Shelley Street! What mania was upon the builder when he so named that joyless, dingy alignment of brick traps! Byron Street and Keats Street and Southey Street and many another street blessed with the name if not the nature of poetry ran off the same black trunk of a high-road from which we branched. And to me, then, the names were nothing but names, and the name of Shelley Street evoked, as I passed the mansions of the rich, only a pang of bitterness and envy.
For, young as I was, I hated all the circumstances of my life. I hated the carrying of bundles of washing. I hated the turning of the mangle, and most of all I hated the close compression of a life that threw us all upon one another by day and night, and made us bite and snarl, and gave no one the chance to be alone. So that when I saw the fine rich houses on the Palatine Road, I burned to be as rich as the people who lived in them. I dreamed of a great room in which I might be alone, of a house full of servants whose chief job would be to prevent anyone from coming near me, of a park which would interpose itself between me and the touch and commerce of men.
I loved to go out on that job of gathering nettles and dandelions and the few other herbs from which our beer was brewed, because solitude could be had thereby. It did not take long in those days, even from the heart of Manchester, to reach flowery fields and hedgerows full of meadowsweet and ragged robin, nor did it take long to eat my bread and butter, swig my bottle of water, and fill the basket with herbs. Then there was nothing to do but wander here and there, lie for hours under a hedge, watch the swifts hurtling across the blue sky, and dream my unfailing dream of being rich.
It is incredible to me now that, then, I had never read a book. I couldn’t read; I couldn’t write. If I had been able to read, I should doubtless have been acquainted with many stories of boys like myself who had become cotton magnates or this or that, and whose first thought had been to make their old parents comfortable and relieve the want of their brothers and sisters. I was unaware that the morality of fiction demanded that of me; my dreams were crude and stark and centred upon myself. There was no one else in the picture. I didn’t want anyone else in the picture. I wanted just me, comfortable, isolated from the demands and stresses of life.
It was because that foul range of dungeons miscalled a street was also called Shelley Street that a turn came to my career. In the pleasant rural part to which I had gone one day in my quest for herbs there was—and is today—an old church of red sandstone squatting in the midst of its graveyard on an escarpment from which you look down to the low water-meadows where the Mersey loops and twists. It is still a pleasant spot, and then seemed paradisal, for the city had not yet marched to within miles of it; and nothing met the eye save a comely house here and there, and tall trees, and the meadows where cattle were wading in the deep pastures.
I lay in the churchyard with my filled basket at my side, with a grey tombstone, fallen askew, to support my back, and with nothing to do but let the tranquillity of the day drift by till it was time to set out for home. The old man who came into my life at that moment was named Oliver—the Reverend Eustace Oliver.
Reverend enough he looked to me, pacing slowly through the grass among the tombstones, his long white hair reaching almost to his shoulders, his clothes black and austere, the index finger of one hand tucked within the pages of a book.
I scrambled to my feet with a feeling that this man, clearly a parson, owned this churchyard and that I had better get out of it. I was picking up my basket when Mr. Oliver put a hand upon my shoulder with a touch extraordinarily gentle and forced me back to where I had been sitting. Then he, too, with a smile at me, sat down upon the grass. “Don’t run away,” he said. “This is God’s acre.”
When I got to know Mr. Oliver better, I found him full of these phrases—what, I suppose, we should call today cant phrases—but he meant them all, and he was a good man.
I don’t remember much of what we talked about that afternoon, except that he asked me my name and I said William Essex; and he asked me “How old are you, William?” and I said twelve; and he asked me where I lived and I said Shelley Street. Then he smiled again, and showed me the book he was carrying, and said: “I often wander down Shelley Street myself.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, and said: “I’ve never seen you there, sir,” and he replied patiently: “No, no. I mean I read Shelley. This book, you see—these are Shelley’s poems.”
He held the book out to me and I said: “I can’t read, sir,” and to that he answered: “Well, let me read to you.”
It was a strange afternoon, and it ended magnificently in Mr. Oliver taking me to the kitchen door of the vicarage. He said to the cook, with his unfailing childlike smile: “Mary, feed my lambs,” and Mary fed me on tea and bread and butter, raspberry jam and cake.
