“It’s like this every night,” said the girl. She told Crow what a bad street it was at night; how she scurried past, on her long way home, listening to their muffled words, pretending not to hear.
He growled. He had strange moods. He said: “You see, if women didn’t try to make themselves so different—for example, if they wore short hair and pants—you wouldn’t get this. It’s your own fault.”
His tone was brusque and cold, she thought she bored him; but as they passed under the lamp-posts, she looked and saw his starved skin, the sparse stiff hair, the rain-bitten hat, the stuff of his summer shirt, the plain spectacles set in silver over his liquidly sad brown eyes. There was something pathetic in the way he walked, dragging one foot a little, hunching one shoulder slightly, and in his tilted hat and the firm twist to his long dark mouth. He had been stamped by poverty. Strange, more curious than insulting, were his sudden grunts, mutterings, his rude sayings. In the midst of her thoughts, he blurted out: “See that little nipper there? I was a newsboy too, when I was his age—I say, he seems to know you.”
She saw Joey Calton running through the traffic to her. “Hullo, Miss Hawkins.”
“Hullo, Joey.”
He was holding out something to her. She took it and saw a coloured picture of the Virgin Mary in red and blue, her heart in red, bloody flesh, visible.
“I got it at the City Dumps,” said Joey. “Can I put it up on the wall?”
“Yes, Joey, tomorrow.”
“All right, Miss,” he said pertly, and dashed off again, in front of a car, slippery as a sardine.
She told him about this boy who sold papers in this area and sometimes watched for her, when she was coming from late classes.
“Can he be an imbecile? The tests say so, but he’s so smart and quick in the streets, and he scours the city from end to end, he knows every street, all the back streets. He goes out two or three times a week to the City Dumps to see what he can get. Is that stupid? Or is there something wrong with the tests?”
“Little devil,” cried Jonathan Crow, appreciatively. “You’re wrong about that youngster, that’s the trouble with girls, they don’t live the same way as boys. You see, you don’t know boys. They’re devils, take my word for it, and what you take for smartness is just a slick way of doing and saying things, they pick it up from the street gang. Don’t get soft over them, if that’s the kind of kid you have. They need a lamming sometimes.” He laughed. “Gee, don’t I know! I’m a slum kid myself, I’ve got friends still there. Snowy Mitchell, that’s my pal, goes down there into Golden Grove with the University Settlement to entertain the kids. He tried to get me along. Nothing doing. Snowy’s all right,” he amended, “but my cousin’s a social worker there.” He paused. “A church organization it is, really, some sort of a church army.” He looked apologetically at her. “He believes that old stuff, can you believe it?—I’ve jawed at him—”
He waited for the cue.
“Yes, yes.”
“How did you get out of the church?”
“What church?”
“I mean religion, God.”
“Oh! We’re atheists.”
He looked at her admiringly. “Gee, I wish I’d had that grit—” He said dolefully: “I tried to believe in God for months, after I broke away.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you think a person needs to believe in something? I mean, you’ve got to have something to believe in. I tried a personal God; no soap, it didn’t work.”
She looked sideways at him.
“Can’t you live for yourself ?”
“Myself alone?”
“Yes.”
“Can you?”
“Certainly.”
“That’s wonderful,” he said frankly. “I wish I had your grit.”
After a glowing pause, she asked: “And what about the man in the church organization, what does he say about the slums?”
“He says the good stuff rises and gets out, and the bad stuff just stays there and rots, then the bad ‘uns from above go down.”
“That’s bunk.”
He said, with choler: “He ought to know, he’s spent his life with them. Now, you see, that’s just what I mean, with you girl school-ma’ams, you’re idealist about those kids, you don’t see them as they are. A real educational system would take them and knock them around, give them what they give themselves and turn them into real tough guys. This coddling weakens them. What have they got to do with fancy reading-methods? I know I just ground it out, I came before the fancy reading-methods and I sweated blood and it gave me what little grit I have.”
These ideas were new to her, and she supposed they were his invention. He had a hectoring tone, commanding her what to do and think, which both aroused and intimidated her. He must have felt it himself, for he immediately changed his tune and told her about himself. The coaching lessons and clerking in an office downtown kept him in bread and beer for the present; he had not taken a summer vacation, but had been teaching ever since last November and he felt fagged out. He was living at home with his parents as he had done since childhood. His mother was a sturdy, brave woman who kept the family together and his father a weak kind of fellow, without any backbone, who would have turned into a rouseabout probably long ago if it had not been for the firm will of his mother. He had often longed to be like other boys, with new clothes and the time to play football, but he had borne the misery, the self-sacrifice, and slavery patiently since he first got the notion, at the age of ten; because as far as he could see, for a poor man the only way to get out of the rut was to follow it to the end.
Now he was at the end. How queer it was to be free. He felt like a lifer who is pardoned and is so frightened by the outdoors that he wants to go back to his cell. But he was forcing himself to idle and take notice of new things. When August came, he would sail first class “among the nobs” and lie at his ease for six weeks at sea. After that came the untrammelled life of a postgraduate student in London, with no set classes, his own thesis to work out, no responsibility save to his student adviser, no living to earn and no will to follow but a youth’s will. “Perhaps I can learn to enjoy life a little.”
