Sat, May 19 2012
The Tale of the Very Large Bathtub
Phileas Fogg wandered in the green warmth of the conservatory in the afternoon with his collar and cuffs undone because of the heat and a great heaviness of trouble in his mind.
All was not well at Shillingworth Magna.
Rebecca kept to her room for most of the morning, these days, but she declined to say what might be the matter, or even to admit that there was something out of the ordinary about her behavior. She was brooding about something. Her denials were no comfort; and yet he couldn't call her a damned liar when she had cheerfully claimed that things could not be better in her life, not if he was to hope to preserve what little conjugal contact he was still permitted. Sleeping apart was not an issue, or not an insurmountable one; Phileas had always cherished a certain horror of the lower class's promiscuous practices along those lines. Rebecca still tolerated being held from time to time, yes, and would accept a chaste kiss in greeting at breakfast when she came to breakfast; but had ceased to offer.
It wasn't the loss of physical contact that hurt.
She had turned away from him.
She denied him her affection, her heart, her mind, she treated him with perfect formality as a guest to whom she chanced to be related; and although he could tell himself that she was in a difficult period of one sort or another-although he could convince himself that she simply needed all of her concentration to work out a problem that she would not discuss-he couldn't quite conquer the fear that was in his heart.
It had been eighteen months since they had been married. Twenty.
What if the problem was that she had realized that it had been a mistake?
An error of such magnitude could never be made right. Such a mistake condemned both of them to a lifetime of loneliness without hope of rescue or relief, because there was no way in which they could become unmarried, not really. Not and remain English. They had been married by the Archbishop in the presence of a personal representative of the Queen of England. The royal sanction to the match was as good as the royal command that it be made, and be successful. If Rebecca had suddenly realized that she did not in fact love Phileas, or that she had exhausted what small store of love she might have had for him, they were both condemned to Hell forever.
Rebecca, because to be trapped in a relationship with a man she could not love would be the ultimate torture for that fine and noble nature.
Himself, because to be Rebecca's husband in name but no longer in fact, to see her every day and know that his presence was intolerable to her, to know that she was in her bedroom just across the hall and would never ever after cross to his or condescend to open hers to him, to know that she shrank from contact with him and still remember the joy with which she had once shared the comforts of the flesh with him-Phileas did not in the least understand how he might be able to bear it.
That there would be no heir to Shillingworth Magna then was only a small part of the grief that Phileas felt in anticipation. The short period of time in which he had imagined that such a thing might happen had not been very long, and had not sunk too deep within his heart. Once, years ago, when he had hoped to bring Mrs. Saratoga Browne home as his bride, he had contemplated the gift that would be within her power to bestow of a child to inherit on both sides of the Atlantic. Again, not too very long ago, when as a newlywed husband he had accepted Rebecca's decision that she did not wish to contemplate motherhood just yet, which quite naturally contained within it an implied promise that she would be willing to consider the idea at some later date. He had not long cherished fantasies of a son or a daughter, nor had the fantasy had time to root itself deeply enough in his hopes for the future for him to feel its loss very terribly.
He had reservations of his own about children.
Father had loved Erasmus, and been tender and proud of Rebecca, so Phileas had decided that it might have been a problem more specific between men and oldest sons because Father had been a good parent to Erasmus, nor did Rebecca remember him with a fraction of the resentful dread that Phileas had not yet managed to banish from his heart. That was a comfort of a sort-his father had not been an incompetent or unloving father to all of his children, only to one of them-and trouble of another sort, because Phileas had long since had to admit to himself that he had been a disappointment and a reproach to his father, and there was no way in which a man could have a younger child to love and nurture tenderly without necessarily having to have an older child first on whom to lay the burden of an amateur parent's expectations and with whom to learn what not to do to love one's children.
So there was that.
And there was the other thing.
Passepartout was quite correct, of course, there were not so many sad burials of women dead in childbed with their dead infants in their arms these days as when Phileas had been a child. But there were still the graves, and the headstones that did double duty, mother and child, and a single day to suffice for the entire span of the latter's life. The scriptures said that Eve's daughters were condemned to bring forth in sorrow; sorrow was too pale a word for it by half. There were women who bore children with tolerable ease, but they were few in number, celebrated by the gossip because of the novelty of the thing. Pregnancy was dangerous. He himself was a tall man; Erasmus had been a baby of prodigious size who had laid Phileas' mother low for months after the long labor that had preceded his delivery.
