The Tower Rooms

NATURALLY it was not news to me when old Dr. Grayson told me I was tired. There are some things one knows without assistance: and for two months I had suspected that I was getting near the end of my tether. The twelve-year-olds I taught at school had become stupider and more stupid—or possibly I had; and Madame Carr—there was no real reason why she should be called “Madame,” but that she thought it sounded better than plain “Mrs.”—had grown stricter and more difficult to please. She had developed a habit of telling me, each afternoon, when school had been dismissed, what a low standard of deportment I exacted from my form. This also I knew; twelve-year-olds are not usually models of deportment, and I suppose I was not very awe-inspiring. But the daily information got on my nerves.

Then the examinations had been a nightmare. I used to wonder how the girls who grumbled at the questions would have liked the task of correcting the papers—taking bundles home at night and working at them after I had cooked the dinner and helped Colin to wash up. I made several mistakes, too; and of course Madame found them out. One is not at one’s best, mentally, after a long day in school, and the little flat in Prahran was horribly hot and stuffy. Colin had wanted to help me, but of course I could not let him; the poor old boy used to work at his medical books every evening, in a wild hope that something might yet turn up to enable him to take his degree. I did my best at the wretched papers, but after an hour or so my head would ache until it really did not matter to me if I met the information that Dublin was situated on the Ganges. There had been a hideous interview with Madame after the breaking-up, in which she hinted, in an elephantine fashion, that unless my services were shown to be of more value she would hardly be justified in paying me as well as letting Madge have her education free.

It was scarcely a surprise, but, all the same, it staggered me. Housekeeping, since Father died, had not been an easy matter. Colin was just the best brother that ever lived, and when we found how little money there was for us, he had promptly left the University—he was in his fifth year, too, my poor boy. And how he loved the work! Father’s practice brought something that we invested, and Colin got a position in an office. His salary was not much; he helped it out by working overtime whenever he could get the chance, and he had two pupils whom he coached for their second year. The big thing was that nothing must interfere with Madge’s work.

Madge, you see, was the really brilliant one of the family: if we could keep her at school for another two years, she had a very good chance of a scholarship that would take her on to the University; and she had passed so many music exams that it would have been a tragedy not to have kept that up, too. I was not at all brilliant, and it seemed wonderful luck when Madame Carr offered me a minor post, at a small salary, with Madge’s education thrown in. Of course, we knew that Madge was likely to be a very good advertisement for the school; still, it might not have happened, and that tiny salary of mine made all the difference in our finances. We managed, somehow—Colin and I; Madge could not be allowed to do any of the housework, for she was only fifteen, and she was working furiously. She fought us very hard about it, especially when we insisted that she should stay in bed to breakfast on Sunday mornings, but we were firm: so at last she gave in, more or less gracefully. And then I would find her sitting up in bed, darning my stockings. As I told her, it gave me quite a lot of extra work on Saturday night, hiding away everything she might possibly find to mend.

There never was anyone like Colin. He used to get up at some unearthly hour and do all the dirty work until it was time for him to rush to the office: and at night he helped just as cheerfully again. He was always cheerful; to see him washing-up you would have thought it was the thing he loved best on earth. I hated to see him scrubbing and polishing, with the long, slender hands that were just made for a doctor’s. Nobody could imagine how good he was to me; and we managed as I said, somehow. But as I looked at Madame Carr’s hard face I did not know how we could possibly manage without my little salary.

She relented a little towards the end of that unpleasant interview, and said she would think it over, and give me another chance; and she advised me to have a good rest, eat nourishing food, and take a few weeks in the hills. I suppose I must have looked pretty white, and she didn’t want me to be ill there; at any rate, she said good-bye in a hurry, wished me a Merry Christmas, and hustled me off. I have no very clear memory of how I got down the hill to my train. But when I reached home I was idiotic enough to faint right off, which frightened poor Madge horribly, and sent her tearing to the nearest telephone for old Dr. Grayson, who had known us all our lives.

Dr. Grayson came, and was very kind, though his remarks were curiously like Madame’s. He sounded me thoroughly, asked me innumerable questions, and finally told me there was nothing organically wrong—I was just tired, and needed rest and change. “Country air,” he said cheerfully. “You won’t get well in a back street in Prahran. Get away for a month—it’s lucky that it is holiday time!” And he went off, airily oblivious of the fact that he might just as well have ordered me a trip to Mars.

It did not worry me much, although the bare idea of the country made me homesick. One expects doctors to say things, but it is not necessary to acquaint one’s brother with all they say. Unfortunately, however, the old man met Colin on the doorstep, and must needs say it all over again to him; and Colin came in with the old worry-look in his eyes that I hated more than anything. I could hear him and Madge consulting in stage-whispers, in the kitchenette—they might have known that no variety of whisper can fail to be heard in a flat the size of ours, the four rooms of which would easily have fitted into our old dining-room at home. One could almost hear them adjusting the cheerful looks with which they presently came in.

