Читать книгу The Master of Man - Hall Sir Caine - Страница 13

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It was the first Saturday in August, when the throbbing and thunging of the vast machinery of the mills and factories of the English industrial counties comes to a temporary stop, and for three days at least, tens of thousands of its servers, male and female, pour into the island for health and holiday.

Stowell and Gell had never yet seen the inrushing of the liberated ones, so with no other thought, and little thinking what fierce game fate was playing with them, they had come into Douglas that day, in flannels and straw hats, in eager spirits and with high steps, to look on its sights and scenes.

It was late afternoon, and they made first for the pier, where a crowd of people had already assembled to witness the arrival of an incoming steamer.

She was densely crowded. Every inch of her deck seemed to be packed with passengers, chiefly young girls, as the young men thought, some of them handsome, many of them pretty, all of them comely. With sparkling eyes and laughing mouths they shouted their salutations to their friends on the pier, while they untied the handkerchiefs which they had bound about their heads to keep down their hair in the breeze on the sea, and pinned on their hats before landing.

The young men found the scene delightful. A little crude, perhaps a little common, even a little coarse, but still delightful.

Then they walked along the promenade, and that, too, was crowded. From the water's edge to the round hill-tops at the back of the town, every thoroughfare seemed to be thrilling with joyous activity. Hackney carriages, piled high with luggage and higher still with passengers, were sweeping round the curve of the bay; windows and doors were open and filled with faces, and the whole sea-front, from end to end, seemed to be as full of women's eyes as a midnight sky of stars.

For tea they went up to Castle Mona—a grave-looking mansion in the middle of the bay, built for a royal residence by one of the Earls of Derby when they were lords of Man before the Athols, but now declined to the condition of an hotel for English visitors, with its wooded slopes to the sea (wherein more than one of our old Manx Kings may have pondered the problems of his island kingdom), transformed into a public tea-garden, on which pretty women were sitting under coloured sunshades and a string band from London was playing the latest airs from Paris.

The young men took a table at the seaward end of the lawn, with the rowing boats skimming the fringe of the water in front, the white yachts scudding across the breast of the bay, the brown-sailed luggers dropping out of the harbour with the first flood of the flowing tide; and then the human tide of joyous life running fast on the promenade below—girls chiefly, as they thought, usually in white frocks, white stockings and white shoes, skipping along like human daisy-chains with their arms entwined about each other's waists, and sometimes turning their heads over their shoulders to look up at them and laugh.

The sun went down behind the hills at the back of the town, the string band stopped, the coloured sunshades disappeared, the gong was sounded from the hall of the hotel and they went indoors for dinner.

They sat by an open window of the stately dining-room (wherein our old Earls and their Countesses once kept court), and being in higher spirits than ever by this time, they ate of every dish that was put before them, drank a bottle of champagne, toasted each other and every pretty woman they could remember of the many they had seen that day ("Here's to that fine girl with the black eyes who was standing by the funnel"), and looked at intervals at the scenes outside until the light failed and the darkness claimed them.

At one moment they saw the dark hull of another steamer, lit up in every port-hole, gliding towards the pier, and at the next (or what seemed like the next), shooting across the white sheet of light from the uncovered windows of their dining-room, a large blue landau, drawn by a pair of Irish bays, driven by a liveried coachman. Gell leapt up to look at it.

"Vic," he cried, "I think that must be the Governor's carriage."

"It is," said Stowell.

"And that's the Governor himself inside of it."

"No doubt."

"And the lady sitting beside him is .... yes, no .... yes ..... upon my soul I believe it was his daughter."

"Impossible," said Stowell, and, remembering what Janet had told him, he thought no more of the matter.

They returned to the lawn to smoke after dinner, and then the sky was dark and the stars had begun to appear; the tide was up but the sea was silent; the rowing-boats were lying on the shingle of the beach; the yachts were at anchor in the bay; the last of the fishing-boats, each with a lamp in its binnacle, were doubling the black brow of the head, and from the farthest rock of it the revolving light in the lighthouse was sweeping the darkness from the face of the town as with an illuminated fan. The young men were enraptured. It was wonderful! It was enchanting! It was like walking on the terrace at Monte Carlo!

