The old man’s sharp tone suddenly made me feel a stranger in the house—a dependant. And I said to myself that I’d be damned if old Moscrop should speak to me like that. “Because people expect a thing,” I retorted, “it doesn’t follow that it’s common sense.”
“It’s common sense that someone should go to chapel with Nellie,” the old boy declared stoutly, “and since you won’t, I will. The means of grace won’t come amiss to me. Perhaps you will be so good, before you retire to your study, as to order a cab.”
He sat down with dignity, Nellie mopped her eyes and fled upstairs. I put on my overcoat, walked to the cab-rank at All Saints and ordered the cab to be at Moscrop’s at a quarter past six. The roads, you know, were not asphalted then. I noticed that the keen wind had stretched a film of ice on all the puddles.
The old man, who had not been out on a winter night for a long time, obstinately wrapped himself up in overcoat and muffler. He glared at me in a fierce “I’ll show you!” fashion, and certainly it would be an Oddy Road sensation for a worshipper to defy his bodily ailments, arrive in a four-wheeler, and depart in the same reckless and spendthrift fashion. I saw them into the cab, helping old Moscrop across the pavement which sparkled with frost. “You needn’t bother!” he exclaimed impatiently. “Get to your study. I’ll manage.” Both hostility and derision were in his tone. He was beginning to think that little enough was coming out of that study.
I did not see him alive again. He made an Oddy Road sensation all right. Half-way through the sermon he was seized with one of his paroxysms. I have pointed out before that the Moscrop pew was right against the vestry door. A couple of stewards got him under the arms and helped him into the vestry, gasping like a landed fish. If he had stayed there till the attack was over, he might have lived; but he managed to articulate the word “cab.” A volunteer ran to the cab-rank and brought back the four-wheeler which would have been there, anyway, half an hour later. Moscrop and Nellie were got aboard, the old man fighting for his breath in the black wind that whirled round the corner. The hack that pulled the four-wheeler, nearly as broken-winded as Moscrop himself, went clickety-clack over the ice-bound road. He was turning the corner to Moscrop’s front door when the accident happened. From my study I heard the sudden wild slither as the poor beast’s hoof met an icy rut, heard the sound of the cab swerving as the horse tried to recover himself, heard the smashing blow as the cab went broadside-on into the street lamp at the corner.
When I got down, a few people had already gathered among the splintered glass on the pavement. The cabby was kneeling at the fallen horse’s head. I helped Nellie out of the cab. She was frozen with fright. “Father!” was all she could say. She had noticed that his grim fight for breath had stopped. It had stopped for good. The shock of the collision had finished him off, as the doctor had expected some such affair would do.
*
I walked back through the murk of the Hulme morning after seeing Mark Harborough set off with the Easifix samples. The gas was lit in the living-room; the fire was bright; the breakfast was ready. Everything looked good, everything smelled good; but the sight of the room did not cheer me. Nellie sat at the table, reading her morning chapter from the Bible. I had persuaded her to see an optician about that frowning stare, and now she wore pince-nez. She put the silk marker into the book, shut it, and looked at me through the glasses. “I’ll put the water on the tea,” she said. Whenever I appeared she had some dutiful remark to make. “I’ll put the water on the tea.” “The joint’s just done.” “Can I sew those buttons on for you now?” But one thing she never did. She never came forward and threw her arms round me and hugged me and kissed me, as I had so often seen Sheila do to Dermot. And, of course, now she never would. Her father’s death lay like a sword between us. She had not spoken of that matter, but in her complete submission there seemed to lurk reproach. Even now, nearly a year after the old man’s death, she was in black from top to toe. She had taken, too, to wearing a vast cameo brooch that had belonged to her mother: a thing that depicted a maiden, vaguely Grecian, sitting beneath the drooping hair of a willow. She seemed to be doing all she could to add to her age and to bid good-bye to the fleeting joys of youth.
