Читать книгу Fame is the Spur - Howard Spring - Страница 5

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“Ah, my friends, the lives of the poor! The basis of patience and misery on which all rests! Come back with me to the little grey street I knew. Listen with me in the cold hour before the winter’s dawn. Down the empty street comes the clatter of clogs—one pair of clogs, breaking the silence on which the stars are still shining. The knocker-up is on his way. He pauses at house after house, calling the poor from the sleep into which they have sunk wearied with labour. Up, up! No rest! The day is not yet come, but you must be up and doing for your task-masters. Rouse yourselves! Come out into the cold streets; hurry! hurry! Already the lights are springing up in the mills. Already the angry hum of machines is heard. You are their slaves. Come, now, come!

“And out they come: the old men bowed beneath the yoke that the years have made habitual; the old women with their shawls about their heads wrapping them against the cold of the morning; the young men and women whose lives are all before them, all dedicated, though they know it not, to profits and percentages; the little children, blinking sleepily, the dreams of the night still bemusing their minds, dreams of an ease and happiness they will never know.

“Ah, my friends! It is those children I see! In imagination, the sound of my little clogs is joined with the chorus of theirs, clattering through the cold of the Manchester morning....”

The Rt. Hon. Hamer Shawcross threw up his head, pushed back the snow-white hair, and almost saw himself, a boy, sallying forth into Broadbent Street, a wage-slave of twelve years old. To his audience there was no doubt about it. They did not know the dexterity of self-deception which had just managed to throw in those words “in imagination.” They gazed at the venerable figure, the man who was known to have come so far, and they pictured the hurrying sound of his clogs, running, running, to be there before the mill-gates closed.

But it wasn’t quite like that.

It was not often that little John Shawcross heard old Jimmie Spit-and-Wink, the knocker-up. When he did, he did not hear the clatter of Jimmie’s clogs breaking the silence in which the stars still shone, because Jimmie did not wear clogs. Years before, he was standing upon a lorry, and a heavy bolt of cloth, dropped from a warehouse landing several floors above him, missed the usual precision of its throw, and smashed his leg. The leg went, and Jimmie’s job went, and his nerves went, leaving him with the melancholy affliction that gave him his nickname. The whole side of his face would jerk his eye into a wink, and, as if by reflex action, he would then automatically spit.

They gave him a wooden leg, and on his other foot he wore a big, hobnailed boot, not a clog. For as long as most people could remember, he had been knocker-up, spitting and winking through the morning with none to see him, carrying his little bunch of wires upon a pole, and playing with this a tattoo upon the windows of his clientele.

There was no reason at all why John Shawcross should hear old Jimmie Spit-and-Wink, because he did not rise till eight. But he heard him on the morning after the Old Warrior’s funeral. He had slept badly. The unaccustomed loneliness, the howling of the storm, the excitement of the day he had been through: all this brought him again and again from the edge of sleep to utter wakefulness; and in one of those waking intervals he heard the dull thud of Jimmie Spit-and-Wink’s leather-shod wooden leg and the brisk clatter of his hobnails alternating down the street.

The wind had cried itself to sleep. The morning was black, cold and still. In the stillness the rattle of Jimmie’s wires on the windows could be heard, and the shrill sound of the witticisms which cheered himself and his victims.

“Come on theer, Mrs. Hannaway. Buzzer’ll be goin’ afore thee’s got thi corsets on. Never mind what thee’s doin’. There’s bairns enough in t’world already.”

Then off he went, thud-clatter, thud-clatter, down the empty street, punctuating the darkness with that raucous clearing of the throat that preceded expectoration.

The boy listened till the street was quiet; but he could not sleep again. He knew the quiet would not last, and soon a solitary pair of clogs went clanging by; then two in unison, leisurely, with time to spare. Soon the iron music was beating itself ceaselessly out of the pavement, with but little accompaniment of talk. Occasionally a snatch of conversation, an adjuration to hurry, a child’s whimper, would reach the boy to whom all this stir and urgency out there in the dark and cold came as something that made him instinctively, as an animal in a burrow, cower closer into warmth and comfort.

The song of the clogs increased in tempo as in volume. Soon there was no talk at all, only the purposeful beat of iron on stone, quicker and quicker, and now at last passing away, save for a few laggards sprinting hell-for-leather. Then all other sounds were swallowed up in the wail that came from the throat of the steam buzzer. It was a vast, impersonal, indecent noise, swelling up and dying, swelling again till it filled all the little streets with its ravening howl, and at last fading out in a long-drawn steamy sob. To the boy, crouching in his bed, listening in the darkness, it seemed like the sound of something hungry and inimical that had swallowed up all the life and energy whose pulse had been beating noisily through the street. It was six o’clock, dark still, and now the quietness flowed back.

If the Old Warrior were here, and if he were awake, this would have been a good time to ask him questions. The old man had been a light sleeper. On those rare days when the boy woke early, he would often hear him tossing and mumbling in his bed, and he would ask him things because he knew his questions would get no farther. By breakfast-time, all that they had talked about seemed to be wiped from the old man’s mind, which now dwelt more readily in the distant past than in the last half-hour.

“Grandfather, what’s a bastard?” There was no light at all in the room, but he could hear the Old Warrior tossing and chuckling.

“Eh, that’s a rum ’un, lad, that’s a rum ’un. What do you know about bastards?”

“Tom Hannaway says I’m one. He says his mother told him.”

“Well, it’s a mother’s question rightly, boy. You’d better ask thine.”

And so he had done, when Gordon Stansfield was present, and his mother had laid her arms along the kitchen table and cried and cried. And Gordon had said: “Now, Ellen, now. Take it easy, lass. Take it easy. That’s all finished and done with.”

Gordon had stroked her hair, and when she had at last raised her face, streaked with tears, he had said: “Now let’s see a smile. Come on now. A smile’s the medicine.”

Then Ellen had smiled, a wan and piteous smile that made the boy want to cry in his turn. Gordon sat her in the Old Warrior’s comfortable wreck of a chair and put a cup of tea on the old man’s toddy-table.

