by A. J. Cronin
With an involuntary shiver, Lucy turned. She could stand it no longer.
‘We give her these newspapers to keep her quiet,’ said the nurse, as they unlocked their way back through the chain of doors. ‘ It’s the only thing that –’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Lucy hurriedly. She saw vaguely the mad motive behind the insensate task.
‘I’m up to all their little ways,’ remarked the other complacently. ‘I’ve been here thirty years by now.’
Lucy looked at her sideways – at the fat, prosaic face, the rather importantly pursed lips, the waddling, consequential walk – and the key, emblem of her kingdom. Thirty years in this place – thirty years of unlocking doors! What a pattern of life!
She took leave of the nurse, who smiled at her companionably – all in the day’s work, it was, for her – and went hurriedly down the drive.
She was profoundly disturbed by her visitation of Miss Hocking. Involuntarily her hands clenched. It seemed to her suddenly monstrous, a travesty of the divine justice, that such frightful inequality should be permitted. All the human creatures within these walls emptied of reason, cast down lower than beasts! And for what cause? That squatting figure in the cell, tearing, tearing its way through futility – it haunted her; and for years to come that figure might still be there, insane, useless, imprisoned by its own nothingness.
She came through the fine scrolled gates, and away from the asylum, troubled and depressed.
For days this baffling, distressing feeling persisted with Lucy; but gradually it faded. She had her own purpose. The opening of the university was at hand, and the thought of her son’s immediate entry absorbed her. She had her own brave ambition. No tearing of paper for her! Her purpose was momentous, and one, she knew, far from the realm of futility.
Chapter Twenty
She had twenty-five shillings a week. Out of this sum, seven shillings went on rent – deducted, indeed, from her wages by Henderson & Shaw before she received it; gas for cooking and lighting, coals at eightpence a bag, a charwoman, for the washing of the stairs, at sixpence – though sometimes, on the bad weeks, it was Lucy and not Mrs Collins who ‘did’ the stairs – consumed together, upon an average, three further weekly shillings. She had, in effect, fifteen shillings a week to provide two people with the bare necessities, and even certain of the minor luxuries, of life.
Fifteen shillings a week – it was not much. She did not disguise the fact from herself that it was a struggle – it was indeed, for her, a bitter battle – but the battle was not eternal. Herein lay her comfort. She was no martyr, and she rejoiced in the fact that the period of her privation was limited; that day by day it steadily grew less.
She was, despite his simile of the mole, an admirable manager. She knew the shops which offered the best value – she would walk two miles to secure a bargain. And she had a way with shopkeepers: pleasant yet firm; she was, in her own words, not to be imposed upon. Was it likely that she would allow herself to be so deluded when the career of her son turned literally upon the value of every penny which passed through her reluctant fingers? She had the ‘knack’ of exacting the best both as to matter and measure in all those dealings. She so established herself with Mr Tutt – the stout butcher with the pock-marked neck and the cartilaginous nose – that she obtained her inconsiderable quantities of steak – usually a quarter of a pound – ‘cut thick’, an impossible achievement contrary to all the laws of orthodox butchery. Still, so it was. Though Mr Tutt’s heart must have bled to do it, he regularly defiled the symmetry of his rump under her anxious yet compelling eye. Again, accepting for the ultimate good those ingenuous advances of Bessie Finch, she often obtained, as a result, bargains of fruit from the maternal establishment: fruit, for example, which was good on Saturday but would not be good on Monday. Three miles, that journey to Whiteinch and back: but in the cool of the evening she walked it gladly: Peter was very fond of fruit. Indeed, to suit his tastes she stretched her purse-strings to the breaking-point. She was, for example, on many a Saturday, the blessed festival of pay day, betrayed to rashness by her innate boldness and suggestive clink of silver in her purse; thus it fell out occasionally, towards the end of next week, that not a single coin remained in this same black purse. Then she devised little economies. During a whole week, for example, disdaining the tramway, she would journey in to the office on foot, and at the end of that week, utilising her petty savings, present him with