‘Well, what luck, Jos?’
This was the first reference, by either of them, to the crisis.
Jos deliberately finished pouring out the gin. Then he said:
‘There’s two on ’em, Charlie.’
‘Two on ’em? What mean’st tha’, lad?’
‘I mean as it’s twins.’
Charlie and I were equally startled.
‘Thou never says!’ he murmured, incredulous.
‘Ay! One o’ both sorts,’ said Jos.
‘Thou never says!’ Charlie repeated, holding his glass of gin steady in his hand.
‘One come at summat after one o’clock, and th’ other between five and six. I had for fetch old woman Eardley to help. It were more than a handful for Susannah and th’ doctor.’
Astonishing, that I should have slept through these events!
‘How is her?’ asked Charlie, quietly, as it were casually. I think this appearance of casualness was caused by the stoic suppression of the symptoms of anxiety.
‘Her’s bad,’ said Jos, briefly.
‘And I am na’ surprised,’ said Charlie. And he lifted the glass. ‘Well – here’s luck.’ He sipped the gin, savouring it on his tongue like a connoisseur, and gradually making up his mind about its quality. Then he took another sip.
‘Hast seen her?’
‘I seed her for a minute, but our Susannah wouldna’ let me stop i’ th’ room. Her was raving like.’
‘Missis?’
‘Ay!’
‘And th’ babbies – hast seen them?’
‘Ay! But I can make nowt out of ’em. Mrs Eardley says as her’s never seen no finer.’
‘Doctor gone?’
‘That he has na’! He’s bin up there all the blessed night, in his shirt-sleeves. I give him a stiff glass o’ whisky at five o’clock and that’s all as he’s had.’
Charlie finished his gin. The pair stood silent.
‘Well,’ said Charlie, striking his leg. ‘Swelp me bob! It fair beats me! Twins! Who’d ha’ thought it? Jos, lad, thou mayst be thankful as it isna’ triplets. Never did I think, as I was footing it up here this morning, as it was twins I was coming to!’
‘Hast got that half quid in thy pocket?’
‘What half quid?’ said Charlie, defensively.
‘Now then. Chuck us it over!’ said Jos, suddenly harsh and overbearing.
‘I laid thee half quid as it ’ud be a wench,’ said Charlie, doggedly.
‘Thou’rt a liar, Charlie!’ said Jos. ‘Thou laidst half a quid as it wasna’ a boy.’
‘Nay, nay!’ Charlie shook his head.
‘And a boy it is!’ Jos persisted.
‘It being a lad and a wench,’ said Charlie, with a judicial air, ‘and me ’aving laid as it ’ud be a wench, I wins.’ In his accents and his gestures I could discern the mean soul, who on principle never paid until he was absolutely forced to pay. I could see also that Jos Myatt knew his man.
‘Thou laidst me as it wasna’ a lad,’ Jos almost shouted. ‘And a lad it is, I tell thee.’
‘And a wench!’ said Charlie; then shook his head.
The wrangle proceeded monotonously, each party repeating over and over again the phrases of his own argument. I was very glad that Jos did not know me to be a witness of the making of the bet; otherwise I should assuredly have been summoned to give judgment.
‘Let’s call it off, then,’ Charlie suggested at length. ‘That’ll settle it. And it being twins—’
‘Nay, thou old devil, I’ll none call it off. Thou owes me half a quid, and I’ll have it out of thee.’
‘Look ye here,’ Charlie said more softly. ‘I’ll tell thee what’ll settle it. Which on ’em come first, th’ lad or th’ wench?’
‘Th’ wench come first,’ Jos Myatt admitted, with resentful reluctance, dully aware that defeat was awaiting him.
‘Well, then! Th’ wench is thy eldest child. That’s law, that is. And what was us betting about, Jos lad? Us was betting about thy eldest and no other. I’ll admit as I laid it wasna’ a lad, as thou sayst. And it wasna’ a lad. First come is eldest, and us was betting about eldest.’
Charlie stared at the father in triumph.