“There!” he said. “John’s as much my son as yours. You know that, don’t you? Anything I could have done for a boy of my own will be done for John. No mill,” he added with his engaging smile. “No mill for John. We’ll try and do something better.”

John listened to the quietness that had swallowed up the hurry of iron feet. “No mill for John.” That was what Gordon had promised, and he knew that what Gordon promised was done.

At seven o’clock he heard his mother stirring in the bedroom across the little landing. His own room by now was full of wan light. He looked, over the top of the blankets, at its unaccustomed spaciousness. He would never live in a smaller room; but now, with old Etchells’ bed gone, it seemed enormous. He got out of bed, took the sabre from beneath it, and, standing on the rug, held it at arm’s length. It was too heavy for his puny arm. He swung it tentatively, but found it an awkward thing to master. He tried a whistling swipe through the air, but it was more than he could do to stand still beneath the impetus. The swing of the sabre carried him with it, making him stagger.

Suddenly he realised that this piece of steel had killed a woman. It had cut through flesh and bone, letting out the life of a girl in gingham, named Emma. Perhaps of others. Often as he had heard the Old Warrior tell his tale, he had never before so completely and irrevocably identified the sword with the deed. He walked to the window, pushed back the curtain, and stood with the cold of the oil-cloth striking through the soles of his feet. The day was as drab as unpolished pewter; the light fell through the window without joy or exhilaration, and the sabre took the dull sheen of a tarn in winter. It looked sullen and unquickened. The boy scrutinised it minutely, looking for stains. Week after week he had polished it; he knew there was no stain from haft to point; but his new realisation of the sabre as a thing of death drew his gaze inch by inch along its length. Presently he put it under the bed again.

He was thoroughly awakened now. He could hear his mother raking out the kitchen grate and Gordon preparing to follow her downstairs. He put on the overcoat which was both dressing-gown and quilt and crept to the chest-of-drawers. The two small drawers at the top had housed a few possessions of the Old Warrior. John saw that his mother’s clearing-up of the day before had not got as far as this. The old man’s things were still there, a pitifully small accumulation for so long a pilgrimage. The boy turned them over curiously. There was a volume of the poems of Sam Bamford, and a Bible, a few clean handkerchiefs, heavy grey worsted socks, a box containing a few English coppers and some foreign coins. There was another box full of seashore shells, and a bigger one containing simple tools: a hammer and chisels and screw-driver. Beneath this was a little package, carefully tied with string. The knot was covered by a small red blob of sealing-wax, like a holly-berry. On the package was written in a beautiful flowing hand the one word: Peterloo.

The boy closed the drawers and stood for a moment with the package in his hand. He got back into his bed and, sitting up with the overcoat on his shoulders, weighed it thoughtfully on his palm. It was very light. Its contents might be nothing more than a few feathers.

He tried then to break the string, but could not. It was cobbler’s waxed thread. He leaned out of bed and under it, and rubbed the thread along the edge of the sabre. The paper came off in such stiff folds that clearly it had been undisturbed for years. Inside the paper was a small cardboard box, such as might have contained cheap stationery. Inside that was tissue paper, and, impatient now, John pulled it carelessly out of the box, and found himself looking at a corkscrew curl of dark brown hair, tangled round a red ribbon.

He knew what it was, but he looked intently to make sure. He could hear the Old Warrior saying of that berserk dragoon: “He had cut through her hair at the side of her head, the bit she had tied the ribbon on. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.” He looked closely, allowing the curl to fall round his finger with the grace of a tendril. There were dark brown blotches on the red ribbon.

Then swiftly, so as not to be caught in the deed, he put the hair and ribbon back in the box, and the tissue paper on top of it. He wrapped it in its old paper, and, leaping out of bed, thrust it beneath the clothes in the chest’s long bottom drawer. That was his own. No one would find it there. He did not want his mother, in a frenzy of “redding up,” to make away with so impressive a relic. He would tell no one about it. He would keep for himself Emma’s curl that had not grown old and grey, and the red ribbon with the bloodstains on it.

He heard the front door bang. It must be ten to eight. Always at ten to eight Gordon left the house. It would take him ten minutes to walk to Birley Artingstall’s shop in Great Ancoats Street. Even if Gordon had not worked there, John would have liked Birley Artingstall’s shop. The smell of new leather that came from it filled all the street, and the windows were decorated with brass and leather in every possible combination. Leather bags with brass locks, leather dog-collars with brass studs, leather horse-collars with all sorts of brass dingle-dangles polished up to the nines. Birley Artingstall himself could usually be glimpsed within, decorated as resplendently as a piece of harness in the window.

Over the window were the words: BIRLEY ARTINGSTALL, LEATHER; and when John had first learned to read, he thought that this was a piece of information intended to leave no one in any doubt as to what Birley Artingstall was made off. There was some reason for the child’s misconception, for Birley Artingstall was a man of most leathery aspect. His face was of the lean and cadaverous sort traditionally associated with Vikings: long-jawed, hollow-cheeked, decorated with a yellow pendulous moustache and thatched with unkempt corn-gold hair that strayed down into his bright blue eyes. His skin was mahogany-coloured leather, and he always wore a leather apron that once had been a lovely red and now was scored with use and faded to the undistinguished brown of a blood-pudding.

