Читать книгу Time and the Hour - Howard Spring - Страница 11

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The snow was falling now good and proper. The stone setts of Megson Street were dumb, and the dandelions were having a cold sleep below them. The Waylands’ front window was bright, and the piano was sounding gaily. That couldn’t be Lottie. “Looks as though Her Ladyship’s entertaining,” Aunt Jessie said with a laugh.

But she hadn’t much time for Mrs. Wayland that night. “Fancy you meeting Dick Hudson like that!” she said. “He’d have been pickled pink if he’d known who you were.”

“How could he know me?”

“Well, he’ll know me all right. We’re going to see him.”

Anthony was strangely excited. He had been thrown too suddenly into an enchanted world. This white street with the snow whirling through the quiet and emptiness of Sunday evening, pricked here and there with the flowering street-lamps; the odd sense of exaltation that flowed from Aunt Jessie; the prospect of seeing and perhaps speaking to the tall romantic man—it was all something outside his prosaic life till now: a life that had contained little save Uncle Horace reading Quain and Aunt Jessie reading The Era, wherein theatrical doings were recorded, and himself rushing through his homework in order to get early to bed, where he would light the forbidden candle and steal an hour with Henty or Manville Fenn.

“Did you know Mr. Hudson?” he asked.

“Well, he wouldn’t have written that bit to me on the photo if I hadn’t, would he?”

She beat at her clothes, shaking off the snow. “It was a night like this when I first met him,” she said. “Years ago. In Newcastle. I was dressing Florrie Finch. I suppose Dick was about twenty. He hadn’t been on the halls long, and he was first turn. That’s what they give to the dogs’-bodies—you know, just a bit of work to fill in while the audience is coming along. Well, he got the bird.”

Anthony didn’t know what getting the bird was, and said so. “It’s something I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy. I’d heard of it, but I’d never seen it before and wouldn’t want to see it again. There was an hour to go before Florrie’s turn, and she hadn’t shown up. I had everything ready in her dressing-room and was hanging round in the wings to watch this new chap. I was a bit of a Nosey Parker, and liked to know the ins and outs of everyone on the bill. Well, Dick Hudson was standing there by me, waiting for his bit of music, and he was trembling like a leaf. He was Yorkshire like me, so I gave him a smack on the behind and said: ‘Go to it, lad. There’s nowt to fear.’ But by gum, wasn’t there! They were stony-quiet for a bit, then someone in the gallery let out a whistle, and it was like a signal. Everyone started whistling and laughing, the wrong sort of laughing, if you know what I mean. Then the chap in the gallery gave a cat-call, and the people round him took it up, and other people started stamping. Oh, I could have killed ’em!” said Aunt Jessie. “It was plain bloody murder.”

She shook her clothes vehemently, as if she were rattling together the silly heads of that far-off audience.

“He couldn’t take it,” she said. “He dried up, and stood there for a bit as if he’d been pole-axed. Then he ran off, right to where I was standing. And, d’you know, he was crying his eyes out. Oh, it can be a cruel thing, an audience, when it wants to.”

“What did you do, Aunt Jessie?”

“Do? Why, I cuddled the lad,” she said practically, “and let him cry a bit while the second turn went on. Then I said ‘Well, I can’t stand here all night mothering you, lad,’ and we walked away together. He was sharing a mingy little dressing-room at the end of a corridor, and we were just passing Florrie’s room when up she comes, smothered in furs and smelling of the cold night outside. A sort of sparkling smell. D’you know? She always had that smell—all alive and kicking.”

Florrie looked at Dick Hudson and asked: “What’s the matter with him?”

She was twenty-five—five years older than Dick, and old enough in experience to be his grandmother. Relaxed in her dressing-room, she loved to have her hands and feet massaged by Jessie Wilsher. Her hands and feet were long and fine. They didn’t seem to belong to the slum she had come from. She would close her eyes and almost purr like a stroked cat. That was because the hands had been red and cracked from soda in the wash-tub, and the feet like leaden weights as she trudged upstairs with buckets of water to scrub the oilcloth in attics. A skivvy in one lodging-house after another. “You’d better dress, Miss Finch. You’ll have the call-boy here any minute.” “Go on, Jess. Another rub. Let ’em wait.” But she never did. She was always on time. The sun-basking cat could in a second become the lithe and agile creature, with the long foot tapping the signature tune in the wings. She never let them wait. They would be there to send a wave of applause to meet her. She owed them so much. She never forgot that. But she didn’t forget, either, as she looked at Dick Hudson with tears smudging his grease-paint, a lot of things she had known in her time, for she hadn’t knocked ’em out with the first blow. Not by a long chalk.

The manager came along the corridor. “Good evening, Miss Finch. Hudson, could we have a word?”

Dick was visibly trembling. “Yes, sir.”

Florrie said: “There’s no need for any words from you. I can give him all the words he needs.”

“Well, I’m not sure, Miss Finch. You see ...”

“I’m sure. And don’t you start rattling me. You know very well that I can’t work unless I’m in a peaceful state of mind. Arguments upset me. So run along like a good boy.”