They wouldn’t let me do anything but lie on the sofa. Madge cooked the chops in a determined fashion that made the whole flat smell of burned fat; and Colin did everything else. After dinner was over—it was a gruesome meal, at which Colin was laboriously funny all the time—I was graciously allowed to sit in the kitchenette while they washed up, and we held a council of war.

All the talking in the world could not alter the main fact. There were no funds to pay for country holidays. Our friends—they were not so many as in the old days—were all in Melbourne: our only relations were distant ones, distant in every sense of the word, for they lived in Queensland, and might as well have been in Timbuctoo, Madge sourly remarked, for all the practical use they were. Discuss it as we might, there was no earthly chance of following my prescription.

Poor old Colin looked more like thirty-three than twenty-three as he scrubbed the gridiron with sand-soap.

“You needn’t worry yourselves a bit,” I told them. “All I need is to be away from that horrid old school and Madame Carr, and I’ve got two whole beautiful months. Doctors don’t know everything. I’ll go and sit in Fawkner Park every day and look at the cows, and imagine I’m in Gippsland!”

Colin groaned.

“I don’t see why we haven’t a country uncle or something,” said Madge vaguely: “a red-faced old darling with a loving heart, and a red-roofed farm, and a beautiful herd of cows—Wyandottes, don’t you call them? If we were girls in books we’d have one, and we’d go and stay with him and get hideously fat, and Doris would marry the nearest squatter!” She heaved a sigh.

“Hang the squatter!” Colin remarked; “but I’d give something to see either of you fat. I’m afraid you’re a vain dreamer, Madge. Put down that dish-cloth and let me finish: I’m not going to have you showing up at a music-lesson with hands like a charlady’s.”

Madge gave up the dish-cloth with reluctance. She was silent for quite three minutes—an unusual thing for Madge.

“Look here,” she said at length, with a funny little air of determination. “There’s one thing a whole lot more important than music, and that’s Doris’s health. I wonder we didn’t think of it before!”

“Well, I’d hate to contradict you,” Colin answered, slightly puzzled. “But I don’t see that this highly-original discovery of yours makes it any the more necessary for you to scour saucepans while I’m about.”

“Oh, bother the saucepans!” said Madge impatiently. “I didn’t mean that—though it’s more my work than yours to wash them, anyhow. Washing-up isn’t a man’s job.”

“There isn’t any man-and-woman business about this establishment,” said Colin firmly, “except that I’m boss. Just get that clearly in your young mind. And what did you mean, if you meant anything?”

“Why, it’s as clear as daylight,” Madge announced. “Doris’s health is more important than music: you admitted that yourself. Well, then, let’s sell the piano!”

We looked at each other in blank amazement. Sell the piano! Madge’s adored piano, Father’s last gift to her. Beneath her fingers it was a very wonder-chest of magic and delight: all the fairies of laughter, all the melody of rippling water, all the dearest dreams come true were there when Madge played. Already old Ferrari, her Italian music-master, talked to us of triumphs ahead—triumphs in a wider field than Australia. And she sat on the kitchen table, swinging her legs, and talked of selling her Bechstein! No wonder we gasped.

“Talk sense!” growled Colin, when his breath came back.

“It is sense,” Madge retorted. “It’s worth ever so much money: a cheaper piano would do me just as well to practise on. Even if I gave up music altogether it would be worth it to give Doris a rest. She can’t go on as she is—you can see that for yourself, Colin Earle!”

“I certainly can’t go on hearing you rave!” I said. “Why, when you’re a second Paderewski you have got to be the prop of our declining years. It would be just about the finish for Colin and me if your music were interfered with, and——” at which point I suddenly found something hard in my throat. I suppose it was because I was a bit tired, for we aren’t a weepy family, but I just howled.

It alarmed Colin and Madge very badly. They patted me on the back and assured me I shouldn’t be bothered in any way, and begged me to drink some water: and when I managed to get hold of my voice again I seized the opportunity to make Madge promise that she wouldn’t mention the word “selling” in connection with the Bechstein again, unless we were really at our last gasp. This accomplished, we dispatched her to practice, and Colin returned to the washing-up.

Madge went, rather reluctantly, and Colin rubbed away at the saucepans, with the furrow deepening between his brows. I was in the midst of explaining clearly to him that I did not need a change, quite conscious the while of my utter failure to convince him, when there was a clatter in the passage, and Madge burst in, waving a newspaper, and incoherent with excitement.