Читать книгу Fame is the Spur - Howard Spring - Страница 7

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If Mrs. Ryerson had not had so tiring a day many things might have turned out differently in the lives of Arnold and Ann. On the other hand, some other compulsions might have driven their lives in the same direction. Be that as it may, it is an historical fact that the utter weariness of this poor woman caused a change of direction to come.

That day of young Hamer Shawcross’s birthday was not substantially different from her other days. When Arnold was gone to work, she saw the three young children off to school. Cold as it was, it was one of those days when they took their meagre midday meal with them. Mrs. Ryerson would be busy morning and afternoon and would have no time to attend to them.

She spent the morning in one of those heartbreaking houses that Ellen Stansfield knew in the days when she was Ellen Shawcross. Mrs. Ryerson began in the basement with the week’s wash. It was dreadfully cold when she got there. Even when the fire was lit under the copper, the week’s chill clung to the stone-floored room, half-buried in the earth, with one small window, on a level with her eyes, looking out upon nothing but a forlorn back-yard given over to a few fowls pecking disconsolately behind their wire fence.

Soon the white billows of steam were filling the basement, and in that atmosphere she scrubbed and rinsed and wrung.

She wasn’t complaining. It was a job she knew inside out. She did it automatically and thoroughly, gazing out into the back-yard and thinking how much easier life had been since her husband’s death. More certain, anyway, if not easier. The children were good and brought home their wages, which is more than Ryerson had done as often as not.

So the tiny indomitable woman wrought gamely at her job, pausing now and then to rub her face with the dry upper part of her arm, and thanking goodness that since she had had to come out to work there had been no lack of work to do.

When the washing was done she ascended to the kitchen of the house, where she was given her dinner. It was a good dinner, and this was what she called a good job. After dinner she had to “run through” the house, which meant a great deal of dusting and then a great deal of work on her knees, scrubbing deal floors and polishing oilcloth. The steel fireside fittings of the kitchen and the brass fittings in dining-room and drawing-room had to be done, and then she was at liberty to go. So the lady of the house was able to assure her husband and her friends that she was a good economist. “I do without a maid. Just a woman in once a week.”

Mrs. Ryerson was not able to go home. It was three o’clock, and she hurried off to Great Ancoats Street where there was a shop that she had been engaged to clean. It had been empty for a long time and had now been let. Her job was to scrub down all the shelves and the counter and to clean and scrub the floor.

She had brought with her from Broadbent Street a bucket and scrubbing-brush and a piece of yellow soap, and she had the key of the shop in a pocket concealed somewhere within her skirt. She didn’t like the look of the floor. Where the oilcloth had been taken up, fragments still adhered, some of them fastened down with tacks, and, being a thorough and conscientious worker, she knew that she would have to remove all this rubbish before she began to scrub. She decided to leave this to the last.

There was no hot water laid on. In a small room behind the shop there was a cold-water tap and a fireplace full of rubbish. Some wooden packing-cases lay about, and she smashed these up with her foot, set light to them and put her bucket across the hobs. She had to make do with tepid water, and by the time she was ready to tackle the floor, darkness was coming on. “Tackle” was her word: a favourite word, suggestive of her attitude to her work: something to be rather aggressively fallen upon and downed.

Tackling the floor was no joke. The gas had been turned off in the shop. A lamplighter came along the street with a small smoky flambeau on his shoulder and lit a street lamp outside. The light fell in faint yellow squares upon that lamentable patchy floor, all odds and ends of oilcloth and nail-heads. She could not see well enough to get those pieces off, and anyway she had no tool to deal with the nails. By the ghostly light of the street lamp she slumped down upon the piece of sacking she used for a kneeling-mat and fell to.

She was very tired. Her knees creaked a little as she bent them and vexed her with a slight insistent pain. She was beginning to feel hungry, and more than once she knelt upright, easing the stiff ache out of her back, and she thought that a cup of tea would be very nice, especially if someone else prepared it for her. But there was no question of that. Her scrubbing water was almost cold. The packing-cases had flared to death quickly, and she must make do with the water as it was. Her greying hair began to fall down into her eyes from under the cap which she wore, but she went on painstakingly working over the floor washed with the yellowish light of the lamp and quartered by the shadows of the window-frame. Across these quarterings upon the floor there moved, too, the occasional shadow of a passer-by, giving the sense that she was working within a prison of impalpable bars. But such thoughts never entered her mind, which was entirely concrete.

