Читать книгу Fame is the Spur - Howard Spring - Страница 6

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When John Shawcross was fourteen years old, he signed his name for the first time J. Hamer Shawcross. It was not till later that he omitted the J.

He had followed Gordon’s advice and was seeing much of Arnold Ryerson. His little piping offer of a penny towards the Idylls of the King had tickled the fancy of the elder boy, who began, whenever he met John, to talk to him with a grave, humorous condescension, and this attitude soon gave way to one of unconditional friendship. Arnold was walking home from school one evening during the week after that encounter in Mr. Suddaby’s, puzzling his honest head over a poser in arithmetic. It was dark, and he paused under a street lamp with the text-book open in his hand. John Shawcross, walking home by himself, found him there and said: “Can I help you, Arnold?”

He had never before called this bigger boy Arnold, and a surge both of shyness and pride went through him as he uttered the name. Arnold was taken aback, and looked at the youngster, not knowing whether to reprove his cheek, to burst out laughing, or to accept his offer. John’s embarrassment deepened under the stare. He pulled off his cap and nervously swept his hand through his hair that drooped upon his forehead. “I think I could,” he said.

“It wouldn’t be fair,” Arnold answered. “Even supposing you could do it. I’m expected to do these sums myself.”

John brightened under the friendlier tone. “Perhaps I could show you the idea,” he said. “You come round to our house to-night.”

Arnold said that he would, and John ran home strangely excited. He felt sure that he could help. He did not know what problem was worrying Arnold, but he had seen that the book was an arithmetic primer, and he knew that he was good at arithmetic. He liked it. He was far ahead of any one in his class. Voluntarily, he had been doing advanced sums for a long time. His heart warmed with the thought of showing off his knowledge to a boy two classes ahead of himself, a boy who would soon be leaving school altogether.

But there was more in it than that. He had no friend. He had often enough been proud of this. He had read of heroes whose lives were lonely because of their greatness. No one understood them because there was no one of their stature; and so he walked with a dragging gait, and was lonely and misunderstood, and enjoyed it. For the first time, he had asked someone to “come to our house.”

“Ah, my friends! Standing here once more, on the platform of this historic hall, at the heart of this great city which has so signally honoured me to-day, what memories crowd about me! What memories of loneliness and secret struggle! None so lonely as the poor child is lonely. To whom shall he tell his hopes? Into what ear shall he pour the urgency of awakening aspiration?

“It is not my intention to recall to this too indulgent audience the state of utter friendlessness which I knew not far from the spot where now the warmth of your presence makes all that happened then seem but an evil dream. I would only say to any who is here to-night, young, friendless, aspiring, lonely: ‘Have courage! The way may be long but it winds upward. Have faith. The night may be dark but it brightens towards a dawn.’ I, too, have cried: ‘Oh for a friend!’ and known no answer.” (The Rt. Hon. Hamer Shawcross, P.C., M.P., at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, on the evening of the day when he received the freedom of the city: December 1934.)

From the beginning, Arnold Ryerson was all that a man could ask of a friend.

“Something new, isn’t it?” Ellen demanded when John poured out in one excited breath, as soon as he was over the doorstep: “Mother, I’ve asked Arnold Ryerson to come round to-night.”

“Oh, you have, have you? And what d’you think your father’s going to do with a lot of chattering boys around him?”

John remembered in time. “It’s Father’s class night,” he said. “I thought of that. And Father told me to see as much as I could of Arnold.”

“Seeing’s one thing,” said Ellen. “Asking him here’s another. Well, go and wash yourself.”

When Gordon came home and they were all seated at the table, she said: “My lord here’s branching out—asking people to the house, if you please.”

“It’s Arnold Ryerson,” said John. “We want to do sums together.”

Gordon looked at John and at Ellen and at the well-provisioned table that was spread with ham and tongue, cake and jam, bread and butter. “It’s a pity you didn’t ask him to eat with us,” he said. “That lad doesn’t get too much to eat.”

“If you want people to eat with you,” said Ellen, “you must ask the fat ’uns. Them as haven’t got enough are backward to admit it.”

Gordon sighed. “There are too many of those Ryersons.”

“Six children,” said Ellen. “I don’t know where they all sleep.”

Gordon took a drink of tea. “There’s room enough here. I shall be out to-night; but whether I’m out or in, there’s room enough. If the lad’s anxious to work, he won’t find much room or much peace in that house. Let him come here.”

“Well, they won’t worry me,” said Ellen. “I’ll only want a corner of the table for my ironing.”

Gordon looked at her with the smile that meant he had a plan. “No, they won’t worry you, lass,” he said. “They won’t be near you.”

“Nay, they can’t go in the parlour and catch their deaths. There’s no fire there.”

“It’s possible to light a fire,” said Gordon, “but not in the parlour. No. Listen. Do you know what I always longed for when I was a boy, and never could get? A room of my own!”

“There’s no room in this house going begging. Two up and two down don’t leave much to spare.”

“There’s John’s bedroom. There’s nothing in it now but his little bed and a chest-of-drawers. I’d like him to turn it into a study.”

Gordon brought out the last word diffidently. A study was an unusual thing to talk about; but it was a thing he had been thinking about. It was something wrapped up rather obscurely with all the intentions he had cherished for the child ever since his decree: No mill for John.

He looked rather anxiously at Ellen and the child. “You know,” he said. “Nothing terrible. Nothing drastic. Just a place where he can keep his books as he gets them, and read them; and perhaps some day he’ll want to write something.”

“Well,” Ellen burst out, “if the kitchen’s good enough for you to write in——”

“Ah, yes—me. That’s all right,” said Gordon modestly. “My little bits of sermons and so forth—that’s one thing. But I’d like to think of John working away up there. We could fit in a little writing-table and a book-case, and that old chair could go up.” He waved towards the Old Warrior’s relic. “That would be cosy alongside the fire.”

“Fire!”

It was the first word John had interposed into the conversation, the first idea to set his mind alight. A fire in his bedroom! This was revolutionary. Immediately, all that Gordon had been saying took new shape. He had been envisaging a cold, cheerless room, himself banished there, sitting in a chair with an overcoat over his shoulders to keep him warm. But now the light spread out from this one word Gordon had spoken. It fell on the hypothetical books; it warmed the chair and glinted on the not-yet-acquired writing-table. It turned exile in Siberia to a home of one’s own.

“Can we have a fire to-night when Arnold comes?” he asked excitedly.

“Why not?” said Gordon. “Thank God, we’re not so poor that we can’t manage that. I’ll see to it now.” He wiped his mouth on his handkerchief, the signal that his meal was ended, and Ellen and John bowed their heads. “Bless these mercies to our use and Thy service, for Christ’s sake. Amen.”

Ellen was up before him. “Nay,” she cried, lapsing into the dialect that she tried hard to overcome. “Tha’ll not lay t’fire. If we’re to have this nonsense, tha can leave it to me. Though what’ll happen when Ah lay match to t’sticks, Ah don’t know. That chimney’s not been swep’ sin’ Ah don’t know when. Full o’ crows’ nests or summat, Ah shouldn’t wonder.”

“It’s a long time, lass, since crows nested in Ancoats,” Gordon reminded her.

“Ay, but it’s longer sin’ that chimney were swep’.”

She bustled off upon the job, and John cried: “Can we take the chair up now, Father?”

“Of course we can,” said Gordon. “You take the cushions. I’ll take the rest.”

It was almost as difficult to take the Old Warrior’s chair up the narrow stairs as it had been to bring his body down them. But before Gordon set out to conduct his weekly Methodist class meeting, all was done that could be done at that time. Ellen’s fears were groundless: the fire drew well, though the grate was a pitifully small one that held little more than a handful of coal. But there it was, glowing, a wonderful transformer. The solitary chair was before it. As yet there was nothing to justify the word “study.” A lamp burned on the chest-of-drawers.

When the job was done, Ellen, practically, went down to her washing-up. John stood with his back to the fire, entranced, excitedly sweeping the hair off his forehead. Gordon looked about him with a slow, tranquil satisfaction. He felt that he was nearer to something that had been in his heart—he hardly knew what, but something important, and something that had been entrusted to him alone.

