Nocturne | Page 6

routine of kitchen affairs, and upon the nursing of a
comparatively helpless old man who could do hardly anything at all for

himself.
Pa was in his bedroom,--the back room on the ground-floor, chosen
because he could not walk up the stairs, but must have as little trouble
in self-conveyance as possible,--staggeringly making his toilet for the
meal to come, sitting patiently in front of his dressing-table by the light
of a solitary candle. He would appear in due course, when he was
fetched. He had been a strong man, a runner and cricketer in his youth,
and rather obstreperously disposed; but that time was past, and his
strength for such pursuits was as dead as the wife who had suffered
because of its vagaries. He could no longer disappear on the Saturdays,
as he had been used to do in the old days. His chair in the kitchen, the
horse-hair sofa in the sitting-room, the bed in the bedroom, were the
only changes he now had from one day's end to another. Emmy and
Jenny, pledges of a real but not very delicate affection, were all that
remained to call up the sorrowful thoughts of his old love, and those
old times of virility, when Pa and his strength and his rough
boisterousness had been the delight of perhaps a dozen regular
companions. He sometimes looked at the two girls with a passionless
scrutiny, as though he were trying to remember something buried in
ancient neglect; and his eyes would thereafter, perhaps at the mere
sense of helplessness, fill slowly with tears, until Emmy, smothering
her own rough sympathy, would dab Pa's eyes with a harsh
handkerchief and would rebuke him for his decay. Those were hard
moments in the Blanchard home, for the two girls had grown almost
manlike in abhorrence of tears, and with this masculine distaste had
arisen a corresponding feeling of powerlessness in face of emotion
which they could not share. It was as though Pa had become something
like an old and beloved dog, unable to speak, pitied and despised, yet
claiming by his very dumbness something that they could only give by
means of pats and half-bullying kindness. At such times it was Jenny
who left her place at the table and popped a morsel of food into Pa's
mouth; but it was Emmy who best understood the bitterness of his soul.
It was Emmy, therefore, who would snap at her sister and bid her get
on with her own food; while Pa Blanchard made trembling scrapes with
his knife and fork until the mood passed. But then it was Emmy who
was most with Pa; it was Emmy who hated him in the middle of her
love because he stood to her as the living symbol of her daily

inescapable servitude in this household. Jenny could never have felt
that she would like to kill Pa. Emmy sometimes felt that. She at times,
when he had been provoking or obtuse, so shook with hysterical anger,
born of the inevitable days in his society and in the kitchen, that she
could have thrown at him the battered pot which she carried, or could
have pushed him passionately against the mantelpiece in her fierce
hatred of his helplessness and his occasional perverse stupidity. He was
rarely stupid with Jenny, but giggled at her teasing.
Jenny was taller than Emmy by several inches. She was tall and thin
and dark, with an air of something like impudent bravado that made her
expression sometimes a little wicked. Her nose was long and straight,
almost sharp-pointed; her face too thin to be a perfect oval. Her eyes
were wide open, and so full of power to show feeling that they seemed
constantly alive with changing and mocking lights and shadows. If she
had been stouter the excellent shape of her body, now almost too thick
in the waist, would have been emphasised. Happiness and comfort, a
decrease in physical as in mental restlessness, would have made her
more than ordinarily beautiful. As it was she drew the eye at once, as
though she challenged a conflict of will: and her movements were so
swift and eager, so little clumsy or jerking, that Jenny had a carriage to
command admiration. The resemblance between the sisters was
ordinarily not noticeable. It would have needed a photograph--because
photographs, besides flattening the features, also in some manner
"compose" and distinguish them--to reveal the likenesses in shape, in
shadow, even in outline, which were momentarily obscured by the
natural differences of colouring and expression. Emmy was less dark,
more temperamentally unadventurous, stouter, and possessed of more
colour. She was twenty-eight or possibly twenty-nine, and her mouth
was rather too hard for pleasantness. It was not peevish, but the lips
were set as though she