by A. J. Cronin
There was a short silence. He did not wish to be an old stick-in-the-mud. He was tired, obsessed by the necessity for study; it was, as he had said, a wet, inhospitable night outside; the concert did not attract him. Suddenly an idea, a grand idea, struck him. His eyes lit up:
“Listen, Jenny! How about this! I’ll take to-night off, like you suggest. I’ll run up and fetch down Sam and Hughie. We’ll bank up the fire, make a hot-pot supper and play rummy. Talk about your entertainers… they’re not in the hunt with Sam. Our Sammy’s the best you ever heard, he’ll keep you in stitches all the time.” It honestly was, he felt, a great idea: he had been worried over his estrangement from his family, he wanted to be one with his brothers again, this was a marvellous opportunity to break the ice. But as his face brightened, Jenny’s fell.
“No,” she said coldly, “I wouldn’t like that at all. Your family hasn’t treated me right, David. I’ll not have them make a back door of my house.”
Another silence. He compressed his lips firmly. He felt that she was unreasonable and unjust, it was not fair to ask him to go into Tynecastle on a night like this. He would not go. Suddenly he saw tears rise smarting to her eyes. That did it. He could not bully her into tears.
He sighed, rose up, closed the book.
“Right, Jenny. Let’s got to the concert then if you feel you’d like it.”
She gave a little trill of delight, clapped her hands, kissed him excitedly.
“You are nice, David darling, really you are! Now you wait a minute, I’ll run up and put on my hat. I won’t be long, we’ve plenty of time to catch the train.”
While she was upstairs he went into the kitchen and cut himself a wedge of bread and cheese. He ate this slowly, staring into the fire: Jenny, he reflected with a wry smile, had probably made up her mind to drag him to the concert days ago.
He had just finished eating when a knock came to the back door. Surprised, he opened it.
“Why, Sammy,” he exclaimed delightedly. “You old dog.”
Sammy, with the hardy grin irremovably fixed on his pale healthy face, rolled into the kitchen.
“Me and Annie was just passin’,” he announced, not—despite the grin—without a certain shyness. “I jest thought I’d look ye up.”
“That’s great, Sammy. But, man… where’s Annie?”
Sam jerked his head towards the outer darkness. The etiquette was perfect. Annie was waiting outside. Annie knew her place. Annie was not sure of her welcome. David saw it all: the obscure figure of Annie Macer strolling quietly, contentedly, outside the house waiting until she be judged worthy to enter. He cried instantly:
“Tell her to come in at once, you big idiot. Go on! Fetch her in this minute.”
Sammy’s grin broadened.
Then Jenny, all dressed to go out, walked into the room. Sammy, on his way to the door, hesitated, not quite sure, gazing at Jenny, who advanced on him with her best company manners.
“This is a great pleasure,” Jenny remarked, smiling ever so politely. “And such a stranger too. What a shame you’ve caught David and me just going out.”
“But Sammy’s dropped in to see us, Jenny,” David broke in. “And he’s brought Annie. She’s outside.”
Jenny’s eyebrows went up; she paused for just the appropriate time; smiled sweetly at Sam.
“Isn’t that a pity! Too bad, really it is, that you should have caught us on the way to the concert. We’ve promised to meet some friends in Tynecastle and really we couldn’t disappoint them. You must look in another time.”
Sammy clung tenaciously to his grin.
“Ah, that’s all right. Annie and me never have much to do. We can come any old time.”
“You’re not to go, Sammy,” burst out David. “Fetch Annie in. And both of you stop and have a cup of tea.”
Jenny threw a pained look towards the clock.
“Not at all, lad.” Sammy was already on his way to the door. “Aw wouldna stop you an’ the missus from goin’ out for anything. Annie an’ me’ll just take a stroll up the Avenue. Good night to ye both.”
Right to the end Sammy’s grin persisted; but beneath it, David saw that Sammy was bitterly hurt. Out Sammy would go to Annie and mutter:
“Come on, lass, we’re not good enough for the likes o’ them. Since our Davey’s turned schoolmaster he fancies himself too much, I’m thinking.”