some trifling delicacy: a cake from Cooper’s or a carton of those ginger chocolates which he liked so well. Not that she fed him on such fripperies. She had indeed a genius for simple cooking. Knowing nothing of calories, she had, nevertheless, an instinct for those dishes providing the maximum of nutriment. From the beginning she had made up her mind that Peter, as a student, a growing youth with a delicate tendency, must above everything be fed. She knew the value, of a well-grilled piece of meat. But, unfortunately, she knew its savour. Fifteen pence bought English steak for one, but not, alas, for two. It was at these moments, when cooking, his dinner, that she weakened and almost knew defeat. Rushing back from her district to prepare his meal, bending over that small gas stove, her healthy appetite would assail and almost betray her. She became conscious of wild and primitive instincts surging within her; the delicate odours arising from the grilling steak would fall upon her nostrils temptingly, causing her an acute anxiety, and water would run freely into her mouth. The very colour of the browning meat, the very richness of the gravy, made her lips twitch like the lips of a hungry dog. But she conquered. She would not submit. As she followed covertly the brisk movements of his knife and fork, it was a delight to mark the excellence of his appetite; it removed in no small measure her qualms as to his health. Yes, she knew the rapture of that steak vicariously.
But the food question was not her only difficulty; unexpected problems kept appearing from the most ridiculous and vexatious quarters. Take, now, the matter of her shoes. Clothes, were, so to speak, easy, in that she knew beforehand that she must make her present wardrobe suffice. Her underwear and stockings could be repaired and darned as need be. No one now required her to wear dainty lingerie. But with footwear it was different. Her work involved a vast amount of walking – and she walked more than need be in order to economise in tram fares – travelling freely over pavements which were hard and unsympathetic to shoe-leather. As a result, the manner in which she wore out her shoes was deplorable, and, though she had always prided herself upon her neat-shod foot – it was a small foot – she came gradually to the conviction, after several successive days when she returned home with soaked, chilled feet, that this was false pride. Thereafter she wore shoes with the thickest soles she could obtain; heavy they were, and somewhat clumsy. She got them in a small cobbler’s shop not far from White Street, and, by an unstinted use of iron protectors, induced them to last until the uppers cracked.
With Peter it was different. He was light upon his shoes and careful of his clothes. Further, if only for reasons of conformity, it was necessary for him to be well dressed when he attended his classes; and it was possible for him to achieve this with that small yet adequate surplus of his scholarship remaining after his fees had been paid. His managing also – in a different sense – was quite astounding. But he knew always to the ultimate penny how and where he stood. The history of his childish ‘jug’ again repeated itself; he kept a little memo book, discovered soon the wise economy of buying his books second-hand at Stenhouse’s; he was exact, punctilious, and never once the prodigal. Nor from the beginning did he countenance her efforts to assist his calculation. It was, he pointed out, his own money; and he knew exactly what to do with it.
Thus it was with his clothes: though Lucy did her share by discovering, after repeated and careful enquiry – Miss Tinto was the ultimate fount of knowledge – a tailor named Ward who promised to shape his cloth and prices to Peter’s slender figure and still more attenuated purse. The first visit to Ward was memorable – almost reminiscent of the choosing of the school
outfit – for, in this instance also, Lucy led her son into the tailor’s shop. Posed stiffly like a lay figure before the long pier-glass, he exposed his worn braces and suffered the indignity of the yardstick with a faintly conscious blush. But Ward was no boor, no mere snipper, lassoed by a tape measure and stuck with his own pins; he was a dapper young man, recently started in business, short in figure but vast in tact and understanding; in his own dress, too, he revealed himself a model of waisted and bespatted elegance. He addressed Lucy respectfully as madam; enquired, indeed – though unsuccessfully – if he might not have the pleasure of cutting a costume for her; and, with a speculative eye upon the future, he maintained towards Peter an affable and knowledgeable friendliness.