Jos Myatt pushed roughly past him in the narrow space behind the bar, and came into the parlour. Nodding to me curtly, he unlocked the bookcase and took two crown pieces from a leathern purse which lay next to the bag. Then he returned to the bar and banged the coins on the counter with fury.
‘Take thy brass!’ he shouted angrily. ‘Take thy brass! But thou’rt a damned shark, Charlie, and if anybody ’ud give me a plug o’ bacca for doing it, I’d bash thy face in.’
The other sniggered contentedly as he picked up his money.
‘A bet’s a bet,’ said Charlie.
He was clearly accustomed to an occasional violence of demeanour from Jos Myatt, and felt no fear. But he was wrong in feeling no fear. He had not allowed, in his estimate of the situation, for the exasperated condition of Jos Myatt’s nerves under the unique experiences of the night.
Jos’s face twisted into a hundred wrinkles and his hand seized Charlie by the arm whose hand held the coins.
‘Drop ’em!’ he cried loudly, repenting his naïve honesty. ‘Drop ’em! Or I’ll—’
The stout woman, her apron all soiled, now came swiftly and scarce heard into the parlour, and stood at the door leading to the bar-room.
‘What’s up, Susannah?’ Jos demanded in a new voice.
‘Well may ye ask what’s up!’ said the woman. ‘Shouting and brangling there, ye sots!’
‘What’s up?’ Jos demanded again, loosing Charlie’s arm.
‘Her’s gone!’ the woman feebly whimpered. ‘Like that!’ with a vague movement of the hand indicating suddenness. Then she burst into wild sobs and rushed madly back whence she had come, and the sound of her sobs diminished as she ascended the stairs, and expired altogether in the distant shutting of a door.
The men looked at each other.
Charlie restored the crown-pieces to the counter and pushed them towards Jos.
‘Here!’ he murmured faintly.
Jos flung them savagely to the ground. Another pause followed.
‘As God is my witness,’ he exclaimed solemnly, his voice saturated with feeling, ‘as God is my witness,’ he repeated, ‘I’ll ne’er touch a footba’ again!’
Little Charlie gazed up at him sadly, plaintively, for what seemed a long while.
‘It’s good-bye to th’ First League, then, for Knype!’ he tragically muttered, at length.
VIII
Dr Stirling drove the car very slowly back to Bursley. We glided gently down into the populous valleys. All the stunted trees were coated with rime, which made the sharpest contrast with their black branches and the black mud under us. The high chimneys sent forth their black smoke calmly and tirelessly into the fresh blue sky. Sunday had descended on the vast landscape like a physical influence. We saw a snake of children winding out of a dark brown Sunday school into a dark brown chapel. And up from the valleys came all the bells of all the temples of all the different gods of the Five Towns, chiming, clanging, ringing, each insisting that it alone invited to the altar of the one God. And priests and acolytes of the various cults hurried occasionally along, in silk hats and bright neckties, and smooth coats with folded handkerchiefs sticking out of the pockets, busy, happy and self-important, the convinced heralds of eternal salvation: no doubt nor hesitation as to any fundamental truth had ever entered their minds. We passed through a long, straight street of new red houses with blue slate roofs, all gated and gardened. Here and there a girl with her hair in pins and a rough brown apron over a gaudy frock was stoning a front step. And half-way down the street a man in a scarlet jersey, supported by two women in blue bonnets, was beating a drum and crying aloud: ‘My friends, you may die to-night. Where, I ask you, where—?’ But he had no friends; not even a boy heeded him. The drum continued to bang in our rear.
I enjoyed all this. All this seemed to me to be fine, seemed to throw off the true, fine, romantic savour of life. I would have altered nothing in it. Mean, harsh, ugly, squalid, crude, barbaric – yes, but what an intoxicating sense in it of the organized vitality of a vast community unconscious of itself! I would have altered nothing even in the events of the night. I thought of the rooms at the top of the staircase of the Foaming Quart – mysterious rooms which I had not seen and never should see, recondite rooms from which a soul had slipped away and into which two had come, scenes of anguish and of frustrated effort! Historical rooms, surely! And yet not a house in the hundreds of houses past which we slid but possessed rooms ennobled and made august by happenings exactly as impressive in their tremendous inexplicableness.