Softly, he bent his eyes on her, with the humid brightness of a little dog.
“What do I know of life but grind, a knack of biological survival? Would you believe it? When they gave the intelligence tests in philosophy in second year, I came away down near the middle of the class and Snowy was among the first three. But I get the University Medal and Snowy just makes an average pass. That shows what the game is worth,” he continued dismally.
His university talk was wonderful to her. She had never before had anything to do with a university man and it dazzled her that he was a medallist, a scholar, a coach, and yet so modest that he would explain himself fully to her. She told him, greatly moved, that she too wanted to get her degree and later go abroad.
“But I have no money and I must be my own scholarship out of my own earnings.”
“That’s wonderful,” he cried. “I’ve never met a girl with such grit.”
At the wharf he touched his hat, saying: “I don’t take my hat off, on principle, just to get rid of those relics of chivalry.”
He smiled at her winningly, wheeled round, and was off with a steady stride, on his way back.
11
Coming Along in the Blowy Dark
She sat outside on the boat and stared at the frothing water. She thought: “Could I love that man?” Continents of cloud were passing across the moon and the moonlit sky; it was dark at times, the wind on the whitecaps had a reedy sound. The boat hand, Manoel, came round near her at the port, looking at her, and after a while went in. The engines changed sound.
Coming along the beach path in the blowy dark, that night, she heard strains of music. One of the boat sheds was open: Joe Martin’s; a lantern inside threw its long dim beams across the narrow footpath. When she reached the lighted patch, she stopped and craned her neck. I
t was Leo playing, but in a weird way; the song that Leo was playing, something unknown to her, went on and on, winding out, with patches of frenzy, patches of melancholy, an untold misery telling itself in hysteria; and an improvisation, a long breath, a returning idea, like a life, moving as the wind of this night. People were drifting nearer along the silent beach path and a few persons had already collected along each side of the ray of light; most were in the dark and one could see only a few of the figures standing there at the entrance to the little boat shed, shoulder to shoulder, mournfully enchanted, speechless, looking in. There was anxiety in their listening faces, drawn as if they heard the steps of danger coming nearer, and of something queer but true in such wild, wanton, miserable music.
Leo sat on a box, his guitar half-embraced on his knees, his dark curly head bent so low that nothing could be seen of his face behind the fallen hair. One lock hung loose from his head. His muscular hands moved fast and small. There he sat, without moving otherwise, so bowed, his head so low, minute after minute, playing on and on at that music they had not heard before. He stopped, raised his head, and flung back the lock of hair. His eyes, as they spun over the people, on their way to the roof, narrowed, had an angry look. He stayed for a moment with his head lifted to the roof and his face pale, convulsed; then bent forward over the guitar again and began one of the old airs, 0 dolce Napoli, 0 suol beato! which the Italian fishermen sang day and night. Some of the people moved away and Teresa came closer, but he weakened, began to strum. His audience had now dissolved. Some could be seen passing like thick shadows under the single light of the sandwich shop towards the wharf; some were on their way home towards the Lawny and passed under the light which stood by the large flame-tree.
The wind started to sing, with intervals. The moon, at times, bolted out of the clouds and tottered boldly by itself in threadbare black space; round it, then, almost invisible, immense in diameter, was a vapour-ring, that looked a hundred yards across. How the sea groaned! The tide, half-way down, made running jumps at the beach as it retired. The small collier was still anchored in the bay, her riding lights shining. This was surprising, for the coastwise vessels never used the bay, and it should have been easy for her to replace one boy who had swum ashore. They tried to get one of the local boys, but the reputation of the ship and of the firm was bad; the colliers were called coffin-ships, one had gone down with all hands off Bulli in the last storm, and anyone could see now that big weather was approaching. The storm signals had gone up this afternoon at the signal station. Beyond the collier jogged the bucket-dredge, which slept in the bay month after month, when it came in from its day’s work in the deep channel. She had one riding light and the small tip of the night watchman’s pipe. The night watchman was a friend of Leo’s and sent messages to Teresa by human telegraph, “Tell your sister to come and see me, you bring her, it’s lonely here at night. I can hear you all, but I don’t talk to no one.”
There was still a light downstairs in the Hawkins house. When she opened the screen door, Kitty called: “Is that you, Leo?”
“No, it’s me. Leo’s along at Joe Martin’s.”
“How do you know?”
“I just saw him.”
She heard her father leave the staircase and go to his room. She went out to the kitchen to get her dinner which had been kept hot on top of a saucepan since the family (Father, Kitty, and Leo) had eaten at six-thirty. There were two plates covered on top of two saucepans of boiling water. One was Lance’s, one hers; they were the same, divided with absolute fairness, so many chunks of meat, so many potatoes. She sat down at once at the oilcloth-covered table and ate greedily.
There was a soft noise and there stood Kitty in a chocolate linen dress. Her dark hair, in a bob, fell straight at each side of her oval cheeks and in a straight fringe across her forehead. Her large eyes were tired tonight, with dark smudges under them; her dark soft mouth seemed to tremble. “What was he doing?”