It was as clear in Jessie’s mind as though it had happened yesterday. But all she said to Anthony as they trudged through the snow was: “She put a bit of guts into him. They were about together all through that week. You know, there are people like that. They blow the cobwebs out of you, and they blow the fresh air into you. She was a one, was Florrie. What she could do to an audience she could do to a man, if she put her mind to it. And she certainly put her mind into Dick Hudson. It was after that week that he gave me the photograph that’s pinned up on the landing.”

Across the road, a nest of snow that had built itself on the branch of a tree slipped and fell and, under the light of a lamp, burst in a noiseless feathery explosion. An electric tram, empty of everything but golden light, swung by like a galleon in an arctic sea. Oh, this is a grand night to be out in, Anthony thought, taking Aunt Jessie’s arm and squeezing it with delight. “Did you go on knowing Mr. Hudson?”

“Well, yes and no. You see, a music-hall chap’s on the go all the time, here to-day and gone to-morrow. Sometimes he and Miss Finch would be on the same circuit, playing in the same house week after week, and I’d see a lot of him. Other times I wouldn’t. Then I chucked it all up to get married, and soon after that Florrie got married, too. I knew that Dick kept a house here for his kid, and I knew from the ads. when he was playing in Bradford and would be at home, but I didn’t worry him much. Just looked in on him now and then. Well, he’s worked, has Dick Hudson, and I’m glad to see him top of the bill at last. And here we are. This is the street.”

Like all the streets running off Manningham Lane, this one fell sharply away to the valley bottom. Down there was Frizinghall station, the hill on the other side of the valley rising above it, but invisible in the snowy darkness. A train had drawn in, and stood like a glowing dragon, a snort of steam blowing up out of its nostrils. Then it grunted and coughed and wormed slowly away towards Bradford.

Going downhill, they moved with care. “Do you think,” Anthony asked, “that Chris Hudson will come tobogganing with me to-morrow?” Not that he wanted Chris. He wanted the son of The Great Hudson.

“You can ask him,” Aunt Jessie laughed, “but why you should want to beats me. Gormless bit of nowt. He’ll never forgive you if he gets his toes cold.” She turned in at a little iron gate and rapped heartily with the knocker.

Anthony did not at first recognise the man who came to the door. He was wearing a tweed suit and smoking a pipe. The gaslight in the hall fell on Aunt Jessie’s face and he knew her and said: “Well, God bless us, Jess! Shake off the snow and come on in for five minutes.”

“Five minutes!” Aunt Jessie cried. “That’s a fine welcome when I haven’t seen you for a year and have dragged this boy through the snow especially to meet you!”

“Well, come in anyway. The devil of it is, I’m due to be away in five minutes to take a cold collation, whatever that may be, and I don’t know where I’m going.”

They shook off the snow and hung their coats in the passage and followed Dick into the front room. Aunt Jessie introduced Anthony, who now realised that this was the dazzling apparition of the afternoon cut down to human size.

“Well, warm your behind, boy,” Dick invited, and that seemed mundane to Anthony after the “A very good day to you, young sir,” that the lips of the apparition had earlier pronounced.

Aunt Jessie sat in a chair at the fireside, her hands to the blaze. “Where’s your lad?” she asked.

“Upstairs, getting into his best suit. He’s coming to eat this cold collation with me. I don’t fancy anything cold to-night, and what in hell is a collation? And, come to that, where’s Marlborough House?”

Aunt Jessie began to laugh without restraint.

“ ’Ere, what’s to laugh at?” Dick demanded. He knocked out his pipe on the fire-bars and took a letter from his pocket. “Now, listen ’ere, lass. This is about young Chris. I’m in the money now, as I expect you know. Well, I want to do something for the lad. Something about his schooling. I never had any myself, but he’s going to have some. He’s going to a public school—see? Well, he’s got to be prepared for that, and he’s not being prepared now because he’s not happy where he is, and that’s why he’s learning nowt. He’s sensitive, and he wants particular care, and that’s what he’s going to have. So I put an ad. in the Argus, asking for someone who would be tutor to a young lad—see?—and give him individual attention. Well, I only got one answer, and this is it.” He waved the letter. “You read it, lass.”

Aunt Jessie read the letter aloud.

“Marlborough House,

Manningham, Bradford

March 6, 1912

“Dear Sir,—In response to your advertisement in the Bradford Argus, I beg to offer my services in the proposed post. I am a widow with one child. For some years my husband held a commercial post in France, which gave me the opportunity to acquire a knowledge of the French language which I could impart to the proposed pupil, not with the barbarous accent that no educated French person would comprehend, but as it is spoken in the best circles in that country. I am versed in the elements of mathematics, and need hardly say that I comprehend the refined usage of my native tongue. As you are no doubt aware, Bradford is not the best place for the acquisition of that accent which is desirable for a young gentleman destined for one of our public schools, but I may truly say that this house is a small centre of cosmopolitan culture which a pupil would imbibe as the air he breathes. I write a copperplate hand, as this letter testifies, and could impart this to my pupil. I invite you to take a cold collation here on Sunday night at 8 p.m., when we might discuss the wider question of whether the proposed pupil might not, with advantage, live here en famille, rather than come to and fro daily. There is a dainty bedroom that could be at his disposal. I think this, altogether, would be most advantageous.

Yours very truly,