FullReads

III

One black morning in December, West remembered, for no reason at all, that it was the birthday of Cyril his godson. Cyril to-day entered on his fifth year, and West found himself making the usual “damned silly reflections” on the flight of time. Dismissing these as stale and unprofitable, he began to wonder what present he could take the boy. He tried to remember what he himself had liked at the age of four, but he could recall nothing of that antediluvian period. He thought of a book, a paint-box, a white fur rabbit, but the delights of painting and reading were surely beyond Cyril’s years, while the Bunny was perhaps too infantile. Finally, he set his face westward, trusting to find inspiration in the windows of the shops he passed. The heavenly smell of chocolate which greeted him at Buszard’s made him decide on a big packet of bon-bons. He knew from previous existence with the Catterson children, that chocolates were sure to be appreciated.

The Cimmerian morning had dragged its course through brown, orange, and yellow hours, to an afternoon of misty grey. But West nevertheless felt inclined for walking. As he crossed the park diagonally from the Marble Arch to Queen’s Gate, his thoughts outran his steps, and were already with the
Cattersons.

They had moved again, and now lived in South Kensington. Nettie had become very intimate with a certain Mrs. Reade, whose acquaintance she owed to a week spent in the same hotel. The two young women had struck up an effusive friendship, based on a similarity of taste in dress and amusement, Mrs. Reade supplying the model for Nettie’s faithful imitation. She copied her new friend’s manners, she adopted her opinions and ideas. Mrs. Reade had declared it was impossible to live so far out of town as Surbiton. The Cattersons therefore disposed of the lease of their house, and took one close to Mrs. Reade’s in Astwood Place.

Catterson had left his pretty suburban garden with the more reluctance that he disliked the Reades, considered the husband common, the wife loud, vulgar, bad style. But he had told West at the time, that no price was too high to pay for the purchase of domestic peace.

He was peaceably inclined by nature, but of late, any nervous energy which might have been contentiously employed, was used up in fighting off the various trifling ailments that continuously beset him. He was always taking cold; now it was lumbago, now a touch of congestion, now a touch of pleurisy. He spent half his days at home in the doctor’s hands. Nettie made his bad health the ostensible reason for quitting Surbiton. The damp air rising from the river didn’t suit him.

Town suited her, as she expressed it, “down to the ground,” and following in Mrs. Reade’s wake, she became one of the immense crowd of smartly-gowned nobodies, who, always talking as if they were somebodies, throng fashionable shops, cycle in the Park, and subscribe to Kensington Town Hall dances. It was far away from the days when she lived in lodgings at Teddington, made her own clothes, and cooked her own dinner.

Now she kept four maids, whom she was constantly changing. West seldom found the door opened by the same girl thrice. Nettie was an exacting mistress, and had no indulgence for the class from which presumably she had sprung. Her servants were expected to show the perfection of angels, the capacity for the work of machines, and the servility of slaves. And she was always detecting imperfections, laziness, or covert impertinence of manner or speech. Every six weeks or so there was a domestic crisis, and Mary or Jane left in tears, and without a character.