It was with no thought of Mr. Oliver’s exalted discourse, but rather in the hope that the raspberry jam would happen again, that I contrived to be in the churchyard often during that summer. Sometimes Mr. Oliver appeared; sometimes he didn’t; and even when he did, the lamb was not always fed. But the feeding was frequent enough to justify a going on with the experiment; and the upshot of it all was that out of cupidity on my part and a tolerant friendliness on his there arose an easy relationship between us which ended by his offering me employment. The wages were something ridiculous, but I was to have my keep, and Mr. Oliver said he would teach me to read and write.
He kept his word, and for three years I lived happily. There was plenty to do. I was the servant of every servant about the place. I helped the cook in the kitchen, lighting fires, cleaning cutlery with bath brick ground to powder, scrubbing tables, keeping the joints turning before the fire. I helped the old man who looked after Mr. Oliver’s horse and garden, cleaning out the stable, carting manure to the garden dump, weeding the borders and raking the gravel of the paths, and occasionally even grooming the horse that was as old and grey and quiet-tempered as Mr. Oliver himself. I helped the sexton to keep the church clean; and in the first fury of my desire to be a good and useful servant, I even began to tidy up the tombstones, scraping with a nail the moss from the inscriptions. But Mr. Oliver wouldn’t have that. He stopped me gently with a murmured remark about the unimaginable touch of time.
My lessons with Mr. Oliver were at no stated hour. At any time of the day he was liable to drop on me, snatch me away from my work, and take me to the copybooks in his study. I liked the winter evenings best, with the oil lamps lit in the brown room full of faded books and with a fire rustling and twinkling in the grate. The room looked upon open fields, and not a sound disturbed us save the occasional crying of an owl. Mr. Oliver sat in his easy chair by the fire, wearing comfortable slippers and smoking a long clay pipe. I sat up to the table which was covered with a red cloth fringed with little balls, and wrote or read aloud from my book.
I owe this to Mr. Oliver: that as soon as I could read at all—and I took to it with really remarkable speed—he kept me reading solid things. We began with the Old Testament; we read some Burton and Browne and some of the speeches of Burke, strange enough stuff for a boy, but it gave me an early sense of rhythm, of richness, a palate which was never easy afterwards with the second-rate.
I didn’t realise it at the time; but what had happened to me was a chance in a million: I had acquired, and kept for three years, a private tutor of exceptional intelligence and skill at his job. Some whim had set him off; he was a bachelor and, I suppose, lonely; but having taken on the task, he did it thoroughly. He wrote a beautiful hand, and so do I to this day. He taught me something of geography. Never a place-name was mentioned but we must find it on the globe. He gave me a smattering of history and talked to me about the men and the happenings that filled the newspapers.
What is more, I had plenty to eat, and I had space and quiet. I slept in a loft over the stable, and, believe me, there was no hardship in that. It was a roomy loft with a window that looked over the fields. In the summer-time the river mists would be up, and I would see the c
attle moving through them so deeply immersed that nothing was visible but their ridged spines like the keels of upturned boats floating on an opalescent lake. In the winter it was cosy in that loft, with three blankets on my bed of hay, and, above all, I was alone there. All the fabled joys of family life were taken from me, and I was happier, healthier and wiser in every way.
I worked hard. I was cleaning out the stable before seven in the morning, and what with my jobs and my lessons I had hardly a moment to spare till ten at night. My wages were ten pounds a year. Shameless exploitation of boy by wicked parson! Nonsense! What I owe to Eustace Oliver I can never repay.
At the end of the first year, he offered me my ten pounds. To a boy of thirteen, who had never handled more than a shilling at a time, it seemed an immense sum—a sum so immense that I could not accept the responsibility of touching it. There was nothing I could do with it. I could, of course, have given it to my parents, but the thought never crossed my mind. I saw them but rarely—more and more rarely as the year went on—and found myself wanting to see them less and less.