The day would have ended much like any other if suddenly a sharp stab of agony had not made her cry aloud. She dropped her scrubbing-brush, shook her right hand vigorously, and saw the blood-drops shoot out and fall upon the floor. A nail, half-buried in a plank, had entered her hand near the wrist and torn across the ball of the thumb.

She got to her feet and walked to the window, so that the light of the lamp should fall upon the injury. There was no more pain after the first fierce pang. She took out her handkerchief which was too small to bind between index-finger and thumb, down across the wound, and round her wrist. So she used it merely as a pad, tearing the straps of her coarse apron to bind it with, pulling the knot firm with her left hand and her teeth.

Then, since work was work, she went on with the scrubbing, dipping her hand into the filthy water, and getting what grip she could upon the brush with four fingers. When she had chased the dirt out of the last corner as well as the light and her condition would allow, she emptied her bucket into the sink in the room behind the shop, rinsed it out carefully, washed out her floor-cloth and scrubbing-brush, put these, with the remainder of the yellow soap, into the bucket, and was ready to go. She was precise and particular in all these matters, and only when the shop door was shut and locked behind her, and she out in the sudden bitter air of the street, did she stagger a little, overcome by tiredness, cold, hunger, and the shock of her pain. But it soon passed, and, dangling her bucket, she made for Broadbent Street.

The Ryerson children—two boys and a girl—had been back from school for some time. They had chalked a hop-scotch on the pavement outside the house, and were leaping nimbly about in order to keep warm in the raw evening air. Catching sight of their mother, they abandoned the game and ran down the street to meet her, shouting that they were hungry and wanted their tea.

She was as hungry as they were, and a good deal more tired, but she could not sit down. There was a lamp to light, a fire to lay, the food to cut up. It all took her a long time. The wound in her hand throbbed; she could not be as neat and swift as usual. It was past six o’clock when the meal was finished, and she at once put the two younger children to bed. They went with protesting screams. It was earlier than their usual time, but she was too worn out to have them near her. Had it been summertime, they could have played in the street; as it was, bed was the only thing.

She came downstairs exhausted by the contest with the children. At last she could rest for a moment. She sat in her rocking-chair by the fire and listened to the sounds coming from the scullery, where her son Francis was washing up. There was no need to ask Francis to do things. He was like Arnold. Indeed, all her children, she reflected with thankfulness, were good and dependable.

“Francis,” she said. “I scratched my hand on a nail to-day. It’s fair giving me jip.”

Francis came into the kitchen and hung the drying-up cloth on a line before the fire. “Let me have a look at it,” he said.

He untied the coarse apron string, revealing the filthy ball of handkerchief over the wound. Congealing blood had caused it to stick. Francis poured some warm water into a bowl and soaked the handkerchief off. He did it all with great tenderness. Suddenly he looked at his mother and smiled. “I’d like to be a doctor,” he said.

Mrs. Ryerson sighed. All her children seemed to want impossible things. “It looks nasty,” Francis said, gravely examining the long red gash that was still suppurating slowly. “You go along to the chemist at once and get him to put something on it and bind it up properly. I’ll look after the house.”

“What about the mangling?” Mrs. Ryerson demanded. “I must run that stuff through to-night. It’ll be called for first thing in the morning.”

“I can do it,” said Francis. “You go to the chemist.”

Mrs. Ryerson leapt up. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll tackle it together. You turn, and I’ll pass the things through. Let’s get it over with, and then I’ll go to the chemist.”

Francis carried the bundle of folded clothing out to the scullery. He seized the handle of the mangle and began to turn as his mother fed the things to the rollers. She wasn’t as rested as she thought, and her right hand felt terribly awkward. She fumbled to get straight a fold that was going in badly, and suddenly screamed. “Back! Oh, Francis, Francis!”

