by A. J. Cronin
Scott came at twelve sharp and went straight upstairs. The door slammed upon Scott, Ada and the screeching Jenny. There was more screeching, the heavy tramp of Scott’s boots, then silence.
Chloroform, thank God, David thought. He sat hunched up in a chair in the kitchen before the nearly out fire. He had suffered every pain with Jenny and now the chloroform silence brought him an almost agonised relief. Human suffering always affected him profoundly and Jenny’s suffering seemed the epitome of all inevitable human pain. He thought of her with tenderness. He forgot all the quarrels and disputes and bickerings that had occurred between them. He forgot her pettiness, her petulance and her vanities. He began to consider the child and once again the child appeared to him as a symbol—a new life rising from amongst the dead. He had a vision of the battlefields where the dead lay in attitudes stranger even than they had lain within the pit. Soon he would be there, in France, on these battlefields. Nugent had written to him from the front where he was serving as a stretcher bearer in an ambulance unit attached to the Northumberland Fusiliers. By joining up at the same headquarters at Tynecastle, he also would get out with the Fusiliers and he hoped his unit would be near to Nugent’s.
A moaning came from the room overhead and then a singing, Jenny’s voice singing. He heard it quite plainly, a verse from one of her old sentimental songs, but the words came curiously ribald and slurred. That was another effect of the chloroform. It made people sing as though they were drunk.
Then again there was silence, a very long silence broken by the sudden coming of another voice, a thin new voice, not Jenny’s or Ada’s or Scott’s voice, but an altogether new voice which cried and piped like a little flute. The sound of that thin voice emerging from the pain and the shouting and the dark succeeding silence struck into David’s heart. Again the symbol: out of the chaos the new dawn. He sat perfectly still, his hands clasped together, his head uplifted, a strange presentiment in his eyes.
Half an hour later Scott clumped down the stairs and entered the kitchen. His face wore that tired and distasteful look which confinements often bring to the faces of overworked and disillusioned doctors. He fumbled in his pocket for a blue raisin. Scott always declared that he carried about these blue raisins to give to children; they were a marvellous cure for worms, he said. But Scott really liked the blue raisins himself and that was why he carried them about.
He found a blue raisin and began to chew it. He said in a non-committal way:
“Well, the little article’s arrived.”
David did not speak. He swallowed; nodded his head.
“A boy,” Scott said with a sort of automatic response, trying to infuse enthusiasm into his words, but failing.
“Is Jenny all right?”
“Oh, your wife’s quite comfortable, perfectly comfortable.” Scott paused and threw a very queer look at David. “The baby’s inclined to be delicate though. He’ll need a bit of attention one way and another.”
He threw another queerly suspicious look at David, but he said no more. He was a coarse old man with a low-class country and colliery practice. But he was not coarse now. He looked merely fatigued with life which, at a moment such as this, seemed to him terrible and incomprehensible. Stretching his arms above his head he yawned. He nodded to David and he spat into the fire that had gone out. Then he went out himself.
David stood in the centre of the empty kitchen for a few moments before going upstairs. He knocked at the bedroom door and entered. He wanted to be beside Jenny and the child. But Jenny was overcome, completely overcome, not yet fully recovered from the anæsthetic and inclined to be hysterical as well. Ada, too, was bustling and cross, fussing him out of the room at once. He had to leave it at that and return downstairs. He made his bed on the parlour sofa. The house was completely silent before he slept.
But next morning he saw the baby. While he sat at his breakfast of cocoa and bread Ada brought the baby down quite proudly as though she had done it all herself. The baby was freshly washed and powdered and dressed up in a lace-trimmed Carricoat, from the Chickabiddy’s set, which draped its tiny body most importantly. But for all its important trimmings the baby was very ugly and puny. It had black hair and blinking eyes and a flat pushed-in watery little nose and was pale and sickly and small. The baby was so ugly and small that David’s heart melted into fresh tenderness. He put down the cup of cocoa and took the baby on his knee. The feel of the baby upon his knee was absurd and wonderful. The baby’s eyes blinked timidly towards his. There was an apology in the timid blinking of the baby’s eyes.