Phileas couldn't bear to think of his Rebecca so wrung out, bedridden, gray in the face with suffering; and he could not, could not, bear to think any further than that, past Erasmus, beyond Erasmus.
Rebecca was an agent. She faced injury, danger, death, and even torture as a normal consequence of her elected profession.
No horror Phileas had ever seen in the Secret Service or beyond had ever compared with the suffering his mother had endured for days and days and days struggling in labor with a child already dead in her womb and no surgeon competent-or willing-to risk what might have saved her, to be found.
With this turmoil in his aching heart Phileas wandered amongst the pomegranate trees in the conservatory wondering what was to become of his life and the blissful happiness that he had once enjoyed as Rebecca's husband. He had to face the facts. But he couldn't make up his mind to what those facts might be. He'd asked Dr. Michelli down from London; Rebecca would be furious, and what could Dr. Michelli tell him, really?
That his wife was not pregnant, and another cause must be sought for her withdrawal from him?
Or that she was pregnant, and subject therefore by Phileas' doing to a horrible death by prolonged and ferocious agony?
Frowning over the leaf of a young banana tree Phileas paid no attention to who might have come into the conservatory. One of the maids, perhaps, because he could just hear the rustle of a woman's skirts across the conservatory floor.
Coming up behind him.
Carrying before it the delicate scent of lavender, French lavender, and Phileas closed his eyes and bit his under-lip and wished as hard as he could wish that it might turn out to be Rebecca.
She came up right behind him and put her arms around him from behind, laying her cheek against his back. Her palms were flat across his mid-section; it felt as though she lay them on his heart to comfort him directly. He couldn't suffer with Rebecca here. The pain would be back later. It had a return ticket, and was faithful and punctual as well.
But right this moment Rebecca embraced him with her hands laid across his heart and Phileas could believe that there was yet good hope to be found in the world.
"Hello, Phileas," Rebecca said. Very ordinary and matter-of-fact, but she had no subtle wall of resentment built up there in her voice to hold him off. Not just now. "Listen. I have been an awful crab, haven't I just? I'm sorry."
He didn't want to turn around in case he was hallucinating. It might not be Rebecca. He might be making it up. There was a coca-plant in here, placed as a part of the Royal Geographical Society's research program; and a beautiful decorative thing that Delacourt said was actually Indian hemp, so it wasn't entirely impossible that there were fumes and miasmas.
Except that miasmas by definition ought properly to confine themselves to the hours of the day after sundown, and it was only mid-afternoon even now, and if there had been fumes and miasmas it was likely that someone else would have noticed it. Someone would have told him. Passepartout would surely have let him know.
Phileas turned around.
It was Rebecca.
Rebecca in a gown of gauzy sky-blue crepe, an old-fashioned pattern very loose and summery, and an apron. Very deep pockets. She was a little pale, but she looked up into his eyes with a clear and unbounded affection that he felt all the way down to the soles of his feet and back up to the top of his head again.
Rebecca.
His Rebecca.
"I've been so awfully worried, Rebecca," he said. He probably shouldn't. He probably should pretend that nothing had been wrong, gloss over the coolness of recent weeks as of no consequence, and maintain the stiffness of his upper lip. Probably. But stiff upper lips only left a man prey to the fears and apprehensions that he could not clearly face and wrestle with because he wasn't supposed to admit to their existence, and Phileas had found out that that was not such a very good idea after all. He'd discovered the weaknesses of that approach to life at Castle Banquo, one memorable evening more than two years ago now.
She took his arm very cordially and walked him over to the wide rattan couch that stood beneath the jasmines. "Nothing that can't be worked out, Phileas," Rebecca said. "But I've been very selfish, and that was wrong of me. I come with a peace offering."
She was not telling him anything in particular. But what she said was all he needed to hear to understand that she was not going to turn her head away from him, she was not going to close her heart to him; she was still his Rebecca.