David winced, tom between his desire to run after Sammy and his promise to take Jenny to the concert. But Sammy was already gone.
Jenny and David caught the six-ten for Tynecastle, a slow, crowded train which stopped at every station. They went to the Eldon Hall. The tickets cost two shillings each, the cheaper seats being filled when they reached the hall. They sat through three hours of steamy performance.
Jenny adored it, clapping with the rest for encores, but to David it was ghastly. He tried not to be superior; tried hard to like it; but the entire concert party defeated him. Oh! They’re first rate, Jenny kept breathing enthusiastically. But they were not first rate. They were fourth rate: the leftovers from holiday pierrot troupes, the comedian relying mainly upon his mother-in-law and Colin Loveday upon a fruity vibrato and a hand laid soulfully upon his heart. David thought of Sally’s little performance in the parlour of Scottswood Road, so vastly superior to this; he thought of his books lying unopened; he thought of Sammy and Annie Macer strolling arm in arm down the Avenue.
When the performance was over Jenny nestled up to him as they came out of the hall.
“It’s an hour till the last train, David; we must take that, it’s such a quick one… first stop Sleescale. Let’s run round to the Percy Grill for something. Joe always used to take me there. Only a port or that, we can’t wait at the station.”
At the Percy they each had a port. Jenny was delighted to be back, recognised familiar faces, chaffed the napkin-stuffed waiter whom, recalling a joke of the red-nosed comedian, she called Chawles.
“A scream, wasn’t he?” she added, giggling.
The port made things a little different for David, outlines less incisive, colours rosier, atmosphere a trifle hazy. He smiled across at Jenny.
“You’re a reckless imp,” he said, “and what an influence on a poor man! I see I shall have to take to coaching young Barras after all.”
“That’s the way to look at it, darling.” She approved warmly, instantly. She enticed him with her eyes, pressed her knee against his under the table. And with a gay daring she ordered Chawles to bring her another port.
After that they had to run quickly for the train. Quickly, quickly, they caught it in a whirl, flung themselves into an empty smoker.
“Oh dear! Oh dear!” Jenny giggled, panting. “That was a scream, David darling, wasn’t it now?” She paused, recovered her breath, saw that they were alone, remembered with a queer catch deep down in her that the train did not stop until Sleescale… another half-hour at least. She liked queer places, always had, even with Joe. Suddenly she snuggled up close to him: “You’ve been so good to me, David, I can’t thank you enough. Pull down the blinds, David… it’s cosier that way.”
He looked at her doubtfully, closely, as she lay in his arms; her eyes were shut—under the lids they seemed full; her pale lips were moist and a little apart as if vaguely smiling; her breath held the generous fume of port; her body was soft and very warm.
“Go on,” she murmured. “Pull down the blinds. All the blinds.”
“No, Jenny… wait, Jenny…”
The train jolted a little; shook up and down as it took some point on the track. He rose and pulled down all the blinds.
“That’s wonderful, David.”
Afterwards she lay against him; she fell asleep; she snored gently. He stared straight in front of him, a curious look upon his set face. The carriage reeked of stale pipes, port and engine smoke; someone had thrown orange peel upon the floor. Outside it was black as pitch. The wind howled, battered the heavy rain against the carriage window. The train thundered on.
EIGHTEEN
At the beginning of April, when David had been coaching Arthur Barras at the Law for close on three months, he received a message from his father. Harry Kinch, a small boy from the Terraces, brother of that little Alice who had died of pneumonia nearly seven years before, brought the note to David at New Bethel Street school one morning. Dear David will you come up the Wansbeck—trouting Saturday yours Dad. It was clumsily written in copying-ink pencil on the inside of an old envelope.
David was deeply touched. His father still wished to go fishing with him as in those days when he had taken him, a little boy, up the Wansbeck stream! The thought made him happy. For ten days Robert had been out the pit with a flare-up of tubercular pleurisy—he passed it off lightly as “inflammation”—but he was up now and about. Saturday would be his last free day; he wished David to spend it with him. The invitation came like a peace offering straight from his father’s heart.
