The Man Who Understood Women and Other Stories/The Third M
THE THIRD M
Otto Van Norden wrote ballads that were popular; but to attain this eminence he had, in his youth, sacrificed commercial prospects which might easily have provided him with wealth. So he often lamented his choice of a career as a terrible mistake. Nevertheless, as he had some private means, his life was no martyrdom, though he aspired vainly to a mansion and a motor. He had pleasant rooms, a good tailor, was frequently to be seen at the second-best restaurants, and spent as much of his time as possible on the Continent. It was, indeed. Van Norden who shocked the owner of a Confession-book by describing his favourite pastime as "Leaving England," and his pet aversion as "Coming back to it."
At the age of forty he fell seriously in love. He was a selfish man, though he inclined to lyrics like "Heaven were a Void without Thee," and "My Life for My Lady's Glove," and he battled against the temptation bravely. Violet was young, captivating, and sang his ballads with considerable expression—he had really no chance. He took a wife, and a villa in Dulwich; and if the music pirates hadn't begun to be so industrious, it is possible that he might have escaped regret, even in the suburb that looks like a cemetery.
To write popular songs in a country where stolen music was exposed for sale on every kerb-stone buttered no parsnips; and for matrimony the composer's private means were a tight fit. Not many quarter-days had elapsed before he felt that his marriage had been as big a blunder as his profession. "Music and marriage!" sighed Van Norden to the long, sad, empty roads of Dulwich; "but for music and marriage how well off I might have been!" And then it struck him that both the calamities of his life begun with an M.
Some men might have attached no importance to it; Otto Van Norden was impressed. He said that it was queer, this recurrence of the initial M—he was of the opinion that it "meant something." Perhaps there was a warning to be derived? Yes, that must be it! If a third catastrophe occurred, doubtless the third, too, would be alliterative—and perhaps fatal. M was evidently an initial ominous to him, an initial to be shunned. From that moment he grew nervous of things beginning with an M. He abandoned the wish to revisit Mentone; and he would not have attempted a march if his publishers had begged for one.
More quarter-days flashed by, and meanwhile his fortunes remained unchanged. Self-respecting citizens still bought the stolen music, the private income was still a tight fit, and Dulwich was still the most melancholy of the suburbs. Then, when he had been married for three annual rentals, and a water-rate over, hopes were entertained of a son and heir—and Violet suggested calling him "Marmaduke." The composer was profoundly agitated; her proposal was no caprice—she had an uncle Marmaduke with money—and Van Norden knew very well that opposition must appear to her unreasonable, since he could not explain it without hurting her feelings.
He contested the point with tact. Kindly, but firmly, he disparaged the name of "Marmaduke" for months, all through the spring in fact. It was a name, he pointed out, more adapted to an elderly gentleman of portly presence than to a baby. It was not a tractable name, not amenable to abbreviation. Assuming that the child had a sensitive disposition, Violet would condemn him to years of suffering, for a boy who was christened "Marmaduke" would, when he went to school, certainly be called "Marmalade." The last argument was at once successful; Violet's eyes filled with tears, and as she thanked her husband for sparing the "poor little fellow" the consequences of her thoughtlessness, the composer's relief was deeper than any who mock presentiments can understand.
This was the first M that had menaced him since he perceived the significance of the initial to him, and nothing else noteworthy occurred until November. One day in November when a pink-and-white bassinette was in readiness for the little "fellow's" advent, the master of the house awoke feeling as if he had a marble under his tongue. He did not mention the matter to Violet, but breakfasting with such an unfamiliar mouth was so discomforting that he sent the servant up to Dr. Lachlan with a request to him to look in during the morning.
"I don't know what's happened to my mouth, Lachlan," he said; "it's for all the world as if a marble had rolled underneath my tongue in the night."
"Let's have a look at it," said the medical man. "Ah! Yes. Y-e-s, that hasn't come in the night—it's been coming for some time."
"Is it serious?"
"No, not necessarily. It wants removing."
"Removing?" echoed Van Norden. "What do you mean by 'removing'—you don't mean 'operating'? Don't you think a—a good lotion"
"Oh, no, we shall have to operate," said Dr. Lachlan. "You may put it at the morning after next. Meantime, I'll get a competent anæsthetist, and arrange about a nurse for you."
"But—but it's very serious indeed," faltered the composer, dismayed. "Am I sure to get better? People sink under operations; we know that every operation is 'performed successfully,' but the patient often dies the same day. What's the matter with me, what have I got?"
"It's what we call 'Myxoma.’"
"My God!" exclaimed Van Norden. "It begins with an M!"