The natural humanity of Jos Myatt and Charlie, their fashion of comporting themselves in a sudden stress, pleased me. How else should they have behaved? I could understand Charlie’s prophetic dirge over the ruin of the Knype Football Club. It was not that he did not feel the tragedy in the house. He had felt it, and because he had felt it he had uttered at random, foolishly, the first clear thought that ran into his head.
Stirling was quiet. He appeared to be absorbed in steering, and looked straight in front, yawning now and again. He was much more fatigued than I was. Indeed, I had slept pretty well. He said, as we swerved into Trafalgar Road and overtook the aristocracy on its way to chapel and church:
‘Well, ye let yeself in for a night, young man! No mistake!’
He smiled, and I smiled.
‘What’s going to occur up there?’ I asked, indicating Toft End.
‘What do you mean?’
‘A man like that – left with two babies!’
‘Oh!’ he said. ‘They’ll manage that all right. His sister’s a widow. She’ll go and live with him. She’s as fond of those infants already as if they were her own.’
We drew up at his double gates.
‘Be sure ye explain to Brindley,’ he said, as I left him, ‘that it isn’t my fault ye’ve had a night out of bed. It was your own doing. I’m going to get a bit of sleep now. See you this evening. Bob’s asked me to supper.’
A servant was sweeping Bob Brindley’s porch and the front door was open. I went in. The sound of the piano guided me to the drawing-room. Brindley, the morning cigarette between his lips, was playing Maurice Ravel’s ‘L’heure espagnole’. He held his head back so as to keep the smoke out of his eyes. His children in their blue jerseys were building bricks on the carpet.
Without ceasing to play he addressed me calmly:
‘You’re a nice chap! Where the devil have you been?’
And one of the little boys, glancing up, said, with roguish, imitative innocence, in his high, shrill voice:
‘Where the del you been?’
D. H. Lawrence
Daughters of the Vicar
I
Mr Lindley was first vicar of Aldecross. The cottages of this tiny hamlet had nestled in peace since their beginning, and the country folk had crossed the lanes and farm-lands, two or three miles, to the parish church at Greymeed, on the bright Sunday mornings.
But when the pits were sunk, blank rows of dwellings started up beside the high roads, and a new population, skimmed from the floating scum of workmen, was filled in, the cottages and the country people almost obliterated.
To suit the convenience of these new collier-inhabitants, a church must be built at Aldecross. There was not too much money. And so the little building crouched like a humped stone-and-mortar mouse, with two little turrets at the west corners for ears, in the fields near the cottages and the apple trees, as far as possible from the dwellings down the high road. It had an uncertain, timid look about it. And so they planted big-leaved ivy, to hide its shrinking newness. So that now the little church stands buried in its greenery, stranded and sleeping among the fields, while the brick houses elbow nearer and nearer, threatening to crush it down. It is already obsolete.
The Reverend Ernest Lindley, aged twenty-seven, and newly married, came from his curacy in Suffolk to take charge of his church. He was just an ordinary young man, who had been to Cambridge and taken orders. His wife was a self-assured young woman, daughter of a Cambridgeshire rector. Her father had spent the whole of his thousand a year, so that Mrs Lindley had nothing of her own. Thus the young married people came to Aldecross to live on a stipend of about a hundred and twenty pounds, and to keep up a superior position.
They were not very well received by the new, raw, disaffected population of colliers. Being accustomed to farm labourers, Mr Lindley had considered himself as belonging indisputably to the upper or ordering classes. He had to be humble to the county families, but still, he was of their kind, whilst the common people were something different. He had no doubts of himself.
He found, however, that the collier population refused to accept this arrangement. They had no use for him in their lives, and they told him so, callously. The women merely said, ‘they were throng,’ or else, ‘Oh, it’s no good you coming here, we’re Chapel.’ The men were quite good-humoured so long as he did not touch them too nigh, they were cheerfully contemptuous of him, with a preconceived contempt he was powerless against.