That helped.
"What's that, then, Rebecca?" Phileas asked, and could detect only so small a hesitation on the "b" that surely no one else would even notice. It was only because she had only just now unlocked the door and set him free from out of the fearful cage into which he'd worked himself. That was all. Rebecca still loved him. He was still her husband.
She reached into the left-hand pocket of her apron as it lay over her gown. Phileas watched, curiously; there was something odd about that apron, now that Rebecca had sat down. It seemed to bunch up in a peculiar manner, at the right.
Had it just moved?
She drew her hand out, and there she had three beautiful oranges in her hand, and offered them to him. Valencias, perhaps. Confused, Phileas received her gift in open hands. Oranges. He wasn't supposed to mention them to her. Oranges meant war, after Seville, and he could not yet contemplate even so light-spirited and humorous a war with Rebecca. He had been in exile from her for days. For weeks. She had only just now let him come back to her.
What was he supposed to say?
"Well. Very kind of you, Rebecca. Thank you. But I must admit that I'm really not at all sure I understand."
She was smiling at him now with the wolf in her grin, but lovingly. She was his beautiful wolf, the most beautiful wolf he had ever seen in a woman's garments. He never knew that she loved him so certainly as when she smiled at him like that, promising an ambush.
"Only polite," Rebecca assured him, as if it explained. "A return of courtesies. Because."
She reached into her apron once more.
But into its rightmost pocket, this time.
The one that seemed to have bunched up rather oddly.
The one that Phileas thought might have just moved.
"I've already got this beautiful little duckling from you, Phileas, after all."
It was a rather annoyed little duckling, really, that Rebecca held in her hands and showed to him.
Ducklings were well past the yellow fluff of their first hatching by this time of year. This one was on its way to becoming a grown duck, and clearly felt that its dignity had been compromised by its transport in an apron pocket.
She had a duckling in her apron that she'd gotten from him, and the idea overwhelmed Phileas all at once.
"Oh, Rebecca. Are you quite sure. I-"
She set the duckling down on the conservatory floor, and it started for the conservatory pool. No longer heated past the comfort level of a duck. Free from lavender bubbles. So changed with water-plants and other vegetation as to be only barely recognizable as the same pool at all.
Taking Phileas' hands she moved the oranges one by one to the seat of the rattan couch behind him so that she could shift herself to rest against him, quite close, and put her arms around his neck.
"Quite sure," Rebecca said-and she sounded almost very happy, to Phileas. "I've just talked to a poulterer from London, some Doctor Michelli or another, wonderful the advances in domestic science and animal husbandry these days, isn't it? And I'm very sorry, Phileas, because I know that this can only be a dreadful imposition. I've got a little duckling with your name on it in my apron, my dear, and it's my fault for not having hidden the nest away in time, but there you are."
It was the words to the old song. The old bawdy song. I'll give anybody a shilling and a bottle of the best, if they'll ruffle up the feathers of the cuckoo's nest.
A duckling, in a cuckoo's nest?
Why not?
Cuckoos hid their eggs in other birds' nests, wasn't that the whole point?
He wasn't going to have a son to raise with love and care whilst doing everything he could to avoid turning into his own father, after all.
He was going to have a duckling.
Father had never had ducklings. Erasmus had been a coot; and Phileas himself more of a stork or a crane than anything else, awkward and too tall and too skinny.
"Phileas?"
Rebecca's voice had gotten a little thin, and Phileas realized suddenly that while he had been sitting there stunned by the declaration and its implications Rebecca was quite as concerned about whether he was happy as he had been about whether she held him to blame. Rather than just responsible.
"I love ducklings." Special sorts of ducklings. "I can't think of anything more wonderful than seeing one in your lap, Rebecca. It's a terrible imposition of me, I know, can you forgive me? Because I'm told that ducklings can be tedious to hatch out."
Little kicking duckling feet. Little webbed toes.
Rebecca smiled, and kissed him very tenderly. "I'll take it out of your hide, Phileas, I promise." Kissed him again. "I didn't mean for it to happen just now. But here we are."
"That's the problem with ducks, though, isn't it?"
