by A. J. Cronin
She sniffed and sobbed on his chest, snuggling up to him. The colour came back into her face, she looked relieved now that she had told him. She said:
“You won’t leave me now, will you, David, not until our baby’s born at any rate?”
There was something almost pitiful in Jenny’s eagerness to share the baby with him; but he did not see it.
“Of course not, Jenny.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
He sat down and took her on his knee. She still kept her head against his chest as though afraid to let him read her eyes.
“The idea,” he said gently, “crying like that. Surely you knew I’d be pleased. Why on earth didn’t you tell me before?”
“I thought you might be angry. You had that much to worry you and you’re different lately. I don’t mind telling you you’ve frightened me.”
He said mildly:
“I don’t want to frighten you, Jenny.”
“You won’t go then, will you, David? You won’t leave me till it’s all over?”
He took her chin gently in his fingers and raised her tear-stained face to his. Looking into her eyes he said:
“I’ll not think about the army until you’re all right, Jenny.” He paused, holding her glance firmly in his. She looked vaguely frightened again, ready to shrink, to start, to weep. Then he said: “But will you promise to give over drinking that confounded port, Jenny?”
There was no quarrel. A sudden final relief swept over her and she burst into tears.
“Oh yes, David, I promise,” she wailed. “I really do promise, I swear to you I’ll be good. You’re the best husband in the world, David, and I’m a silly, stupid, wicked thing. But oh, David…”
He held her closely, soothing her, his tenderness strengthened and renewed. Amongst all the troubled darkness of his mind he felt a shaft of light strike hopefully. He had a vision of new life rising out of death. Jenny’s son and his; and in his blindness he was happy.
Suddenly there came a ring at the bell. Jenny raised her head, flushed now and relieved, her mood altered with almost childish facility.
“Who can it be?” she queried interestedly. They were not used to front-door callers at such an hour. But before she could surmise the bell rang again. She rose smartly and hurried to answer it.
She was back in a minute, quite excited and impressed.
“It’s Mr. Arthur Barras,” she announced. “I showed him in the parlour. Can you think of it, David, young Mr. Barras himself? He’s asked to see you.”
The fixed look returned to David’s face, his eyes hardened.
“What does he want?”
“He didn’t say. I didn’t think to ask him, naturally. But imagine him calling at our house. Oh, goodness, if I’d only known I’d have had a fire going in the front room.”
There was a silence. The social occasion did not seem to strike David as important. He rose from his chair and went slowly to the door.
Arthur was walking up and down in the parlour in a state of acute nervous tension and as David entered he started quite visibly. He looked at David for an instant with wide, rather staring eyes and then came hurriedly forward.
“I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you,” he said, “but I simply had to come.” With a sudden gesture, he sank into a chair and covered his eyes with his hand. “I know how you feel. I don’t blame you a bit. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had refused to see me. But I had to come, I’m in such a state I had to see you. I’ve always liked you and looked up to you, David. I feel that you’re the only one who can help me.”
David sat down quietly at the table opposite Arthur. The contrast between them was singularly pathetic: the one rent by a painful agitation, the other firmly controlled with strength and forbearance in his face.
“What do you want?” David asked.
Arthur uncovered his eyes abruptly and fixed them on David with a desperate intentness.
“The truth, that’s what I want. I can’t rest, I can’t sleep, I can’t be still until I get it. I want to know if my father is to blame for the disaster. I must know, I must. You’ve got to help me.”
David averted his gaze, struck by that strange recurrent pity which Arthur seemed always destined to evoke in him.
“What can I do?” he asked in a low voice. “I said all I had to say at the Inquiry. They wouldn’t listen to me.”
“They can reopen the Inquiry.”
“What would be the use?”
An exclamation broke from Arthur, a sound lost in bitterness, between a laugh and a sob.
“Justice,” Arthur exclaimed wildly. “Ordinary decency and justice. Think of these men killed, cut off suddenly, dying horribly. Think of the suffering among their wives and children. O God! it won’t bear thinking of. If my father is to blame it’s too brutal and horrible to think it should all be glossed over and forgotten.”