The child himself nearly fainted, so unnerved he was by such a cry as he had never before heard his mother utter, and by the swift realisation of what had happened. He whirled the handle into reverse. Mrs. Ryerson stared stupidly for a moment at the mangled ends of her fingers, and then she said urgently: “Fetch Arnold! Quick! Fetch Arnold! He’s at Mr. Stansfield’s.”

The boy rushed out of the house. Mrs. Ryerson made her way to her rocking-chair, and as she felt her senses almost leaving her before the onset of her pain, she heard the two youngest children pattering barefoot down the bare stairs to see what had caused that agonized cry.

“We’d better be going, Uncle Birley,” Ann said. “Father will be calling for me at eight, and it’s nearly that now.” She turned to Ellen. “Thank you, Mrs. Stansfield. It’s been a lovely evening.”

She was in the little passage, with her hat and coat on, and John had opened the door, when Francis Ryerson came leaping along the street. He rushed unceremoniously into the passage and yelled: “Arnold! Arnold! Come home quick! Mother’s crushed her fingers in the mangle.”

Arnold rushed from the parlour, his face ashen. He did not say good-bye to anybody. He did not stop for coat or hat. Within a few seconds of Francis’s cry the two brothers were tearing down the street.

“That poor woman!” said Birley. “That poor woman! I must go along.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Ellen. She snatched her shawl off a hook, cowled her head with one dexterous movement, and followed Birley down Broadbent Street. Without a word, Ann went after them.

“There’s nothing we can do, John. We’d only be in the way,” Gordon said. “Your mother will see to this.”

Ann overtook Birley and Ellen as they were entering the Ryerson house. She went in with them, and saw at once that she had been mistaken in thinking that Gordon Stansfield’s was a poor man’s house. This was different: this was a poor house: one step over the threshold told her. Her feet echoed on bare boards; there was not even oilcloth down in the passage; and when she came into the kitchen she saw such a room as she had never looked on before. There were no curtains to the window, only a linen blind that had not been pulled down. The light was from a lamp hooked to the wall: a lamp that had no shade and whose feeble ray was hardly helped by the tin reflector behind the chimney. The room was clean and threadbare—pitiably threadbare—no covering to the floor, no cloth upon the deal table. The fire was low and dispirited.

Mrs. Ryerson was rocking in her chair, and the two young children whom she had put to bed not long before were sitting in their nightclothes, howling at the tops of their voices. They knew Ellen, and her advent made them redouble their cries; but when Ann appeared, emerging suddenly from behind Birley Artingstall, their uproar began to diminish. They sensed in Ann a woman different from the women they knew. They stared at the hair which was lint-white yet lustrous with brushing, at the fresh face, the new clothes, the shining shoes. Their mouths opened, their eyes widened, their cries stopped.

Ellen had dropped to her knees at Mrs. Ryerson’s side and taken the wounded hand into her lap. She and Birley looked at the crushed fingers and Ann saw their faces wince. There was nothing she could do for Mrs. Ryerson, so she turned to the children. They at least could be got out of the way. She put an arm round each thin pair of shoulders and smiled into the two wondering faces that lifted to hers. “What about getting back to bed now?” she said. “Come along. I’ll put you.”

They were such wraithy mites that they could all go upstairs side by side. The youngsters pressed in against her legs and did not seem anxious to ease away from the pressure of her guardian arms. The staircase was dark, and when she reached the small landing at the top she said: “Which room?”

“One in each,” the youngest child said. “I’ll put your hand on the candle.” He took her hand in cold fingers and directed it to a small table pushed back against the landing wall. She felt the matches, struck one, and lit the candle in a blue japanned candlestick. On each side of the landing was a door. She opened the one to the right, and one of the children at once rushed from her, leapt into bed and pulled the clothes up to her chin. Ann followed, and looked about among the wavering shadows. It was the smallest, meanest bedroom she had ever seen, carpetless like every room in the house, and, like them, scrubbed, spotless, and somehow for that very reason the more pitiable. The child in the bed looked at her with the bright eyes of a small animal. “Who are you?” she said. “What’s your name?” Being back in bed seemed to give her courage.

