Part 8 (1/2)

He used to reprove his mother like that.

Mrs. Perch would give a grim little laugh, relis.h.i.+ng her strength, and then Young Perch would give an involuntary little laugh, accepting his weakness.

That was how they lived.

Young Perch always carried about in one pocket a private pair of spectacles for his mother and in another a private set of keys for her most used receptacles. When the search for her spectacles had exhausted even her own energy, Young Perch would say, ”Well, you'd better use these, Mother.” It was of no use to offer them till she was weakening in the search, and she would take them grudgingly with, ”They don't suit me.” Similarly with the keys, accepted only after prolonged and maddening search. ”Well, you'd better try these, Mother.”--”They injure the lock.”

Sabre often witnessed and took part in these devastating searches.

Young Perch would always say, ”Now just sit down, Mother, instead of rus.h.i.+ng about, and try to think quite calmly when you last used them.”

Mrs. Perch, intensely fatigued, intensely worried:

”How very silly you are, Freddie! I don't know when I last used them. If I knew when I used them, I should know where they are now.”

”Well, you'd better use these now, Mother.”

”They don't suit me. They ruin my eyes.”

Yet Mrs. Rod, Pole or Perch, who confided much in Sabre, and who had no confidences of any kind apart from her son, would often say to Sabre: ”Freddie always finds my keys for me, you know. He finds everything for me, Mr. Sabre.”

And the tide of glory would flood amazingly upon her face, transfiguring it, and Sabre would feel an immensely poignant clutch at the heart.

VI

The Perchs' house was called Puncher's--Puncher's Farm, a few hundred yards along the lane leading to the great highroad--and it was the largest and by far the most untidy house in Penny Green. Successive Punchers of old time, when it had been the most considerable farm in all the country between Chovensbury and Tidborough, had added to it in stubborn defiance of all laws of comfort and principles of domestic architecture, and now, shorn alike of its Punchers and of its pastures, the homestead that might easily have housed twenty, was mysteriously filled to overflowing by two. Mrs. Perch was fond of saying she had lived in nineteen houses ”in her time”, and Sabre had the belief that the previous eighteen had all been separately furnished and the entire acc.u.mulation, together with every newspaper taken in during their occupation, brought to Puncher's. Half the rooms of Puncher's were so filled with furniture that no more furniture, and scarcely a living person, could be got in; and half the rooms were so filled with boxes, packages, bundles, trunks, crates, and stacks of newspapers that no furniture at all could be got in. Every room was known to Mrs. Perch and to Young Perch by the name of some article it contained and Mrs. Perch was forever ”going to sort the room with your Uncle Henry's couch in it”, or ”the room with the big blue box with the funny top in it”, or some other room similarly described.

Mrs. Perch was always ”going to”, but as the task was always contingent upon either ”when I have got a servant into the house”, or ”when I have turned the servant out of the house”--these two states representing Mrs.

Perch's occupation with the servant problem--the couch of Uncle Henry, the big blue box with the funny top, and all the other denizens of the choked rooms remained, like threatened men, precariously but securely.

But not unvisited!

Sabre once spent a week in the house, terminating a summer holiday a little earlier than Mabel, and he had formed the opinion that mother and son never went to bed at night and never got up in the morning. In remote hours and in remote quarters of the house mysterious sounds disturbed his sleep. Eerily peering over the banisters, he discerned the pair moving, like lost souls, about the pa.s.sages, Mrs. Perch with the skirts of a red dressing-gown in one hand and a candle in the other, Young Perch disconsolately in her wake, yawning, with another candle.

Young Perch called this ”Prowling about the infernal house all night”; and one office of the prowl appeared to Sabre to be the attendance of pans of milk warming in a row on oil stoves and suggesting, with the glimmer of the stoves and the steam of the pans, mysterious oblations to midnight G.o.ds.

VII

Mrs. Perch believed her son could do anything and, in the matter of his capabilities, had the strange conviction that he had only to write and ask anybody, from Mr. Asquith downwards, for employment in the highest offices in order to obtain it. Young Perch--who used to protest, ”Well, but I've _got_ my work, Mother”--was in fact a horticulturist of very fair reputation. He specialised in sweet peas and roses; and Sabre, in the early days of his intimacy with the Rod, Pole or Perch household, was surprised at the livelihood that could apparently be made by the disposal of seeds, blooms and cuttings.

”Fred's getting quite famous with his sweet peas,” Sabre once said to Mrs. Perch. ”I've been reading an ill.u.s.trated interview with him in _The Country House_.”

Tides of glory into Mrs. Perch's face. ”Ah, if only he hadn't worn that dreadful floppy hat of his, Mr. Sabre. It couldn't have happened on a more unfortunate day. I fully intended to see how he looked before the photographs were taken and of course it so happened I was turning a servant out of the house and couldn't attend to it. That dreadful floppy hat doesn't suit him. It never did suit him. But he will wear it. It's no good my saying anything to him.”

This was an opinion that old Mrs. Perch was constantly reiterating.

Young Perch was equally given to declaring, ”I can't do anything with my Mother, you know.” And yet it was Sabre's observation that each life was entirely guided and administered by the other. Young Perch once told Sabre he had never slept a night away from his mother since he was seventeen, and he was never absent from her half a day but she was at the window watching for his return.