David got up and went to the window. He wanted to give Arthur the chance to collect himself. Presently he said:
“I felt exactly that way too at first. Worse, perhaps… hatred… a terrible hatred. But I’ve tried to get over it. It’s not easy. It’s human nature to have these violent reactions. When a man throws a bomb at you, your first reaction is to pick it up and throw it back. I talked all this out with Nugent when he was here. I wish you’d met Nugent, Arthur, he’s the sanest man I know. But throwing back the bomb isn’t a bit of good. It’s far better to ignore the man who threw the bomb and concentrate on the organisation which made it. It’s no good looking for individual punishment over this Neptune disaster when the whole economic system behind the disaster is to blame. Do you see what I mean, Arthur? It’s no good lopping off a branch when the disease is at the very roots of the tree.”
“Does that mean you are going to do nothing?” Arthur asked desperately. The words seemed to stick in his throat. “Nothing? Absolutely nothing?”
David shook his head, his features rigid and saddened.
“I’m going to try to do something,” he said slowly. “Once we get rid of the war. I can’t tell you, I can’t say. But, believe me, I am going to try.”
A long silence fell. Arthur passed his hand across his eyes with that nervous, bewildered gesture. Perspiration was beaded on his brow. He stood up to go.
“So you won’t help me?” he said in a suppressed voice.
David held out his hand.
“Give it up, Arthur,” he said in a sincere and affectionate tone. “Don’t let it become an obsession with you. You’ll hurt yourself most of all. Forget about it.”
Arthur flushed violently, his thin boyish face looked faltering and afraid.
“I can’t,” he said in that same tormented voice, “I can’t forget about it.”
He left the room and went into the tiny hall. David opened the front door. Outside it was raining. Without looking at David, Arthur said good-bye, and plunged into the wet darkness. David stood for a moment upon the doorstep of his house listening to the rapid footsteps dying down the lane. Then all that he heard was the slow patter of the rain.
SIX
Arthur did not reach the Law until after seven. In the tumult and disorder of his mind he wished to be alone, he hoped that supper would be over. But supper was not over. Everyone was seated at table as he went in.
Barras was jubilant, he had been to Tynecastle and brought home the news of another victory. It was the battle of Loos, fought on September 26th, and the British forces on the Western front had won a glorious victory at the cost of only 15,000 men. The Tynecastle Argus computed the enemy losses at 19,000 killed and wounded, 7,000 prisoners and 125 guns captured. The Northern Star went a little better with 21,000 enemy killed and wounded and 3,000 prisoners.
Barras glowed with an excited satisfaction. As he ate his cutlets he read the communiqué aloud from the Northern Star in a firm official voice. Barras had never taken an evening paper before. The Times had always satisfied him, but now he was never without an evening A
rgus or Star, or both. With the paper in his hand he jumped up from the table, and went over to the opposite wall where a big-scale map hung all pricked out with the flags of the allied armies. Consulting the paper carefully Barras moved half a dozen of the tiny Union Jacks. He moved the tiny Union Jacks forward.
Watching his father covertly Arthur was seized by a terrifying thought. Barras, the flag-mover, was the genetic impulse behind the war. In his jubilation over the gain of a few hundred yards of torn-up trenches he was guilty, in essence, of the deaths of thousands of men.
When he had moved the flags Barras studied the map intently. He was heart and soul in the war now, he had lost himself in the war, he was a patriot, he lived in a whirl of forgetfulness. He was on six committees already, and had been nominated for the Northern Refugee Council. The telephone rang all day long. The car tore up and down the road to Tynecastle. Coal was coming out Five Quarter and Globe Seams and selling magnificently at forty shillings a ton pit-head price.