At last, passing from indignation to silent resentment, even, if he dared have acknowledged it, to conscious hatred of the majority of his flock, and unconscious hatred of himself, he confined his activities to a narrow round of cottages, and he had to submit. He had no particular character, having always depended on his position in society to give him position among men. Now he was so poor, he had no social standing even among the common vulgar tradespeople of the district, and he had not the nature nor the wish to make his society agreeable to them, nor the strength to impose himself where he would have liked to be recognized. He dragged on, pale and miserable and neutral.
At first his wife raged with mortification. She took on airs and used a high hand. But her income was too small, the wrestling with tradesmen’s bills was too pitiful, she only met with general, callous ridicule when she tried to be impressive.
Wounded to the quick of her pride, she found herself isolated in an indifferent, callous population. She raged indoors and out. But soon she learned that she must pay too heavily for her outdoor rages, and then she only raged within the walls of the rectory. There her feeling was so strong, that she frightened herself. She saw herself hating her husband, and she knew that, unless she were careful, she would smash her form of life and bring catastrophe upon him and upon herself. So in very fear, she went quiet. She hid, bitter and beaten by fear, behind the only shelter she had in the world, her gloomy, poor parsonage.
Children were born one every year; almost mechanically, she continued to perform her maternal duty, which was forced upon her. Gradually, broken by the suppressing of her violent anger and misery and disgust, she became an invalid and took to her couch.
The children grew up healthy, but unwarmed and rather rigid. Their father and mother educated them at home, made them very proud and very genteel, put them definitely and cruelly in the upper classes, apart from the vulgar around them. So they lived quite isolated. They were good-looking, and had that curiously clean, semi-transparent look of the genteel, isolated poor.
Gradually Mr and Mrs Lindley lost all hold on life, and spent their hours, weeks and years merely haggling to make ends meet, and bitterly repressing and pruning their children into gentility, urging them to ambition, weighting them with duty. On Sunday morning the whole family, except the mother, went down the lane to church, the long-legged girls in skimpy frocks, the boys in black coats and long, grey, unfitting trousers. They passed by their father’s parishioners with mute, clear faces, childish mouths closed in pride that was like a doom to them, and childish eyes already unseeing. Miss Mary, the eldest, was the leader. She was a long, slim thing with a fine profile and a proud, pure look of submission to a high fate. Miss Louisa, the second, was short and plump and obstinate-looking. She had more enemies than ideals.
She looked after the lesser children, Miss Mary after the elder. The collier children watched this pale, distinguished procession of the vicar’s family pass mutely by, and they were impressed by the air of gentility and distance, they made mock of the trousers of the small sons, they felt inferior in themselves, and hate stirred their hearts.
In her time, Miss Mary received as governess a few little daughters of tradesmen; Miss Louisa managed the house and went among her father’s church-goers, giving lessons on the piano to the colliers’ daughters at thirteen shillings for twenty-six lessons.
II
One winter morning, when his daughter Mary was about twenty years old, Mr Lindley, a thin, unobtrusive figure in his black overcoat and his wideawake, went down into Aldecross with a packet of white papers under his arm. He was delivering the parish almanacs.
A rather pale, neutral man of middle age, he waited while the train thumped over the level-crossing, going up to the pit which rattled busily just along the line. A wooden-legged man hobbled to open the gate, Mr Lindley passed on. Just at his left hand, below the road and the railway, was the red roof of a cottage, showing through the bare twigs of apple trees. Mr Lindley passed round the low wall, and descended the worn steps that led from the highway down to the cottage which crouched darkly and quietly away below the rumble of passing trains and the clank of coal-carts in a quiet little under-world of its own. Snowdrops with tight-shut buds were hanging very still under the bare currant bushes.
The clergyman was just going to knock when he heard a clinking noise, and turning saw through the open door of a black shed just behind him an elderly woman in a black lace cap stooping among reddish big cans, pouring a very bright liquid into a tundish. There was a smell of paraffin. The woman put down her can, took the tundish and laid it on a shelf, then rose with a tin bottle. Her eyes met those of the clergyman.
‘Oh, is it you, Mr Lin’ley!’ she said, in a complaining tone. ‘Go in.’
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1 Page 68