The Beth Book
Her evening dresses had been in the box which she had just unpacked,
and while she was still sitting on the floor amongst them cogitating,
Ethel Maud Mary came into the attic out of breath to ask how she was
getting on.
"Why," she exclaimed in admiration of Beth's finery, "you've got some
clothes! They'd fetch something, those frocks, if you sold them."
"Then tell me where to sell them, for money I must have," Beth
rejoined precipitately.
"And it's no use keeping gowns; they only go out of fashion," Ethel
Maud Mary suggested, as if she thought Beth should have an excuse.
"Gwendolen would manage it best. She's great at a bargain; and there's
a place not far from here. I'd begin with the worst, if I was you."
"Advise me, then, there's a dear," said Beth, and Ethel Maud Mary
knelt down beside her, and proceeded to advise.
Only a few shillings was the result of the first transaction; but the
better dresses had good trimmings on them, and real lace, which
fetched something, as Ethel Maud Mary declared it would, if sold
separately; so, with the strictest self-denial, Beth was still able to
pay her way and provide for the sick man's necessities.
From the time she put him on the Salisbury treatment, he suffered less
and began to gain strength; but the weather continued severe, and Beth
suffered a great deal herself from exposure and cold and privations of
all kinds. She used to be so hungry sometimes that she hurried past
the provision shops when she had to go out, lest she should not be
able to resist the temptation to go in and buy good food for herself.
If her sympathy with the poor could have been sharpened, it would have
been that winter by some of the sights she saw. Sometimes she was
moved by pity to wrath and rebellion, as on one occasion when she was
passing a house where there had evidently been a fashionable wedding.
The road in front of the house, and the red cloth which covered the
steps and pavement, were thickly strewed with rice, and on this a band
of starving children had pounced, and were scraping it up with their
bony claws of hands, clutching it from each other, fighting for it,
and devouring it raw, while a supercilious servant looked on as though
he were amused. Beth's heart was wrung by the sight, and she hurried
by, cursing the greedy rich who wallow in luxury while children starve
in the streets.
In a squalid road which she had often to cross there was a butcher's
shop, where great sides of good red beef with yellow fat were hung in
the doorway. Coming home one evening after dark, she noticed in front
of her a gaunt little girl who carried a baby on her arm and was
dragging a small child along by the hand. When they came to the
butcher's shop, they stopped to look up at the great sides of beef,
and the younger child stole up to one of them, laid her little hand
upon it caressingly, then kissed it. The butcher came out and ordered
them off, and Beth pursued her way through the mire with tears in her
eyes. She had suffered temptation herself that same evening. She had
to pass an Italian eating-house where she used to go sometimes, before
she had any one depending on her, to have a two-shilling dinner--a
good meal, decently served. Now, when she was always hungry, this was
one of the places she had to hurry past; but even when she did not
look at it, she thought about it, and was tormented by the desire to
go in and eat enough just for once. Visions of thick soup, and fried
fish with potatoes, and roast beef with salad, whetted an appetite
that needed no whetting, and made her suffer an ache of craving
scarcely to be controlled. That day had been a particularly hungry
one. The coffee was done, every precious tea-leaf she had to husband
for Arthur, and the butter had also to be carefully economised because
a good deal was required for his crisp toast, which was unpalatable
without it. Beth lived principally on the crusts she cut off the
toast. When they were very stale, she steeped them in hot water, and
sweetened them with brown sugar. This mess reminded her of Aunt
Victoria's bread-puddings, and the happy summer when they lived
together, and she learnt to sit upright on Chippendale chairs. She
would like to have talked to Arthur of those tender memories, but she
could not trust herself, being weak; the tears were too near the
surface.
That day she had turned against her crusts, even with sugar, and had
felt no hunger until she got out into the air, when an imperious
craving for food seized upon her suddenly, and she made for the
Italian restaurant as if she had been driven. The moment she got
inside the place, however, she recovered her self-possession. She
would die of hunger rather than spend two precious shillings on
herself while there was that poor boy at home, suffering in silence,
gratefully content with the poorest fare she brought him, always
making much of all she did.
Beth got no farther than the counter.
"I want something savoury for an invalid," she said.
That evening, for the first time, Arthur sat up by the fire in the
grandfather chair with a blanket round him, and enjoyed a dainty
little feast which had been especially provided, as he understood, in
honour of the event.
"But why won't you have some yourself?" he remonstrated.
"Well, you see," Beth answered, "I went to the Italian restaurant when
I was out."
"Oh, did you?" he said. "That's right. I wish you would go every day,
and have a good hot meal. Will you promise me?"
"I'll go every day that I possibly can," Beth answered, smiling
brightly as she saw him fall-to contentedly with the appetite of a
thriving convalescent. Practising pious frauds upon him had become a
confirmed habit by this time--of which she should have been ashamed;
but instead, she felt a satisfying sense of artistic accomplishment
when they answered, and was only otherwise affected with a certain
wonderment at the very slight and subtle difference there is between
truth and falsehood as conveyed by the turn of a phrase.