This leathery man, who loved to feel leather and to see leather married to curiously-wrought pieces of useful or decorative brass, was himself decorated with a tie-pin, ear-rings which were tiny but impressive hoops of gold reputed to be a help to weak sight, with many rings, none of which bore a stone, and with a watch-chain on which shields, coins and emblems hung across his concave stomach as plentifully as washing on a Monday-morning line. But you saw the chain only when the apron was off, and that hardly happened except on a Sunday when Birley Artingstall might be found at the Emmott Street Wesleyan Chapel, enduring everything patiently: anthem and hymns, sermon and announcements and collection: waiting for the prayer-meeting which followed the Sunday evening service. It was for the moment when the minister would say: “Perhaps Brother Birley Artingstall will lead us to the mercy seat” that Birley lived. The tall drooping length of him would stand, one hand grasping the end of his pew, the other clenching and unclenching spasmodically, and out of him would pour petitions that once had had the virtue of extempore utterance but now were polished and rehearsed litanies. His voice began with cool and reasonable suggestions to a Deity not beyond the reach of common sense, and gathered in a few dutiful “Amens.” Stage by stage it reached at last a thunderous utterance which culminated invariably in a command to the Lord to come quickly and “sway the sceptre of universal dominion.” The fervent “Hallelujahs!” that fell like bouquets round Birley Artingstall as he sat down made all but the most obdurate hesitant to follow him. He was always anxious and restless, once the prayer-meeting had broken up, until someone had said to him: “You led us to-night with great acceptance.” Then he would go happily home to the rooms over the leather shop where he led a bachelor existence, looking after his own simple wants.

On what had once been the garden, or yard, behind the shop there now stood the large shed which was the workroom. Here Gordon Stansfield had begun to work when he was a boy in the days of Birley Artingstall’s father. He and Birley had grown up together; they liked one another; and Gordon’s was a rather more privileged position than that of the other worker who shared the big shed with him. For one thing, he too was an Emmott Street man, and it often happened that after some special service he and Birley Artingstall would find much to discuss concerning the choir and the sermon and the satisfactory or unsatisfactory amount of the offertory. So Birley always called it, though Gordon used the simple word collection. “Remember, Birley,” he would say, “First Corinthians, sixteen, one: Now concerning the collection for the saints.”

They were very happy together.

As soon as he heard the front door bang, John dressed quickly, ran downstairs to the scullery, washed his face and hands in a tin bowl under the tap, and went into the kitchen. He always breakfasted alone. His mother ate with Gordon and then prepared the boy’s breakfast. They wanted him to get as much sleep as possible, because he was not strong.

Neither Ellen nor Gordon ever spoke of the first two years of John’s life: the years when the seeds of weakness were planted in him, when he had wanted food and care and love. He had had all that for so long now, his life had been so set about with sheltering wings, that he could remember, as older people remember a cataclysm, the day when his mother struck him.

It was two years ago. He was a child of ten. The day was raw, damp, midwinter foggy, and Gordon had gone to work coughing. He had been looking for some time pinched and pale, and Ellen stood, as she often stood, at the street door, watching him walk away down Broadbent Street. She turned back into the house, anxious and foreboding, as she always was when Gordon was ailing. It was a Saturday, and so the child was about the house. At eleven o’clock Ellen made a jug of cocoa, put it in a basket stuffed round with straw to steady it, and told John to take it to his father at Birley Artingstall’s. Gordon did not bother as a rule with eleven o’clock drinks; this would show that she was thinking of him.

The child rebelled. He was busy with something that seemed important to his infant mind; and he said: “Don’t bother me, Mother.”

Ellen looked at him in surprise. “Take this to your Father, at once! Do you hear me?”

“Yes, I hear you. But why should I be bothered?”

“Bothered? Is it a bother to do a little thing for your Father?”

“Yes,” said the child.

She struck him, a smarting blow, flat-handed across the face. He did not cry, but recoiled with a look of astonishment and mental pain. Ellen, surprised at the intensity of her own emotion, snatched up the basket. “Stay there,” she said. “Don’t leave the house. I’ll take it myself. It’s no bother to me.”

She switched a shawl round her head and shoulders and went out into the street. The fog was thicker. She could hardly see a house-length in front of her, and memory came about her sharp as pain.

It had been like this, eight years before, except that then it was night. The fog had seemed friendly to her desperate intention. On the preceding Monday morning she had arrived at her new place. It had been difficult to get, because of the child. She wore, without title, a wedding ring and she said her husband was dead. It was pointed out to her that a child about the house was inconvenient. Sitting on the extreme edge of a chair, nervously twisting her fingers together, she faced the façade of black satin, decorated with a gold chain, on which the firelight flickered. She raised her eyes to the heavy face and agreed that of course it must be inconvenient.

“Especially here, where all our children are out in the world long ago. We don’t want to start crying at nights all over again.”

Oh, but the baby was a good baby. It did not cry at nights, and if someone did not give her work, what could she do?

The rigid figure, set about with shining mahogany, gilt frames and waxy fruits, stirred a little and said: “Very well. But in such circumstances, you could hardly expect wages.”

Ellen gave a little cry of dismay, and the voice went on: “After all, in return for what you do, you will have food and a roof over your head. And a child about the house is most inconvenient.”

There was nothing she could do about it—nothing at all: such people had you trapped. For two years she had been chivvied from place to place, never anywhere for long. The child was her undoing. Sooner or later, its story followed her, and with righteous outcries she was thrust forth. One would think there had never been a bastard in the world before; one would think the pale, undeveloped little wretch was monstrous or contagious.

Now she was using this pitiful subterfuge of the wedding ring; and even at that she was asked to work without wages. She looked up at the harshly brushed-back hair, the black brows and beady little eyes. She nodded mutely. There was nothing else to do.

“Very well then, Shawcross. You can begin on Monday. Don’t come on Sunday night. We shall be at church, and after church my husband likes to meditate.”

So on Monday she put her few things into her yellow-varnished tin trunk, roped it, and paid a boy sixpence to help her to carry it to the new place. She left it in the attic, ventilated only by a skylight, that was to be her bedroom; then went back for the child and carried him.

Her new mistress opened the door. “This is my baby,” Ellen said with a shyness that a word could have blown to pride. The woman said: “The less I see of the baby, Shawcross, the better we shall get on. When you are ready I’ll show you the run of things.” With that, she went to her own part of the house.

Ellen took the child up to the attic, turned her things out of the tin trunk, and made up his bed in it. She had a horror that the lid would fall; that some day she would come to her room and find him smothered. So here, as she had done elsewhere, she tied a string from the lock of the trunk to a nail in the wall above it, and then hurried down to see what might be wanted of her.

