The Northern Light

by A. J. Cronin

  In the car Henry made no attempt to talk, for now he was fully occupied by his thoughts. His brief unconsciousness had damped the shock of the sudden and unexpected blow delivered by the Chronicle. His brain was working clearly and logically and already he had decided what he had to do. Under the threat of persecution, his gentle nature had become compact, capable of infinite resistance, inflexible. As he made up his mind, his temples throbbed with the force of his determination.

  When they arrived at the consulting room, Bard made him stretch out on the couch. Although he disdained a bedside manner and recoiled from the bustling clichés of the popular physician, Bard had the best practice in Hedleston and he made a particular point of keeping himself up to date. He took Page’s blood pressure, then, while Henry watched with restrained impatience and an eye on the clock, wheeled over a trolley of electrical apparatus with a vertical recording drum.

  ‘Not that again,’ Henry said. ‘ Why don’t you just use your stethoscope and be done with it?’

  ‘We’ll try this, if you don’t mind, just for old times’ sake.’

  Henry had to submit while Bard pressed small lead discs on his left wrist and on various points of his chest, meanwhile running the current through the machine, to which the discs were wired. Finally the doctor drew off a number of tracings and took a long look at them by the window.

  ‘Henry,’ he said, coming over and seating himself on the edge of the couch, ‘do you remember what I told you when you were an air-raid warden?’

  ‘In a way … yes.’

  ‘You wouldn’t listen to me then. But you must now. I want you to knock off and rest for at least six weeks.’

  ‘Later, perhaps.’

  ‘I insist.’

  ‘Ed, I appreciate all you do for me, but I simply can’t promise anything just now.’

  A pause followed, then Bard said seriously:

  ‘Listen to me, Henry. You’ve got the kind of heart that needs a lot of care. If you look after it you’ll probably outlive me. If you don’t …’ He made a slight but expressive movement.

  ‘I do try to be careful.’

  ‘You may think so, but you’re mistaken. On the surface you seem calm enough, but underneath you’re strained and overwrought. For months now you’ve been living under the worst kind of tension. It’s little short of suicide for you.’ He lowered his voice and went on as if appealing for agreement. ‘A sensible man knows when he’s had enough. I’m your doctor and your best friend and I tell you you’re not physically capable of carrying on this fight. Under these circumstances it’s no defeat to give in. Remember old Socrates: ‘There is no failure in unavoidable surrender … to know when to give up the struggle … there also is a kind of triumph.”’

  ‘Are you offering me the easy way out?’

  ‘In your own interests … yes.’

  ‘No, Ed,’ Henry said: ‘ I’m afraid I have to go on.’

  Again there was silence, broken only by the sounds of traffic from the street outside.

  ‘Very well, if you want to kill yourself, go ahead.’ Bard moved unemotionally from the couch, broke a glass ampule and began to fill a small hypodermic syringe. ‘ Meantime, I’m going to give you a mild hypnotic. Then you’ll go straight home to bed.’

  When he had done, Henry got up and began to put on his things. Bard’s pessimistic prediction had not greatly disturbed him, there were too many other things on his mind; moreover he had always thought Ed a man who carried caution to extremes. But he could not let him feel that he would ignore his advice completely.

  ‘I will go slow,’ he said, ‘in a week or so.’ Then in an odd tone he added, ‘Perhaps even sooner.’

  ‘You’d better.’ Bard raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re a poor patient but not a bad sort of chap at bottom. Come and see me tomorrow; I’m going to start you on dicumerol injections. And here – he handed Page a box of cotton-covered capsules – ‘if you feel queer again crack one of these and inhale it.’

  He telephoned the cab rank, saw Henry into the taxi, and directed the man to Hanley Drive. Page let the cab start off along Victoria Street in the direction of his home, but when they reached the traffic lights at the corner of Park Street he told the driver to turn right and go back to the Light building. He felt completely recovered from his attack, better, in fact, than he had been for weeks. His head was clear, the pain had gone, he was no longer breathless, and, perhaps because of the injection Bard had given him, he was suffused by an extraordinary sense of calm which seemed to clarify and strengthen his vision. Apparently the fortune of the Light could go no lower, it was on the verge of collapse – creditors swarming, funds attached, payroll delayed, newsprint delivered only for hard cash, word from the union leader to ‘sell out or pay up,’ and now … the printing hall shut down. But Henry was not going home just yet, not by any means. He looked at his watch – not quite five o’clock. There still was ample time.