I needed no clothes. Though it was not in his bargain, Mr. Oliver provided them. I had plenty of food and a roof over my head; and, though I had by this time reached the point where I should have bought books if there were none to hand, I didn’t need books either. There was all Mr. Oliver’s library to explore.
So Mr. Oliver said he would bank the money for me and give me five per cent interest. And that was another piece of education for me. I learned that money I had no immediate use for had the delightful property of adding to itself with no effort whatever on my part.
“You see,” Mr. Oliver explained, “if you had a hundred pounds out at five per cent, then at the end of the year you’d have your hundred with another five added. But as you’ve only got ten, that is one tenth of a hundred, you’ll only get one tenth of the five pounds, that is ten shillings. But that is something, William, for the ten pounds plus the ten shillings will all be added to your next ten pounds, and then you’ll have twenty pounds ten shillings all earning five per cent.”
That was my first lesson both in mathematics and finance, and it seemed very good and wonderful to me.
I never had lessons with Mr. Oliver on a Saturday evening, for Saturday evenings were reserved for Mr. George Summerway. George Summerway lived in one of those fine stucco-fronted houses that were scattered about the church and vicarage. Like Mr. Oliver, he was a bachelor, but that was all, so far as I could see, that there was in common between them. Summerway was a huge, broad-shouldered man with a head overflowing with crisp black hair. He had a loud Lancashire voice that bellowed forth frighteningly from his florid face. He was always dressed with an overpowering elegance. He ran to tight trousers and sprigged waistcoats and a white beaver hat. You could see him driving up to town most days, managing the reins with an air, while a depressed-looking coachman sat beside him in the dogcart.
Throughout the time I lived with Mr. Oliver, he and George Summerway dined at one another’s houses on alternate Saturday nights. It was on a Saturday night in the winter when I had served Mr. Oliver for two and a half years that he sent for me to the dining-room. The table was littered with the relics of the feast. George Summerway sat with one elbow leaning upon it, his chair skewed away, his legs sprawled out towards the fire. He was twirling a glass of port in one hand.
“Well, this is t’lad, is it?” he bellowed, as I stood timidly within the doorway. His face was flushed, and his curling black hair hung over his forehead. “Looks a skinny ’un to me.”
“He’s strong enough,” said Mr. Oliver quietly. “I’ve been talking to Mr. Summerway about your future, William.”
“Wants thee to go into t’cotton trade. Does that appeal to thee, lad?”
I’m afraid I didn’t make a good impression. I stammered and blushed. The thing had been sprung on me too suddenly.
“We’ve taken him at a disadvantage, George,” said Mr. Oliver kindly. “I’ll talk to him about the idea.”
“Ay, an’ get him to learn to talk, too,” Summerway shouted, swigging down his port. “Tha’s got to shout in t’cotton trade. No place for dumb ninnies. And learn summat about figures, lad. Learn summat about figures, an’ then us’ll see.”
That was all at the moment, but throughout the rest of that winter and during the succeeding spring Mr. Oliver conscientiously bent his mind to teaching me “summat about figures.” I could feel that it was not a matter greatly to his taste. Often his hand would stray to some favourite volume, as though for once he would break the routine and diverge into paths more congenial. But he would put the book down with a sigh and take up a foolscap sheet ruled with cash lines.
We were occupied with this business of figures up to nine o’clock one May evening. It had been a beautiful day, and suddenly Mr. Oliver thrust away the work as though he were impatient with it. “That’ll do for tonight, William,” he said, and walked to the window to look out over the water-meadows towards the last flush of sunset that lingered in the sky. Then, as was his custom, he expressed his deepest emotion in a catchword. “The golden evening brightens in the west,” he murmured. “Good-night, William.”
“Good-night, sir,” I said.
The next morning Mr. Oliver was found dead in his bed.
2
Mr. Oliver died on a Wednesday. Mr. Summerway told me to report to his office in Mosley Street on the following Monday. I disliked the idea of going home, but there was nothing else to do, so I went. Things were greatly changed since I had last been there six months before. There was no congestion now. My father had disappeared—had quite simply walked out of the house one morning and never come back. He is not exiled in order that he may dramatically reappear in these pages. He never did reappear. He was gone, mysteriously and for ever. My eldest brother, who was married, was now living in the house with his wife and my mother. There was no one else. My other brother had joined the army. One of my sisters had gone to “live in” at a large drapery store in the town; another had taken a position as “general.” Concerning the third I could get no information whatever. “Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies,” my mother said darkly; and to this day I have never discovered what happened to my third sister.