I had been unable to interest her in the affairs of the Easifix Company. Moscrop had left nearer six than five thousand pounds. He had died intestate, and Nellie was without a relative in the world. Every penny was hers, and I found it no easy matter to open the subject of throwing the money upon the waters in the hope of a goodly return. But once I had done so, she was acquiescent. That was her mood now in everything: acquiescence, resignation. Thy will be done. If I wanted the money, there it was. Was I not her husband? There were mornings when this attitude kept me awake at nights, shivering with apprehension. If she had heartily backed the gamble, I could more bravely have faced failure. But to lose the money of this spiritless woman would have cut me deeply. Every atom of my pride was engaged in making Easifix Toys a winning venture.
Nellie believed in feeding me well. She placed before me a plate containing rashers of bacon, a fried egg, and a fry-up of yesterday’s surplus potatoes. I had begun to grow a moustache, and she handed me my tea in one of those monstrous creations, unknown to the present generation, called a moustache-cup. There was a china ledge to prevent the moustache from being waterlogged, though my own adornment was not of a size that made precaution necessary. A portrait of Queen Victoria, backed by the Union Jack, decorated the cup. This was the first I had seen of it; but Nellie was always doing me these small kindnesses, as though determined to fulfil all the duties of a wife.
I used the occasion to try to put some spirit into her. “Thank you, Nellie,” I said. “This will do fine till we’re drinking out of silver beakers. I hope that won’t be long now. Harborough’s on the road this morning.”
“I shall pray for your success,” she said austerely.
“Far better to work for it,” I cried, but at that she shook her head. “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of,” she quoted.
“Very well, then,” I agreed, laying into a rasher. “You pray and I’ll work. That ought to make a winning team. And I bet that within three years we’ll be closing down the bakery, or, better still, putting it up for sale.”
“You wouldn’t do that!” she cried in alarm. “You wouldn’t close the bakery!”
“Like a shot I would,” I answered. “If Easifix turns out a success, why carry on with this? Why go on living in Hulme? It’s never been my idea of paradise.”
“I’ve always been used to it,” she said. “And father was here ever since he was a boy. He remembered when there were green fields in Hulme.”
“Well, there are none now, nor anything else that makes life worth living. The sooner we’re out of it the better.”
“I shouldn’t like to leave Oddy Road. I’ve always attended there. I should like to go on there, even though you’ve given it up.”
Now we were back at a sore point. I wiped my mouth with my handkerchief and pushed back my chair. “I’d better go and see that they’re loading the van,” I said.
I had given up attending Oddy Road. I don’t know why. The wish to go there went as suddenly and inexplicably as it had come. The place no longer meant anything to me, and so I didn’t go. That was all there was to it. So Nellie went alone. This was a real break, because Oddy Road meant so much to Nellie. It was half her life, and now it was a half I could not share.
10
Nellie did not like to see anything changed, but change enough soon came. Two years after Mark Harborough first went out, I had finished with Moscrop’s bakery for good. It continued to exist, but an efficient man ran it. All my time now was being given to Easifix Toys. In the office over the loft I had a clerk, a telephone, and a routine. Once I had thrown off the bakery, I gave my time to mastering the three elements of any trade: buying raw material, making the product, and selling. Anyone of average intelligence, given the capital to start with, can d
o these three things, and I have more than average intelligence.
By the time another year had passed, the office had shifted to a couple of rooms in Oxford Street. Old O’Riorden came in as chief of the office staff. The manufacturing part of the business was housed in a new building that covered the whole of the yard in which our original stable had stood. Throughout all the time I was connected with Easifix, that building sufficed for our purposes. It was a good two-storey affair; and you don’t want a great deal of room for toy-making.