Barras came back to the table. As he sat down he stole a look at Hilda and Grace and Arthur as though to discover whether they had observed his generalship with the flags, then in obvious satisfaction he resumed his paper. His odd preoccupation and detachment were gone; the arteries of his temples stood out a little and showed the beat of his pulse. His air was vaguely restless, almost feverish; he was like a patient who insists on being about in defiance of his doctor’s orders, a patient whose metabolism is accentuated and every function accelerated. As he read the paper he drummed incessantly with his fingers upon the table. The drumming sound was not unlike the sound of quick jowling in the pit.
For a few minutes everything was silence but for that quick jowling of Barras’s fingers; then it happened, the incredible thing. Barras read a small item in the news twice over. Then he raised his head.
“Lord Kell has most kindly offered his London house as a temporary hospital for the wounded. The work of conversion will be completed in a month. They are asking already for volunteer nurses. Lord Kell has expressed the wish that all V.A.D. nurses should be if possible from the North.” Barras paused. He looked at Hilda and at Grace with that bland intentness. “How would you like to go?”
Arthur sat rooted in his chair. His father, the rock of family unity, the immovable rock upon which all Hilda’s pleading had previously broken in vain. Arthur went very pale. His eyes darted towards Hilda almost in apprehension.
Hilda had coloured deeply, violently. She seemed unable to believe her ears. She said:
“Do you mean that, father?”
Blandly intent, Barras said:
“Do I usually mean what I say, Hilda?”
The wave of colour receded from Hilda’s face as swiftly as it had come. She looked at Grace, large-eyed and eager beside her. Her voice trembled with joy.
“I think we should both like to go, father.”
“Very well!” Barras briskly resumed his paper. It was settled.
A quick glance between Hilda and Grace. Hilda said:
“When may we expect to go, father?”
From behind the paper:
“Shortly, I should imagine. Probably next week. I am seeing Councillor Leach at Tynecastle to-morrow. I shall speak to him and make the necessary arrangements.” A pause, then significantly: “I shall feel happy that at least you, Hilda, and Grace are doing your country’s work.”
Arthur felt the perspiration break out on his palms. He wanted to rise and walk out of the room but he was unable to rise. His eyes remained fixed upon his plate. The sense of sickness which agitation always brought came upon him now.
Hilda and Grace went out, he could hear them flying upstairs to discuss the miracle. Aunt Carrie was already upstairs attending to his mother. Once again he made the effort to rise, but his legs refused to move. He sat paralysed, bound by the current of animosity which flowed towards him from behind the paper. He waited.
As he had expected, his father lowered the paper. His father said:
“I am very pleased at the eagerness of your sisters to serve their country.”
Arthur winced. A whole ocean of emotion boiled and surged within him. Once it had been love. Now it was fear, suspicion, hatred. How had the change occurred? He knew and yet he did not know, he was tired from the tension of the day, his brain felt thick and stupid. He answered heavily:
“Hilda and Grace only want to get away from here.”
The mottled flush spread over Barras’s forehead. In rather a high tone he said:
“Indeed! And why should they?”
Arthur replied listlessly; he seemed not to care now what he said:
“They can’t stand it here any longer. Hilda has always hated it here but now Grace hates it too. Ever since the disaster. I heard them talking the other day. They said how much you had changed. Hilda said you were living in a fever.”
Barras seemed to allow the words to slip over him. It was a faculty he had lately developed of shutting out any issue which might be likely to disturb him, the supreme faculty of judicial inhibition; to Arthur it seemed like Pilate when he washed his hands. He paused, then said in a measured voice:
“Your attitude is worrying me, Arthur. You are very different.”
“It’s you who are different.”
“It isn’t only I who am worried. I saw Hetty to-night at the Central Organisation offices. She is extremely worried and unhappy about you.”
“I can’t help Hetty,” Arthur said with that same listless bitterness.
Barras’s dignity increased.
“Alan has been mentioned in dispatches. They have just had the news, Hetty told me to-day. He is recommended for the M.C.”
“I can’t help Alan either,” Arthur answered.