“There, now, there!” Ada took up the baby again and dandled it up and down. “Your father’s clumsy with the pet!”
She had the stupid convention that no man was capable of holding a baby without serious consequences to the baby. Strangely enough the baby had been good as gold on David’s knee. But now it began to cry and was still crying when Ada carried it from the room.
David went out to his clerking thinking about the baby and when he returned at the end of his day’s work he was still thinking about the baby. He had begun to be fond of the small, ugly baby.
It was perfectly clear that the baby was delicate. Jenny admitted it herself and in course of time adopted a neatly descriptive phrase which she used in the presence of visitors. Looking compassionately towards the baby she would remark all in one breath: “Poor little mite, he’s not very robust, the doctor says!”
Powders were prescribed by Dr. Scott for the baby with an ointment to rub in and Jenny, after a few initial protests, fed the baby herself. The doctor insisted on that, too.
Already the memory of her confinement—considered at the time to be excruciating and unforgettable—had become dimmed and Jenny was brightening up, recovering from her disappointment that the baby was not a girl. She wanted to call the baby David. She implored David very prettily to let her call the baby after him.
“He’s yours, David,” she remarked with a naive logic. She faced him with her clear, beautiful eyes and smiled. “It’s only right he should have your name.”
But David wanted the baby to have the name of Robert: his dead father and his living son both Robert. And Jenny, after countering with several other names, notably Hector, Archibald and Victor, which she thought superior in point of sound and importance, very meekly gave in. She wanted to please David in every possible way. So the baby became Robert.
Three weeks passed. Ada went back to Tynecastle. Jenny was able to leave her room and recline languidly upon the sofa downstairs. Yet she found the duty of nursing Robert a tax on her in many ways. As her strength returned and her life approached the normal the resolutions formed by her romantic imagination gradually seemed less attractive. Robert, from being a dear little mite, had now become a dear little nuisance. She was pleased to let David give Robert his medicine and to bath Robert when she felt tired. And yet in a way Jenny was queerly resentful of David’s interest in the child.
“You do love me best, don’t you, David?” she exclaimed one evening. “You don’t love him better than you love me?”
“Of course not, Jenny.” He laughed at her as he knelt with rolled-up shirt-sleeves beside the tin bath where Robert lay in the soapy water.
She did not reply. And, still watching them, the look of discontent deepened upon her face.
Indeed, as the New Year approached Jenny became increasingly discontented and restless. Everything seemed wrong, nothing right. She wanted David to go to the front and yet she did not want him to go. She was proud one minute and afraid the next. To distract her mind she took to reading a great many paper-backed novelettes, Sunny Half-hours in the Happy Home having been mislaid. She had forgotten about her music now, never touched the piano and never sang her lullabies. She studied her reflection in the glass for long periods on end to reassure herself that her looks and her figure had not suffered. Once again she felt she had no friends. She was out of things, life was passing over her. She was missing everything. It was very trying and
upsetting for Jenny, she might as well be dead. The weather was wet, too, and though she was able to get about now it was useless to go out in the rain. Besides, Robert had to be fed every four hours and that naturally interfered with any decent outing she might make up her mind to take.
But on New Year’s Eve the rain ceased and the sun came out and Jenny felt that she could stand it no longer. She really must have a little jaunt. She must, she must. It was years, hundreds of years since she had had a little jaunt. She would go and see her mother at Tynecastle. Her face brightened at the decision, she rushed upstairs, dressed herself nicely and came down. It was four o’clock. She fed Robert, put him in his cot and scribbled a hurried note for David saying she would be back at eight.
David was quite glad when he returned and found Jenny’s note, pleased to think that Jenny was having an outing and pleased in some singular way to have Robert to himself.