When Arnold Ryerson arrived, Ellen answered the door. “You’d better go upstairs,” she said. “The room’s on t’left. Nice goings-on.”

Arnold hung his cap on a peg in the passage and went upstairs, mystified. Gordon shook his hand. “Well, lad,” he said, “I’m glad you’ve come. I hope you’ll come again. Come a lot. Come whenever you want to. Well, now, I’ve got to go. I’ll leave you and John to get on with your work.”

But he did not go. He hesitated and fidgeted in the doorway, then came back into the room. “I think I’d like to say a word of prayer,” he said simply.

John felt the blood rush into his cheeks. He looked at Arnold Ryerson aghast. For the first time Gordon’s religion had cut into a personal relationship, and the child felt shaken. Arnold Ryerson said quietly: “Yes, Mr. Stansfield,” and without invitation kneeled on the meagre rug before the meagre fire. Then John knelt, too, and Gordon Stansfield knelt between the two boys.

“O Christ,” he said, “Who in Thy earthly pilgrimage didst know and take comfort from the friendship of simple men, grant to these boys that they may be friends to one another, to cherish and sustain one another in all the tribulations that life may bring. And grant that out of this moment, in this humble room, some thing may grow and increase to Thy glory and to Thy knowledge among men.”

John did not speak. Arnold Ryerson said in a firm voice: “Amen.”

When Gordon was gone, John said: “Sit down, Arnold,” and waved his hand towards the chair newly-arrived in his room.

Arnold sat down. “This is very nice,” he said. “You’re lucky, John, to have a room like this.”

“It is my study,” John said proudly. “I am to have a book-case and a writing-table.” He sat on the rug at Arnold’s feet. “I must get a couple of sausages,” he said, “for the door and window.”

Arnold looked about him slowly, as though daunted by magnificence. “I’ve never known anybody before with a room all to himself.” He sighed. “It’s terrible in our house if you want to read or do any homework. There’s nowhere at all.”

“Why don’t you use the parlour?” John asked. The front room downstairs was always the parlour in Broadbent Street.

“Because my three sisters sleep in it,” Arnold said simply, “and we three boys sleep in the back room upstairs. That only leaves the other bedroom, where my father and mother sleep, and the kitchen. There’s always something going on in the kitchen—washing or ironing or bathing or arguing.”

“Well, you come here whenever you want to,” John said. “My father means that.”

Arnold eyed the stingy little grate. “It’s going to cost you a lot in coal.”

“Oh, we can afford it,” John answered grandly.

They did not do much work that night. John had a look at Arnold’s arithmetic book, solved his problem, and explained the principle. Then they gave up all pretence of doing anything but enjoy the unexpected position they found themselves in. They walked about the room—although there were no more than a few paces to walk—and they discussed its furnishing as though the equipment of a cathedral were in question.

“You let me furnish this,” said Arnold. “I know how to do it. I’m used to doing things on the cheap”; and furnish it he did. He came round the next night with a few planks, a saw, a hammer and nails. There was a recess on either side of the out-jutting chimney breast. In one Arnold fixed up the book-case. He nailed pieces of lath to two of his planks and stood these on the skirting board in the recess. Then he cut his other planks to make shelves. He cut them infinitesimally too long, so that they had to be jammed down hard to rest on the lath supports. This pressure kept the side-pieces upright and the whole taut. In the other recess, the “writing-table” was made in the same way. There were two lower shelves for books, and the third shelf, at writing height, was two planks wide instead of one. That made the writing-table.

When all this was done, Arnold conscientiously swept up the sawdust with the hearth-brush and threw it into the fire. Then he took from his pocket the arithmetic primer and the Idylls of the King. He put them solemnly on one of the shelves. Even in so small and haphazard a book-case they looked lonely; but the two boys regarded them with satisfaction: almost with wonder. There was no doubt that this simple carpentry, adorning either side of the fireplace, made a great difference to the look of the room. They called downstairs to Gordon and Ellen to come up and look.

“That’s fine,” said Gordon. “We shall have to see Mr. Suddaby on Saturday and start filling these shelves. And we needn’t wait till then. Let’s see what we’ve got downstairs for a beginning.”

The boys didn’t go with him. They hovered about the work, touching it now and then, and again standing off from it and regarding it, apt.

Ellen came back first. She brought a kitchen chair and placed it in front of the writing-shelf. “That’d better stay there,” she said. “Happen I’ll make a cushion for it.”

Gordon brought half-a-dozen books—a strange lot: Birds of the Bible, Wuthering Heights, Barnaby Rudge, some bound volumes of the Cornhill Magazine, and a volume of John Wesley’s sermons. Before putting the sermons on the shelf, he looked here and there through the pages. “If either of you lads ever takes to local preaching,” he said, “you’ll want this. You’ve got to be well up in some of these sermons, you know, before they’ll accept you.”

He looked at them expectantly, as though he would have welcomed a fervent response then and there, but they had no thoughts for anything but the wonders which were being enacted before them. “Well, think on,” Gordon said; and then he added to the collection the last book he had brought up—Southey’s Life of Wesley.

When they were left alone once more, John took two of the longest nails Arnold had brought, stood on the kitchen chair, and drove them into the wall over the fireplace. He took the Old Warrior’s sabre from under the bed and hung it proudly as for so long it had hung in the kitchen downstairs. Then he remembered that among the Old Warrior’s possessions in the chest-of-drawers there were two books. He took them out and added them to the collection on the shelves: the poems of Sam Bamford and the Bible.

“I don’t think we can do anything else to-night, Arnold,” he said; and at the same time Gordon’s voice was heard, calling Arnold down to drink a cup of cocoa before going home.

The next day, as soon as the child was gone to school, Ellen went out, bought a penny bottle of ink, some pens, pencils, sheets of blotting paper. When she got home, she made up the rag cushion for the kitchen chair. She dug out two old tin candlesticks and put candles in them, and having furnished the writing-shelf she placed these upon it.

There seemed to be a conspiracy to do things in John’s room. Arnold arrived that night with a jam-pot, a brush, and some crystals of permanganate of potash. Soon all the shelves were stained. Gordon had put a glue-pot on the fire during his evening meal. When he had eaten he took the pot upstairs, and then produced a fine piece of thin red leather, just the size to cover the writing-shelf. He had tooled a gold design into the edge, and he applied the skin to the wood with a craftsman’s loving care.

This was not all. He had brought strips of scalloped leather, also beaten with a design, and little brass nails with finely-wrought heads to fasten the strips to the edges of the bookshelves. When all was done, the writing-shelf and the bookshelves looked very different from the raw job of the night before.

“You’ve got Birley Artingstall to thank for that,” Gordon said. “I told him what we were doing, and he said he’d like to do a bit towards it.”

So the first “study” that Hamer Shawcross ever knew came into being. Gordon and Ellen, Arnold Ryerson and Birley Artingstall: these had a hand in it. Hamer Shawcross alone did nothing but accept the good will and the good work of them all; and there he stood, pushing back his long shining hair, full of pride, looking at the shelves and the books and the curved cold symbol gleaming on the wall.

The walk to Manchester, the call on Mr. Suddaby, and the buying of a book or two had long been a Saturday ritual with Gordon and John. Now Arnold Ryerson began to join them. Arnold, at nearly fourteen, was unusually tall for his age: he was nearly as tall as Gordon Stansfield. John was small. If you had seen these three from the back, going along Great Ancoats Street on some cold winter afternoon, you would have thought you were looking at two brothers, taking out a son and nephew. They strode along with John always in the middle, sometimes holding Gordon’s hand, but never Arnold’s. Small as he was, he never felt that Arnold was a superior or protector. Through that small matter of arithmetic, he had established an ascendency. Arnold seemed to recognise it, and occasionally even acknowledged it, taking John’s advice about the books to be bought at Suddaby’s. In the catacombs, Gordon left them alone. He went his own way, looking for books that would give him things to point his sermons; and the two boys went theirs, whispering, rustling over the pages, looking at pictures. More often than not, the final choice for them would be made by Mr. Suddaby. He had come to expect them, and he would have a few books put by. It was thanks to him that they bought no rubbish.