Then suddenly, as at the striking of a clock, the town itself began to flame. One by one the façades of the theatres and dancing palaces that lined the front were lit up by electricity. It raced along like ignited gunpowder and in a few minutes the broad curve of the bay from headland to headland, was sparkling and blazing under ten thousand lights.

It was now the beginning of night in the little gay town. The young men could hear the creak of the iron turn-stile to one of the dancing-halls near at hand, and the shuffling of the feet of the multitudes who were passing through it, and then, a few minutes later, the muffled music of the orchestra and the deadened drumming of the dancing within.

That was more than they could bear, in their present state of excitement, without taking part in the scene of it, so within five minutes more, they were passing through the turn-stile themselves and hurrying down a tunnel of trees, lit up by coloured lamps, to the open door of the dancing-hall—deep in a dark garden which seemed to sleep in shadow on either side of them.

The vast place, decorated in gold and domed with glass, was crowded, but going up into the gallery the young men secured seats by the front rail and were able to look down. What a spectacle! Never before, they thought, though they had travelled round the world, had they seen anything to compare with it. To the clash of the brass instruments and the boom of the big drums, five thousand young men and young women were dancing on the floor below. Most of the men wore flannels and coloured waist-scarves, and most of the girls were in muslin and straw hats. They were only the workers from the mills and factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire, but the flush of the sun and the sea was in their faces and the joy and health of young life was in their blood.

Stowell felt himself becoming giddy. Waves of perfume were floating up to him, with the warmth of women's bright eyes, red lips and joyous laughter. His nerves were quivering; his pulses were beating with a pounding rush. He was beginning to feel afraid of himself and he had an almost irresistable impulse to get up and go.

II

One other person important to this story had come to Douglas that day—Bessie Collister. During the first three years after her return home from Castletown she had lived in physical fear of Dan Baldromma; but during the next three years, having grown big and strong and become useful on the farm, she had been more than able to hold her own with him, and he had even been compelled to pay her wages.

"I don't know in the world what's coming over the girls," he would say. "In my young days they were content with priddhas and herrings three times a day, and welcome, but nothing will do now, if it's your own daughter itself, but ten pounds a year per annum, and as much loaf bread and butcher's mate as would fill the inside of a lime kiln."

"Aw, but the girl's smart though," Mrs. Collister would answer.

"I'm saying nothing against her," Dan would reply. "A middling good girl enough, and handy with the bases, but imperent grown—imperent uncommon and bad with the tongue."

There was scarcely a farmer on the island who would not have given Bessie twice the wages Dan paid her, but she remained at home, partly for reasons of her own and partly to protect her mother from Dan's brutalities by holding over his head the threat of leaving him.

Mrs. Collister, who had been stricken with sciatica and was hobbling about on a stick, had by this time taken refuge from her life-long martyrdom in religion, having joined the "Primitives," whose chapel (a whitewashed barn) stood at the opposite angle of the glen and the high road. She had tried to induce her daughter to follow her there, but Bessie had refused, having come to the conclusion that the "locals" on the "plan-beg," whose favourite subject was the crucifixion of the flesh, were always preaching at her mother, or pointing at her.

So on Sunday mornings when the church bells were ringing across the Curragh, and the chapel-going women of the parish were going by with their hymn-books in their handkerchiefs, and old Will Skillicorne, who was a class-leader, was coming down from his thatched cottage in his tall beaver, black frock coat and black kid gloves, Bessie, in her sunbonnet and a pair of Dan's old boots, and with her skirt tucked up over her linsey-wolsey petticoat, would be seen feeding the pigs or washing out a bowl of potatoes at the pump.

And on Sunday evenings, while the Primitives were singing a hymn outside their chapel before going in for service, she would be tripping past, lightly shod, and wearing a hat with an ostrich feather, on her way to town, where a German band played sacred music on the promenade, and young people, walking arm-in-arm, laughed and "glimed" at each other under the gas-light.

"I wonder at herself though, bringing up her daughter like a haythen in a Christian land," old Will would say. "But then what can you expect from a child of sin and a son of Belial"—the latter being a dig at Dan, whose lusty voice could always be heard over the singing, reading aloud to himself in the kitchen the "Rights of Man" or "The Mistakes of Moses."