Everything was wanted of her—everything from morning to night. From the kitchen below ground to the attics up in the air, everywhere was her province. She shopped and she cooked, she swept and she dusted, she scrubbed the steps leading up from the long bleak street, and she waited at table. Never had she had such a place, and at night she would creep to her attic exhausted in body and mind.

On the Saturday night she went up at eleven o’clock. She had just lighted her candle when a knock resounded through the house. Well, she was done for the day. Let them knock. Then the voice of her employer was heard, calling up the stairs: “Shawcross, the door!”

With death in her heart, Ellen wearily pulled on again the skirt that she had taken off. She answered the door and went back to her room. The small happening, coming on top of so much, had unnerved her. There was no end to it—no end at all. She carelessly pushed aside the chair on which the candle had been set down and threw herself, dressed as she was, on to the bed.

She lay there with her eyes closed, a prey to desperate thoughts, when a sudden metallic clang brought her upright. The candle-flame had caught a loose-hanging end of string. The flame had run up this to the knot on the wall, and the child was shut up in the box.

Ellen leapt off the bed and ran to raise the lid. Then she stopped, wild-eyed, gazing at the yellow varnish. She knew that the longer she stopped the harder it would be to lift the lid, and deliberately she made herself stop, a prey to dreadful temptations. She had gone to sleep exhausted ... she had forgotten to blow out the candle.... No, she had heard nothing. “Didn’t I tell you—I was exhausted—exhausted, I say!”

Her mind was fearfully rehearsing, as she stood there with her hands grasped about her brow, gazing at what might soon be the coffin of her child. An imperious rapping at the locked door brought her, like a blow, to her senses. “Shawcross! Come downstairs at once!”

She tied up the lid again, blew out the candle with a shudder at her thoughts, and went down the flight of bare-boarded stairs, down the next flight of oilcloth-covered stairs, and down the last flight of carpeted stairs. She went into the room full of mahogany and wax and gilt. Her employer’s husband said: “I’d better leave this to you, Agnes,” and, without looking at Ellen, went out of the room.

The implacable black façade swelled and heaved silently for a moment; then the woman spat out: “Take off that ring, you liar, you whore!”

So it had come again; it always followed her; but never before had it burst upon her so venomously as this. She strove to be calm, to take it as she had taken it often enough; but this time she could not: she fell to her knees, buried her face in a chair, and wept.

Never had she imagined that such hurtful things could be said. It seemed as though the woman for years had brooded on indecency, damming up in her privy breast a flood of detail that she now unloosed with gloating on Ellen’s head. Once, the girl rose and essayed to leave the room, her hands stopping her ears, but the woman seized her by the arm, forced her to her knees again, and hissed: “No! You shall stay! You shall hear me out and know how your filth stinks in a decent woman’s nostrils.”

When it was ended, Ellen crept up to her attic and flung herself again upon the bed. She did not undress that night, and she did not sleep. She lay as though her body and soul had been flayed, with the woman’s words swilling endlessly back and forth through her mind, a filthy tide. She began to believe it was true, that she was fit for nothing but to be cast out.

The next day she was kept at work as hard as ever. She cooked the Sunday dinner, and she gave an extra Sunday polish to the master’s boots. She did these things with a strange resignation, that was almost peace, about her heart, because she believed that she would never do them again.

At six o’clock the pair were dressed for church. “By the time we are back, be out of this house,” said the woman. “I do not want to see you when I come out of God’s presence.”

Ten minutes later, Ellen followed them into the street. She left everything: her old tin trunk and her child: that was all she had, and she felt she would not want these things any more.

The fog was thick. As she breathed it, the cold of death seemed to pass into her body. At her table in the basement kitchen, she had sat with each meal of the day before her, but she had eaten nothing, and so she felt hollow, and the fog now seemed to fill her. She was like a foggy wraith herself, without human volition, following a blind instinctive command to have done with a world that, for her, had been without hope, without mercy.

The air was full just here of the vibration of church bells, and presently she passed the church, by day a black unprepossessing lump, but now endowed with the wistful configurations of fairyland. It was as insubstantial as a dream, its fabric non-existent, its outlines suggested only by the blur of gold that was the lighted doorway and the paler yellow luminosities that, here and there, the windows laid upon the darkness. A shudder of organ music inhabited the unseen space between these luminous landmarks, and as Ellen went by human voices broke forth suddenly in a hymn.

She had wrapped a shawl about her head and shoulders, and now, holding this close about her breast with one trembling hand, she paused for a moment, listening to the voices:

The God of Abram praise.

This was the church her employers attended. She did not stay for long, but faded into the mist that soon wiped out the romantic apparition and the luring voices.

Ellen knew where she wanted to get to, but soon she became puzzled by her failure to get there. The darkness was absolute except where street lamps were like pale flowers blooming without stalks, high up, achieving a useless poetry that defeated the plain prose purpose for which they were intended. She could not read the names of the streets; she had turned and twisted towards the direction in which she knew that the canal lay; but now, chilled and shivering, she found herself completely lost. She could neither find what she sought nor make her way back whence she had come.

Now she was filled with desperation. She walked without direction, trusting to chance to guide her. The air was so dense that it felt as though you could take it substantially into the hands and wring the moisture from it. The fringes of her shawl and the lashes of her eyes were dewed, and the dew was cold. So cold that she felt now that she need not seek death; death would take her, there in the street, where her footsteps were fumbling in what felt to her like the last extremity.

When at last she saw again a light, she was ready to give up, ready to throw herself upon any promise of mercy.

What she had come to was a small street-corner chapel. She pushed open the door and staggered within, unaware of the incongruity of her intrusion at the very end of the service. She slumped down upon a back seat, and the warmth, reviving her a little, permitted her to see what a mean interior this was, and how small was the congregation dotted here and there: fifteen or twenty people—not more. A few oil lamps made all the light there was, and they burned each in its own pale aura, for the fog had penetrated here. The people turned and stared at her, but she was beyond caring.