When they got back to Broadbent Street, Arnold stayed to high tea, and then, Ellen having prepared the table for Gordon’s sermon-writing, the boys would go upstairs, put a match to the fire, and sit down to their new books. Little enough use was made of the writing-shelf, but there was now a second easy chair. All through that winter they read and read, saying little, but growing towards one another, so that each would have felt a sense of loss if anything should chance to put an end to this happy and harmonious state of affairs.

Of course, it had to end. It ended with brutal violence. All through that winter, when John was twelve and Arnold Ryerson was fourteen, they spent three or four evenings together every week, with the lamp-flame singing quietly on the table between them, sometimes with the wind and the rain beating on the window, sometimes with the silence of great cold without, and once or twice with snow falling, so that they pulled aside the curtains and watched the dithering whiteness whirling down out of the black void of the night.

John would not now casually say “Good-night,” pick up the sausage from in front of the door, and unceremoniously watch Arnold go. He would go with him, stand about the kitchen as Arnold drank the cup of cocoa that Ellen always provided, then help him into his coat and see him out. His mind, by the end of the winter, was stored with memories: of Arnold rushing pell-mell through the rain; of Arnold standing still outside the door, lifting his face up till the snowflakes fell upon it and the light of the street lamp illumined it; of Arnold entranced by a night when there had never been so many stars. The sky was pricked full of them, sparkling icily, and he had run across the road with Arnold and leaned on the canal parapet and looked down to see the water of the canal shining like black velvet tricked out with diamonds.

And now he no longer felt lonely in the little pallet bed tucked unobtrusively into a corner of the room as he had been when first the Old Warrior went away and the big bed disappeared. He slept with a glow still warm in the grate and the warmth of Arnold’s presence seeming still to irradiate the room.

It was not so good when the summer came. The mean streets of Ancoats stewed in the heat. The room was stuffy, and, without the lure of a fire and drawn curtains, it lost its romance. They did not use it so much, but every Saturday they went with Gordon Stansfield to Manchester.

On a Saturday towards the end of that July they were walking home at five o’clock when Tom Hannaway, breathless with running, met them. “Hurry up, Arnold! Hurry up! Your father’s dying!” he shouted, and hooking his hand into Arnold’s elbow, he snatched him from the other two and whirled him away. John and Gordon quickened their pace, and when they got to Broadbent Street there was a little crowd leaning on the canal wall outside the Ryerson house, looking open-mouthed at the doctor’s gleaming victoria and polished horse, that made John think of Tom Hannaway’s racehorse, and at the coachman sitting up aloft.

The doctor came out, top-hatted for all the sultry warmth of the day, just as John and Gordon reached the house. Gordon knew him—one of the Emmott Street upper ten who never stayed behind to the prayer-meetings—and asked for news. The doctor shook his head. “He’s finished.”

A little gasp went through the crowd, some of whom had seen Mr. Ryerson go out not an hour before. And now he was finished. And all those children! There was a small boy who had seen it happen, and he kept on telling his story again and again. “I seen Mr. Ryerson walking down the street and he met Mr. Hannaway and said ‘Hallo, Mike!’ an’ then he fell down dead.”

Gordon thought of the florid Ryerson, so different from his thin, diffident son: bloated, self-confident, with the face full of purple veins. He had driven a dray, and sometimes, watching him haul on the reins to bring his two great horses to a standstill, you would think he would go off in apoplexy there and then. And now that sultry day, that excessive touch of sun, had done it; and there was Mrs. Ryerson, as the neighbours pityingly said, with all those children.

When they had finished their high tea, Ellen began to prepare the table for Gordon to write. “Not to-night, lass,” he said. “Don’t bother. I’m not preaching to-morrow, and that can wait. I’m going along to see Birley. He might know of something for Arnold. You can come with me, John.”

The shop was shut, and Gordon banged the polished brass knocker on the door that led to Birley Artingstall’s private apartments. John had never been through that door before. When it was opened he found that it gave straight upon a stairway, up which Birley preceded them. He led them to his sitting-room at the rear, looking upon nothing but backyards and walls and chimney-pots. It was a very warm evening and the window was pushed up. John went straight to it and gazed at the uninspiring prospect.

“The abomination of desolation, eh, lad?” said Birley. “Ay, its pretty bad in the summer, pretty bad. You must bring him round on some winter night, Gordon. That’s the time, my boy, to see an old bachelor making himself comfortable. Have you got any imagination?”

John gazed at all the seals and medals dingle-dangling on the chain that adorned the old man’s lean belly, and raised his glance to the fair drooping moustaches and the bright, boring blue eyes. He did not answer.

“He’s got plenty,” said Gordon. “As much as most.”

“Well, just imagine this room on a winter night, my boy, with that dull-looking grate full of a cheerful fire, and the curtains drawn, and me in that chair with that lamp on a table at my elbow. Imagine a pot of nice hot tea, and this pipe in my mouth, and John Wesley’s Journal to read. Have you read it?”

The child shook his head. “Read it,” said Birley Artingstall, pointing a bony finger at him. “The times I’ve had with John Wesley! Up first thing in the morning, on to a horse, and off we go! Through rain and snow and wind; over the moors and the hills, preaching, being stoned, gathering in the souls of men! And all without leaving Ancoats. All without leaving this fireside. Ah! this is a precious spot to me. Come some winter night.”

Leather and John Wesley seemed to be the dominant things in the room. As Birley and Gordon discussed the case of Arnold Ryerson, John prowled about. On the mantelpiece was a white bust of Wesley with curls of hair falling down to his shoulders and a parson’s bands under his chin, and over it hung a large steel engraving of the itinerant saint still at last, lying on his death-bed, surrounded by disciples. Among them, an old gentleman was holding an ear-trumpet composedly to his ear, in the apparent hope of catching some last salutary words. Standing by him was a child, who looked younger than John himself, staring at the mounds made under the bedclothes by the dying man’s feet. The Journals and the Sermons, and many volumes of the Minutes of Conference, as well as Southey’s Life of Wesley, were in the book-case, and over the book-case, set in a surround of white pasteboard and framed, was a small printed card, which John did not know was Birley Artingstall’s first “quarterly ticket,” attesting his membership of the Wesleyan Church.

The leather interested the boy more than the Methodism. Birley’s trade was also his private joy, and he had surrounded himself with fine craftsmanship of his own devising. All his chairs were splendidly upholstered, and all his books had been taken from their original bindings and bound anew. They were a lovely sight, with the gold lettering shining on blue, green, red and brown leather. Even the prosaic Minutes of Conference had been transformed, and a long row of them shone in their splendid jackets as though they were works of exalted imagination.

There were boxes of leather, a pen-tray of leather, a stationery-rack of leather, and upon the panels of the door Birley had applied skins tooled and gilded into charming patterns.

With half an eye as he talked with Gordon, he saw the child’s interest, and when the discussion was ended and Gordon rose, Birley said: “You come in the winter, my boy. Then you’ll see how all these things should look. And take this now. There’s a lovely thing for you. You won’t pick up a thing like that every day. You take that home now, and when you look at it, just think: ‘I must go and see that old chap in the winter.’ Remind him, Gordon.”

All the way home John hugged the beautiful leather box, rubbing his fingers over its embossed configurations, looking with satisfaction at its gilded embellishment. He knew what he was going to do with it. He was going to make it a casket to contain a brown curl and a piece of stained red ribbon.

In that immense and still new Town Hall that John and Gordon had recently circumnavigated Alderman Hawley Artingstall found a casket for his own magnificence. Up the finely-twisting main staircase, on to the great landing whose floor was sown with a mosaic of bees, symbolic, he reflected, of wise men gathering their honey, along echoing corridor after corridor he would go, peeping into committee-rooms and Mayor’s parlour, council chamber and great hall embellished with Ford Madox Brown frescoes: and never did he get over the wonder of having at last a setting so appropriate to his own grandeur.

Watching him standing there looking down from a tall pointed window upon the people walking languidly in the heat across Albert Square, you would never have guessed that he was the brother of that blond and bony Viking Birley Artingstall. Hawley was puffed out—in the face and the belly and the pride. He had a habit of puffing out his cheeks and puffing out his big moustache and, when he spoke in public, as he loved to do, of puffing out his words. He had never succeeded, as Birley had, in overcoming his Lancashire speech, and as he had not been able to cure it, he intensified it, and carried it off as a matter of pride. “Nay, Ah’m jannock. What Ah says Ah means. Ah’m not soft in t’speech or in t’brain, like some.”