Bessie was a full-developed and warm-blooded woman by this time, living all day and every day in the natural world of the farmyard, ready to break loose at the first touch of the hand of a live man if only he were the right one, and having no better relief for the fever of her womanhood than an occasional dance in the big barn at Kirk Michael Fair.

But then came her adventure with Stowell and Gell in the glen and it altered everything. Running down in her excitement she told her mother what had happened, and her mother, in a moment of tenderness, told Dan, and Dan, in the impurity of his heart, drew his own conclusions.

"It's the Spaker's son again," he said, making a noise in his nostrils.

The young men had camped out there expressly to meet Bessie, and it wasn't the first time the girl had gone up to them.

"Goodness sakes, man veen, how do thou know that? And what's the harm done anyway?" said Mrs. Collister.

"Wait and see what's the harm, woman. Girls is not to trust when a wastrel like that is about. We've known it before now, haven't we?"

To one other person Bessie told the story of the glen, and that was her chief friend, Susie Stephen, the English barmaid at the Ginger Hall Inn—a girl of fair complexion and some good looks who had shocked the young wives of the parish by wearing short frocks, transparent stockings and a blouse cut low over the bosom.

It was at closing-time a few nights after the event, and as the girls stood whispering together by the half-open door, with the lights put out in the bar behind them, they squealed with laughter, laid hold of each other and shuddered.

The young men had gone from the glen by that time, but the August holidays were coming, so they decided to go up to Douglas on the Saturday following to dance off their excitement.

At five o'clock that day, having milked her cows, and given a drink of meal and water to her calves, Bessie was in her bedroom making ready for her journey.

It was a stuffy little one-eyed chamber over the dairy, entered from the first landing of the stairs, open to the whitewashed scraas (which gave it a turfy odour), having a skylight in the thatch, a truckle bed, a deal table for wash-stand and a few dried sheepskins on the floor for rugs.

Bessie threw off the big unlaced boots and the other garments of the cow-house, kicking the one into a corner and throwing the others in a disorderly mass on to the bed over her pink-and-white sunbonnet, washed to the waist and then folded her arms over each other in their warmth and roundness and laughed to herself in sheer joy of bounding health and conscious beauty.

While doing so she heard her step-father's voice in the kitchen below, loud as usual and as full of protest, but she had a matter of more moment to think of now—what to wear out of her scanty wardrobe.

The question was easily decided. After putting on white rubber shoes and white stockings, she drew aside a sheet on the wall that ran on a string and took down a white woollen skirt and a new cream-coloured blouse cut low at the neck like Susie's.

But the anchor of her hope was her hat, which she was to wear for the first time, having bought it the day before in Ramsey. It was shaped like a shell, with a round lip in front, and to find the proper angle for it on her head was a perplexing problem. So she stood long and twisted about before an unframed sheet of silvered glass which hung by a nail on the wall, with a lash comb in her hand, a number of hat-pins across her mouth, while the floor creaked under her, and the conversation went on below.

She got it right at last, just tilted a little aside, to look pert and saucy, with her black hair, which was long and wavy, creeping up to it like a cushion. And then, standing off from her glass to look at it again over her shoulder, with eyes that danced with delight, she turned to the door and walked with a buoyant step downstairs.

III

Dan Baldromma also had made an engagement for that day, handbills having been distributed in Ramsey during the morning saying that "Mr. Daniel Collister of Baldromma" would deliver an address in the market-place at seven o'clock in the evening.

At five Dan had strapped down the lever which stopped the flow of water on to his overshot wheel and stepped into the dwelling-house, where Liza, his wife, had laid tea for two and was blowing up a fire of dry gorse to boil the kettle.

"Tell your girl to put a lil rub on my Sunday boots," he said.

"But she's upstairs dressing for Douglas," said Mrs. Collister.

"You don't say?" said Dan. "So that's the way she's earning her living?"

"Chut, man," said Mrs. Collister. "If a girl's in life she wants aisement sometimes, doesn't she? And her ragging and tearing to keep the farm going, and a big wash coming on next week, too."