The suit was a speckled grey homespun, chosen by Lucy after much careful fingering, more for its warmth and wearing qualities than for any startling effects of colour. Peter’s taste lay towards a lighter and more lavish check; but Ward, whilst sympathising with the son, agreed wholly with the mother; it was unwise, he said, for a gentleman to become known by his suit; the grey might be quiet, but would ‘ make up’ well, and it was unimpeachably distingué; it was, he continued, ‘the cut’ which mattered – cut was everything, and he (looking knowingly at Peter) guaranteed himself as gifted in this mysterious, elusive, but all-essential art.
The suit certainly was a triumph – the jacket curving down-wards gracefully from the judiciously padded shoulders, the waist neat, the lapels small and square, the trousers two parallel lines of extreme precision – the whole a triumph of elegance and the sartorial genius. Moreover, in the making and completion of the suit Peter and the tailor grew friendly: after each fitting they ‘adjourned’ – it was Ward’s word and invitation – and over a coffee discussed the future which opened so brightly before them in their respective spheres. It was entrancing for him, sitting at the window-seat, whilst the trams swam up and down the street and all the stirring movement of the city flowed in a fascinating stream before him, to feel this delicious opening out of life.
Over these coffees he tasted in advance the savour of existence: to be so surely aware of his University career; and above all, like a motif running through the piece, to have the consciousness of the ultimate certainty of his success. It was delightful.
He was good to that first tailor-made suit, changing it for the older garments of his youth whenever he returned from classes, hanging the jacket meticulously upon a chair-back, reposing faithfully each night upon the trousers, flatly pressed beneath his mattress. And, by the inevitable justice of time and circumstance, he was rewarded. When the next instalment of his bursary came round and his fees, which were light that term, had been duly paid, it was natural that the surplus should be applied to supplement this first component of his wardrobe. Another suit – it was the check – and a neat spring overcoat came in cardboard boxes and tissue paper to 53 Flowers Street. Peter became a well-dressed young man, the admiration of his mother, of Bessie Finch, of Mrs Collins, and – proof positive of his pre-eminence – the object of an occasional derisive catcall from the corner boys outside Demario’s Venetian Café. Mrs Collins, indeed, relinquishing her pipeclay to throw a half-blinded eye after the effulgence vanishing down the stairs, remarked to Lucy on one occasion:
‘’Tis the air of a duke he has.’ She tugged at the straggle of fur that choked her neck. ‘’Tis a crime to think he’ll come to smoke and go wid the girls like the rest.’
Lucy accepted the just compliment, ignored the ridiculous aspersion in complacent silence. She had no qualms; she knew her son: his constancy, his purity of heart, his loyalty to her. Other sons, perhaps, might falter and fall by the wayside, but Peter – well, he was hers, and that unanswerable fact alone sufficed.
He had not yet become the president of the Union, but his progress, like his conduct, was good, and she marked it with a passionate interest; it became, in fact, the source from which she drew a steady and increasing comfort, the deep and secret well of all her happiness. During their long evenings together he would favour her, on precious occasions, with a full and expansive confidence. Thus, spellbound, she followed his zoological adventures with the dead dogfish and the sluggish amba, joined in his profound chemical research with silver nitrate and the chlorides, heard mazedly of the botanical, wonders of the cambium, and – in physics – of the hitherto undreamed-of principle of gravity. Her glowing eyes, fixed upon his moving lips, transcended the laws of optics he indulgently defined as actually she perceived his progress through these shining scenes. She saw him at his microscope, with slides and stains at hand, with scalpel poised delicately over a dead lumbricus (had he once called this disdainfully a worm and used it casually for bait?): she felt the swiftly rising heat of blue-flamed bunsens; the aromatic scent of benzine mingling with Canada balsam rose to her nostrils in a stimulating fragrance; she heard the voice of the professor, the movements of his fellow-students, the slow pacing of feet echoing through the cloisters beyond. She lived her life in his, not only when he spoke, at nights, of the great doings of the day, but during her own day also; when, at odd moments, as she stepped with relief out of some condemned dwelling, or saw perhaps the sudden beauty of a slant of sunlight striking through the squalor of a back court, her mind would lift with a sudden overwhelming buoyancy to the thought of him, working within that classic pile upon the hill. The very chime of the University clock as it rose over the city and fell faintly upon her ears drew her to him, linked them together in love and unity of purpose.