He had always hated the leather shop that his father had founded. He had always hated Ancoats with its dirt and misery; and when, a young man in his twenties, he had started his draper’s shop in Oldham Street, he couldn’t understand why Birley declined to join him. Looking back on it all, he though Birley was daft, sticking there over a shop in a noisy, soot-smothered region, with no one to look after him, and no one to talk to at nights.

“Birley Artingstall: Leather.” Hawley smiled sometimes at the quaint inscription. As for him, he needed neither a Christian name nor a word to describe his trade. “Artingstall’s.” That was all it said over his shop at the beginning, and he had taken care that Artingstall’s stood for something. And then there were two shops, three, and now four, with “Artingstall’s” right across the whole lot of ’em; and if any one in Manchester said “I got it at Artingstall’s,” you didn’t need to ask were that was.

Hawley made money and married money. He had lived over his own first shop, and now goodness knows how many assistants were living over them all. As for Hawley, he had moved out to Fallowfield, to a fine stucco-fronted house with lime-trees in the garden—so many lime-trees that on a warm June day the scent of the flowers came into the house. No wonder it was called The Limes. You wouldn’t believe, out at The Limes, that this was the same city which comprised Hulme and Ancoats. In the springtime Hawley’s garden was full of flowering trees—lilac and laburnum, cherry and hawthorn—a dazzling spectacle under a sky which could be kind and blue. Walking there and thinking of Birley, he couldn’t make the chap out. Why, the whole Ancoats outfit could be put here in Hawley’s stables, and Burley’s living quarters weren’t half so good as those which Briggs and Haworth, his groom and coachman, had in the loft over the horses.

Very delightful it was on one of those mornings of early spring to sit in the phaeton behind Haworth’s broad back and spin through the streets to Artingstall’s. He entered the building on the dot of nine, a paragon of punctuality, and it pleased him to see men set their watches by the passing of what some of his friends called with affectionate raillery the Artingstall diligence.

Hawley had long since given up his Methodist allegiance. The Church of England was an altogether more respectable shrine for the devotions of one who, already an alderman, would infallibly be Mayor and not inconceivably a knight. And so, driving on Sunday morning in a capacious two-horsed equipage towards his customary worship at the Cathedral, Hawley, with these pleasant dreams in his head, would turn his puffy face to the thin hatchet-face beneath the lilac parasol beside him, reflecting that Lilian at least would know how to carry it off. Ann? He glanced at the girl riding with her back to the coachman and a doubt clouded his mind and his countenance. Irresponsible. That was the word that always thrust at him when he thought of Ann. All that he had done for her—all that he had given her—and she seemed to value it at two pins. Where did she get it from? Reluctantly he admitted that she was too much like that damn’ fool Birley.

Eight to eight were the office hours at Artingstall’s, but Arnold Ryerson at least did not have the mortification of then “sleeping in.” That was the fate of the elder men and girls, but Arnold, engaged after one of the rare colloquys between Birley and Hawley, was too inconsiderable a cipher in the Artingstall machine. He did not have to be subjected to Artingstall beds and food and general domesticity. He was a mere sweeper of floors, duster of chairs, runner of errands, and when on the morning of Arnold’s first appearance Hawley breezed with a blowing out of the moustaches into the shop, he did not even know who this tall thin boy was, holding open a door for him, with awe. Errand boys came and went. There was no reason why he should associate this one with that talk he had had with Birley.

Gordon Stansfield, pleased that Arnold had found work, was unhappy because John was now deprived of friendship. By the time Arnold had walked from Artingstall’s to Broadbent Street and eaten his supper, it was nine o’clock, John’s bedtime. Gordon thought the matter over, and was ready when Birley raised the question of Arnold.

“How’s that lad of Mrs. Ryerson’s getting on, Gordon?” he asked one day when August was ending and the workroom was insufferable hot, choked with the smell of tanned hides.

“He’ll be all right,” Gordon said confidently. “He’s the sort of lad who’ll make something of his life, give him a start. But I wish he and John could see a bit more of one another. The boy says nowt, but he misses Arnold.”

“There’s Sunday,” said Birley. “Take ’em along to Emmott Street.”

“Ay, there’s that,” Gordon admitted. “But I was thinking of getting ’em both to join my class. That’s seven-thirty on Thursday nights.”

Birley was doing some fine sewing. He looked quizzically at Gordon over the steel spectacles he used for close work. “And what will my lord the alderman say to that?” he asked.

“Well, Birley. I was hoping that would be where you’d come in.”

“Look here, lad,” said Birley. “An alderman in the family, especially an alderman married to one of them sour-faced Sugden lasses, is a bit of a responsibility. D’you know that when I go to The Limes I knock my forehead on the doorstep, crawl on my hands and knees into the parlour, and lie full length till all the family’ve wiped their boots on me? Well, not all of ’em. Not Ann.”

“You’re piling it on, Birley.”

“Maybe I am. But it’s more or less like that. Me a Wesleyan, too. That doesn’t help. And now you want some of Artingstall’s precious time off, just so that an errand lad can go to a Methodist class meeting. Time’s money, Gordon, time’s money, especially at Artingstall’s.” He took up his work again. “Ah, well. I’ll see him at the shop. I’ll miss Lillian that way. Lillian! One look from that lass is enough to turn her own brass rusty.”

“She’s got plenty, I hear,” said Gordon with a rare touch of wistfulness.

“Rolling in it, lad, rolling in it. All the same, she’s the sort that puts a man off marriage. But there’s no sense even in that, because look at Ann. Mr. Alderman and Mrs. Vinegar, and the result is Ann. Eh, it’s a rum do. There’s no sense in life anywhere, look at it how you will.”

“Nay, you’re wrong there, Birley,” Gordon reproved him gravely. “I haven’t see this lass, but p’raps it’s she that makes the sense. Sounds like it from what you say.”

Hawley was annoyed at receiving a second petition on behalf of an errand boy. His interview with Birley ended on a note of temper. “Eh, well! Have it any damned way you like,” he said, and with that ungracious permission Birley was content.

And so, on the following Thursday, a scrubbed Arnold, with hair down-plastered by water, and attesting his wage-earning status by wearing a pair of his late father’s trousers miraculously brought to an approximate fit by Mrs. Ryerson—this Arnold, his face shining with joy at renewing an old intimacy, presented himself at the Stansfield door in Broadbent Street.

John, too, had been scrubbed and purified like a sacrifice. Ellen had never become a “class member” and so, though she attended services at Emmott Street, she was not a member of the Methodist Church. But she knew with what seriousness Gordon regarded this night’s proceedings, and while he was assembling the class register and his Bible and hymn-book, she slipped a penny into each boy’s hand.

“What’s it for?” John demanded in a whisper. “Do we have to pay to go in?”

“You’ll see,” said Ellen. “Put it in your pocket.”

Gordon was silent and grave as he walked between the two boys through the sultry streets. They caught his solemnity, and when they passed Tom Hannaway trundling his perambulator in the direction of Darkie Cheap’s, they nodded and said nothing.

It did not take them long to reach the Emmott Street chapel. Railings, as formidable as a prison’s, shut it in, a blackened fortress, fashioned all of stone on which for years the clouds had wept sooty tears, so that from the basement disappearing into the earth behind the railings to the sharp apex of the spire lifted upon a sky flushed now with pink, all was black and funereal as crape. Within the railings there was nothing green. The path to the front door went through sour-looking earth as hard as though no spade had turned it since “Emmott Street,” as its devotees called it, was built. And indeed there would have been no point in turning that sterile and poisonous soil. A few elders had their roots in it. In the spring they fluttered green leaves for a few hopeful weeks; then the noxious airs of Ancoats blasted them as surely as frosts would have done, and for eleven more months they existed in twiggy desolation, recruiting their forces to perform again the puny and pointless miracle.