"Well, that's good! That's rich! I thought it was myself that was keeping the farm going. Douglas, you say? Well, well! I wonder at you, encouraging your girl to go to such places, and you a bound Methodist. Tell her to put a rub on my boots, ma'am."

"I'll do it myself, Dan," said Mrs. Collister. "It's little enough time the girl will have to catch the train, and her fixing on her new hat, too."

"New hat, eh?"

"Aw, yes, man, the one she bought at Miss Corkill's yesterday."

"What a woman! And you telling me, when you got five goolden sovereigns out of me on Monday that she was for wearing it at the Sulby Anniversary. I wonder you are not afraid for your quarterly ticket."

"But it was only the girl's half year's wages, and the labourer is worthy of his hire. Thou art always saying so at the Cross anyway."

"Hould thy tongue, woman, and don't be milking that ould cow any more—it's dry, I tell thee."

It was at this moment that Bessie came downstairs, and Dan, who was on the three-legged stool before the fire, making wry faces as he dragged off his mill-boots with a boot-jack, fell on her at first with his favourite weapon, irony.

"Aw, the smart you are in your new hat, girl—smart tremenjous!"

"I didn't think you'd have the taste to like it," said Bessie, sitting at the table.

"Taste, is it?" said Dan. "Aw, the grand we are! The pride that's in some ones is extraordinary though. There'll be no holding you! You'll be going up and up! Your mother has always been used of a poor man's house and the wind above the thatch. But you'll be wanting feather beds and marble halls, I'm thinking."

"They won't be yours to find then, so you needn't worry," said Bessie.

"You think not? I'm not so sure of that. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards .... So you're for Douglas, are you?"

"Yes, I am, if you'll let me take my tea in time for the train."

"Aisy, bogh, aisy!" said Mrs. Collister.

"Well, you're your own woman now, so I suppose you've got lave to go," said Dan.

And then rising to his stockinged feet, his face hard and all his irony gone, he added, "But I'm my own man, too, and this is my own house, I'm thinking, and if you're not home for eleven o'clock to-night, my door will be shut on you."

Bessie leapt up from the table.

"Shut your door if you like. There'll be lots of ones to open theirs," she cried, and swept out of the house.

"There you are, woman!" said Dan. "What did I say? Imperent uncommon and dirty with the tongue! She'll have to clane it this time though. If she's not back for eleven she'll take the road and no more two words about it."

Mrs. Collister struggled to her feet and followed Bessie, pretending she had forgotten something.

"Bessie! Bessie!"

Bessie stopped at the end of the "street" and her mother hobbled up to her.

"Be home for eleven, bogh," she whispered. "It's freckened mortal I am that himself has some bad schame on."

"What schame?" asked Bessie.

"I don't know what, but something, so give him no chance."

"What do I care about his chance?"

"Aw, bolla veen, bolla veen, haven't I enough to bear with thy father and thee? Catch the ten train back—promise me, promise me."

"Very well, I promise," said Bessie, and at the next moment she was gone.

Five minutes later, arm-in-arm with Susie, she was swinging down the road to the railway station for Douglas.

The little gay town, when they reached it, was at full tide, with pianos banging in the open-windowed houses, guitars twanging in the streets, and lines of young men marching along the pavements and singing in chorus. The girls, fresh from their twinkling village by the lonely hills, with the river burrowing under the darkness of the bridge, were almost dizzy with the sights and sounds.

When they came skipping down the steep streets to the front, and plunged into the electric light which illuminated the bay, they could scarcely restrain themselves from running. And when, bubbling with the animal life which had been suppressed, famished and starved in them, they passed through the turn-stile to the dancing-palace and hurried down the tunnel of trees, lit by coloured lamps, and saw the stream of white light which came from the open door, and heard the crash of the band and the drumming of the dancers within, their feet were scarcely touching the ground and they felt as if they wanted to fly. And when at last, having entered the hall, the whole blazing scene burst on them in a blinding flash, they drew up with a breathless gasp.

"Oh! Oh!"

