.
"Wouldn't you like