My brother was twenty-five years old and worked as a boilermaker. He did not receive me graciously, and I don’t blame him for that. His wife, whom I had never seen before, was a dark surly girl, big with her first child. They owed me nothing, and had no reason to want me about the place. I spent an intensely unhappy week-end, and when I set out on the Monday morning for George Summerway’s office I made up my mind to follow what seemed to be a family habit: to disappear without a word.
I did so. I was fifteen years old, in good trim after three years of fresh air and generous feeding, but thin as a lath, dark as night, as all our people were, and as melancholy as hell at the sudden overturning of my world. I had in my pocket thirty pounds, plus some odd shillings, my faithfully computed five per cents, and in a carpet bag I had a few clothes.
I was disappointed with George Summerway’s offices. I had expected that so splendid a personage would conduct his affairs in splendid circumstances, but, though his own room was airy enough, the rest of the premises was dismal and dingy beyond what I should have thought possible.
“Report to Mr. O’Riorden,” Summerway had said to me, and when I came in that morning out of the clear air of May I found Mr. O’Riorden before me, sitting at a very dusty desk set in the middle of a small dusty room that was not so much lighted as dimmed by one small dusty window. Mr. O’Riorden was himself small and dusty. When he stood up, I saw that already I was taller than he. He could not have been more than five feet two. He was as bald as an egg, and from the crown of his shining skull down to his chin his skin was of a dull parchment yellow. His clothes were black and formal, shiny with use. He wore paper protectors over his cuffs, and his silk hat hung from a hook behind the door. He looked at me from over the top of steel-rimmed s
pectacles, and said: “So you’re Essex? Young and blooming. The good God help ye.” He shook his head as though the sight of me filled him with intolerable sadness.
Having looked his fill, he took a snuff-box from his waistcoat pocket, sniffed vigorously at the brown powder, and said: “Ye’ll work in the outer office. I’ll introduce you to the clerks when they condescend to appear, the good-for-nothing limbs of hell. Ye’ll do just what they tell you. Ah, Mr. Sloper, ye’ve decided to give us the benefit of yer presence?”
I find it difficult at this distance of time to recall the individual characteristics of Mr. Sloper, Mr. Sykes and Mr. Sayers, the three clerks, and that is probably because they had no individual characteristics. They called themselves the Three S’s, and Mr. O’Riorden called them the Three Asses. My recollection is of three witless, cheerful blades who told the bawdiest stories of their nightly doings and whose clear eyes and guileless faces belied the saga of prodigal dissipation with which they regaled me and Mr. O’Riorden.
O’Riorden lived a harassed life, a buffer state between the Three Asses and Mr. Summerway. He called himself the confidential secretary and seemed, in practice, to be an overworked correspondence clerk, taking down innumerable letters in some shorthand system of his own and transcribing them laboriously in longhand into a carbon-copy book. Neither the typewriter nor the telephone was yet usual in such an office as that of Mr. Summerway, and for illumination in the often murky late afternoons we had crude gas jets singing dolefully in little wire cages.
I spent a futile and unhappy morning. It was soon apparent that George Summerway, who had the reputation of having never done a generous thing in his life, had done one for me out of regard for his old friend Mr. Oliver. There was no place for me, there was no need for me, in the office. I was to receive fifteen shillings a week, and I saw no means of earning it. But I provided great fun for the Three S’s who were delighted to have someone to order about and who kept me busy washing their inkwells, dusting their desks and running their errands. When lunch-time drew near, Sayers’s enterprise rose. He handed me a bottle and charged me to go to the dairy and buy half a pint of pigeon’s milk, but when this time-heavy jest failed to get home, they left me alone, with nothing to do but mope idly about the shabby room.
My Son, My Son Page 2