Gordon Stansfield and the boys did not go up to the front door, an affair of stout oak, nail-studded, which now was locked. They diverged to the left, along a path which fell downwards towards a basement door. Here, in the great dimly-lighted space beneath the chapel, there was a hall for those jollifications that could not be conducted on the more sacred ground floor. Opening off the hall were a number of rooms, and as the three hastened to their own objective the sound of hymn-singing came from one of these rooms, having in the cheerless half-light the eerie suggestion of timid Christians quavering in the catacombs.

There was no one in the small room to which they presently came. One window of opaque glass lighted the place and opened on to a wall divided from the room by nothing but a yard-wide path, so that the place was both dark and stuffy. Gordon stood on a chair and threw up the lower sash of the window. Then he lit the solitary gas-burner. The blue flame, uncovered by any sort of guard, sang with a high tiny whine.

“No one here,” said Gordon. “Good! I like to be first. I like to greet them as they come in.”

At the end of the room away from the window was a table with a wooden armchair behind it and on it a cloth of red rep. Whoever sat in the chair would look across the table at an array of straight-backed uncomfortable cane-bottomed chairs. Gordon placed his register, his hymn-book and Bible on the table in front of the arm-chair, and then took his stand at the door.

The boys sat side by side in the front row of chairs, not looking at one another, feeling awkward and self-conscious.

One by one, Gordon’s class-members assembled. They were all poor people. It was a gibe of Birley Artingstall’s that Wesleyan “classes” were like that. “They’re all graded, Gordon. You’ve got the nothing-a-weeks. Someone else has the pound-a-weeks, and so they go on. Any one with more than five pounds a week doesn’t bother to attend class at all, unless he happens to be a class leader.”

Clogs thudded on the resonant uncovered floors. Shawls were draped over heads and held with one hand across the breast. Summer and winter these women wore their shawls. They were nearly all women—about a dozen of them: washerwomen and weavers and harassed-looking mothers who had left their babies at home in the charge of elder children. There were only two men, and one of them was Darkie Cheap. He must have disposed quickly of Tom Hannaway.

For each one Gordon had a hand-clasp and a cheerful appropriate word. When they were all in, he took his place behind the table and asked them to sing a hymn. He read the first verse:

What shall we offer our good Lord, Poor nothings! for His boundless grace? Fain would we His great name record, And worthily set forth His praise.

The little congregation sang with gusto. The tune was easy, popular, harmonious. Gordon had a thin but true tenor voice. Darkie Cheap and the other man achieved something adequate in the bass, and the women sang with the soulful fervour of the poor who find consolation in rich promises.

Stand in the temple of our God As pillars, and go out no more

they concluded, and then there was a scraping of clog-irons on the boards as they got awkwardly down on their stiff knees. John did not shut his eyes. Through the bars at the back of his chair he stared at one of those pictures that remained printed for ever on his photographic mind. A head bowed down, cowled in a coarse shawl, a back bent in worship that for so many years had been bent by labour, a pair of rough woollen stockings and clog-irons shining like a horse’s shoes.

He glanced sideways and saw that Arnold Ryerson had laid his arms along the chair-seat and buried his face in them. He could not do this. He was alert and interested. He heard Gordon begin to pray, quietly and simply, with none of the emotional fervour to which Birley Artingstall could screw himself up. Gordon’s prayers were conditioned by the circumstances of the people kneeling with him. He knew them all and knew their needs, and he sincerely believed that he was laying those needs before someone who listened from a Mercy Seat. Still on their knees, they repeated the Lord’s Prayer together, and then they stood and sang another hymn.

“Now,” said Gordon, “we are met to testify to the power of God in our lives. There are two new members in this class to-night, and they should know that John Wesley himself founded the class-meeting as the very bed-rock of his church. He founded it as a place where little companies of those who love the Lord could come together to comfort and sustain one another. It is a place for personal confessions and personal testimony. It is not a place for sermons or long addresses, and so I shall not make either. I shall lay before you and before God my own desire, which is that the two lads who are here to-night may receive of God’s blessing full measure, pressed down, and running over. I ask your prayers for them, that this means of grace may work in their hearts like a leaven; and I ask your prayers for myself, that I may be a worthy shepherd. Now, if any brother or sister has any confession to make, or any need of our prayers, or any testimony to give, let us hear it.”

It was evidently a well-understood routine. Gordon’s eye rested on the first woman in the back row of seats. She stumbled to her feet and recited in a gabble: “Thank the Lord, Mr. Stansfield, and forget not all His benefits. I’ve felt the benefit of my religion all through this past week. I’ve needed the help of God, and I’ve had it.”

She sat back, greatly relieved, into her chair, and Gordon said: “Amen, sister, amen. Praise God for that.” Then his eye passed on to the next woman. She was mute. She slowly shook her head to and fro, as though suffering from some affliction that prevented her from keeping it still. The next woman praised God that her husband had found work. She had prayed for it long and ardently. “Let me have your prayers,” she said, “that he will bring the money home.”

So it went. Some were silent; some uttered a few naïve words; and John began to apprehend that his turn would come. A sweat broke out in his palm. He no longer heard what the people behind him were muttering or gabbling. He felt as panic-stricken as he sometimes did at school when the master, stick in hand, was questioning round the class. He glanced at Gordon, listening with a rapt expression to these poor people, an expression charged with pity, too, as though he wished he were God, so that he might himself bring some comfort to their lives. But Gordon was not looking at him: there was no help there.

And then deliverance came. It was Arnold’s turn, and Gordon did not turn his eyes upon him. Instead, he took up the register. He called his own name first and laid a penny upon the book. One by one as their names were called most of the members came up to the table and laid down a penny. But some had no penny to lay down, and Gordon laid it down instead. There were no arrears of “class-money” in his class.

“Arnold Ryerson.” Gordon wrote the name in the book as he called it. Arnold went forward with the penny that Ellen had provided.

“John—Hamer—Shawcross.” Gordon split the name up, his voice dwelling lovingly on each part of it as he wrote. He looked up at John, and on his face was a smile so radiant that the boy, arrested on the other side of the table, for a moment did not stir. He stood there with the penny clutched in his moist palm. It seemed as though no one was present but him and Gordon, and as though between them were passing currents of love and understanding beyond belief. The meeting had perplexed him. It had seemed to him dreary and wearying. There had been nothing to explain the joy he had often seen in Gordon’s face as he set out to go to “class.” And now there that joy was again, in a measure that seemed almost physically to embrace him. He did not know that Gordon felt in that moment as though he were literally bringing the boy to God. John came to with a start. He opened his hand to drop the penny. Sweat stuck it to the palm. He shook it off and walked back to join with the others in the closing hymn. Most of those present thought it a strange hymn for a class-meeting. How could they guess that Gordon had chosen it with care?

Jesus, who calledst little ones to Thee, To Thee I come; O take my hand in Thine, and speak to me, And lead me home; Lest from the path of life my feet should stray, And Satan, prowling, make Thy lamb his prey.

How could they know that Gordon’s thoughts were ten years back, on a night of fog and bitter cold through which he had run with the child’s head resting on his arm, to find Millie comforting Ellen and to see Ellen’s face light again with the hope that had seemed to be gone for ever?

Mrs. Ryerson was not sorry to find Gordon Stansfield taking an interest in her son. With her husband dead, she had plenty to do. There were five other children, all younger than Arnold, all still at school; and as soon as they were packed off in the morning, she would set out, wearing an old cap and with her charwoman’s apron in a roll under her arm, to lay into the scrubbing of other people’s floors or the washing of other people’s clothes. So far as she could, she took work which would permit her to return to Broadbent Street at noon, so that she might give the children their dinner, but that was not always possible, and then the young Ryersons would be sent off to school each with a packet of bread and lard or bread and dripping. On those days, whether it were wet or fine, they would have to “make out” for themselves, as Mrs. Ryerson put it, and when they had munched their food and had a drink of water from the school tap, they would play in the Ancoats streets till classes began again at two o’clock.