Robert was asleep in his cot in the corner beside the kitchen range. David took off his boots and walked about in his socks in order not to make a noise. He got his tea and enjoyed his tea in Robert’s company. Then he took a book and sat down to read beside the cot. The book was Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and David was interested in Nietzsche. But David looked more frequently at Robert than at Nietzsche.
At half-past seven Robert woke up and got ready to be fed. He lay perfectly quietly on his back, looking up at the much-befrilled ceiling of his cot. What a queer view of the world he must have, thought David.
For a good half-hour Robert kept on contentedly taking his queer view of the world, meanwhile staving off his appetite with his thumb. But in the end the thumb was not satisfactory and after a few preliminary whimperings Robert began to cry. David lifted Robert out of his cot and soothed him. That was successful for a little while, then Robert began to cry again.
Anxiously David looked at the clock. Half-past eight: Jenny must have missed her train and the next did not arrive till ten! It struck David how utterly dependent Robert was upon Jenny.
He did the best he could. He saw that Robert was uncomfortable and wet, and though he had not much experience with napkins he took Robert’s napkin off. Robert seemed pleased and by way of gratitude when David lifted him aloft again he clutched hard at David’s hair.
David laughed and Robert laughed too. He seemed hungry, but otherwise much relieved. David put Robert down on the hearthrug and Robert sprawled and kicked before the fire. He seemed altogether a healthier baby these last few weeks, he was fatter, his rash had gone and he did not snuffle so much. But now he was extremely hungry, he cried a good deal again as it came towards ten o’clock.
With a rising indignation at Jenny’s lateness David got down on his hands and knees and began to talk to Robert, to try to soothe and reassure him. At that moment the door swung open and Jenny came in. She was in tremendous spirits. She had been to the pictures with Clarry and had her glass of port. She stood in the doorway with one hand on her hip and a broad smile on her red lips, then all at once she began to laugh; she was convulsed with laughter at the picture made by David and Robert on the hearthrug.
David drew his lips together.
“Don’t laugh like that,” he said sharply.
“I can’t help it,” she giggled. “It’s something… something just come in my head.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said hurriedly. “Just a kind of joke.” There was a short pause. He got to his feet and lifted the child.
“Robert’s hungry,” he said, still angry and indignant. “Can’t you see he wants his feed?”
She came forward rather unsteadily.
“Here, then,” she said, “I’m the one that can see to that, amn’t I?”
She took Robert from him and sat down with a bump on the sofa. Perhaps two glasses of port gave a certain generosity to her movements. David watched her grimly. She ripped open her blouse. Her big full breasts protruded like udders, veined and white and fat, the milk was already dripping from them. As Robert nestled to one breast and sucked the milk spurted from the other. Flushed and happy Jenny smiled, rocking sensuously back and forward on the sofa, careless of the dripping milk.
But David turned away. He felt suddenly revolted. He made a pretence of stirring up the fire, then he faced her again.
“Remember!” he said in a low, serious tone, “I expect you to look after Robert when I’m away!”
“I will, David,” she gushed. “Oh, you know I will.”
He left for Tynecastle the following day and from there he was drafted straight away to camp at Catterick. Three months later, on the 5th of April, he went with the field ambulance unit attached to the fifth battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers to France.
NINE
On that second Sunday of September, 1915, Hetty’s car drew up briskly on the gravel drive of the Law. As he stood at the dining-room window with his hands in his pockets Arthur watched Hetty get out, very smart in her khaki, and advance towards the front door.
Arthur had known that Hetty was coming to the Law today. Impossible not to know of Hetty’s coming. Aunt Carrie had mentioned it, his mother had mentioned it, and at lunch, on Saturday, Barras had looked down the table and remarked with unusual significance:
“Hetty will be here for tea to-morrow. She has asked the day off specially.”