The sound of his own voice was so soft in his ears he hardly recognized it. "You never know where one will turn up next. A duckling in an apron. Imagine that, Rebecca, and have I told you yet today that I love you more than my life, which would not be in the least worth living without you in it?"
Forehead to forehead with him Rebecca smiled. "Perhaps. Perhaps you just did. But you can tell me again, Phileas, because I'm feeling rather insecure just now, and I'm afraid it's only going to get worse before it gets better."
Then he would be forced to dote on her, fuss over her, and pet her to his heart's content.
She would usually only tolerate so much.
"How do I love thee?" Phileas asked, rhetorically. "Let me count the ways. Quack. Quack. Quack. Quack."
The oranges fell to the floor and rolled away.
The duckling paddled in the conservatory pool.
Phileas Fogg held Rebecca on the rattan couch and talked complete nonsense to her with a full heart until well past tea-time, and Rebecca for once seemed to be content.
Afterward
Verne's Voiceover
In the weeks that followed the announcement of Rebecca's pregnancy, I sometimes wondered whether people who were married could come to share some sort of a psychic connection. Rebecca seemed to be a perfectly serene expectant mother; Fogg was the one whose behavior became erratic. Even more so than usual.
It was a sharing of the role, perhaps, in a sense. Fogg's behavior became increasingly irrational as time went on, and I worried about my friend until I finally realized that he was just managing his fears for Rebecca and her child as best he could. For her own part Mrs. Rebecca Fogg simply sailed through the summer and on through the end of the year as peacefully and calmly as you can imagine.
Under the circumstances it was entirely understandable that she not tell Fogg the doctor's suspicions about twins. She may well have given him hints, though. I chanced to glimpse them one day in the parlor as Fogg-on his knees-leaned his head against Rebecca's belly as though he were listening to something, a liberty I never saw her permit to anyone else or at any other time. The evidence was there, by that time, we had all become aware that the child or children as it happened had begun to kick. He might have felt it.
There were too many issues in Fogg's mind for him to be able to face the possibility, perhaps. Fogg dealt with his increasing anxiety in a number of more or less ingenious ways, and building the duckpond was only one of them.
Declaring an absolute moratorium on duck-hunting at Shillingworth Magna was another. It generated a great deal of local controversy that I'm afraid brought out the worst in Phileas Fogg; I was concerned for my friend's peace of mind at the time, but years later I realized that it was all just part of the local color of rural England in this nineteenth century.
It isn't for me or any other man to claim that it was an uneventful confinement, when it came, but I have to say that Rebecca seemed to get through it as well as could be hoped. I tried to get Fogg out of the house, but he wouldn't go. I hadn't realized that his mother had died in somewhat similar circumstances and in that very house when Fogg had been much younger. He hid himself in his study like a wounded animal in a dark den, but he wouldn't close the door. He could hear everything that was going on upstairs in Rebecca's bedroom, and it maddened him.
She was in heavy labor for some hours, and I'd have to admit that even though the screams that I could hear sounded at least as much angry and martial as filled with pain it was hard to hear them. As I said Fogg would not leave the house, terrified I think that Rebecca would die and he would not be there. I never saw a man go through so much brandy in so short a time and show so few signs of intoxication. I did what I could; I badgered him into fencing with me in his study. It wasn't fair, because Fogg was not entirely himself, and it might be said that I was taking advantage of him; but I learned some interesting techniques that afternoon.
You've never heard a house go so quiet so suddenly as that house did when the baby cried.
Fogg froze in mid-riposte, but then he wheeled and was half-way to the stairs before I quite realized that he had moved. He wasn't running, either, Fogg could simply move more quickly than was natural or holy when he really wanted to.
I had nearly caught up with him near the top of the stairs when the baby cried again.
Fogg staggered back against the wall, and I almost think he might have lost his balance and fallen, but luckily I was there to catch him. Or else he caught me. I can't be sure. The point is that it wasn't the same baby. There should have been no rational way to have been able to tell the cry of one newborn from another; I was in on the secret and Fogg may have guessed, but there was no question about it. It was another baby.