“Oh, I’m just a girl,” said Ann. “Just a girl, and her name is Ann.”

“And she crept under the frying-pan,” said the child, giggling now, her mother forgotten.

The little boy, the youngest Ryerson, seemed to think himself overlooked. He tugged timorously at Ann’s skirt. “Put me to bed, please,” he said very politely.

Ann tucked in the clothes round the little girl, who said: “My mother shares this bed,” wished her good-night, and then took the boy to the room across the landing. “I sleep at the foot,” he said importantly.

She did not understand what he meant, so he took her hand and led her to the bed. “Here,” he said, patting the pillow. “I stick my legs up between Arnold and Francis.”

Then she saw that there were pillows at each end of the bed. “Oh, I see;” she said, “three of you sleep together.”

“Yes,” the child answered. “Sometimes they kick my neck, but I can only kick their knees.”

She had never heard of such an arrangement before, and it seemed to her remarkable, and, like everything in that house, pitiable, but she let him think that she knew all about these things. She tucked him in, allowed him at his request to blow out the candle, and by the light of a match, tiptoed to the landing. There she left the candle, and went down to the kitchen. Arnold Ryerson was alone, sitting in his mother’s chair, rocking gently to and fro. For a while he did not see her. She had time to observe the grave preoccupation of his face, the untimely shadow of care that darkened it. His bony hands were gripped so tight upon the chair-arms that the knuckles stood out whitely. When at last he saw her, he got up from the chair. “No,” she said. “Sit down.” But he insisted on her taking the chair. “When Mother gets back,” he said, “she’ll like a cup of tea. I’ve got the kettle on. I’ll make one now for us. I’m ready for it.”

With the air of one accustomed to such small household tasks, he quickly assembled the cups and saucers, the teapot, milk and sugar upon the table. And still he had no idea that this, to Ann Artingstall, was an adventure into the incredible, the fantastic. Looking about the room, at the tin clock on the mantelpiece, at the thick, chipped cups and saucers on the table, at the uncurtained window and at the wallpaper hanging in loops in the corners, she suddenly burst out: “I always have tea brought by the parlourmaid on a silver tray!”

Arnold’s face at once reddened and hardened. He thought she was condemning his impertinence in offering tea in that room. He put down the milk-jug with a little trembling clatter. “I’m sorry,” he said stiffly.

She saw at once that she had hurt him. He showed it so quickly, like a child. She leapt from the chair and impulsively laid a hand on his arm. “Please!” she pleaded. “Don’t you see! I was talking almost to myself. I was thinking of—well, the way I live, and then—well, the way other people have to live. It’s terrible. I wasn’t condemning anybody. I had no idea people could be so poor. That’s all, really.”

“Poor!” said Arnold. “D’you call us poor?”

He gave a scornful laugh, and she looked at him, mystified. If this was not poverty, what was, she wondered?

“If you want to see poor people,” Arnold went on, “I’ll show you some one of these days. People without clothes, without food, without beds. Good Lord, no. Don’t think we’re poor. We’ve got a roof and food and clothes and a fire to sit by. And everybody ought to have that. Have you read Robert Owen?”

Ann had not read Robert Owen. She had never heard of Robert Owen. Arnold poured out the tea, and as they sat there by the small dying fire he opened his mind. Even to Hamer Shawcross he had never talked as he talked to Ann Artingstall that night. “So that’s it. That’s what I’m going to do with myself,” he said earnestly. “I’m going to fight against poverty.” He stood up and looked at her defiantly. “I’m a Radical!” he said, expecting her to recoil as though he had announced that he held credentials from Hell. “Liberty. Fraternity. Equality. That’s what we want, and that’s what we’re going to have.”

“And to think that I don’t even know your name!” said Ann inconsequently. “But that’s like Uncle Birley.”

“Ryerson—Arnold Ryerson. And look—you must read Robert Owen. Let me lend you one of his books.”

“I should like to,” said Ann, and Arnold opened the dresser drawer and fumbled among the books piled in there anyhow. “That’s it—A New View of Society. You read that, and tell me if you don’t think it’s good.”