Arthur had not answered. Did they take him for a fool? It was too obvious; that “specially” had a grim humour all its own.
During these last eight months Hetty had been frequently at the Law. Hetty, as one of the first to join the Women’s Emergency Corps, had now secured a commission in the W.V.R., executive headquarters, Tynecastle. She was often useful to Barras in his activities, dashing between Tynecastle and Sleescale in her two-seater runabout, bringing official papers for his signature. But on this Sunday Arthur was fully aware that Hetty’s duties would not be official. Hetty was having a day off to be sweetly unofficial. He saw it plainly and for all his bitterness he could have laughed.
She came into the room. And at the sight of him there, by the window, she smiled brightly and extended her hands with a little twitter of pleasure.
“You’ve been looking out for me,” she said. “How nice of you, Arthur.”
She was extremely bright; but he had anticipated that. He did not smile back. He said flatly:
“Yes, I expected you.”
His tone might perhaps have warned her, but she was not dismayed.
“Where are the others?” she asked lightly.
“They’ve all disappeared,” he said. “They’re all conveniently out of the way so that we can be alone.”
She laughed reprovingly:
“You sound as if you didn’t want us to be alone. But I know you don’t mean to be unkind. I know you better than you do yourself. Come on, now, what shall we do? Shall we go for a walk?”
He coloured slightly and looked away from her. But in a moment he said:
“All right, then, Hetty, let’s go for a walk.”
He got his hat and coat and they set out on the walk they usually took together, though they had not taken it for some months now, the walk through Sluice Dene. The autumn day was calm, the dene was full of russet colour, the bracken crackled under their feet. They walked in silence. When they reached the end of the dene they sat down on the high root of an oak tree which a subsidence had unearthed. It was their usual seat. Below, the town lay subdued in the Sunday quiet and the sea stretched out beyond, shimmering away into the distance and merging with the sky. The headstocks of the Neptune rose up black and high against the clear background of sea and sky. Arthur stared at the headstocks, the gallows headstocks of the Neptune pit.
And presently, having tucked her skirt round her trim legs with seductive modesty, Hetty followed his gaze.
“Arthur,” she exclaimed. “Why do you look at the pit like that?”
“I don’t know,” he said bitterly. “Business is good. Coal selling at fifty shillings a ton.”
“It isn’t that,” she said with an impulse of curiosity. “I do wish you’d tell me, Arthur. You’ve been so queer lately, so unlike yourself. Do tell me, dear, and perhaps I can help you.”
He turned to Hetty, a warmth penetrating through his bitterness. He had an impulse to tell her, unburden himself of the awful weight that pressed upon him and crushed his very soul. He said in a low voice:
“I can’t forget the disaster at the Neptune.”
She was staggered, but she concealed it. She said as she might have humoured a troubled child:
“In what way, Arthur dear?”
“I believe the disaster could have been prevented.”
She stared at his melancholy face, exasperated, feeling that she must get to the bottom of this irritating enigma.
“Something is really worrying you, Arthur dear. If you could only tell me?”
He looked at her. He said slowly:
“I believe the lives of all these men were thrown away, Hetty.” He broke off. What was the use? She would never understand.
Yet she had a vague glimpse of the morbid obsession that burned in his mind. She took his hand. She humoured him. She said gently:
“Even if it were so, Arthur, don’t you think the best way is to forget about it? It’s so long ago now. And only a hundred men. What’s that compared with the thousands and thousands of brave fellows who have been killed in the war? That’s what you’ve got to remember now, Arthur dear. There’s a war on now. A world war, and that’s a very different affair from the tiny disaster in the pit.”
“It is not different,” he said, pressing his hand against his brow. “It’s the same thing exactly. I can’t see it any other way. I can’t separate them in my mind. The men at the front are being killed just like the men in the pit, needlessly, horribly. The disaster and the war mean exactly the same thing to me. They’ve become united in one great mass murder.”