In the evenings, at his request, especially before examinations, she would hearken him his work, struggling with the pronunciation of a dead language or the formulf of chemical equations. His tolerant amusement of her efforts to follow his enumeration of such profundities as the nomenclature of schizomycetes made her smile in sympathy; and in dealing with the invertebrates her solecisms created a neology which moved them both to spasms of hilarity. Soon, however, he passed to studies beside which these early researches were but children’s playthings. Here, of course, she could not follow him, nor was her proffer of assistance of the slightest service. He shook his head mysteriously, even warningly, so that she felt she had intruded upon the realms of the taboo; nevertheless, in expansive moments he chilled her blood with, an occasional morbid detail of the anatomy room, or terrified her with an anecdote pertaining to the antics of a decerebrated ape. Temporarily, coincident with his descent to the caverns of the dissecting-room, he went off his food, and evinced a disinclination for the wares of Mr Tutt, especially when presented in an underdone condition. But this phase soon passed, and he was able to refer hardily, with a manly smile, to the stiff subjects of his glistening knife. Admitting his student robustiousness, she could never quite condone this attitude towards those unfortunates who finished, in this fashion upon a marble slab. For her, this end, tragic in its failure, epitomised the most piteous calamity of life; and once she had a terrifying nightmare filled with the horrors of the mortuary chamber. To die defeated and unknown; to be stretched upon this ghastly bier; she shuddered.
But she reflected that he could never perform such work without assuming a veneer of indifference. Moreover, his success in the recurrent professional examinations justified the means towards the great and glorious end.
Yes; he was getting on. Her heart swelled at the thought. The episode of the bursary competition had given her a transient apprehension, but this was now forgotten, buried in the limbo of unworthy thoughts. He worked nobly, and passed his examinations honestly, not with the flashy achievements of honours or the specious distinction of prizes, but with a comfortable solidity, sure sign of a stable and well-balanced mind, more to her than all the questionable pyrotechnics of genius.
Only yesterday, it seemed, gazing from the window, had she seen him walk – with steps restrained through the correctness of his new garments – to his first lecture at the University; and now he was through his second professional examination, sated with the profundities of anatomy and physiology.
‘That’s the pons asinorum I’m over,’ he asserted, with a satisfied sigh. ‘Easy going now.’
She knew enough of the learned tongue to understand his remark.
‘That bridge was never built for you, Peter,’ she returned calmly.
‘Apparently not,’ he agreed meditatively; then he laughed.
‘There’s two or three old fellows still trying to get over it, though, mother. Been stuck for years. Bit of a joke – what? One man’s married – with two children.’
She shook her head, said almost judicially. ‘ Everyone can’t be born with brains –’
When she saw his name definitely in black and white among the list of passes in the second professional, a positive conviction of her own judgement, a sweet vindication in the course she was taking, passed through her in a quivering elation. ‘That will show them,’ she thought exultantly, including in this category all who had impugned the wisdom of her conduct. She was proud, and her justifiable pride was shared, apparently, by Edward. The reverend gentleman had seen the results in the Herald and, gratified by this new lustre on the name of Moore, feeling perhaps that it redounded to his own growing ecclesiastical importance and popularity in the diocese, he had mused pleasantly over the paragraph and his morning chocolate: asking of his handmaiden, ‘Would the Bishop see that now, do you think?’ And Miss O’Regan, answering faithfully: ‘ He’s bound to know it’s your nephew, your reverence,’ had firmed a conviction tending already towards the affirmative. Considerately, Edward had written an encomium to the student coupled with an invitation to share his coming holiday, not this time to Madeira but to St Andrews, where the ecclesiastic, still under medical instruction, proposed to stimulate his liver with a niblick.