“Right,” Ann answered. “But how am I to tell you?” she asked practically. “We may never see one another again.” His face darkened, and she added quickly: “But I expect we shall. Perhaps we’ll meet at Uncle Birley’s.”

For a time they were silent; she sitting in the chair and he standing before the fire, looking down at her strange hair and firm little chin. He was pleased with her for having had the quick sense to take the children out of the way, and he was surprised that she had been so easy to talk to. After all, he had seen her get into her father’s victoria. He had seen Mr. Tattersall the Manager bowing and scraping to her as if to a princess. He could not forget the incredible gulf that lay between them. And yet, there it was: she had talked to him as if they had been friends for years. She was sitting there now, nursing Robert Owen’s book, with the lamplight shining on her hair, as if to sit in the Broadbent Street kitchen were a usual, an accustomed thing.

Suddenly he said: “Miss Artingstall, sometimes, when something good has happened to me, I say to myself ‘I’ll never forget this morning’ or ‘this night’ or whatever it happens to be. Like that, I make it stick in my mind and I never do forget it. Do you ever do that?”

She shook her head. “Oh, of course, I often say ‘I’ll never forget it,’ but I usually do.”

“You won’t if you do it the way I mean,” said Arnold. “You really fasten your mind on it and say ‘I won’t forget!’”

“What sort of things? When did you last say that?”

“Well, not long ago I was in a bookshop, and there was a man there named Engels. Mr. Suddaby who owns the shop said: ‘You must never forget that you met Mr. Engels.’ He seemed to think it was important, so I shut my eyes and said: ‘I won’t forget Mr. Engels, I won’t. I won’t.’ And I know I won’t.”

“And you don’t want to forget to-night. Is that it?” Ann asked, smiling.

“Yes, that’s it,” Arnold answered earnestly. “I’m saying now: ‘I’ll never forget this night!’ Will you say it?”

She laughed, tossing her fair hair in negation. “No, no!” she said. “I don’t think that sort of thing’s any good to me. Perhaps I’ll forget. Perhaps I’ll remember.”

She remembered. Alderman Hawley Artingstall saw to that. At eight o’clock the victoria stopped outside Birley’s door, and Hawley, crossing the pavement, looked with frowning distaste upon the street in which he had run wild when a boy. He hammered authoritatively with the knocker—a violent rap designed to let all within know that here was one who brooked no delay. But there was delay. A second and a third rap brought no response but the echoes that rolled down Birley’s stair.

Hawley said sharply to Haworth: “You left Miss Ann here?”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Birley came down, and she went in with him.”

Hawley stepped back and looked up at the unlighted windows. “What the devil are we to do?” he demanded. “Where can she have got to?” He pulled out his heavy gold watch. It was ten minutes past eight. He looked up and down the street, which offered a cold and almost empty prospect. The only moving thing in sight was a four-wheeled cab, bowling slowly towards him, its lantern throwing a blur of yellow light upon the haunches of the woebegone hack. Hawley turned back, tried one more thunderous assault upon the door, and in the silence which fell when the knocking ceased he heard his own name called. “Hey, Hawley!”

He swung round. The four-wheeler had come to a standstill. Birley was leaning out of the window, his lantern jaws grinning. “Sorry I can’t stop,” he said. “’Pon my soul, I forgot all about you. There’s been a bit of an upset. I had to take a woman to the doctor, and now the doctor says I’ve got to take her on to the Infirmary. She’s here in the cab.”

Hawley did not care one rap who was there in the cab. “Where’s Ann, you fool!” he demanded truculently.

“She’s quite safe,” Birley said cheerfully. “I left her in Broadbent Street. You go along and pick her up.” He gave the number, withdrew his head, and pulled up the cab window. The old horse shivered and jog-trotted off along the freezing road.

Hawley cursed openly. Broadbent Street! He knew it only too well. He had enjoyed running along the canal wall. He had fallen off it into the water and had his backside tanned for consolation. It wasn’t the sort of place that, even in his young days, an Artingstall child was supposed to play in. And that was where that irresponsible fool had left Ann! And how had Ann got there, anyway? What was she thinking of to go to such a place, Birley or no Birley? A black anger made him for a moment almost blind. He gave the street number to Haworth and got into the carriage.