We were all going ahead. Dermot had his fine new showrooms. They were under the Easifix offices in Oxford Street, and a sight they were, stored with the lovely furniture that carried out his ideas of strength combined with simplicity. They had never looked better than they did on a May morning in 1895 when even the sky of Hulme was like taut blue silk and in the grim and sooty soil of the All Saints churchyard a few shrubs were troubled for a while with a green dream of summer. We had only just moved into the new offices. Reports coming in from Harborough were beyond all expectation; and I had come belting down from home full of energy and enthusiasm. I paused on the All Saints side of Oxford Street and looked across the road at the two first-floor windows with “Easifix Toys” lettered upon them, and at the large plate-glass expanse beneath them. Dermot had fitted the whole window as a dining-room. The furniture was teak. The upholstery was green leather. The carpet was sage-green. The electric-light fittings were all in wrought-iron, the work of a craftsman Dermot now employed; and the only picture in the room was a thing I had not yet got used to. It hung over the fireplace. Dermot’s interest in ceramics had caused him to make a visit to Copenhagen. There he had drifted into an exhibition of paintings arranged by a Madame Gauguin whose husband was living and painting on a South Sea island. This thing had caught his eye—a thing of fierce burning colour: a pink beach, a Polynesian woman, a few palms—and he had bought it. There it was, a portentous thing to see in Manchester at that time. “It makes the room,” Dermot had said the day before, “and what’s more, it makes people stand and look. ‘Pink beach!’ they say. ‘Nonsense!’ And then they think: ‘But the furniture’s damned good,’ and so I get ’em. But that picture’s not for sale.”
I dashed across the road, bounded up the stairs to the office, and shut myself in my own room, pondering on the case of Dermot. He was always a goad in my side, a bit ahead of me in everything. This picture was a case in point. I couldn’t pretend at that time to like it, and I couldn’t bear Dermot’s easy laughter. “In ten years’ time, my dear Bill, you’ll probably be offering me a few thousand pounds for it.”
There was his house, too. He had left Ancoats. The client for whom he had remodelled and furnished that place in Withington had failed in business. Dermot had taken the house over from him, furniture and all. He had moved in last week. “I don’t want Rory to be born in Ancoats,” he said, because now Rory was on the way—once more. “And I want to show off, too,” he added, his fly-away eyebrows going up in a grin. “I’m having a grand party to warm the house. Grand for me, anyway. There’ll be six of us: me and Sheila, you and Nellie, and father and mother.” He paused for an almost imperceptible moment; and added: “If Nellie’d care to come?” People were beginning to feel like that about Nellie now.
She came, though. I think she felt rather uncomfortable in Dermot’s house. It was a great contrast to the cosy jumble of our own place. Dermot was passing through a mad phase of whiteness. The dining-room was panelled in white. There was a pair of candle-sconces over the fireplace, and between them the Gauguin picture looked exquisitely at home. “I can’t leave it in the shop,” he explained. “I’m always bringing it back and forth, and now, I think, it had better stay where it is.” Six candles without shades burned in a row down the long table which Sheila had laid beautifully. “Not that I ought to be here,” she said with a laugh. “The man’s mad, asking people tonight, with Rory expected at any minute. Ach, ye young devil, I wouldn’t be surprised if ye interrupted the party.”
Nellie gave her a shocked and wondering look; but Sheila took her gaily by the arm and led her away to see the little Maeve, who had been put to bed.
Old O’Riorden turned up in a shiny frock-coat and stiff cut-throat collar, looking rather intimidated. Things had indeed changed for him since the day when he first took me home to Gibraltar Street, Summerway’s new office boy, and Dermot was a gawky youth with sawdust in his hair. But Mrs. O’Riorden was not the person to be intimidated by anything. “Ah don’t know why you can’t live without all these faldelals, Dermot,” she said, when Sheila’s neat little maid had left the room. “Servants and candles, and yon picture that’s like nothing on earth.”
Dermot smiled benignly. “One of these days that picture may keep us all out of the workhouse,” he told them.
“Time was,” she said, “when the only picture you wanted was that thing with the names of the Manchester martyrs. That used to give me the pip, but I prefer it to yon.”
“Ay, what’s become of that, my lad?” old O’Riorden asked. “I’d be glad to know you’d put it behind the fire.”
“Will you leave the boy alone?” Sheila demanded. “There was no place where it would fit in with his scheme of decoration. Dermot’s an artist now, not an Irishman.”
She spoke lightly. Was I mistaken in thinking there was a hint of bitter raillery behind the words? I glanced across the table, and saw what I had not seen for a long time: the green glint of anger and excitement flash for a second in Dermot’s pale eyes. It was gone even as I looked, and Dermot answered easily: “Just concentrate now on the blessings here provided. I shan’t discuss either of my two religions with unbelievers.”