The man in the pulpit was not a parson. He looked like a working man, and his homely enunciation as he gave out the last hymn confirmed her guess that she had strayed into a Wesleyan chapel served by a lay-preacher. She tried to stand with the rest as the hymn was sung, but her legs failed her, and she was too exhausted and indifferent to be annoyed by the glances that fell upon her as the little congregation went past her into the raw night when the Benediction had been said. She rested her arms upon the bench in front of her, laid her head upon them, and presently was aware of a hand upon her shoulder.

She looked up warily. It was the preacher, and the woman who had played the harmonium was standing by him. “You seem done up, lass,” he said. “Tell us what’s the matter.”

There was something in Gordon Stansfield’s tone that the weary and unhappy could not resist. It seemed to wake Ellen from the stupor of grief into which she had fallen, but to wake her to a half-crazed state in which she did not yet discriminate thought from action. “My baby!” she cried, not knowing clearly whether she had killed it.

The chapel-keeper was putting out the lamps. Gordon and his sister took each an arm and led Ellen through the fog to the house in Broadbent Street. They lived alone there. The fire, which had been damped down, was stirred to a blaze, the lamp was lit, food was placed upon the table. Not till she was warm, not till she had eaten, did Gordon say again: “Now, lass.”

And this time she was able to tell them, and when the recital was over he said nothing but snatched up a shawl and went out of the house. Three-quarters of an hour later he was back, and Millie Stansfield, who had guessed his errand, had warm bread-and-milk waiting for the child whose pale face was peeping from the shawl upon his arm.

Ellen was too bemused by the events of the night to notice the flush in Millie’s cheek, the cough that tore her, as she took this strange girl to her own bed. Thence Ellen soon moved to other work, untroubled by the problem of the child, for the child stayed with Millie and Gordon till Millie went out a few months later to whatever reward there may be for those who tend the widows and fatherless.

On all these things Ellen was pondering as she walked through foggy Broadbent Street carrying a jug of cocoa to Gordon. She could hardly see across Great Ancoats Street, but, trusting to her ear, made the plunge and came to Birley Artingstall’s shop that was a joyous golden smudge of light in the gloom.

“Some cocoa for Gordon,” she said to Birley.

“Take it through, lass, take it through,” Birley said. “Cocoa’s good, but a sight of you’ll do Gordon more good than cocoa on a day like this.”

There was no fog in Broadbent Street on the day after the Old Warrior’s funeral. The wind of the night before had swept the air clean.

As John sat at his breakfast, Ellen, unseen, considered him critically. He was never ill, but he never looked strong. The veins on his forehead and wrists were startlingly blue, his complexion was pale and transparent. He had a face whose fragility kept her palpitating with anxieties that were never justified.

Now, when he got down from the chair, she said: “Stand up straight. Don’t drag your leg like that. What’s the matter with your leg? Does it hurt you?”

“No,” the child said. “My leg’s all right. I’m not dragging it.”

He did not know that he was doing it. It was a habit he had got into some time before. He had read of some hero or other whose wound caused him ever after to walk with a “dragging gait.” He lived in a world of heroes. He could not yet share their wounds—that would come. But he could, and did, adopt some of their peculiarities; and these hardened into what an onlooker thought were mere bad habits.

He put on his coat and his cap. “Where are you going to?” Ellen demanded.

“The croft.”

“Well, mind you stay at the croft. Don’t go wandering away. And be back in time for your dinner.”

The sun was showing when he went out into Broadbent Street: a ruddy, smoky sun that was all glow and no warmth. Its reflection lay in the sluggish water of the canal. He threw in a stone, making the reflection dance and shiver and spread out in circles of trembling colour. He walked on, and found a piece of orange-peel lying in a puddle. He put his heel upon it and squeezed, and the puddle became magic with veils of green and red and purple and yellow stretched upon its surface, coiling and fusing interminably. That, too, pleased him.

The croft was a small space of hard-beaten open land. Away from the street, a back-yard wall was its limit; on either hand were the raw ends of houses, that looked as though someone had intended to finish them off some day and had forgotten all about it. The fourth side was open to the street. The croft was not a piece of land that had, by hazard, not been built on. It was a piece of industrial history. It had once been used for the bleaching of cloth—long ago, when cloth was bleached out of doors. Now, hammered hard as cement by the feet of a few generations, it was adopted by the children as a playground.

Tom Hannaway and Arnold Ryerson were already there. Tom, with his wide humorous face, his thick black curls on which, even in winter, he never wore a cap, was busy with coloured chalks freshening the notice which he had inscribed some time before on the back-yard wall. The letters were immense. No passing eye could miss them.

T. HANNAWAY—MERCHUNT

Bring your Rags, Bones, Bottles, Jars to this

Pitch.

Hannaway is here each Saturday

10 to 11 a.m. Finest Rats in

exchange, personaly bred by Thomas

Hannaway, whose decision is final.

Old Iron, Lead Piping, Anything.

Arnold Ryerson, as fair as Tom Hannaway was dark, with a sensible unsmiling face, stood by with his hands in his pockets as Tom framed this announcement in arresting arabesques of red and green and blue. Tom was the youngest of many Hannaways. It was unlikely that there would be any further use for the dilapidated perambulator which he had wheeled on to the croft. John stole up silently behind the other two and lifted the apron of American cloth which covered the pram. A scuffling and squeaking bespoke the presence of the rats. They were in the well that pushed down through the floor of the perambulator—the well in which many small Hannaway feet had pounded. Now scaly tails swirled there and the minute toes of the rats scratched, and pink noses were stuck up through the mesh of wire-netting that was weighted down over the well.

John watched the rats with mingled delight and repulsion. He would have loved to have one, but Ellen’s decree had been uncompromising. “No vermin in this house, my boy—especially vermin from the Hannaways! The Lord only knows what you might bring home on rats from that place!”

The well seemed full of the creatures—all white, with eyes like rubies. He tried to count them—there must be a dozen at least. They were clambering over one another, squeaking frantically.