It took him no longer than three minutes to reach the Ryersons’ door, but in that little time a multitude of emotions had churned and ploughed his undisciplined mind. He had passed Ann in review, judging her in the light of her mother’s gentility and his own aspirations, and had found her wanting. She wouldn’t do what other girls did. She had complained openly that her life was silly and empty. Those were her very words: silly and empty. “Can’t I do something? Can’t I be trained for something? I’d like to earn my living.” There she was, with everything life could offer a girl—good money being paid for a music-master, for dancing-lessons, for any reasonable thing she wanted, and in a few years there would be all the men she could want to pick from. The right sort of men, too. But no—“Couldn’t I be a nurse? What about Florence Nightingale?” His only child!

Hawley was bursting when the victoria drew up. The street door was open. He didn’t knock. He stormed into the passage, towards a thread of light that he saw lying under a door. With no more ceremony than one imperious rap, he flung the door open.

Ann simply could not believe that her world had changed so astoundingly. She sat at her bedroom window and gazed out into the garden of The Limes, now leafless and desolate. Beyond the garden-wall lay the Wilmslow Road, and from time to time she could see the heads and shoulders of coachmen or of riders upon horses go by, the ones with a forward gliding, the others jog-jogging up and down. They looked as free as the air; and hidden by the wall, unseen by her but not for that the less clearly imagined, were foot-passengers going and coming as they pleased. The afternoon light was fading. Rooks went slowly, a deeper black, across the dark sky, and all these things—the men and the horses and the birds—made her imprisonment the more odious. Now she saw tit-tupping past the garden-wall a black hat adorned with a stylish green feather. It was one of the girls from next door, riding slowly home to tea. Ann’s agonised imagination ran riot with the firelight and the muffins, the steaming teapot and the friendly chatter. It was more than she could bear. She pulled down the blind, ran to her bed, threw herself upon it, and began to cry again.

It was humiliation more than anything else that made her cry. Her thoughts kept engaging like cogs into this or that part of the dreadful things that had happened to her. At each engagement a shiver of misery would go through her. She could not believe that her father and mother had said such things.

Hawley had been utterly quiet on the way home. He had walked into the kitchen at the Ryersons’, given one horrified look about him, and then barked to Arnold: “Don’t let me see you at my place again. This is how tha takes time off for t’Wesleyan class, is it?” Then, without a word to Ann, he took her by the arm, led her to the door, and put her into the carriage. He sat at her side, stiff with hostility, not speaking, but clearly bottling up an explosion that promised to be terrific.

When they reached The Limes he could hardly wait for the victoria to come to a standstill after it had swept up the circular drive and reached the big covered porch in which a gas-lamp was burning. He leapt out before Haworth was down from his seat, took her arm again as though he were her gaoler, and held her while fumbling his key into the lock. He marched her in and there was Mrs. Artingstall, impatience written in every peaked inch of her face, exclaiming as soon as she saw him: “You’re late, Hawley. Dinner’ll be ruined.”

He flung his tall silk hat on to a table. “Dinner can wait,” he said. “You go in theer!” He pushed Ann towards the door of the drawing-room, “And tha can go, too, Lillian,” he added to his wife.

“Why, whatever’s the matter, Hawley? What has Ann been doing?”

“She’s disgraced us,” he said. “That’s all—disgraced us—dragged us in t’dirt. Ah’ve told thee,” he went on, pushing behind her into the drawing-room, his voice becoming broader and broader, “Ah’ve told thee to control yon girl, and see what it’s coom to now.”

He shut the door behind him, advanced to the hearth, and stood there upon the white bearskin, his puffy little face swollen with anger, his round paunch pushed aggressively forward behind the golden decoration of its watch-chain. The fire gleamed between his slightly bowed legs.

