Inheritance

by Phyllis Bentley

  “Art vexed, lad?” asked Mary softly, putting a bowl of porridge on the table before him.

  “Nay! I’m weary and moithered,” said Joe with a sigh. “That’s all.”

  Mary put her arm about his shoulders and drew his head to her breast. “It’s a wonder to me what makes thy hair twist so much, Joe,” she murmured, gently ruffling up the dark curls with her other hand. “I wish mine did.”

  “Yours is well enough as it is,” said Joe, freeing himself—he did npt like the sound of the word “twist” just now. Mary sat down by the hearth, and took the ginger cat into her lap; Joe set to work on his porridge. “What did Will Oldroyd say about t’Leeds Mercury when he came?” he pursued, still puzzling over this, feeling that he was failing Will by not understanding his message.

  “Nowt,” said Mary softly, stroking the cat. “He just said he brought it for thee.”

  Joe sighed. “Well, I can’t make it out,” he mused. “It’s strange he should take the trouble to come up to Scape Scar.”

  “Happen he just dropped in from t’moor as he used when he were a lad,” suggested Mary.

  Joe felt that if Mary had been George Mellor’s sister, George would at once have uttered: “Well, look out for thy sen, lass,” or some other such warning of the danger of having handsome young men coming to see one in one’s brother’s absence. But he himself could not say such things to Mary, could not appear to doubt her so much that a warning was necessary. He finished his meal in silence; he could have eaten much more, but somehow he felt in the air that there was no more, and so did not like to embarrass Mary by asking for it. He began to wonder, as he had often wondered lately, how on earth the Mellors managed to scrape up enough to eat for themselves and three children. When trade was brisk Mellor earned a good wage, twenty-two shillings a week or even twenty-four, but the cropping trade was, alas, by no means brisk just now. He strongly suspected that Mrs. Mellor rather often borrowed food from Mary and forgot to pay it back—her husband would be furious if he knew—but there was little enough in both cottages put together to feed a couple of women, let alone two men and three children. Well! He sighed again, and picked up the paper, but had hardly read two or three lines before he faintly heard a scream. He started, and Mary, who was washing up the pots he had used, started too; they fixed each other with eyes wide in question and alarm. This was only the second time they had heard sounds from the Mellor’s cottage since George’s marriage; the first time had been when Lizzie Mellor was brought to bed with Charley. Her scream must have been loud, her distress great, to penetrate the thick stone wall. Joe, much upset, threw down the paper.

  “I suppose I’d best go in,” he said ruefully.

  “Aye, go,” breathed Mary.

  Joe stepped out into the night. As he passed the Mellors’ windows he glanced in; there was no light within save that of the fire, but Joe could dimly see Mrs. Mellor crouched by the table with her back to him, and her husband standing erect, facing her. Vague heaps on the floor by her skirts were probably the three children. Joe knocked. After a pause Mellor threw open the door.

  “Well?” he said in a hostile tone.

  “I thought happen you’d come in to me for a bit, George,” suggested Joe soothingly, “and let the women-kind be in here together.”

  “What’s use o’ that?” said Mellor roughly. “We should hear her fretting just t’same there as here—tha’s heard her, I reckon, and that’s why tha’s come. It just comes over her at times, like, what’s to happen to t’childer if things goes on.”

  “I’m right sorry, George,” said Joe heavily. “If there’s owt I can do, say the word, and I’m your man.”

  “There’s nowt,” said Mellor with decision. “Unless,” he added, suddenly struck by the idea, “tha’ll come up to t’Moorcock wi’ me? See thee, Joe,” he went on coaxingly, “Now come! Will tha, eh?”

  Joe hesitated. He had not the faintest desire to cross the moor and walk a mile towards Lancashire along the Oldham road to the desolate inn, where he strongly suspected, moreover, he would meet croppers of the Luddite persuasion. Yet he was so sorry for Mellor and so anxious to help him and his wife through their quarrel, he regretted so much having avoided Mellor on the way home, and thus helped to bring it about, that he could hardly bring himself to refuse. “Well——” he began, his reluctance only too audible in his tone.