  He paid off the cab, took the stairs quietly and without difficulty. He found Maitland at his desk, absently drawing patterns on the blotting pad, sunk in gloomy meditation. At the sight of Henry he started up.

  ‘What now?’ His eyes expressed his surprise and concern. ‘ What are you back for?’

  ‘To get the paper out.’

  Malcolm’s ruddy, homely face turned pale. He thought Page had taken leave of his senses. Scraping back his chair, he came forward.

  ‘Come now, Henry. You’ve had a rough day. You ought to be in bed.’

  ‘Later,’ Henry said.

  Maitland’s look of dismay deepened. He said, with open alarm:

  ‘Look here, man. You know the machines are inoperable. We can’t print a line.’

  ‘That makes no odds. Good God, don’t look at me like that! Don’t you realize the Light’s never missed a single edition, not for a hundred and eighty-eight years? Not even when James Page had to issue holograph bulletins during the Napoleonic Wars? So long as I’m alive and have two brass farthings to rub together I’ll get it out somehow.’

  ‘Somehow?’ Maitland echoed. ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘We’ll produce a token edition by duplication. The text can be typed on a stencil and run off on our office duplicating machine.’

  Maitland’s face had lightened perceptibly; apparently he no longer thought Henry mad, but he looked at him doubtfully.

  ‘You’ll only get eight hundred copies off your stencil at the very outside, and the last couple of hundred will probably be blurred.’

  ‘We’ll use more stencils. We’ll cut our size to the minimum. With six typists working all night we’ll put out a single-sheet edition of five thousand copies. Let’s stop talking and make a start. Get Moffatt to phone Miss Renshaw’s Bureau for all the typists and machines she can give us. We’ll pay overtime and a half. Bring me everything from the A.P. machine. And tell Fenwick, Poole, and young Lewis I want to see them in my office at once.’

  Fifteen minutes later Page took off his jacket and, filled with a calm intoxication, a sort of lucid frenzy, settled into his chair, with Fenwick, Poole, and Bob Lewis grouped about his desk, ready to dictate their concentrated copy. Moffatt, dispossessed of her usual chair, had brought in her typing stool. Maitland was seated beside Henry, savagely massaging his lower lip, a gleam of anticipation in his eye.

  ‘We’ll let the whole town know what the blighters have done to us.’

  ‘No, not a word, Malcolm. This edition will speak for itself, and the entire country will hear it.’ A wild, fierce exultation boiled up in Henry – perhaps he was at that moment a trifle mad. ‘It’ll speak so loud it may shut up the Chronicle for good. Yes, by God, they think they’re smart, but mark my words, they may have over-reached themselves at last.’ He turned to Moffatt, who was looking at him as though she’d seen a ghost. ‘We’ll have a block-letter heading – ‘THE NORTHERN LIGHT’ – and below: “All the news that we can print.”’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Next morning, following her usual after-breakfast
conference in the kitchen, Mrs Page set out to walk to the town. Despite Hannah’s repeated urgings ‘ not to pity herself,’ Alice was in low spirits, less from her conviction that she was being brought to destitution, than from the sorrowful suspicion that social ostracism had finally overtaken her.

  The week before, Lady Wellsby had given a large party and neither she nor Henry had been invited. It had been a bitter pill for Alice to swallow, she had always prided herself on being particularly close to Eleanor Wellsby, and it seemed ominously to presage an equal deterioration in her relations with Catharine Bard, and her other friends. Furthermore, she had begun to suspect that the tradesmen were less respectful than before. Mr Scade, the butcher, had been quite disagreeable last Saturday when, having forgotten to order the joint, she asked him to deliver at short notice. Alice was therefore disinclined to venture upon the busy streets, yet she had felt the need to cheer herself, and now she was on her way to her little dressmaker, Miss Jennie Robinson, who was altering her grey moiré, the one she had bought in Jenner’s when she was in Edinburgh visiting her sister last spring and, as she explained to Hannah, she had ‘never liked the ruched sleeves’.