Tom Hannaway completed his work, stood away and regarded it with an artist’s eye, added a touch of yellow, and then produced a couple of small cheese-dice from his pocket. He dropped them through the wire-netting.

“Well, Charley,” he grinned. “You having a rat to-day?”

John straightened his back. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m not allowed.”

Tom’s impudent grin widened. “Allowed!” he scoffed. “I’m not allowed to do anything. I’m not allowed to have this pram. I’m not allowed to chalk on the walls. I’m not allowed to go near Darkie Cheap. Allowed! You just got to do things—not wait till you’re allowed to do ’em.”

“That’s all very well,” said Arnold Ryerson in his grave way. “When they don’t allow me to do things, I reason with ’em. My father said I was never to come on the croft, so I just asked him why not. And then I proved to him that he was wrong about it, so he said I could go. You want to get things changed like that—not just fly off and do what you like.”

Tom Hannaway’s white teeth flashed between his fleshy red lips as he said: “Take’s too long, Arnold. And I’d like to see you reasoning with my old woman. She reasons with a smack in the mouth, and all you’ve got to do is dodge it.”

Tom and Arnold were of the same age—fourteen. They would soon be leaving school. Tom was burly for his years, heavily built as a young bull, and Arnold was tall and slight. They both regarded the twelve-year-old John Shawcross with tolerance. He was always hanging round them, and they put up with him.

Tom Hannaway’s trade by barter was soon in full swing. This was his fourth Saturday morning on the pitch at the croft, and the fame of his white rats had had time to spread. It had spread so far that his original stock was all but exhausted, and there was no longer any truth in the claim that the rats were “personaly bred.” That had been true enough at first; and now that he was buying the rats he saw no reason to alter the wording of his announcement. It looked well, and he had the commercial wisdom to let well alone.

With a shock, John saw approaching him across the croft the head of the brass-knobbed bedstead on which the Old Warrior had slept. It was carried by two small boys, one holding each end, and even so both were staggering beneath its antiquated weight. John knew that his mother had given the bedstead away. Now he saw how the gift had been appreciated.

“Lean it against the wall,” Tom commanded the panting youngsters. He looked at it with a despising eye. “Junk,” he said. “Rubbish! Not worth carting away. What d’you think that thing’s worth?”

“Two rats, please,” piped the bolder of the two children, and the younger nodded vigorously and produced from his pocket a canvas bag in which he proposed to take home the fruits of his deal. “We’ve got a cage for ’em,” he volunteered, “with a treadmill.”

Tom Hannaway looked at John and Arnold Ryerson. “Two rats!” he said. “Did you hear that, boys? Two rats! They’d ruin a man. Two rats for half a rotten bedstead that’s not worth taking to the marine store dealer. Can you kids read?”

The boys looked at him with pinched little faces. They nodded.

“Well, read that,” said Tom Hannaway—“‘whose decision is final.’ My decision is one rat. Give us the bag.”

He put the rat into the bag. “That’s a buck. Bring me the other half of the bed, and you can have a doe. See?”

Again the youngsters nodded mutely. “Well, then, get along now.” They trotted away, one of them holding the squirming bag. Tom turned then to the bedstead leaning against the wall. A broad grin of satisfaction widened on his face. “There’s a bargain!” he exclaimed. “That’ll fetch eighteen-pence if it fetches a penny.”

“You diddled ’em,” said Arnold Ryerson. He left it at that, but there was no mistaking the condemnation in his tone.

“Of course I diddled ’em,” Hannaway answered. “What are customers for? And d’you think I’ll give ’em a doe if they come again? I will not then. It was a buck this time and it will be a buck next time. And if any one gets a doe this time he’ll get a doe next time. There’s not going to be any competition round here.”

By the time the rats were all disposed of, there was a miscellaneous litter on the ground at Tom Hannaway’s feet: worn-out coats and trousers, rags that had never been any garment that could be named, odds and ends of brass and lead and iron, jam-jars, bones, bottles and bundles of newspapers. He continued to be high-handed. Some of the customers went empty away. “What! A rat that I’ve spent days and weeks personally breeding for an old coat like that? You leave it, and bring something next week. Then we’ll see.”

Now that the perambulator was empty of rats, Tom piled in his booty. The bed-end, resting precariously across the top, threatened either to flatten or capsize the crazy little vehicle. “You coming to Darkie Cheap’s?” Tom demanded.

Arnold Ryerson shook his head. “Going home to read,” he said briefly, and went.

“Reading! You’re always reading!” Tom shouted after him. Arnold did not answer. In a moment he had turned the corner by the raw house-end and disappeared.

“You come, kid,” Tom said, for he wanted someone’s hand to steady the bedstead on the perambulator while he pushed. “Hold on to that. Don’t let it wobble.”

John was delighted. Never before had Tom Hannaway invited his company. He took hold of the bedstead with his puny hand—the bedstead whose monstrous brass knobs had for so long been so familiar, which did not prevent it from having, out here in the street, under the light of this red wintry sun, an alien air.

They went trundling on through the glum unbeautiful thoroughfares, and suddenly Tom said surprisingly: “D’you know what I’m going to have some day? A racehorse!”

He stopped pushing, spat on his hands, and rubbed them up and down the legs of his trousers as he considered the effect of his announcement on young John Shawcross.

“Where will you keep it?” John demanded, his mind occupied with an incongruous image of a polished, slim-legged horse confined in a Broadbent Street back-yard.

“Where d’you think? In my racing stables,” Tom answered. “Come on. Don’t let it wobble.”

Darkie Cheap’s rag-and-bone business proclaimed itself while they were still a long way off. Its rotten odour permeated all the short street in which it was situated. It was in a large shed, whose only light came from the double doors that stood open. John, who had never been there before, looked round him curiously. At the end, and on both sides, the wall space was divided by hanging sacks into many small cubicles, and each cubicle was cluttered with a different sort of junk: one with bones that smelled abominably, one with old clothes, one with old iron, another with lead, another with brass. There seemed no end to the variety of rubbish that Darkie Cheap had accumulated here in this tall, dark building, floored with earth and festooned with cobwebs. In the middle of such floor space as the cubicles left uncovered stood an immense iron weighing-machine.