  “By God!” shouted Mellor suddenly, staring at something behind Joe’s shoulder.

  “What is it?” cried Joe, wheeling.

  “T’sixpence!” replied Mellor eagerly. “See!” He pointed, and Joe saw a faint gleam on the ground in the track of the flickering light which came through the open door. Mellor pushed him aside and strode out. “Aye!” he exclaimed, stooping. “It’s here.” He showed the coin lying in his palm to Joe, and tossed it up exultantly. “Here thou art, lass!” he cried to his wife, hurrying into the house to her: “It’d non gone so far after all.”

  Something heavy and burning seemed to close upon Joe’s heart. He had admired Mellor’s action in throwing the coin away; though perhaps wrong-headed and unnecessary, it was independent, sturdy, worthy of an Ire Valley man; it chimed in with all Joe’s notions of what a man should be. That Mellor should be so reduced by want that he was obliged to go back on his defiant act, that he should be too poor to be able to afford to be proud, oppressed Joe to the point of stifling him. If Mellor felt no shame in his retracting, it was very bad; if he felt shame and yet retracted, it was hardly better. If frames were going to sap manhood thus it was a bad day for the Ire Valley when they came there. Joe felt quite choked with pity and rage. “George!” he called sharply, to put an end to the spectacle of the Mellors gloating over the recovered sixpence. “I’ll go to t’Moorcock.”

  “Tha will?” cried George, delighted. “Come on, then, let’s start.”

  Joe ran back to get his coat and explain to Mary. He was disconcerted to see her face cloud. “Don’t go, Joe,” she urged, coming to him and laying a hand on the coat he was trying to put on. “What hast tha to do wi’ George Mellor and t’Moorcock? They’ll do thee no good there. Why dost want to go?”

  “I don’t want to go,” said Joe with a kind of mournful irritation, “But I’m that sorry for Mellor I don’t see that I can’t help it.”

  There was a pause.

  “Well! I suppose tha mun go, then,” said Mary sadly at length. She lifted up the coat and helped him into it. “But don’t be led into swearing owt there, Joe.”

  “What dost tha know about t’Moorcock?” demanded her brother, startled.

  “I know what Lizzie Mellor says,” said Mary, fingering his buttons. Suddenly she threw her arms about his neck. “Don’t go, Joe,” she breathed, laying her warm round cheek against his hollow one: “Don’t go, lad.”

  Joe, longing to stay but driven by pity for Mellor to go, kissed her, put her gently aside and went out soberly.

  Gloom seemed to have fallen upon Mellor too—he was apt thus to be moody, full of fire and vigour one minute, limp and dull the next—and the two men stumbled up the rough lane without speaking. Presently they turned into a narrow path across the moor, where they walked in single file and their knees were brushed by the heather. The breeze was strengthening, and now and again softly moaned and died, rustling eerily; the night was still as black as pitch. At length they reached the high Oldham road, and went along it to the left, climbing still. Mellor now broke the silence, saying heavily: “Tha thinks worse o’ me over that sixpence, Joe.”

  “Nay, I don’t,” lied Joe from a full heart. “I’m sorry for thee, George, that’s all,” he added.

  Suddenly Mellor became very animated, and talked fierily and wildly on his usual Luddite themes. It appeared to Joe that he knew a great deal about the Hartshead Moor affair, so much, indeed, that he must surely have been present at it. Joe’s head ached with the misery and the turmoil of it all. Here was Mellor saying that the frames were ruin, while the Oldroyds said that frames alone could save t
he cloth trade; and both sides were prepared to uphold their conviction that they were right to the bitter end. They couldn’t both be right, thought Joe dejectedly; one of them must be wrong; perhaps they were both wrong—unless perhaps it was all the fault of the war. Joe sighed with relief at this agreeable solution, and for a moment felt quite bright and cheerful about it, but he was soon recalled to realities by Mellor’s saying in a hearty tone:

  “I wish tha’d let thysen be twissed in, Joe. Wi’ thy scholar’s ways tha could write the oath out for us champion.”

  “And I wish thou were well out of it,” said Joe with emphasis. “Have some sense, man. What can tha do if they get the soldiers out? If they fire on you? Eh?”