  Her progress along Park Road was agreeably uneventful, but as she approached the centre of the town her eye was caught and held by a most unusual spectacle. At the newsstand in Victoria Square a large crowd of the townspeople had collected, talking excitedly amongst themselves and pressing round the stand, to buy some sort of bulletin.

  Alice’s curiosity was aroused. She joined the queue and after some difficulty secured a copy of what appeared to be no more than a single sheet of slightly smudged typing. Then she saw the heading: THE NORTHERN LIGHT. At first she could not understand; she thought this must be an advertisement of some sort; then, through her confusion, there came a stab of realization. This was the actual paper! A shiver of consternation went over her. She took a few indecisive steps forward, like a startled hen, wavered, then halted, saying to herself, ‘I can’t face it’. Abandoning the visit to Miss Robinson’s, she turned and started back for Hanley Drive, avoiding the main thoroughfares, exclaiming over and over again, ‘This is the end.’

  Meanwhile, the commotion round the news-stand, showed no signs of abating and, from his office window, which afforded an angled view of the square, Archibald Wellsby stood observing the unusual scene with an absorbed and contemplative eye. No one, he flattered himself, was more capable of judging the temper of the town, yet the reaction provoked by the appearance of the stencilled Light had astounded him. During his regular morning round of the factory, just completed, it had been, in every department, the subject of indignant comment. Halliday, his manager, who accompanied him, had condemned the Chronicle’s sequestration of the printing hall as iniquitous – it was shameful that an old Hedleston institution should be forced to the wall by outsiders. Jim Davies, his six-foot head foreman, captain and international half-back for the Rugby League Fifteen, a real personality and general favourite, to whom even Wellsby genially deferred, had summed up the general feeling when he said bluntly:

  ‘It’s a proper dirty trick, Sir Archie. Just when Page was getting the better of them. Something ought to be done about it, but I don’t suppose anything will.’

  These remarks, especially that suggestive and stimulating phrase, ‘just getting the better of them,’ were circulating through the convolutions of Wellsby’s mind as, still planted at the window, he thoughtfully lit his first cigar of the day. Personally, he was not particularly worked up over the event; nevertheless, there was an aspect of the situation which appealed to him strongly, as a shrewd and successful speculator. His vanity, which was considerable, assured him that he was the leading figure of the borough. When he presented the cups at the local sports, or gave away the prizes at the grammar school, the three hearty cheers always asked for Sir Archie made sweet music in his ears, as did the laughter and applause which greeted him when, cigar in hand and beaker of port at elbow, he delivered one of his famous speeches at the annual banquet of the Loyal Order of Noble Dalesmen. Often when coming away from such an event, snugly ensconced beneath the fur-lined rug in the back of his Daimler, he would say jovially to his wife, who had, perhaps, been the least appreciative of his audience, ‘ Ellie, you’re married to the most popular man in Hedleston.’

  And now, narrowing his gaze, as though to bring everything into perspective, he began definitely to perceive what an opportunity was presented him to rise even higher in the general esteem while furthering his essential motive of ‘ doing himself a bit of good on the side’. A loan of ten, fifteen, yes, even twenty thousand pounds, off his own bat, would mean little enough to him and it would almost certainly save the day for Page and the Northern Light. The news of it would go through the town like wildfire. By Jove, they’d think the world of him, stepping into the breach, standing four-square for justice and fair play, upholding the rights and dignity of Hedleston. Besides, Sir Archie cogitated wisely, it would prove a thoroughly profitable investment when he came to stand for Parliament. Although not a man to be bound beforehand, Page would certainly back him to the hilt at the next election. Henry was, above all, reliable, which was more than could be said of this chap Nye, who seemed just a trifle too smart to be trusted. A man of swift decision, Wellsby puffed hard at his cigar for a few seconds – sign of intense mental concentration – then pressed the buzzer for his secretary.