Arnold was a good boy. He did all he could to make life easier for his mother. He soon developed the habit of leaping from bed when he heard the clash-thump of Jimmie Spit-and-Wink going down the street. He found it no hardship on these summer mornings. He would go straight out through the front door and cross the road to lean on the canal parapet, drinking in the air which was sweet and cool, washed by the darkness of the night. He felt already grown-up, liberated and responsible. There was no one to say “What are you doing out of bed?” Once the clang and clatter of the clogs had ceased, once the mill buzzer had given its fearful call and fallen to silence, Broadbent Street, flanked by the sleeping houses on the one side and the still water on the other, seemed beatific. The boy breathed deeply, and dreamed: not of leaving this jungle of stone so deceptively tolerable now that its denizens were quiet and its fœtid airs were unawakened, but simply of being able to live in it unafraid, untroubled by the petty shifts and stratagems of the poor. If he could so arrange that his mother did not have to go to work, then he would feel he had achieved something.

At half-past six he went in, raked out the ashes from the kitchen grate and lit the fire. Then he laid the table for seven breakfasts and prepared two—for himself and his mother. At seven o’clock he went up and called her softly. He had ready for her in the scullery sink a tin bowl of hot water. She washed herself, and came into the kitchen for breakfast.

It did not take them half an hour, or anything like it, to eat what there was, but they did not get up from the table till half-past seven. They talked, their voices quietened by the still quiet sense of the morning and the thought of the children sleeping above. Arnold told her of the grandeurs of Artingstall’s—an establishment she had never entered: of how Alderman Hawley Artingstall arrived on the stroke of nine, leaping from his phaeton, and going with a sort of urgent waddle, looking neither to right nor left, to his private office; of the wonders of silks and carpets, of armchairs so downy that you could sink into them as if you were sitting in a billow of feathers, of gorgeous clothes and sumptuous blankets.

“One of these days,” said Arnold, with his shy smile, “I’ll buy you a blanket just like those.”

“Go on with you,” said Mrs. Ryerson, who did not believe in miracles. “You’ll be getting me a carriage and pair next.”

“Well, don’t forget the donkey,” said Arnold. The donkey was their private half-serious joke. He had promised her that some day she should have a gig and a donkey to pull it.

“Ay, I’ll have a donkey when pigs have wings,” said Mrs. Ryerson. “Off you go now.”

It was half-past seven. Arnold set off for Artingstall’s, and Mrs. Ryerson began to prepare breakfast for the five children. She was a tiny woman, shorter than Arnold, still only in her middle thirties, but there were anxious lines in her face and her hair was turning grey. Her hands were as rough as nutmeg-graters.

When Arnold went to work at Artingstall’s he was paid five shillings a week. That was exactly the rent of the house in Broadbent Street. Two years later, when he was sixteen, the Ryersons felt that their fortunes were most happily changed. Arnold was earning seven-and-sixpence. He kept sixpence a week for himself, and now was able to contribute two shillings to the household expenses as well as pay the rent. This was not all. For a year, the oldest of the Ryerson girls had been in domestic service, living in, no charge at all on the exchequer, and sending home half-a-crown a week. Now the second girl had gone to work and was sending home one-and-sixpence. Here was indeed a leap up the ladder: only five to clothe and feed, and six shillings coming in after the rent was paid, in addition to what Mrs. Ryerson could earn herself!

Pay-day at Artingstall’s was on Friday; and on a Saturday morning in December Arnold set out for work with sixpence in his pocket. It was the first sixpence he had kept of all the money he had earned. He knew what he was going to do with it. It had been a bitter night. He had been aware of clinging for warmth, all night long, to the brother who shared his bed. The frost persisted, and the ruts were frozen in Great Ancoats Street. He found it exhilarating: the horses going by striking their hooves metallically upon the icy road and blowing great clouds of steam that hung upon the air after they had passed; the men hurrying to the city, muffled in overcoats and scarves; the red round sun rising slowly above the grey roofs crenellated with chimney-pots, and staring through a plum-coloured haze that prevented the fall of any shadow.

His job was now a little more responsible than dusting and sweeping and running errands. He was allowed to lay an occasional hand on the precious merchandise, to remove the cloths that swathed the goods at night, and once or twice he had even penetrated the holy place where, upon a mossy carpet, before a glowing fire, stood the desk of Hawley Artingstall, so placed that, sitting at it, one could take in the comforting vision of Alderman Hawley Artingstall, painted in full municipal canonicals, hanging in a gilded frame upon the wall. Arnold did not know it, but the artist had painted the picture twice, the second one at a reduced fee for the embellishment of the dining-room at The Limes.

But though these more important functions were now his, he still, when nine o’clock was near, posted himself at the main entrance in order to open the door for the alderman.

Mr. Tattersall the Manager—you never spoke of Mr. Tattersall but always of Mr. Tattersall the Manager—had been fussing here and there since eight o’clock, requiring the boy’s presence continually at his heels, and it was already nine o’clock when Arnold began to sprint across the floor of the carpets department. He took the stairs in flying fashion to the next floor, dodged through its array of furniture, and sped down to the ground floor, glittering with seasonable things, hung with holly, draped with cotton-wool that scintillated under a powder of mica, festooned with coloured paper chains, glass baubles and Chinese lanterns. Leaping like a hart through this festive and unaccustomed scene, he perceived that he was already too late. The alderman was within the door which he had been compelled to push with his own august hand, and he was now holding it open for someone to follow him.

Not once in the more than two years he had been in the place had Arnold failed to be at the door. No one had told him to perform this service, but repetition had made it a ritual act, expected by both him and Hawley. So now, wishing to retrieve something, he did not check the rush which had brought him to the spot. He grabbed at the door, hoping at all events to show his morning courtesy to whoever it was that followed the alderman. The gesture went astray. Neither he nor his employer held the door firmly. They muffed it between them, and the heavy contraption of mahogany and plate glass swung back unexpectedly and hit the girl almost off her feet. Both her hands were in a muff of black astrakhan. Arnold never forgot that gesture, the first he ever saw her make: the hands in the muff flying up to her face to ward off the swinging door, and then, when all was well, lowering themselves a little, hiding all the face except the eyes which, between astrakhan hat and astrakhan muff, suddenly smiled. Arnold smiled, too—the eyes were at once so inviting and forgiving; but Hawley brought him to his senses with a snarl. “Open t’door, you clumsy fool.”

He stood glowering at Arnold after the girl was in the shop, and then glowered down at his own boots. Arnold’s eyes followed his gaze and saw that he had indeed been clumsy. He had stepped upon the alderman’s boots and scraped their burnished surface.

Suddenly the girl said “Thank you.” The unexpected words brought his eyes to her face again. Curling hair that was white almost as lint escaped from under the hat. The face was heart-shaped, with prominent cheek-bones, and the eyes were grey. So much he saw before Hawley barked: “What’s there to thank him for?”

“Why, Father, for opening the door.”

“Opening t’door!” Hawley snorted. “Wellnigh killed thee wi’ t’ blasted thing. Coom on.”

She smiled again, as if to say “Forgive him, won’t you?” as she turned to follow her father to his office.

At ten o’clock Arnold saw her go. She looked a tiny thing, walking out alone from the office, all wrapped up with that hat and that muff and a big coat and furred boots. She looked no older than his own sister who was younger than himself. She did not see him, and he had no chance to open the door. Mr. Tattersall the Manager was across the floor in a few lithe strides, bowing and showing his white teeth in a smile. Arnold saw the coachman leap down from the box of a victoria and arrange rugs round the girl as she sat beside an upright stringy woman. Mr. Tattersall the Manager had bowed the girl right across the pavement. He stood there, bending his head and washing his hands till the victoria moved off. The girl took one hand out of her muff and fluttered it to him. The woman did not notice him. Some celestial drill-sergeant seemed to be saying to her: Eyes front!

When he left the shop at eight o’clock Arnold hurried through the biting air to Mr. Suddaby’s. The catacombs were cold. The gas-jets had the wan look of spirits materialising in that graveyard of authorship. Arnold, with sixpence in his pocket, had come to look for a birthday present for John Shawcross. In a day or two, John would be fourteen.

His wanderings brought him at last to the alcove where Mr. Suddaby had his fire and his white Persian cat and his table. Arnold began to retreat again as the sound of voices told him that Mr. Suddaby was not alone. But the old man had seen him, and called him. “Nay, my young student, come here a moment.”

The boy went shyly nearer. “Sit down and have a cup of tea,” Mr. Suddaby said unexpectedly. “And before you do that, shake hands with Mr. Engels. Friedrich, this boy’s name is Arnold Ryerson. He’s a member of the oppressed proletariat.”