He was now intensely alarmed for himself. He was also alarmed lest the news should reach the ears of Violet, who was in no condition to be told such things. However, on the next morning but one she was unable to rise, so the preliminaries passed unnoticed by her. In a room on the first floor, madame awaited the arrival of the son and heir; in a room on the second, monsieur awaited the arrival of the surgeon. Few circumstances could have been more adverse to marital tranquillity: few circumstances therefore could have been less favourable to the operation.
The first person to tap at the second-floor door was the nurse engaged by Dr. Lachlan.
"Good-morning, Nurse," said Van Norden. "Nobody has come yet; sit down and make yourself at home."
"Thank you," said the nurse. She added sympathetically, putting on her apron. "It's a trying time for you, I hear, what with one thing and another, sir?"
Lachlan came in, as blithely as if it were a party. "Well, how are we this morning?" he asked. "Good spirits? That's right! You'll be glad you've had this done—you'll feel much better, once it's over.—Ah, here's the man I'm waiting for! 'Morning, Major."
"Er, Dr. Major, pleased to meet you," murmured the composer, feebly untruthful. Already the bedroom was taking a strange aspect to him, the aspect of a hospital. Bandages and bottles seemed to have sprung from nowhere. Lachlan poured fluids briskly in basins before the window, and Major set out mysterious articles from a black bag on the chest of drawers. The paraphernalia spread incessantly, and the nurse continued, as if by magic, to produce sheets, and cans of hot water without having quitted the room.
"I think we'll move the bed. Nurse," said Lachlan, and they pulled it into the middle of the floor. The anæsthetist felt the patient's pulse, and applied the stethoscope; and Van Norden noticed for the first time that the pattern of the wall-paper resembled pink mushrooms in bunches of vermicelli.
An oppressive "tent" was placed over his mouth. He felt very helpless, very childish all at once. The vapour of the "A.C.E." grew suffocating; his heart began to thump as if it would burst. He signalled the danger to Lachlan, and Lachlan gave a nod. Van Norden glared impotently—he was sure that he was the victim of a blunder, that this pounding of the heart was too violent to be safe. Now there was a roaring in his ears. The idiots were killing him—and he was gagged, defenceless! Momentarily he was faint with terror, and then a lethargy which he mistook for courage stole through him; it flattered his vanity to perceive with what listlessness he confronted death. He was being a hero! … It was not unpleasant—it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Nothing mattered in the least.
His next impression was of being very cramped. In the mist of his consciousness there lurked the remembrance of the operation, and he assumed vaguely that it was over. He lay waiting to be congratulated, wondering why nobody spoke to him. Had he been left alone? He felt so bewilderingly limp that he couldn't turn, but he opened his mouth to say, "Are you there, Lachlan?" and to his horror, emitted nothing but a baby's bleat. His mouth remained open with amazement, and gigantic fingers suddenly thrust something sickening into it, while an unfamiliar voice made ridiculous noises at him.
Consternation held Van Norden spellbound. There were seconds in which he feared that he was insane. Presently another thought assailed him, one so startling that his blood ran cold. Minutes passed, minutes too terrible for words to paint. He gathered the fortitude to examine as much of his person as was exposed: the hands belonging to him were minute, the hands of an infant! He stared at them aghast and shuddering. There could be no doubt of it—he had died under the operation, and had been born again! All that was natural enough, but the unforeseen and fearful thing was that he still remembered.
He was once more a baby. Whose? The immense import of the question throbbed in him. Where he lay he could see no more of the room than the ceiling, and he was unable to judge whether he had been reincarnated in a mansion or a hovel. There had been a royal princess expecting a baby, he reflected. "Great Scotland Yard!" thought Van Norden, "suppose I'm Royalty this time?" But the remaining pessimism in him rejected the fancy almost as it rose. "Too good to be true," he mused; "I expect my father's a beggarly artist, or a curate—I don't suppose I'm even an only child. It's a ghastly situation—I wonder at what age one begins to forget?"
The woman with the gigantic fingers—or fingers comparatively gigantic—was speaking to someone now, and Van Norden listened intently, in the hope of ascertaining something of his prospects.
"Yes," said the woman, "and her, too, poor soul—don't know anything about it yet of course! They won't tell her for days. He died a moment before the mite was born. Wrote songs and such like. Yes, they say the operation was quite successful, but he didn't rally—too weak, you know. Oh, awfully sad!"
"Grant me patience!" thought Van Norden; "I might have known it—I'm in that damned house in Dulwich still!"