The duskiness on Barras’s brow spread behind his ears and into the loose tissue of his neck. The vessels in his temples thickened and throbbed. He said loudly:
“Have you no wish to fight for your country?”
“I don’t want to fight for anything,” Arthur answered in a stifled tone. “I don’t want to kill anybody. There’s been enough killing already. We started off pretty well in the Neptune. That’s sickened me against killing.” His voice rose suddenly, shrill, hysterical. “Do you understand? If that hadn’t happened I might have run out like the rest of them with a gun, run out looking nice and pretty in my uniform, run out looking for a man to kill. But it has happened. I saw these men killed and I’m not satisfied. I’ve had time to think, you see. I’ve had time to think. I’ve had time to think….” He broke off, his breath coming quickly. He dared not look at his father, but he felt his father looking at him.
There was a long heavy silence. Then Barras performed the usual gesture, a measured movement towards his left-hand waistcoat pocket, an impressive inspection of his watch. Arthur heard the click as the watch was shut and the significance of the action bore down upon him as pathological and alarming. His father had an appointment in Tynecastle, another committee meeting, another and yet another, his father whose habit it had been never to go out, who used to sit listening to Handel in the quiet of his own home, his father, who had sent all these men down the Neptune to die.
“I hope you understand,” Barras said, rising from the table, “that you are not indispensable to me at the Neptune. Turn that over in your mind. It may help you to do your duty.” Then he went out and shut the door. In two minutes Arthur heard the purr of the car as it slid away down the drive.
Arthur’s lip trembled, his whole body trembled again as a rush of stubborn weakness flooded him.
“He won’t,” he shouted suddenly to the empty room. “He won’t!”
SEVEN
Towards the end of September, abruptly and extremely early in the morning, Joe Gowlan had quitted Sleescale. Though he said neither why nor where Joe had his own good reasons for going. He returned, by a discreet route, to Yarrow and set out for Platt Lane.
Trudging along the Lane on that damp autumn morning he became aware of an unusual activity
at Millington’s. Above the high paling he saw a long corrugated shed in course of erection and a lorry, backed into the yard, discharging heavy equipment. Cautiously, he applied his eye to a knot hole in the fence. Holy Gee, there was a do on right enough! Two new lathes going into the machine-shop, a drilling machine, new moulds and trays, men hauling and heaving, Potterfield the foreman shouting merry hell, Irving tearing out of the drawing office with a bunch of papers in his fist. With a thoughtful air Joe straightened up and stepped into the offices.
He had to cool his heels interminably in the Inquiry Room before gaining admittance to Millington’s office but neither the delay nor the reluctant eye of Fuller the head clerk damped him. He went in firmly.
“It’s Joe Gowlan, Mr. Stanley.” He smiled—deferential yet confident. “Maybe you don’t remember me. You promised you might have an opening for me when I came back.”
Stanley, who sat in his shirt-sleeves before a littered table, raised his head and glanced at Joe. Stanley was plumper about the face and his waist line had increased, he was a trifle paler, too, his hair beginning to recede from his forehead, he had a flabby and irritable look. He frowned now: he recollected Joe at once, yet he was rather puzzled; remembrance associated Joe with dungarees and a certain amount of grime. He said perplexedly:
“Why, yes, Gowlan, of course. But are you after a job now?”
“Well, yes, sir.” Joe’s smile though still deferential was quite irresistible and despite himself Stanley smiled slightly in sympathy. “I’ve been doing pretty well, mind you, but I wanted a change and I’ve always felt I’d like to come back to you.”
“I see,” Stanley declared drily. “Unfortunately we don’t want puddlers here now. And what about the army? A stout young fellow like you ought to be at the front.”
Joe’s brightness dissolved into an expression of disconsolate regret. He had anticipated this difficulty and he had no intention ever of being at the front. Without hesitation he answered:
“They’ve rejected me twice, sir. It’s no use. It’s my knee, a cartilage or something, must have jiggered up when I was boxing.”