By

ARN*LD B*NN*TT

I.

Emily Wrackgarth stirred the Christmas pudding till her right arm began to ache.  But she did not cease for that.  She stirred on till her right arm grew so numb that it might have been the right arm of some girl at the other end of Bursley.  And yet something deep down in her whispered “It is your right arm!  And you can do what you like with it!”

She did what she liked with it.  Relentlessly she kept it moving till it reasserted itself as the arm of Emily Wrackgarth, prickling and tingling as with red-hot needles in every tendon from wrist to elbow.  And still Emily Wrackgarth hardened her heart.

Presently she saw the spoon no longer revolving, but wavering aimlessly in the midst of the basin.  Ridiculous!  This must be seen to!  In the down of dark hairs that connected her eyebrows there was a marked deepening of that vertical cleft which, visible at all times, warned you that here was a young woman not to be trifled with.  Her brain despatched to her hand a peremptory message—­which miscarried.  The spoon wabbled as though held by a baby.  Emily knew that she herself as a baby had been carried into this very kitchen to stir the Christmas pudding.  Year after year, as she grew up, she had been allowed to stir it “for luck.”  And those, she reflected, were the only cookery lessons she ever got.  How like Mother!

Mrs. Wrackgarth had died in the past year, of a complication of ailments.[8] Emily still wore on her left shoulder that small tag of crape which is as far as the Five Towns go in the way of mourning.  Her father had died in the year previous to that, of a still more curious and enthralling complication of ailments.[9] Jos, his son, carried on the Wrackgarth Works, and Emily kept house for Jos.  She with her own hand had made this pudding.  But for her this pudding would not have been.  Fantastic!  Utterly incredible!  And yet so it was.  She was grown-up.  She was mistress of the house.  She could make or unmake puddings at will.  And yet she was Emily Wrackgarth.  Which was absurd.

[Footnote 8:  See “The History of Sarah Wrackgarth,” pp. 345-482.]

[Footnote 9:  See “The History of Sarah Wrackgarth,” pp. 231-344.]

She would not try to explain, to reconcile.  She abandoned herself to the exquisite mysteries of existence.  And yet in her abandonment she kept a sharp look-out on herself, trying fiercely to make head or tail of her nature.  She thought herself a fool.  But the fact that she thought so was for her a proof of adult sapience.  Odd!  She gave herself up.  And yet it was just by giving herself up that she seemed to glimpse sometimes her own inwardness.  And these bleak revelations saddened her.  But she savoured her sadness.  It was the wine of life to her.  And for her sadness she scorned herself, and in her conscious scorn she recovered her self-respect.