John stood there, still holding on to the bedstead, till, his eyes at last accustomed to the gloom, he perceived Darkie Cheap himself. This was the more difficult to do because Cheap really was a darkie; you first became aware, in this his chosen habitat, of the whites of his eyes. John had often seen Darkie Cheap about the streets: an old, wrinkled nigger with curly grey hair, harmless enough; but here in his dark lair, amid the filth and the stench, he took on the proportions of an ogre moving with evil stealth among the clothes and bones of his victims.

The boy’s thin hand tightened its grip upon the bedstead; but Tom Hannaway was not afraid. “How much for this lot?” he demanded with noisy assurance.

Then the comedy that had been enacted on the croft was gone through again with a change of characters. Tom, who had looked down his nose at everything he had acquired, now praised extravagantly the goods he had come to sell. But Darkie Cheap was not impressed by bravado. He quietly sorted out everything: rags, brass, iron, bones, each into a separate pile. The knobs were unscrewed from the bedstead in spite of Tom’s hot protest that they were part of an article that should sell on its own merits which, he pointed out, were considerable. Darkie Cheap said nothing. His bony pink-palmed hands threw the knobs among the brass, the rest among the iron. Then each lot was weighed: iron with iron, brass with brass, bone with bone. When this was done, he announced his price, and there was nothing for Tom Hannaway to do but take it.

“That makes twenty-five and ninepence,” he confided to John as they set out together for Broadbent Street.

“How much does a racehorse cost?” John enquired.

Tom let out a howl of laughter. “You don’t think I’m saving up for a racehorse now, do you? Lord, kid! A racehorse costs hundreds and hundreds. There’ll be a lot to do before I get my racehorse. I’ll have to get where the money is. That’s the first thing to do: get where the money is.”

They had reached the Hannaway house, noisy with Mrs. Hannaway’s voice upraised in song and with the howling of many children. Tom stood for a moment at the door, looking up at the round red sun, smothered in a smoky aura, as though he wished its disc were gold and that he could pluck it there and then out of the sky.

Gordon Stansfield came home, as he always did, to the midday dinner, but, as this was Saturday, he did not go back to Birley Artingstall’s. He said: “Get your cap, John. Let’s take a walk to town.”

He did not ask Ellen to go with them, because he knew that she would not. It would take a lot to shift Ellen out of her house, but she was glad to see John out of it occasionally. Gordon knew that, and took the boy out whenever he could, so that Ellen might be alone.

So John set out with this placid commonplace man to whom he owed so much. Gordon had changed from his working clothes into a suit of stiff-looking brown cloth, with a collar that stood up all round his neck. A black cravat was bound about the collar, finished with a big bow. From a buttonhole high up in his waistcoat a silver chain dropped down to the silver watch in his pocket. His boots were fastened at the sides with buttons. But you didn’t see much of this, because he wore a heavy overcoat, rather tight-waisted and flowing out into almost the fullness of a skirt. You saw, though, the hard squarish bowler that he wore on his head. No stranger would have looked twice at Gordon as he walked down Broadbent Street, one hand holding John’s, the other rhythmically thudding to the ground a holly stick with a silver shield engraved with his initials. No stranger would have looked twice at the face that would have seemed thinner without its greying mutton-chop whiskers, at the kind brown eyes and the undistinguished nose and mouth. But Ellen stood at the door and watched till the pair had turned to the right into Great Ancoats Street.

It was no great distance to town. They went through Oldham Street where, on that tragic day of high summer so long ago, the Old Warrior had hidden the sabre in his brother’s barber’s shop. Now, grand new shops were there, and when they came out into Piccadilly John thought he had never seen so much exciting life crowded together into one place. Hansom cabs dashed by and four-wheelers went more soberly. There were horse-drawn omnibuses, and splendid private carriages, and horsemen jogging quietly along till release from the press should permit them to go more gaily.

Gordon was a persistent walker. He did not dawdle to allow John to look into shop windows. He went forward at his steady pace across Piccadilly into Mosley Street, and through Mosley Street to the Free Trade Hall. It was only when he got there that he at last paused, on the other side of the street, and looked across at the heavy solemn building that stood on the spot where the dragoons had ridden down the people.

“That’s where it was, John,” he said, thinking of the old man whom, yesterday, they had laid in the grave. “That’s where your grandfather picked up his sabre. But it was morning, with the sun shining, and there was green grass where you see that big building now.”

And that’s where Emma was killed, the child was thinking. That’s where the soldier cut off her hair with the ribbon on it.

He did not tell Gordon about the hair and the ribbon. To withhold this small piece of knowledge even from Gordon made it secretly and excitingly his.

The daylight was draining out of the sky and the air was keen as they turned and made their way to Albert Square. The gas-lamps were lit and shining fitfully on the white façade of the Town Hall. They stood right back across the square to look at it soaring up into the night, its towers and pinnacles dark perpendicular smudges on the greater darkness of the sky. They had often come to watch it rising there at the heart of the city, with all its ropes and cranes and pulleys and scaffoldings, its workmen scaling the raw and dizzy cliffs of masonry, its noise of hammers, saws and chisels. And now it was finished, a virgin building, so soon to be befouled by the smoke and fume of the very prosperity that had called it into being. With childlike awe, Gordon walked round it, occasionally smiting his stick against the mighty ashlar of its base. With satisfaction he noted by his big silver watch that he needed nearly ten minutes to make the circuit.

Then on they went by Cross Street to the Shambles, leaving the last strident note of progress and finding themselves among the little crooked streets and leaning inns and houses that clustered where Manchester from the beginning had clustered, whether Roman camp or Saxon village, alongside the Irwell stream.