Passepartout was in the doorway to Rebecca's room with something very red and wrinkled wrapped up in a receiving-blanket, and one of the silliest smirks on his face that I've ever seen. That's saying a lot, for Passepartout. Oddly enough though Fogg only glanced at the baby, and didn't seem to notice the nurse washing the other twin at all. He was through and on his knees at the bedside in a moment's time. I was a little worried myself, so I was close enough to hear Fogg talk to her. Stuttering, but not like it had been during his ordeal in Scotland; it was a different sort of tension in his speech.
He asked her if she was all right, and she said she was fine, and asked him if the babies weren't beautiful-as though she was encouraging him to notice that he was a father. Fogg wasn't noticing. He can be a very single-minded man, and what he seemed to want to know more than anything was whether she would ever forgive him the torture she had just endured.
I didn't quite catch what it was she said, because Passepartout wanted to show off the baby he was holding, and also I wasn't sure I should be listening. Rebecca said something about Greek poets. Fogg said something about Pythagoras, as though it caused him genuine anguish; Rebecca said-now, this was very clear, I can quote her exactly-"Well, more than Aristophanes, perhaps, but nothing to touch those damn Dialogues," at which point Fogg put his face down against the rumpled sheets, and wept.
It was at that precise moment that I knew with certainty that if I lived to be a hundred and eighty-seven years old I would never understand the English.
People always speak of beautiful babies. These were pretty ugly, but allowances must be made for the fact that they were about as new as they could be. They got much more appealing within a very few hours after their birth. The nurse finished washing the younger twin and set him in my arms, which was an unpleasant surprise, because I was sure I was going to do something wrong. The weight distribution of newborns is very unexpected. There's so much head there, and the neck is so delicate; it was terrifying.
Fogg had twins.
Passepartout had gone to the bed and settled the girl-baby on Rebecca's bosom before trying to rouse Fogg. Fogg reacted as though he was astounded that Passepartout was there, jumping to his feet and looking about him wildly. The baby that I held pulled Fogg in like a magnet. It was remarkable. I could almost believe those old-wives'-tales of people knowing their infant children even naked and amidst a dozen other babies. That child was Fogg's and Fogg knew it, and he took his son out of my arms as though he had been handling children all his life and took him over to show to Rebecca. As if Rebecca wasn't already acquainted with the child, having carried him around for nine long months.
Passepartout watched them together. Passepartout was looking completely serious, all of a sudden; I knew what that meant. It was up to me to get Passepartout off his feet. He'd been with Rebecca in the bedroom since her labor had started, even before it had become acute.
Fortunately for me I happened to know where Fogg kept the brandy, so I could take care of that.
And that was the end of it all, in a sense; the end of one story-oranges, bathtubs, mallard decoys-and the beginning of an entirely different one for Phileas and Rebecca Fogg. And Passepartout, of course. A son and a daughter, or a daughter and son, because she is the older twin after all by several minutes. Rather attractive children, really, intelligent, polite, two and a half years old.
I chanced to be visiting at Shillingworth Magna not too long ago. I'd come to London on business and arranged some extra time to go and visit my old friends, who were at home just then. It was the evening of the last night of my stay; I was reading the papers in the study while Fogg executed some official correspondence. It was early evening; the double doors-they call them French doors, in England-were open to the terrace. Rebecca came in from the garden trailing a wonderful fragrance of fresh lavender, and paused beside Fogg's desk where he was reading his diplomatic papers to put something down on top of his documents of State. An immature domestic bird. A duckling, of all things.
Fogg didn't seem to be nearly as confused as I was. His behavior really was rather inexplicable. A respectable matron, the mother of his children, and Fogg chased-literally chased-her out of the room and up the stairs.
Passepartout was standing outside the doorway to the study as I rose to look after Fogg in wonder and amazement. Passepartout and I exchanged glances; then Jean smiled at me happily.
"I am always wanting a big family," Jean said, but in English. I almost never heard him speak our own language at Shillingworth Magna. "It is about time. I am not getting any younger."
I'll leave the rest of the scenario to you; I think it's obvious enough. Except the duck.
If I live to be a hundred and eight-seven I will never understand the English.
The End
Scene 4 | Scene 5