PARTISAN REVIEW
<497
looking from a window of the building it,elf, nor going into any of
the doors. The place always seemed decorously deserted. On Armis–
tice Day the gun would be surrounded by wreaths of Flanders
poppies.
Burton's daughter Edith had married a gunner m the Great
War, and he had been killed, after leaving her with one child. But
she didn't live at these almshouses because she then married another
gunner who, unfortunately, had survived the war, because no man
could have been worse to her than he was. The savagery that
he
brought home with him from the mud of the Ypres Salient (but
which no doubt had been fed on much that was there before) was
execrated even by Burton, who was respectable and civilized by
comparison.
The man's name was also Ernest, but he was known to every–
one as Blonk, a mysterious label put onto him by his childhood
friends from Radford Woodhouse, and which lasted him till the day
of his death. He was a demon with boots and fists, and he used
both on his wife, together with the blackest bad language he could
muster. He worked alternately as a bric:;layers' laborer and a coal
miner, changing jobs when the mood took him, and indulging his
craze for playing football whenever a spell of unemployment came
between. The expression of his face was tough and cunning, and he
had a head of springy and grizzled hair. When Burton told Edith,
just before she married Blonk, that he was no good and would be
sure to lead her a dance, she simply thought he was trying to keep
her under his thumb as he had always done, and so ignored his
warnmg.
Wayward Edith had already been a few years in service, and
wouldn't listen to her father. In fact the three of Burton's girls who
married young were wayward, and were not entirely made that way
by his bullying.
It
is said that wayward girls never get good husbands
- whatever a good husband might be. They are never satisfied, in
any case, being too mettlesome either to get a good husband, or to
be content with a bad one.
Perhap~
they desen'ed neither, and
should never have married at all. But they did because many men
found them attractive, that flighty trio of blacksmith's daughters,
and they sooner or later succumbed to marriage in order to get out
of Burton's clutches.