“In the boat shed, playing the guitar. Some people were listening to him on the beach path.”
“A fine time of night to be playing.”
“Well—he’ll be home soon.”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s the matter?”
“He said he was going to leave home. They had a squabble, Dad wants him to come home and go to bed.”
“Squabble about what?”
“Dad told him that those who didn’t work didn’t complain of the food, Leo said he’d go and get a woman who would cook for him, Dad said what did he mean by that, and Leo said he was going to get married. Dad blew up.”
Teresa became conscious that the meat was leathery, grey.
Kitty said: “They had an argument. Dad said he was too young to leave home, and Leo said he’d rather give the money to his wife than here to us.” Kitty sat down at the table, put her round brown arms out in front of her and bent her head; Teresa saw the fat tears roll.
“Dad said he not only didn’t work but wanted to leave home too, all the burden would come on Lance and you.”
“Leo ought to leave home if he wants to.”
“They had a terrible argument. Leo said he was going to take a place on the collier that wants a hand.”
“He has to go back to his factory.”
Kitty, looking very soft, with her habitual stoop, glancing down at the table with eyes blacker than ever, continued: “Leo gave Daddy lip and Daddy kicked him, then Leo saw red and began to shout at Daddy. He said he was striking camp, he kept saying: ‘I’m going, I’ll vamoose the ranch, don’t worry, I’ll settle down myself.’”
Kitty, shadowing into tears, stooped farther over, scraping with her fingers at a candle-grease spot on the table, her lip trembling. “He said he hated me.”
“Who said?”
“Leo said. He said he hated me, he wouldn’t be nagged at by all of us, he wouldn’t be keeping me when I didn’t work.” She tried to go on with the story. She gave up and simply cried; her hair bobbed round her cheeks and the little fringe stuck to her low, well-curved forehead, while her living eyes rose at Teresa, momently, as she told her story and wept.
“What for? What did he say he hated you for?”
“Because I nagged him, he said. I was mending his shirt, and I said what you said last night, that I ought to get some money for doing it—it was just a joke on my part—and he jumped up from the table like a loony and threw a glass in the corner of the room and smashed it. I had to sweep it up—I just had to sweep it up——”
She pointed to a dustpan full of glass and dust. She looked at her sister, pushing her fringe back, her eyes blinking away the tears. The fine olive skin was faintly mottled; then her eyes brightened and a flush flew into her cheeks.
“It isn’t fair. I do everything for him. For Lance too. Why doesn’t Leo try to get another job?”
“He says he’s not allowed.”
“Do you think it’s true or he’s just lazy? Why can’t he get a job at the same trade when they’re locked out?”
“Oh, I think it’s true,” said Teresa.
“It’s stupid to keep him from making a living. Then he gets no pay.”
Teresa pushed aside her plate and looked at her sister. “Why don’t you go and get a job yourself?”
Kitty sank into her usual brown study for a while and then bashfully confessed: “I answered a couple of ads for secretary.”
“For secretary? You can’t do that.”
“Where it said beginner, or shorthand not needed. I can type. I got one answer. He said to go and see him. I telephoned him, but he said I had to have a neat appearance, to interview people——”Her lip trembled again. She got up, picked up Teresa’s plate, and took it to the sink. When her back was turned and she was scraping, Teresa heard, “Where am I to get the proper dress? I could have managed the fare! I couldn’t go in this, this isn’t an office dress.”
“What about your dress you wore to the wedding?”
“I hate it. You think I do
n’t know it’s ugly?”
There was a silence.
“This old dress,” said Kitty, “and that brown voile—”
“You’ll have to get out of here before it’s too late.”
“But how? To get money, you must have a job, and to get a job, you must have money. Nancy Palmer got a job and I heard her talking, she had on her best dress, silk stockings, and a permanent. Her mother and father gave it to her.”
Teresa cried, stamping out of the kitchen: “I’ll give you the money, why don’t you ask for it?”
Kitty became quiet, polishing the sink round and round. “Will you really?”
“How much do you want?”
“I think two pounds.”
“All right!”
Kitty turned round and looked at her. Unexpectedly, her face broke up into a crowd of little joys, she smiled, her irregular white teeth all showed, her hair danced, her eyes closed half-way and looked like Leo’s, and a gleeful laugh struggled in her throat. What a buoyant, jolly young woman she really was, thought Teresa, better than I am—charming!
“Really? Two pounds! I could manage with that. Two pounds ...”She stopped laughing and became serious, plotting, planning her outfit, her journeys to the city, and looking anxiously at her sister and with guilt, “I have a few shillings of my own,” she added apologetically. “It isn’t fair to take it from you, you work hard enough for it, but I need stockings. At work you must look decent, you mustn’t look as if you needed the job, they take notice of that, they don’t want to take you on if you look as if you needed it.”
“It’s all right,” said Teresa.
“I think it’s funny, don’t you, that they prefer people who look as if they don’t need it?” She laughed gaily.
Teresa looked at her with disgust. “What do they care whether we need it or not?” she said. “They don’t care about us.”
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