Arnold had no idea what Mr. Suddaby was talking about. He sat on a wooden chair and Mr. Suddaby poured some tea from the pot on the table. Mr. Engels, stretched out in a basket chair by the fire, had a cup on his knee. His face was heavily bearded; his clothes were of stout, excellent broadcloth. There was no smile in his eyes to answer the smile in Mr. Suddaby’s.

“It is a bit of luck for you,” said Mr. Suddaby, “that you came in to-night. I don’t suppose Mr. Engels will ever be in Manchester again.”

“No, Charles,” said Engels. “I came to see you and a few other friends for the last time. That is all. When I go, I shall never look on this hell on earth again.”

“You see, my boy,” said Suddaby, “what Mr. Engels thinks of your native city. Hell on earth. He lived in it for a long time, and in those days we did a few things together—eh, Friedrich?”

Engels stared at the fire; one hand, hanging down, absently stroked the head of Sheba the cat. He did not answer.

“We were young men, my boy, and we believed in heaven on earth. I suppose Mr. Engels still does.”

He looked towards the man slumped in the chair, but again Engels made no sign.

“As for me—well, you see, I’m just an old bookseller, with a cat that doesn’t give a damn for me or anybody else, and a lot of memories. I remember it all, Friedrich, but the light’s gone out of it for me. I remember all the talk and laughter, all the work and the meetings, and Mary Burns, and Lizzy.”

Engels got up with sudden passion, his foot kicking the cat which sprang away hissing. “Do not mention them!” he cried. “They are dead, and Marx is dead, and you are dead.”

Suddaby left him standing there, his elbow leaning on the mantelpiece, and drew the boy away into the bay of books. “Always remember,” he said, “always remember that you met Friedrich Engels who earned the bread-and-butter for Karl Marx, and paid his rent, so that the world could be a better place. At least, that’s what I thought. Now, I don’t know. I’m not sure. The light’s gone out of it, and Friedrich thinks I’m dead. Perhaps I am. Perhaps I am.”

John’s birthday that year fell on the day of the weekly class-meeting. Gordon Stansfield arranged with a substitute to take the class. Only something remarkable would have caused him to do that, and there was, to Gordon, something remarkable about this birthday. John was fourteen. At fourteen schooldays ended. A boy became a wage-earner. It was a coming-of-age occasion, a coming of working-age; and Birley Artingstall and Arnold Ryerson had been asked to come and eat the birthday meal at six o’clock.

John did not go to school that day. The Christmas holidays would soon be beginning, and, anyway, he was now within the law in staying away. The day was both raw and cold—one of those days when Ellen wrapped Gordon’s scarf well round his neck, fidgeted if he gave the smallest cough, and, as she watched him go along Broadbent Street, worried herself with recollections of that fatal affliction which so speedily had carried off his sister Millie.

Coming back into the house, she looked at the boy. He had grown a lot in the last two years. He was lanky: wrists, ankles and neck all seemed to be too thin, all started out of his clothes in a way the eye couldn’t overlook. His face, too, was thin, whiter than it should be; and this was emphasized by the burning lustre of his eyes and by that dark cascade of hair tumbling over the steep white brow. She was sometimes startled by her glimpses of him, and she was startled now. Never before had her mind been driven back so sharply upon what she wanted to forget: that other face, white, too, with desire, and, she could now believe, with terror of what was about to happen, because he was not a bad boy. He had been gentle and persuasive.

The kitchen was dim in the December morning, and as John stood there so thin and white in the doorway, she remembered that that was just how that other had stood, at once commanding and pleading. She had told him to go away; all the house was asleep—such a grand house, the grandest house she had ever worked in, in a great park in Cheshire. There was a whole party of these young people—aristocrats all of them—she could hardly tell one from another, they seemed so alike with their thin bony faces and long hands and strange voices. But she had noticed this one as he lounged in the hall, his booted legs stretched out to the blazing logs. They had all come in from riding, and she took a tray, and when she reached him he continued to stare absently into the fire. He looked up with a sudden start. He did not smile, but his eyes held hers. Something struck like a spark between them, and when he took his drink his hand trembled. And then there he was, with all the house asleep, white, panting a little, urgent.

The next day they all went riding again. He looked flushed and boyishly triumphant. He was brought home on a hurdle, covered with a horse blanket. A little later, the horse that had rolled the life out of him was shot where it lay, its own back broken, behind a hedge. The hedge was not far from the house. She heard the shot. It seemed to go through her heart.

She said to John: “Go upstairs and light your fire. It’s not a fit day to be out in.” She couldn’t stand seeing him there at a loose end, like a ghost without a job even of haunting to do. At times he seemed so detached from her, so independent, so little hers. She thought with comfort of Gordon’s utter devotion. He at least was all hers. There had never been much occasion for letters between them, but she treasured a few, signed “All yours, Gordon.” That was it.

“Well, if you want me, you’ll know where to find me,” John said. “If there’s anything at all that I can do——?”

He turned at the door to give her a smile that was enchanting. But she was beginning to find out that he would not smile if she took him at his word and asked him to do something disagreeable.

In the bedroom he put a match to the fire and watched the woolly smoke go up the chimney in sluggish yellow plaits, then clear as a flame burst through. The sabre was bright above the mantelpiece. He still cleaned it every Saturday. The bookshelves were now well filled. Thanks to Mr. Suddaby, there was nothing second-rate upon them. They had disturbed the boy’s mind with dreams of vague magnificence. Marco Polo’s travels, Prescott’s Conquest of Peru, Hakluyt’s Voyages: he was familiar with all these, with their fantasies and cruelties and heroisms. He had read Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, and old Suddaby had fed him with much romance, too. There upon the shelves were novels by Scott and Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper and Fielding, Goldsmith, Smollett, and Swift. The gentler writers had their place. Lamb’s Essays of Elia and Holmes’s Autocrat were among them. There was much to thank the old man for, unobtrusively feeding his peerless six-pennorths to an appetite ready for anything.

No doubt about it: as he entered upon his fifteenth year, John Hamer Shawcross had had his eyes opened in many directions; but the direction he most liked to follow was that in which some brilliant individual went out against great odds, and fought, and conquered, and was honoured. Many of whom he read conquered indeed, but died unhonoured and obscure. That was not his idea of a good ending to a tale.

He sat down in the chair that had belonged to the Old Warrior, enjoying his unaccustomed freedom. He knew that now he would have to work. What he would do he did not know. Gordon had said there would be no mill for him, and that was as far as it had gone. His own desires were both vague and grandiose. He thought of Tom Hannaway, who was going to own a racehorse. Poor Tom! He was working for Darkie Cheap, pushing a barrow about the streets, shouting “Any old rags, bones, bottles, jars! Any old iron!” Tom was sixteen, the same age as Arnold Ryerson. The racehorse seemed a long way off.

Something that had nothing to do with this: nothing to do with Tom Hannaway and Darkie Cheap, nothing to do with Broadbent Street and the early morning stampede of clogs and the moaning of the mill buzzer: that was as far as he got in his meditations that morning when he was fourteen years old.

John’s birthday party was simply the customary six o’clock high tea with a few frills on. It was held in the front room instead of the kitchen, and it gained a festal air because the Christmas decorations were already up. Sprigs of holly, with scarlet berries vivid against the dark green leaves, were stuck behind the pictures. Paper-chains with many-coloured links began in each corner of the room, dropped in loops, and were all four caught up and fastened together into the middle of the ceiling. From the point where they met a Chinese lantern hung down, and at five minutes to six Ellen lit the candle in it and the lamp on the sideboard. The fire had been going all day to chase the chill out of the unused room.

It all looked very gay to Arnold Ryerson, who had hurried straight from Artingstall’s, and the food upon the table made his mouth water. He was a growing, hungry boy, and though the Ryerson establishment a few doors down the street was faring better than had recently seemed likely, still, this display of an uncut ham, of jars of pickles, of bread and butter, cake and jam, with apples, oranges and nuts piled in a bowl in the centre, seemed to him a high spot both of elegance and opulence.

Ellen came in from the kitchen with an immense teapot, and Gordon followed her, carrying a kettle which he placed upon the fire. John came then, feeling self-conscious as the cause of these unaccustomed splendours.