Sheila took Nellie and Mrs. O’Riorden away to the drawing-room, and we three men sat on at the littered table, smoking cigars. It was the first cigar I had ever smoked, and somehow that, too, increased the nagging sense of inferiority I felt in Dermot’s presence. He produced them with an air, and invited us to drink port. I declined, but old O’Riorden took the wine gladly, holding his glass to the light and savouring the liquor lovingly upon his tongue. I couldn’t have put up a dinner like this. I had no such home as this, and Nellie could never preside in it, as Sheila could do, even if I had one. And this was not coming out of Easifix Toys, either. Both Dermot and I were now making a little money out of it, but not much. Most of the takings were still going back into the business. All this comfort and comeliness of Dermot’s was coming out of the work which primarily he wanted to do. That was where I felt a failure. Determined as I was that Easifix Toys should succeed and make much money, I still regarded it as a side-line. Writing meant as much to me as ever, though still I was doing nothing but fiddling little bits and pieces of work. Sitting there, chewing at a cigar which I failed to enjoy, I had another of those maddening urges to get on with my own job and worry it till I had broken its back.
These melancholy yet charming meditations were suddenly interrupted. Mrs. O’Riorden burst excitedly into the room. “Dermot! Dermot! Sheila’s started! The baby’s coming!”
This was where, according to the novels, a young husband should go to pieces. Dermot didn’t. He got up and flung his half-smoked cigar into the fire. “Get her to bed,” he said calmly. “Bill, go for the nurse. She was due to come in tomorrow morning anyhow. Here’s her address. I’ll go for the doctor. Dad, you— Well, you might as well stay where you are. Finish your port and cigar.”
A moment later I parted from him in the street, he going one way and I another, and he seemed far more collected than I was. I pictured myself rushing back, dragging a palpitating and eager nurse, but the staid and middle-aged Lancashire woman whom I found at the address that had been given to me was not to be flustered. “Nay, tha needn’t wait for me, lad,” she said. “Ah’ll mak misen a coop o’ tea an’ then ah’ll be along. When did ’er pains begin?”
The question embarrassed me absurdly. “They’re just begun,” I stammered. “Ah well,” she said, “she’s got it all to
go through yet. But tha needn’t fret. Ah’ll be along.”
Half an hour after that, when the doctor and nurse were upstairs with Sheila, Dermot and I were in the small coach-house at the side of the garden. He had fitted it up into a lovely workshop. It was ten times the size of the old lean-to shed in Gibraltar Street. Nellie and the O’Riordens were gone. “You stay, Bill,” Dermot said; and I recognised in the words the strength of our friendship and the need that was in him, despite his pose of calm. So there we were, as we had been on the night so long ago when first we met, the night when he had fiddled with the work he was doing, and had blazed out suddenly about William Morris, and then later about the Manchester martyrs. I thought of those things as he moved about restlessly under the strong electric light, tinkering away nervously at a job that was on the bench. I sat on an upturned crate, smoking my pipe; and suddenly I said: “Did you ever see that fellow Flynn again, Dermot?”
“I did not,” he answered, rather sharply; and then added: “The man’s dead.”
He took up a pencil and began to draw with smooth-flowing lines on a panel of wood; and then he threw down both pencil and panel and swung towards me with his eyes shining in his pale face. “It’s all over, that,” he said harshly. “I had to choose one thing or the other. I’ve got no use for windbags. I got sick of ’em, sick to death. What do they do but meet and talk and belch out the wind that’s in their bellies? If I could have gone to Ireland, and worked for Ireland—in Ireland—and perhaps died for Ireland, I’d have done it. By God and all the martyrs, yes—I’d have done it. But I had to work for my living, and then I got married, and there’s Maeve, and there’ll be more. So what can I do? Go on being a windbag patriot? Not me! There was a time when I thought I’d be something else. But now I know I won’t.”
He sat on the bench and swung his long thin legs, and the light burned down on his red hair. “And there’s all this,” he went on, waving his hand round the room. “Sheila says I’m an artist now, not an Irishman. Well, I am an artist. No one’s taught me to do a thing, but I can do it, and do it well; and by God, I’m going to do it better. You believe that, Bill, don’t you?” he suddenly appealed, with a great need for comfort in his eyes.
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