Here were cosier streets than those they had till now been treading: streets whose shops had windows bulging outwards, patterned with many tiny panes; whose public-houses had a friendly look, red-curtained, and a friendly sound as laughter and applause bespoke a sing-song; whose life seemed as much underground as above it. It was underground that Gordon now plunged, down a flight of rickety wooden stairs, into a catacomb of books.

John had been there before and knew what to expect. A call upon the second-hand bookseller was never omitted from a visit to Manchester. It seemed to the child that you could lose yourself in the place. You turned right and you turned left, and whichever way you turned you could turn again and still find yourself confronting a vista of books rising on either hand from floor to ceiling. In each of these corridors a gas-light burned, enclosed in wire; and the smell, compounded of decaying paper and leather, gas-heated air and some aboriginal earthly flavour, was one that he was never to forget.

Somewhere, at some time, if you went on exploring long enough, you would come upon Mr. Suddaby, a dusty old spider at the heart of his amazing web. Perhaps you would come upon him in his own special nook, where a fire burned, though by what tortuous means its smoke was conveyed to the outer air it was difficult to imagine. As likely as not, he would have a meal, sent in from a neighbouring eating-house, on the table before him, and, with his carpet-slippered feet extended to the fire, he would be dividing his attention between that and the Manchester Guardian, propped against an ale bottle. He was an old man made of parchment, with a white moustache and little pointed beard, that somehow emphasised the ironic cast of his yellowish face. He wore a black velvet skull-cap from beneath whose edge an outflow of white curly hair escaped; and a coat and waistcoat of black velvet, stained and dusty and not without historical reference to the meals he might so frequently be found consuming.

If you did not find him there in his own particular and domestic niche, which was shared by Sheba, his snow-white Persian cat, emerald-eyed, you might find him sitting on the top step of a ladder in one of his own bookish aisles, reading one of his own volumes; or, with his hands behind his back and his eyes sunk apparently in contemplation of his carpet slippers, he would be found fixed in thought, moveless and soundless.

To-night he was doing none of these things. He was talking in his low-pitched voice, which seemed concerned always not to awaken the echoes of his own catacombs, to a boy whom John saw at once to be Arnold Ryerson. Arnold was looking red and embarrassed, and Mr. Suddaby was looking at once grave and mischievous.

“Here’s a serious case, Mr. Stansfield,” he said, recognising his old customer. “I’ve caught a Tartar, a lawyer, a great argufier. We’ve had it out all ways, this boy and I, and now I’ll turn the case over to you. What you say, I shall accept. This boy discovered a sixpenny book—namely, this battered copy of the Idylls of the King—in the tuppenny box. He argues that a book in a tuppenny box costs tuppence; and I maintain that a sixpenny book costs sixpence, wherever it may have fallen by accident. What do you say?”

Gordon tucked his holly stick under his arm, took the book, and allowed the pages to flicker through his fingers. Presently, he read, half-aloud:

Then from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint As from beyond the limit of the world, Like the last echo born of a great cry, Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice Around a king returning from his wars.

Gordon’s murmuring voice ceased, and in the silence the four of them could hear the gas-flame singing like a gnat. Then Arnold Ryerson, his face lit up, said: “You like it, too, Mr. Stansfield?”

Gordon nodded; and Mr. Suddaby, without the book, continued the quotation:

Thereat once more he moved about and clomb Ev’n to the highest he could climb, and saw, Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand, Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King, Down that long water opening on the deep Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go From less to less and vanish into light. And the new sun rose, bringing the new year.

“I don’t know what’s coming over boys in these days,” said Mr. Suddaby severely. “They want that sort of thing for tuppence—immortal verse for tuppence. What d’you say, Mr. Stansfield?”

“I’ve only got tuppence,” Arnold Ryerson intervened.

“Pay your tuppence,” said Gordon, “and I’ll pay fourpence. Then every one will be satisfied.”

“No, no!” said old Suddaby, lifting his skull-cap with three fingers and scratching his head with the little one. “If there’s generosity about, I can be as generous as the next man. We’ll all pay tuppence each.”

Suddenly John piped up: “Arnold, let me pay a penny.”

At that Suddaby’s face creased in an ironic grin. “Nay! Damn it all,” he said. “This is becoming preposterous. Take the book, boy, and have done with it.” And he thrust the Idylls into Arnold’s hands.

Five minutes later Gordon was walking home with the boys. For himself, he had bought Hugh Miller’s Old Red Sandstone and for John a coverless copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

No one was ever asked into the Stansfield’s house on a Saturday night. When Gordon and John returned, high tea was ready in the kitchen, and John well knew the unvarying routine that would follow. This was Gordon’s sermon-writing night. As a local preacher, he was not called on every Sunday, but every Saturday he worked on a sermon.

He and Ellen washed up in the scullery; then Ellen put the red cloth on to the kitchen table and brought out from a dresser drawer the blotting-pad, the ink-pot and pen, the half-sheets of note-paper which were the size Gordon liked for writing on. She placed a Bible, Cruden’s Concordance and the Methodist Hymn-book alongside the blotting-pad. She pulled out the wooden chair, ready for him to sit down. This was the total extent of Ellen’s secretarial work in any week, and not for anything would she have abrogated one gesture of it. Then she sat down with a basket of mending at her side, and put a silence-commanding finger to her lips as she looked at John, sitting with his new book in the Old Warrior’s chair on the other side of the purring fire.

The boy snuggled into the chair, aware of the keen cold without and of the warm silence within, a silence broken only by the steady scratching of Gordon’s pen, the tinkle of ash into the grate, the tiny rasping of a woollen sock over his mother’s rough-skinned hands.

As the hands of the clock touched nine, he did not need to be spoken to: he rose quietly, and Ellen rose, too, ready to steal out of the room with him, no word spoken, no good-night said. But that night, for a wonder, as the boy got up, Gordon laid down his pen, removed the steel-rimmed spectacles from his nose, and smiled at him. “Good-night, John,” he said. “Yon Arnold Ryerson’s a nice lad. See as much of him as you can.”