Standing at his desk in the humming class-room, David’s thoughts flashed swiftly back over these past months. He had gone to the Law against his own inclination, partly because of Jenny’s importunities, certainly because they needed the extra money. But it had upset his father greatly. And, indeed, he felt it strangely unreal himself, that he should now be on familiar terms with the Barrases, who had always figured in his mind as apart from him and his life. He reflected. Aunt Carrie, for instance, so curious and worried about him at the start, inclined to look at him as she did people who came into the house with muddy boots or at Ramage’s bill when she thought he had overcharged her for the sirloin. Her nearsighted eyes had worn that worried distrustfulness for quite a while.
But the look had faded from Aunt Carrie’s eyes in time. She had “taken” to David in the end and would send up hot milk and biscuits to the old schoolroom about nine-o’clock when Arthur and David were due to finish their work.
Then Hilda, strangely enough, had started to drop in with the hot milk and the biscuits. She had begun by treating him—not like the person who came in with dirty boots—but like the actual dirt upon the boots. He took no notice, he was quick enough to see it as the symptom of Hilda’s conflict. Hilda interested him. She was twenty-four; her forbidding manner and dark unattractiveness ingrained more deeply now. Hilda, he thought, is not like most unattractive women. They will go on deluding themselves, dressing up, making the best of themselves, reflecting before the mirror, this blue does suit me, or my profile is really quite good, or isn’t my hair charming with this middle parting? deluding themselves until they die. But Hilda from the start had resolutely made up her mind that she was ugly, and with that forbidding manner, she resolutely made the worst of her ugliness. Apart from this, he saw that Hilda lived in conflict: perhaps her father’s strength fought against her mother’s weakness within her. Hilda always struck David as the unwilling union of these two elements, as if she had been conceived unwillingly, fought with herself in embryo and came into the world finally in a state of threshing discord. Hilda was not happy. She revealed herself gradually, not knowing that she revealed herself. She was missing Grace, who was now at school in Harrogate, acutely. Though her remarks usually took this form: “They’ll never teach her anything, she’s a perfect little jay!” or, as when reading a letter: “She can’t even spell yet!”—David saw that Hilda adored Grace. She was a queer sort of feminist, she was militant within herself. On March 12th the papers were full of a campaign of destruction organised by suffragists in the West End of London. Windows had been smashed in all the principal streets and many hundreds arrested, including Mrs. Pankhurst. Hilda glowed. She started a magnificent argument that night, quite taken out of herself. She wanted to be part of the movement, she said, to do something, go into the active whirl of life, work madly to relieve the crushing oppressions on her sex. Her eyes flashed as she instanced the Armenian women and the white-slave traffic. She was disdainful, magnificent. Men? Of course she detested men! Hated and detested them. She launched into arguments, she knew her Doll’s House by heart. It was another symptom of her conflict, her ugliness, her psychosis.
Though she never openly revealed the fact, it was evident that Hilda’s aversion to men was rooted in her father. He was MAN, the phallic symbol, her father. His calm suppression of all her wishes inverted her more fiercely, magnified and deepened her repressions. She wanted to get away from the Law and out of Sleescale, she wanted to work for her living—anything and anywhere so long as she was amongst her own sex. She wanted to do something. But all her frantic desires beat themselves out against her father’s calm detachment. He laughed at her, made her feel a fool with one inattentive word. She swore she would get away, that she would fight. Yet she remained, and the fight took place only within herself. Hilda waited… waited for what?
From Hilda, David got one view of Barras. The other, of course, came from Arthur. At the Law David never came in contact with Barras, he remained a remote and unapproachable figure. But Arthur talked a great deal about his father, he was never happier than when talking about him. After the quadratic equations were disposed of Arthur would begin… anything would serve to set him going. But while Hilda’s disclosures wore the taint of hatred, Arthur’s rang out like an ecstasy.
David grew very fond of Arthur—yet through his fondness lingered that same sense of pity which had come to him in the pit yard when he first saw Arthur upon the high seat of the dogcart. Arthur was so earnest, so pathetically earnest. And yet so weak! He would waver even upon the kind of pencil he must use—an H or an HB. A quick decision comforted him like a kindness. He took everything to heart, he was inordinately sensitive. Often David tried gently to move Arthur from his shyness with a joke. It was no use, Arthur had not the faintest sense of humour.