"A quiet little thing, poor orphan, ain't it?" the monthly nurse went on; and then she leant over the cradle and made the ridiculous noise at him again. In a burst of fury, Van Norden tried to swear at her, but he could produce only the baby's bleat. He yearned to be quiet, to be left undisturbed—there was so much to consider. He had allowed his life-policy to lapse, and now he bitterly repented the false economy. He wondered what the furniture would fetch, and if Violet would be enabled to bring him up properly. Perhaps his father-in-law would come to her assistance?—his "grandfather," he ought to say now! It would be a pretty kettle of fish if his widow—that was to say his "mother"—were left to her own resources. What would become of him? A board school, and a junior clerkship! "I suppose it's entirely problematical whether I shall even inherit my musical talent?" mused the unhappy infant. "It's a nice lookout for me, I must say!"
"But there," added the woman, "a girl baby always does keep quieter than a boy—I'm always thankful to see it a girl. Ookytooky, then! Ain't I, my precious? Lor, the blessed lamb's choking!"
Van Norden had indeed turned purple in the face. A girl! Culminating calamity, a girl! The blankness of the girl's outlook, the poverty of the marriage that she must expect to make, was overwhelming. "Now, why," Van Norden asked herself passionately, "why has this thing happened to me? Among all the births that were taking place in the world, couldn't they have spared me a decent one? I don't harp on a palace, but, say, reasonable advantages? Opulent people are having sons every minute, yet I must go as the daughter of a widow in straitened circumstances. Upon my soul, it's heartrending!"
However, when she and Violet met again she was somewhat consoled by the warmth of her mother's welcome; and after the news of the bereavement was broken, the young widow cooed so tenderly of the manifold virtues of "darling papa" that Van Norden was quite touched. "A good sort!" meditated Van Norden, as Violet joggled her up and down; "I had no idea at the time that she appreciated me so much."
In hours of comparative resignation there was nothing more fascinating to Van Norden, while she lay in the pink-and-white bassinette, than to mark the development of her new identity—the process by which the trivial pains and pleasures of the moment attained supreme importance, and the pressing anxieties which beset her at the hour of her birth became gradually blurred. The fact would have appeared incredible to the baby formerly had she heard with how little fret and jar the human mind adapted itself to another form and sex; she would not have believed the Ego could renounce so easily its interest in matters that, to its previous incarnation, had been absorbing. And doubtless, she reflected, she would disbelieve it again later!
Her attitude towards the bottle, for instance, fascinated her extremely. At first she had regarded it with disdain. Even when she recognised its suitability to her physical needs, she had merely tolerated the thing as a disagreeable necessity. This contempt, this suction under protest, was very brief. Soon she grew to relish the bottle, to clamour for it when it was late. Then, too, she was able to extract amusement from a coral-and-bells, and was again engrossed by the ticking of a watch. "Marvellous!" thought Van Norden, while she hovered at the parting of the ways, "marvellous thing, Nature, upon my word!" But, a trifle humiliated at moments like these, she would throw the coral, or watch, on the floor and set up a howl. The devoted Violet often mistook the humiliation for a pin, and undressed her—an indignity which annoyed Van Norden more still.
Before she was six weeks old Van Norden had ceased to consider the financial position, and accepted without questioning who provided; she began to yield to the charm of the bottle and the watch unreservedly, and had scarcely a remaining care. Only while she plucked at Violet's crape, the past whispered in her, and a dim consciousness that the relations between her mother and herself were involved clouded the infantile brow.
"What's she thinking about, a love?" Violet would murmur, swaying her to and fro. "Doesn't she look worried, a pet!" And from the lap that was once Van Norden's wife's, Van Norden would raise great eyes to her solemnly.
When eight or nine months had passed, this glimmer of memory, which had then become nearly extinct, was fanned to ardour by a painful circumstance. They had gone to Dieppe with Violet's parents, and in the hotel Violet made the acquaintance of a Major somebody. The acquaintance had progressed when Van Norden was first brought in contact with him in the garden, and the gentleman paid the pretty widow marked attentions, and grinned at her baby propitiatingly.
"Jolly little chap," remarked the Major, worrying Van Norden with a forefinger.
"It's a little girl, Major," said Violet, smiling reproval.
"Oh, confound it all! I mean how stupid of me!" faltered the Major. "Lovely little thing, anyhow. I suppose you're awfully proud of her, Mrs. Van Norden, eh? The only pebble on the beach, what? It seems awfully rum to see you with a baby though—you look such a girl, don't you know."
"What nonsense!" said Violet, blushing; "I'm an elderly woman if one counts one's age by one's troubles." She glanced significantly at her weeds, and sighed.
"Oh, ah, of course I understand; I—I can sympathise, I can indeed. But you shouldn't think of your troubles too much, Mrs. Van Norden, if I may say so—you should buck up. Life, after all, is" He struggled with his eyeglass and failed to enunciate his sentiments on life.
