CHAPTER II.

Excursions In Vulgarity.

A violent dispute with the cabman set that disturbed heart yet more wildly thumping in Mrs. Chater's bosom; the sight of her husband uneasily mooning in the dining-room heated her wrath to wilder bubblings.

Mr. Chater--a 'oly dam' terror in Mincing Lane, if his office-boy may be quoted--was an astonishingly mild man in his own house.

He said brightly, noting with a shiver the gusty stress of his wife's deportment: "You _drove_ up, my dear?--And quite right, too," he hastily added, upon a sudden fear that his remark might be interpreted as reproach.

"How do you know?" Mrs. Chater's nose went into the brandy-and-soda.

"I saw you from the window," her husband beamed. He repeated, "The window," and nervously pointed at it. There was a strained atmosphere in the room, and he was a little frightened.

"_Oh!_" Out from the brandy-and-soda came the nose; down went the gla.s.s with an emphasising bang: "_Oh!_"

Mr. Chater gave a startled little jump. He saw, immediately he had spoken, the misfortune into which his admission had plunged him; the bang of the gla.s.s tw.a.n.ged his already apprehensive nerves, and he jerked out, "Certainly, my dear," without any clear grasp as to what he was affirming.

"If you had been a _man_," said Mrs. Chater, speaking with a slow and extraordinary bitterness--"if you had been a _man_, you would have come out and helped me."

"But you had got out when I came to the window, my dear."

"With the _cabman_, I mean." Mrs. Chater fired the word with alarming ferocity. "With the _cabman_. Did you not see that violent brute insulting me?"

It was precisely because he had observed the episode that Mr. Chater had kept well behind the curtain; but he did not adduce the fact.

"I certainly did not," he affirmed.

"Ah! I expect you took precious good care not to. You've done the same thing before. Never to my dying day shall I forget the figure you cut outside Swan and Edgar's last Christmas. Making me--"

Mr. Chater implored: "Oh, my dear, don't drag that up again!"

"But I _do_ drag it up!" Mrs. Chater a little unnecessarily cried. "I _do_ drag it up, and I shall always drag it up--making me a fool as you did! I was ashamed of you. I was--"

Mr. Chater nervously wiped his moist palms with his pocket handkerchief: "I've told you over and over again, my dear, that I never understood the circ.u.mstances. There was a great crowd, and I was very much pushed about. If I had known the circ.u.mstances--"

Mrs. Chater hurled back the word at him: "Circ.u.mstances!"

"My dear," the agitated man replied, ticking off the points on soft fingers, "my dear, I had gone to the window of Swan and Edgar's, leaving you, as you expressly desired, to pay the man _yourself_. When I came _back_ to you, what I gathered was that the man was ent.i.tled to a further _sixpence_ and that you had no _change_."

Mrs. Chater lashed herself with the recollection: "Nothing of the kind!" she burst. "Nothing of the kind! What did the man say to you when you asked what was the matter?"

"I quite forget."

"You do not forget."

"My dear, I really and truly do forget."

"For the hundredth time, then, let me tell you. He said that if you pushed your ugly mug into it he would knock off your blooming head."

"Did he say _mug?_" asked Mr. Chater, a.s.suming the air of one who, knowing this at the time, would have committed a singularly ferocious murder.

"Well you know that he _did_ say mug--_ugly_ mug. Was _that_ a thing for a man of spirit to take quietly? Was _that_ a thing for a wife to hear bawled at her husband in the open street with the commissionaire grinning behind his hand? To my dying day I shall never forget my humiliation when you handed him sixpence."

The unhappy husband murmured: "I do so wish you could, my dear."

Mrs. Chater shook, handled her troops with the skill of a perfect tactician, and hurled in the attack upon another quarter.

She said: "Ah, now insult me! Insult me before Miss Humfray! That's right! _That's_ right! That's what I'm accustomed to. We all have our cross to bear, as the vicar said last Sunday, and open insult from my husband is mine. I can't complain; I married you with my eyes open."

Mrs. Chater revealed this secret of her girlhood in a voice which implied that most young women go through the ceremony with their eyes tightly closed, mixed a second brandy-and-soda for her shattered nerves, swallowed it with the air of one draining a poison flask by way of happy release from martyrdom, banged down the gla.s.s, and, before her amazed husband could open his lips, hammered in the attack from a third quarter.

"Little you would have cared," cried she, "if a miracle had not saved my life this afternoon!"

Mr. Chater stood aghast. "My dearest! Saved you! From what?"

His dearest bitterly inquired: "What does it matter to you? You take no interest. If my battered corpse--" Swept to tremendous heights by the combined forces of her agitation, her imagination, and her two brandys-and-sodas, she rose, pointed though the window. "If my battered corpse had been carried up those steps by two policemen this very afternoon, what would you have done, I wonder?"

Mr. Chater, apprehension creeping among the roots of his hair, affirmed that he would have dropped dead in the precise spot at which he happened to be standing at the moment.

Mrs. Chater trumpeted "Never!"--dropped to her chair, and continued.

"You would have been glad." Her voice shook. "Glad--and in all this wide world only my Bob and my blessed lambs in the nursery would have wept o'er my body."

Of so melancholy a character was the picture thus presented to her mind, augmenting her previous agitation, that the tumult within her welled damply through her eyes, with noisy distress through her lips.

Patting her distressed back, imploring her to calm, Mr. Chater begged some account of the catastrophe from which she had escaped.

Between convulsive sobs she told him, he bridging the hiatuses of emotion with "Oh-dear-oh-dears," in which alarm and sympathy were nicely mingled.

Painting details with a masterly hand, "And there was I alone," she concluded--"alone, at the mercy of a wild horse and a drunken cabman."

"But Miss Humfray was with you?"

"Miss Humfray managed to jump out and leave me."

Through all this scene--in one form or another a matter of daily occurrence, and therefore not to arouse interest--Mary had stood waiting its cessation and her orders. Mr. Chater turned upon her.

Naturally disposed to be kind to the girl, he yet readily saw in his wife's statement a way of escape from the castigation he had been enduring. As the small boy who has been kicked by the bully will with delighted relief rush to the bully's aid when the kicks are at length turned to another, urging him on so that he may forget his first prey, so Mr. Chater, delighted at his fortune, eagerly joined in turning his wife's wrath to Mary's head. For self-preservation, at whatever cost to another, is the most compelling of instincts: its power great in proportion as we have allowed our fleshly impulses to master us. If, when they prompt, we coldly and impersonally regard them, find them unworthy and crush them back humiliated, they become in time disciplined--wither and die. In proportion as we permit them, upon the other hand, they come in time to drive us with a fierceness that cannot be checked.

Mr. Chater had disciplined no single impulse that came to him with his flesh.

In pious horror he turned upon the girl.

"Managed to jump out!" he exclaimed, speaking as one re-echoing a horror hardly to be believed.

"Managed to jump out! Miss Humfray, I would not have thought it of you!"

She cried: "Mr. Chater, I fell!"