As for Arthur’s mother, David came to know her too. One evening Aunt Carrie brought the hot milk into the schoolroom with an air of conferring a favour even greater than usual.
She said with dignity:
“Mrs. Barras, my sister, would like to see you.”
Lying back upon her pillows, Harriet wanted to know about Arthur, just his “opinion,” of course, about Arthur. He was a great anxiety to her, Arthur, her son, and a great responsibility. Oh, a great responsibility, she said, asking him if he would mind handing her the bottle of Cologne from the little side table. Just there, if he please, by his elbow. Cologne soothed her headaches when Caroline was too busy to brush her hair. Yes, she went on, it would be such a disappointment to Arthur’s father if Arthur did not turn out well. Perhaps he might try, in his own way, since Caroline spoke so highly of him, to influence Arthur’s character for good to prepare him for life. And, without taking breath, she asked him if he believed in thought healing. She had felt lately that she might try thought healing for herself, the difficulty being that in thought healing the bed should, strictly speaking, face to the north and it was awkward in this room from the position of the window and the gas stove. She could not, naturally, dispense with her gas stove. Impossible! Now, she continued, since he knew mathematics did he honestly believe that thought healing would be equally effective if the bed faced north-west which could be managed with a little difficulty by moving the chest of drawers against the other wall.
Jenny was delighted that David had made such a good impression at the Law, delighted that he had become “so friendly with the Barrases.” Jenny’s desire for society was such that it pleased her even to take it by proxy. When he came back at night she would urge David to tell her all that had happened: now did she really say that, and did they hand the biscuits round or just leave the barrel on the tray? That Hilda might have an interest in David did not worry her in the least. She had no jealousy, she was “dead sure” of David, and in any case Hilda was the dowdiest thing.
Jenny’s reactions to the Law amused David, often he invented the most elaborate incidents to tease her. But Jenny was not so easily taken in. Jenny, in her own words, had a head on her shoulders. Jenny was Jenny.
David, all this time, w
as becoming acquainted with Jenny. It often struck him as strange that he should only now be getting to know his own wife, but it was not so strange when he reflected that he certainly had not known her before her marriage. Then Jenny had been the projection of his love, a flower, a sweetness, the very breath of spring.
Now he began to know the real Jenny, the Jenny who wanted “society,” clothes, amusement, who liked “going about” and was fond of a glass of port, who was passionate yet easily shocked, who smilingly put up with big discomforts and cried over the little ones, who suddenly demanded love and sympathy and “petting,” who had a habit of flat contradiction with no argument to support it, who combined logic and wild unreason in the same sweet breath.
He still loved Jenny, he would never stop loving her, he knew. But they started now to have frequent and violent quarrels. Jenny was stubborn and he was stubborn. And there were certain things in which Jenny must not have her way. He would not have her drinking port. On the night when she had ordered herself a port in the Percy Grill he had felt that Jenny was too fond of port. He would not let her have port in the house. They fought over that port: “You’re a killjoy right enough… you ought to join the Salvation Army… I hate you. I hate you…” Then would come a burst of tears, a big reconciliation and love. “Oh, I do love you, David, I do, I do…”
They fought over David’s examination as well. She wanted him to take his B.A., of course. She was mad that he should take it, she would like to spite that Mrs. Strother and a few of them But she simply would not give him time to study. There was always something for them to do at nights, or if they were alone it was a case, very pathetically, of: “Take me on your knee, David darling, it seems ages since I had the littlest bit of petting.” Or perhaps she had given herself a tiny cut with the potato knife—lost such a lot of blood and when do you think we’ll have a maid, David?—and must have no one but him to bind it up. The B.A. receded at such moments. David had already put it back six months and it looked now, with this extra coaching at the Law, as though another six months would be added to the other. In desperation he took to cycling the fifteen miles to Wallington, the village where Carmichael now lived. In the school house he got peace and judicious advice: what best to go on with and what to leave alone. The disillusioned Carmichael was kind to him, really decent. Often he stayed the whole week-end with Carmichael.