One moment they stood by the door with blinking and sparkling eyes, their linked arms quivering in close grip. Then Bessie, who was the first to recover from the intoxicating shock, looked up and around, and saw Stowell and Gell sitting in the gallery.

"Good sakes alive," she whispered, "they're there!"

"Who? The gentlemen?"

"Yes, in the front row. Be quiet, girl. They see us. Don't look up. They might come down."

And then the girls laughed with glee at their conscious make-believe, and their arms quivered again to the rush of their warm blood.

IV

"Alick, isn't that our young friend of the glen?"

"Bessie Collister? Where?"

"Down there, standing with the fair girl, just inside the door."

"Well, yes, upon my word, I think it is!"

"I've a great mind to go down to them. Let us go."

"No? Really? In a place like this?"

"Why not, man?"

"Well, if you don't mind, I don't."

A few minutes later, in an interval between the dances, Victor, coming behind Bessie, touched her on the shoulder.

"How are those sweet-smelling heifers——still grazing on the mountains?"

Bessie, who had watched the young men coming downstairs, and felt them at her back, turned with a look of surprise, then laughed merrily and introduced Susie. For a few nervous moments there were the light nothings which at such times are the only wisdom. Then the violins began to flourish for another dance, and the two couples paired off—Victor with Bessie and Susie with Gell.

Victor took Bessie's hand with a certain delicacy to which she was quite unaccustomed and which flattered her greatly. The dance was a waltz, and she had never waltzed before, so they had to go carefully at first, but when the dance was coming to an end she was swinging to the rhythm of the orchestra as if she had waltzed a hundred times.

In the interval the two couples came together again, and there was much general chatter and laughter. Gell joined freely in both, and if at first he had had any backward thoughts of the promise he had given to his father they were gone by this time.

Another dance began and without changing partners they set off afresh, Stowell taking Bessie's hand with a firmer grasp and Bessie holding to his shoulder with a stronger sense of possession. His nerves were tingling. Turning round and round among women's smiling faces, and with Bessie's smiling face by his side, he had the sense of sweeping his partner along with an energy of physical power he had never felt before.

When the orchestra stopped the second time and they went in search of their companions, they discovered Susie on a seat, panting and perspiring, and Gell fanning her with the brim of his straw hat.

Victor's excitement was becoming feverish. He wanted Bessie to himself, and during the third dance he felt himself dragging her to the opposite side of the hall. She knew what he was doing, and found it enchanting to be carried off by sheer force.

When the dance came to an end Victor put Bessie's moist hand through his arm and walked up and down with her. Her throat was throbbing and her breast rising and falling under her low-cut blouse. They spoke little, but sometimes he turned his head to look at her, and then she turned her eyes to his. He thought her black eyes were looking blacker than ever.

The evening was now at its zenith, and the orchestra was tuning up for the "shadow-dance." The white lights on the walls went out, and over the arc lamps in the glass roof a number of coloured disks were passed, to throw shadows over the dancers, as of the sunrise, the sunset, the moon and the night with its stars. The dance itself was of a nondescript kind in which at intervals, the man, with a whoop, lifted his partner off her feet and swung her round him in his arms—a sort of symbol of marriage by capture.

When the shadow-dance ended there was much hand-clapping among the dancers. It had to be repeated, this time with a more rapid movement and to the accompaniment of a song, which, being sung by the men in chorus, made the hall throb like the inside of a drum. Many of the dancers fell out exhausted, but Victor and Bessie kept up to the last.

Then the big side doors were thrown open, and amid a babel of noise, cries and laughter, nearly all the dancers trooped out of the hall into the garden to cool. Victor gave his arm to Bessie and they went out also.

Lights gleamed here and there in the darkness of the trees, throwing shadows full of mystery and charm. After a while the orchestra within was heard beginning again, and most of the dancers hastened back to the hall, but Victor said,

"Let us stay out a little longer."

Bessie agreed and for some minutes more they wandered through the garden, in and out of the electric light, with the low murmur of the sea coming to them from the shore and the muffled music from the hall.

She was breathing deeply, and he was feeling a little dizzy. They found themselves talking in whispers, both in the Anglo-Manx, and then laughing nervously.

"Did you raelly, raelly see the young colts racing on the tops, though?"