“Where’s Birley Artingstall?” Ellen demanded. “That chap’d be late for his own funeral. You’d better start cutting the ham.”

“Nay,” Gordon protested, “give him a chance. I wouldn’t like Birley to think I was giving him a hint.”

So for five minutes they stood awkwardly about the room in the narrow space round the table, looking, all four of them, with childlike pleasure at the glowing lantern and the decorations, and the ruddy light that fell upon the white drooping end of the tablecloth from the flames dancing round the singing kettle. Then Birley’s resolute knock was heard, and John, who was nearest to the door, hurried into the passage. A lamp was burning there, and as he opened the door its light showed him that Birley was not alone. A girl had her arm linked in his, a girl of whom John could see but two bright eyes shining under the dark arch of a bonnet that was tied beneath the chin with a bow of wide ribbon.

“Many happy returns,” Birley cried. “I’ve brought a visitor. Come in, Ann, my dear.”

Birley bustled into the passage, which was hardly wide enough to contain the three of them.

“I’m afraid I’m unexpected,” the girl said, and John didn’t know what to answer. His reading didn’t help here. He felt awkward and foolish. She smiled, hoping to put him at ease, but he couldn’t smile back. He had hardly exchanged a word with a girl in his life.

Birley raised his voice and shouted. “Mrs. Stansfield, I’ve brought a visitor,” and Gordon and Ellen came out into the passage.

“I don’t think you’ve met my niece, Ann,” Birley said. “It’s not often she calls on me, and when she does it’s always at the worst possible time.”

Ann Artingstall shook hands with them. Ellen said: “Let me take your hat,” and Gordon said: “You’re welcome, miss. Come into the front room.”

“Yes, go in,” said Ellen, “I’ll get another plate.”

You would not have thought to see Ann Artingstall that she was the one to whom all this was a great adventure. Never in her life before had she been in such a house as this one in Broadbent Street. She was here now by the merest fluke and misadventure. Her father had promised to go home early that evening, and when she had done her shopping in the town she had called at Artingstall’s. But Hawley wasn’t ready, and didn’t think he would be ready for an hour or two.

“Then I’ll go and see Uncle Birley,” said Ann. “I haven’t seen him for months.”

Hawley grumbled. He disliked the Ancoats he had sprung from. He disliked the affection for Birley which Ann never thought of concealing.

“Ah don’t know what you want down in them low parts,” he said. “If you want to see Birley ask him out to t’Limes.”

“He’s never at his best at The Limes,” said Ann with truth. “I like him better in his own little room.”

Grudgingly, Hawley conducted her to the door. “Take Miss Ann to Mr. Birley Artingstall’s,” he said to Haworth, who was sitting up on the box of the victoria, “and don’t come away till you see she’s met him.”

He himself wrapped the rugs round her. “Stay there,” he said, “till I come for you. That’ll be about eight.” He watched the carriage drive off through the murky night as anxiously as though Ann were being driven to an encounter with cannibals.

Haworth did as he had been told. Indeed, there had been no need to tell him. The black, forbidding length of Great Ancoats Street, with its poor shops and poorer houses, its few lights and ill-dressed passers-by, commended itself as little to him as to Hawley Artingstall. Not for anything would his well-trained rectitude have left Miss Ann alone there. He waited till Birley had come to the door, till Ann had entered, till the door was shut again, before driving slowly back to town.

Birley was already dressed for going out when Ann arrived. “Well, lass,” he said. “You’ve come at a rum time. I’m just off to a birthday party. You’d better come with me.”

“I’d love to,” Ann said, and off they went, disposing thus simply of a situation which Hawley would have viewed with horror.

And there they were. There was Ann Artingstall, who was fifteen, and who had no idea what the lives of the poor were like, entering the Stansfields’ front room and deciding with one glance of her dancing eyes that they might be worse. “How lovely!” she cried, pausing in the doorway and taking in the ample table, the glowing fire, the decorations. And, more than this, she took in the sense of happiness and goodwill that seemed to abide in the house as a positive and palpable presence.

Then she came farther into the room, and there was Arnold Ryerson, gazing at her open-mouthed, as taken aback as if Hawley himself had suddenly appeared at John’s party.

“But I know you!” Ann cried.

“Yes, miss,” said Arnold. “I work at Artingstall’s.”

“Of course! You’re the boy who stepped on Father’s foot and nearly hit me down with the door.”

She laughed so merrily at the recollection that Arnold joined in; and then Ellen came in with the necessary extra things, and Gordon brought in a kitchen chair, and there was a lot of pushing and rearranging round the table. Birley and Ann sat on one side, facing the two boys, and Gordon and Ellen were at either end.

Everything about the occasion was amusing to Ann. The solemnity with which Gordon said grace before laying into the ham was amusing; the mere fact of eating such a meal at such a time was amusing, for Alderman Hawley Artingstall was accustomed to dine at eight, when he got home from the shop, and since her fifteenth birthday Ann had been expected to join him. The grave way in which the two boys stared at her was amusing, too. Try as she would, she could not evoke more than the most transient smile from either. She thought the smaller of the two whose birthday this was, was nice-looking, with his thin face and big dark eyes and tumbling hair that he swept nervously off his forehead every time she spoke to him.

“We’d better leave t’washing up,” said Ellen when the meal was ended.

“Ay, leave it. I’ll give you a hand later,” Gordon said. “I expect you’re dying to see your presents, eh, John?”

They were already rising from the table as Gordon hurried through the thanksgiving that even himself had almost forgotten. “Come upstairs,” he said.

They went up in single file. There was no room for two abreast. John, who was last, gave a cry of delight when he came into the room. A little knee-hole desk had been smuggled across from Gordon’s room on the other side of the landing, where it had been concealed for some days.

“From me and your mother,” Gordon said. “It’s only second-hand, and cheap at that,” he added apologetically and with his customary grave honesty; “but I’ve patched it up and it doesn’t look bad.”

John could not resist sitting down at it there and then. He looked round the room, and could hardly believe that it was the same room which two years ago he had shared with the Old Warrior. Then, it had never to his knowledge known a fire. It was overcrowded by the big bed; it was bleak and gloomy and often frightening. Now it was as cosy a little room as you could desire. He looked across the desk at the five people facing him, and suddenly laughed.

“I feel so important,” he said. “You’re all standing up, and I’m sitting down.”

“I hope you’ll sit down there a lot,” Gordon said. “I thought that would be a good place for you to write your sermons.”

“Sermons?” the boy asked, surprised.

“Well,” said Gordon, “I hope you’ll take to local preaching some day. Perhaps even the ministry—eh, Birley? The Reverend J. Hamer Shawcross. Who knows?”

“Ay,” said Birley. “Who knows? Perhaps the Lord will lead his thoughts that way.”

J. Hamer Shawcross. The boy liked the sound of it and repeated it to himself: J. Hamer Shawcross.

Birley produced a book. “I hope you haven’t missed this,” he said. “Gordon borrowed it from your shelves.”

It was the volume of Sam Bamford’s poems that had belonged to the Old Warrior. Birley had bound it handsomely in red morocco as his gift. Arnold shyly produced a sixpenny copy of Marmion.

“And what about me?” Ann cried. “I’ve eaten your lovely meal and I’ve got nothing to give for a present.”

“You’d better give him your hair ribbon,” Birley joked. Ann took it seriously. “I will,” she said, and untied the ribbon impulsively from her hair. She took up the book that Birley had bound and flattened the ribbon out between the pages. “There!” she said. “A book-marker.”

John opened the book. “I should like you all to sign your names,” he said suddenly. “Then I’ll always remember who came on my fourteenth birthday.”

He got up from the chair, and one by one they sat in it and signed: Ellen in a sprawling illiterate hand, Gordon more neatly, Birley with fanciful copperplate twists and twirls. Arnold Ryerson signed next, and after him Ann Artingstall. Finally the boy wrote: J. Hamer Shawcross. It exists to-day, that book with Ann’s name written between the names of Arnold Ryerson and Hamer Shawcross. Against the names, thus first brought into conjunction, is the date December 20, 1879, which was a bleak night there in the mean Ancoats street.