  “We can get killed, I suppose,” said Mellor bitterly. At Joe’s movement of protest he went on with fire: “Tha doesn’t understand how we feel, lad; tha’s non a cropper. Feel this!” He stretched out his right arm, and, fumbling in the dark, drew his bared wrist across Joe’s hand. Joe winced as he felt the “hoof” which, formed by the constant pressure of the “nog” of the shears, always marked the hand-cropper. “Aye, shrink from it!” cried Mellor. “It’s the cropper’s mark, tha knows; it shows he’s worked t’shears for mony a year. It’s a man’s job, is a cropper’s; it needs strength and skill. And then they want to bring in them cursed frames to take bread out o’ wer mouths and spoil t’cloth.”

  “They won’t spoil t’cloth,” put in Joe mildly. “Will Oldroyd says they’ll do it better—crop more even like.”

  “And I say they won’t!” cried George in anguish. “How can wood and iron and water work better nor a man? So!” he mused bitterly after a pause: “Will says they’ll do it better, does he? And which on ’em is it says he’ll wade i’ Luddites’ blood to his saddle-girths, eh? Will or his father? Which?”

  “It were Mester Oldroyd,” admitted Joe. “But tha doesn’t understand Mester Oldroyd, George. His bark’s worse nor his bite. He means he’ll have his own way about the frames, that’s all. Enoch Smith has advised him to call out the soldiers,” he added warningly.

  “Well, Enoch makes ’em and Enoch breaks ’em,” cried Mellor with a loud wild laugh.

  Joe could make no sense of this, and, as they had reached the junction of the moorland roads and were at the door of the public-house said nothing, but stood back to allow George to lead the way within.

  2

  A good deal of noise, talking, laughing and singing, was coming from a room on the left, but as the newcomers’ tread rang in the flagged passage, the noise abruptly fell away, and there was a silence, as though those within were all listening. The innkeeper put his fat crimson hairless face round a corner of the passage, peered at the newcomers, nodded, and withdrew without a word. Joe, in a tremor of unease and nervous expectation, tossed off his coat as Mellor did, and followed him into a room which seemed, in the half-light of two guttering candles, full of lurid lights and shadows and men’s faces. Mellor was greeted with friendly shouts of welcome. “I’ve brought Joe at long last,” he said, and there seemed a general feeling that Joe was very welcome too—hands were thrust out at him, and wrists of which almost all bore the croppers’ hoof, and he shook them vaguely. A place was made for him on a settle facing the fire; he sank into it gladly, drew his thin limbs together and tried to efface himself from the company’s notice.

  After a while his heart ceased to beat so thickly, and his eyes cleared; he saw he was in just an ordinary inn parlour, much the same as that of the Red Lion down in Marthwaite, with three settles and the fireplace making four sides of a square. The settles were full of men, and men, too, leaned over the settle backs and stood against the walls. They were mostly young fellows in their twenties; several of them Joe knew, though he did not see any of the Oldroyds’ men there; on his right there was one named Walker who worked in the same “shop” as Mellor down by the Ire Bridge, a white-faced fellow with very red lips and very black sleek hair. Joe had always disliked him without knowing why, and he disliked him more than ever now, for without stopping for an instant he poured into Joe’s shrinking ear a thick torrent of bawdy talk. Mellor had called for ale, and the landlord’s daughter now brought it; Walker nudged Joe in the ribs with his elbow, and covering his mouth with his pasty hand whispered a lewd comment on her substantial breasts. Joe frowned, shifted uneasily in his place and thanked the lass as politely as he was able; he found that he had Tom Thorpe on his left hand, and felt better. Thorpe lived in a hamlet on the far side of the valley between Marthwaite and the Ire Bridge, where he worked in the same “shop” as Mellor; a squat, sturdy, dark man, with slightly bowed legs and very red cheeks, he was noted for his cynically jocular interruptions, which he always brought out from a serious face in a long high drawl. He was a decent, honest fellow, unmarried as yet, the eldest of a long family; taking his pipe out of his mouth, he now gave Joe a friendly wink and asked how Mary was. Joe replied that she was well, and to return Thorpe’s courtesy observed that Thorpe had had a long walk up to the Inn.