But now the money ran shorter and shorter; she had nothing much left
to sell; and it was a question whether she could possibly hold out
until her half-year's dividend was due. Perhaps the old lawyer would
let her anticipate it for once. She wrote and asked him, but while she
was waiting for a reply the pressure became acute.
Out of doors one day, walking along dejectedly, wondering what she
should do when she came to her last shilling, her eye rested on a
placard in the window of a fashionable hairdresser's shop, and she
read mechanically: "A GOOD PRICE GIVEN FOR FINE HAIR." She passed on,
however, and was half-way down the street before it occurred to her
that her own hair was of the finest; but the moment she thought of it,
she turned back, and walked into the hairdresser's shop in a
business-like way without hesitation. A gentleman was sitting beside
the counter at one end of the shop, waiting to be attended on; Beth
took a seat at the other end, and waited too. She sat there, deep in
thought and motionless, until she was roused by somebody saying, "What
can I do for you, miss?"
Then she looked up and saw the proprietor, a man with a kindly face.
"Can I speak to you for a moment?" she asked.
"Come this way, if you please," he replied, after a glance at her
glossy dark-brown hair and shabby gloves.
When she went in that day, Arthur uttered an exclamation.
"Do you mean to say you've had your hair cut short?" he asked,
speaking to her almost roughly. "Are you going to join the unsexed
crew that shriek on platforms?"
"I don't know any unsexed crew that shriek on platforms," she
answered, "and I am surprised to hear you taking the tone of cheap
journalism. There has been nothing in the woman movement to unsex
women except the brutalities of the men who oppose them."
He coloured somewhat, but said no more--only sat looking into the fire
with an expression on his face that cut Beth to the quick. It was the
first cloud that had come to overshadow the perfect sympathy of their
intercourse. She was getting his tea at the moment, and, when it was
ready, she put it beside him and retired to his attic, which she
occupied, and looked at herself in the glass for the first time since
she had sacrificed her pretty hair. At the first glance, she laughed;
then her eyes filled with tears, and she threw herself on the bed and
sobbed silently--not because she regretted her hair, but because he
was hurt, and for once she had no comfort to give him.
Just after she left him, an artist friend of his, Gresham Powell, came
in casually to look him up, and was surprised to find he had been so
ill.
"I missed you about," he said, "but I thought you had shut yourself up
to work. Who's been looking after you?"
Brock gave him the history of his illness.
Powell shook his head when he heard of Beth's devotion.
"Take care, my boy," he said. "The girls you find knocking about town
in these sort of places are not desirable associates for a promising
young man. They're worse than the regular bad ones--more likely to
trap you, you know, especially when you're shorn of your strength and
have good reason to be grateful. You might think you were rewarding
her by marrying her; but you'll find your mistake. Look at Simpson!
Could a man have done a girl a worse turn than he did when he married
Florrie Crone? They haven't a thought in common except when he's ill
and she nurses him; but a man can't be always getting ill in order to
keep in touch with his wife. I don't know, of course, what this girl's
like; but half of them are adventuresses bent on marrying gentlemen.
Is she a clergyman's daughter, by any chance?"
"I know nothing about her but her name," Brock answered coldly. "She
has never tried to excite sympathy in any way."
"Well, they are of all kinds, of course," said Powell temperately.
"But you'd better break away in any case. Nothing will set you up so
soon as a change. Come with me. I'm going into the country to see the
spring come in, and the fruit trees flower, and to hear the
nightingales. I know a lovely spot. Come!"
"I'll think about it, and let you know," Arthur Brock answered to get
rid of him.
When he had gone Beth appeared. To please Arthur, she had covered her
cropped head with a white muslin mob-cap bound round with a pale pink
ribbon, and put on a high ruffle and a large white apron, in which she
looked pretty and prim, like a sweet little Puritan, in spite of the
pale pink vanity; and Arthur smiled when he saw her, but afterwards
grumbled: "Why did you cut your pretty hair off? I shouldn't have
thought you could do such a tasteless thing."
Beth knelt down beside his chair to mend the fire, and then she began
to tidy the hearth.
"Am I not the same person?" she asked.
"No, not quite," he answered. "You have set up a doubt where all was
settled certainty."
She had taken off the gloves she wore to do the grate, and was about
to pull herself up from her knees by the arm of his chair when he
spoke, but paused to ponder his words. It was with her left hand that
she had grasped the arm of his chair, and he happened to notice it
particularly as it rested there.
"You wear a wedding-ring, I see," he remarked. "Do you find it a
protection?"
"I never looked at it in that light," she answered. "In this vale of
tears I have a husband. That is why I wear it."
There was a perceptible pause, then he asked with an effort, "Where is
your husband?"
"At home, I suppose," said Beth, her voice growing strident with
dislike of the subject. "We do not correspond. He wishes to divorce
me."
"And what shall you do if he tries?" Brock asked.
"Nothing," she replied, and was for leaving him to draw his own
conclusions, but changed her mind. "Shall I tell you the story," she