  ‘Put me through to the Northern Light.’ As he stood waiting, a thought crossed his mind. ‘No … let me speak to Lady Wellsby.’

  By this time Mrs Page had reached home and, through one of those extraordinary mutations which so notably distinguished her, the abject mood in which she had begun her circuitous return was gone. Self-justification had effected the transition. She went into the library and sat down, sustained by a growing sense of vindication, resolved at all costs to be calm, level-headed, and composed. Henry had brought his upon her – from the very beginning she had warned him; he had ignored her warning; this was the result. Permitting herself the final indulgence of a tragic little smile, she lapsed, as she occasionally did when talking to herself, into the simple doric of the North: ‘Well, my fine lady, you’ll never see your Hawaii now. And your braw reception for the Philharmonic, that’s gone to the wa’ as well.’ Then she set herself to face the future with fortitude and enterprise. She would be loyal to Henry – she had always been a good wife to him in spite of everything – and if unable to restrain some words of reproach, she would temper them with condolences. Already, too, tangible sacrificial schemes were flitting through her head for the support and regeneration of the family. Naturally, her jewellery would be the first to go, not that she had much of it, for Henry’s taste had never run in that direction, and in any case, unlike Eleanor Wellsby, she had never been a woman to bedizen herself. But at least, with her few bits and pieces, she would ensure that they all had bread.

  And there was more, much more, that she could do: as her vision widened, exciting possibilities took shape before her. Might she not open a shop to sell her needlepoint, or perhaps a tea room, where in a quietly refined and ladylike manner she would every afternoon attract a superior clientele? After some consideration she decided to name the café the Lavender Lady, and she began in her imagination to design a fetching uniform for Dorothy and herself, in that shade, which had always suited her colouring. A brilliant idea came next when she remembered those wonderful homemade wheaten scones that Rose used to bake at Banksholme and which must surely prove an irresistible attraction at the new establishment. She would write to Rose, dear Rose, for the recipe, this very day.… But this thought of her sister, and of her old home, swept Alice from the future to the past. Her dream life, which fed on fantasies, and into which she could be swept by a word, an odour, by the echo of a distant cry, the faint pealing of church bells, the tinkle of a piano on a still Sunday afternoon, now took possession, and in a flash her mind had lost itself in a maze of nostalgic recollection. Back, back she went to her chil
dhood, scenting the rich aroma of baking in the big dark kitchen, seeing herself accept a scone warm from the oven, dripping with golden butter, and run out, laughing, to the swing behind the shrubbery. She heard the creak of the swing, the clip-clop of her father’s pony as the trap came up the drive, the faint thin bleating of lambs upon the Cheviots, the shrill drawn-out cry of the village fishwife as, bowed beneath her creel, she passed along the lane: ‘Fresh fillets … all fresh today … fresh frae the Firm …’

  There was a knock on the door and Hannah entered.

  ‘What about your lunch, Mrs Page?’

  Abruptly, Alice came back to Hedleston, blinked for a moment, became again the saviour of the household, and said, very quietly:

  ‘I’ll just take some toasted cheese and a glass of milk.’

  ‘Nothing more?’

  ‘Nothing, thank you, Hannah.’

  She knows, Alice told herself, when Hannah had gone, and she felt that her old Scottish maid would respect her, not only for her reserve, but for this first step towards retrenchment. Still, when the toasted cheese came in, nicely set out on a tray, it was a generous portion, and Alice enjoyed it. This was, in fact, one of her favourite dishes, and Hannah, perhaps because of the occasion, had made it particularly well. She finished every bit of it, then went upstairs to take her usual rest.

  Somewhat to her surprise she fell asleep and it was past three o’clock when the ringing of the telephone roused her. She took up the receiver and immediately heard Lady Wellsby’s voice.

  ‘Alice, my dear, is that you? Eleanor Wellsby here. Alice, we want you and Henry to come to dinner next THURSDAY. Not a party, just a cosy little evening for the four of us. Is that all right?’

  Startled, and not fully awake, Alice could not believe her ears. She managed to say:

  ‘Yes … yes … I think we’re free.’

  ‘Good, then we look forward to having you. Only this morning Archie was saying how little we had seen of you lately …’