  “Not so far as some on ’em,” said Thorpe. “There’s some from beyond Annotsfield.”

  He spoke with pride, and indeed Joe marvelled at the energy of men who, after twelve hours or more with the shears, would walk the six or seven moorland miles between their home and the Moorcock twice before going to work next day. The men must care deeply for what brought them there, and he no longer doubted, if indeed he ever had doubted, that what brought them there was Luddism; for talk was brisk about frames and men, and many a sly reference to things that happened on Hartshead Moor o’ windy nights was received with winks and laughter. Joe could not help seeing in his mind a picture of the little lonely Moorcock Inn, set in a vast wild stretch of moor, beneath a dark night sky, with tiny figures making slowly and painfully towards it from different directions, all bound by a mutual oath. It was exciting, it was different from ordinary life, it seemed fine and noble, there was almost a historical quality about it somehow; Joe felt moved and uplifted in spite of himself. He was interested and pleased, too, to see that Mellor was regarded here with much respect, and his words deferred to; he stood by the fire, his pale cheek reddened by its glow, laughed and chattered and looked animated and young and handsome, not the same man at all as the one who had picked Will Oldroyd’s sixpence from the dirt an hour ago.

  “Now, Joe!” cried Mellor suddenly, perhaps feeling his neighbour’s eyes upon him: “What about it, lad? Tha’s come here to-night, and tha’s a good heart for all men in trouble.”

  “Aye, he has,” murmured Thorpe.

  “Tha knows what we’re here for,” continued Mellor with authority. “Now, art willing to be twissed in?”

  Joe hesitated.

  “Speak up, lad!” cried someone.

  “I don’t understand what you mean to do,” said Joe.

  “We’re out to stop frames from running i’ th’ Ire Valley,” said Thorpe.

  “You can’t do it,” began Joe, turning on him.

  “Then we may as well go dig wer graves and lie down in ’em now,” observed Thorpe drily. “We may as well do it now as clem for a few months first, and that’s what frames means to us.”

  “Unless we get poor relief,” put in one man bitterly.

  “Aye! Charity!” said another over Joe’s head.

  “That’s all right,” said Joe, colouring on Mellor’s behalf as he thought again of the sixpence : “Nobody hates charity more nor me, and nobody’s sorrier for th’ Ire Valley croppers nor me. But I think——”

  “Tha thinks too much,” put in Thorpe.

  “I know,” Joe corrected himself earnestly, “Violence, breaking frames and such like, won’t do you a ha’porth of good. Violence never does any good.”

  “Well, nowt else will,” observed Thorpe in a cheerful tone.

  “They’ll meet violence with violence, and get out the soldiers,” persisted Joe, “and then where will you all be?”

  To his surprise a shout of laughter greeted this, and several voices
broke out into jeering comment.

  “We shall dodge them, lad!”

  “We shall be on t’moor when redcoats is in t’valley.”

  “Aye, and in t’valley when they’re on t’moor.”

  Seeing Joe quite disconcerted, Mellor explained briefly that the soldiers had been sent out to meet the frames crossing Hartshead Moor, but the jingle of their harness could be heard a mile away, and as they knew only the main roads and never ventured their horses upon a path, the croppers made, as he said, “rings round ’em.”

  “But suppose you do smash up a few frames here and there,” urged Joe, “Do you think that’ll stop t’use on ’em?”

  “Of course it will!” shouted a cropper.

  “Not it,” said Joe. “It isn’t human nature to stop using an improvement o’ that sort. No such thing has ever happened in history. It’s in t’nature o’ things to change, and you can no more stop it than you can stop the ire from running downhill.”

  His eyes glowed and he spoke with fire, but the men laughed, and Thorpe repeated: “Tha thinks too much, lad.”

  “Tha’s got thyself moithered, Joe,” observed Mellor condescendingly: “We can dam the Ire, can’t we?”

  “Aye, that’s true,” said Joe thoughtfully. “We can guide t’course o’ things, certainly.”