"Life is very, very strange," said Violet, gazing pensively at the sea.
"Isn't it?" said the Major eagerly. "Just fancy, it's only a week since I met you, what?"
"Oh, I wasn't thinking of that," she murmured.
"I am," said the Major, "I think of it lots. It seems so rum, don't you know, that I'd never seen you till a week ago. Don't you think that sometimes people meet who were meant to meet, and that, for them, a week scores more than years and years of society between people who er—well, who only happen to meet because they're introduced, don't you know?"
Van Norden lay communing with herself. In the little brain the voice of the past cried for recognition. She eyed the adults darkly, agitated by the sense of a tragedy which she sought piteously to define. The soul of the baby sprawling on the cushions was symptomatic of marital jealousy, though the mind failed to diagnose the disease. Distressed and puzzled, Van Norden burst into startling screams, and kicked her little limbs about furiously. Violet was unable to pacify her; and, much alarmed, was about to dispatch the Major for the nurse when, through the windows of the salon, came the prelude to a song, and someone began to sing "Heaven were a Void without Thee." The baby's paroxysm ceased almost at once; her gaze grew wide. Striking her ear when it did, the ballad that she had created in her preceding incarnation revivified her consciousness of the former life. The veil was rent; the female infant was at heart a husband—and looking in the faces of Violet and her new lover. Van Norden remembered all.
She could say nothing—speech was not yet granted to her—could not proclaim, "I am Otto," though she beheld her widow wooed by another man. Life holds no moment more terrible than an experience like this. Nor did her agony fade with her banishment from the scene. On the contrary, her helplessness intensified her sufferings; too young as yet to toddle, incapable of intruding where she wished, Van Norden was constantly racked by tortures of the imagination. Consumed with jealousy, and craving to be in the salon, she was compelled to lie fuming in her cot—or was strapped in her perambulator while her frenzied fancy followed Violet and the Major into the Casino.
Soon she employed the only weapon in her power, and kicked and screamed as often as an attempt was made to remove her from Violet's presence. By this means she witnessed much that would otherwise have been hidden from her—was indeed a witness of her successor's proposal. Stricken with resentment, the babe that had once been the widow's husband lay in her lap while the Major begged her to be his wife.
"I know it's a bit early for me to speak," he stammered, "but I can't help it—if I were to let you go away without telling you how much I care for you, I might never see you again. Only give me a word—I'll wait. I'll be as patient as I can, but tell me that there's a chance for me."
She was silent a long while; evidently she was much moved. At last she murmured, "I don't know what to say."
"Can't you care a bit for me?"
"Ah, it isn't that!" she owned tearfully.
"Darling! Dearest!"
"Sh!" she said, "you oughtn't. It's so soon; and—oh, I don't know, there's so much to consider. There's my child." She clasped Van Norden protectively.
"You don't suppose I'd be rough on it?" cried the Major. "Why, I give you my word—just as if it were my own. Violet, in a few months' time? Will you marry me in a few months' time?"
He leant lower, and she raised her gaze; the next instant they had kissed across Van Norden's head. All the rekindled manhood in the infant's consciousness flamed to avenge the outrage, burned to strike the supplanter down, to destroy him. The disparity between the virile impulse and the tiny frame was maddening. Purpling with shame and indignation, Van Norden reared to spit at him, but could only dribble.
The human brain at the age of nine months is incapable of supporting a strain of this degree. Soon afterwards Violet had to send in hot haste for a medical man. After an examination, he spoke gravely of removing something.
"‘Removing' something? You don't mean operating'?"
"Yes, we shall have to operate," answered the doctor.
There was a morning when a hospital nurse came to the cot, putting on an apron, and the surgeon followed. Violet and the Major were present, the Major soothing her.
"I think we'll move the bed," said the surgeon; and Van Norden lay staring through the window at the brilliant sky.
The room began to acquire a novel air. The nurse produced sheets and cans of hot water from nowhere; the surgeon poured fluids in basins briskly. The Major set out mysterious articles from a black bag on the chest of drawers. The sky developed a pattern of pink mushrooms and bunches of vermicelli—and Van Norden came to his senses.
He saw Lachlan looking at him.
"Well, how do you feel?" asked Lachlan. "We've got rid of your Myxoma for you. And your wife's first-rate. You've a little son waiting downstairs—fine boy, too!"
"Fine boy?" murmured the composer drowsily. "No, I was a fine girl."
"Not quite come round yet, Nurse," said Lachlan; "let him sleep the rest of it off, and he'll be as right as rain!"