Ann never forgot it all. To her dying day she could, if she wished to, call up the memory of the figured yellow brocade that made deep scallops from the edge of the mantelpiece, the tall curtains of the same material draping the window, the pleated yellow silk behind the fretwork front of the piano, the spindly tables that stood here and there and the chairs and sofas whose fluted woodwork was painted white with gold marks down the fluting. All this she could always remember, but especially the central figure of the drama, her father, posed like a figure of doom, no less frightening for being, in retrospect, ridiculous. He was arranged almost as in a stage setting, with the wings of the brocade drooping behind his shoulders, on either side of his head a round opaque white globe in which a tongue of gas chuckled quietly, behind his head a Marcus Stone picture of a lover languishing upon a mouldering and doubtless ancestral terrace.

Suddenly he barked at her: “What’s that in thi hand?”

Only then did she realise that all through the last disturbing half-hour she had been clutching the book that Arnold had lent her. “It’s a book,” she said.

“Don’t be damn’ soft,” he burst out with a rudeness that was unaccustomed where she was concerned. “Ah can see it’s a book. What book is it, and wheer did tha get it?”

“Arnold Ryerson lent it to me,” she said.

“Who is Arnold Ryerson?” Mrs. Artingstall demanded, her sharp nose sniffing at the mention of a man’s name.

Hawley snatched the book from Ann’s hand. “Arnold Ryerson,” he said, “is a little tyke who earns about tuppence a week in my shop.”

“That’s your fault, not his.”

There was silence. Mrs. Artingstall looked at her daughter aghast. The red of Hawley’s face deepened slowly to purple. Ann herself could hardly believe that her own mouth had uttered the words. Now that they were out, they seemed appalling, rebellious, undutiful.

Hawley and Lillian spoke almost simultaneously. “Ann!” said Lillian. “To speak to your father like that!” And Hawley: “So! You not only disobey my orders, leave your uncle’s house, and go to a place where you had no right to be, but now you presume to tell me how to run my business! And you bring this home with you—A New View of Society! Radical trash!”

“Radical?” cried Lillian, deeply perturbed.

“Yes, Radical. Ah give her permission to call on Birley, and t’damned fool not only takes her in t’slums but leaves her there. When Ah coom, there she is—alone in t’kitchen of a slum house wi’ that young Ryerson that runs errands in t’shop. What dosta think o’ that? There’s a daughter!”

“Alone?” said Mrs. Artingstall.

“Ay, alone. God knows what might have happened to her. In a dirty little room wi’out a cloth on t’table. There she was, suppin’ tea wi’ that young tyke, and scarcely a scrap o’ fire in t’grate.”

Again Ann found her tongue, and this time she did not regret it. She spoke up boldly out of her heart. “It’s not the Ryersons’ fault if they’re poor, is it? Don’t you think they’d have tablecloths and better fires if they could? They’re nice people, and they work hard, and Mrs. Ryerson crushed her fingers in the mangle. That’s why I was there.”

“So! You’re learning about life! You’re seeing things. You’re getting a new view of society.” He flung the book behind him into the fire. “And you’re learning to teach your father how to run his affairs.”

“I want to learn things,” Ann said. “I didn’t do anything wrong. Why shouldn’t I know poor people as well as rich ones?”

Hawley reached out a pudgy hand, took her by the shoulder, and pulled her upright. “So long as you’re living under this roof,” he said, “you’ll know the people that Ah want you to know an’ you’ll do the things that Ah want you to do. T’classes don’t mix. There’s rich an’ poor, an’ they’d better keep apart. A lot o’ good has come to that lad through you to-night. He’s lost his job. That’s the outcome o’ your kind actions.”

“It’s not!” she cried. “It’s not. It’s the outcome of your cruelty. There was no reason at all for you to dismiss him. They need the money. They need a lot more money than they’ve got.”

“So now I’m cruel!” Hawley shouted. “I work my fingers to the bone,” he stormed, clenching his flabby fist, “to give thee an’ thi mother every comfort, an’ I’m a cruel tyrant! You’ll take that back, my girl; you’ll promise never to do again what you’ve done to-night; and you’ll apologise for all the sorrow you’ve caused me and thi mother, before you eat your dinner.”

“I don’t want my dinner,” said Ann.

“Before you leave this room then, you ungrateful headstrong girl.”

She stood before him silent, her heart beating with furious anger. “Come along now, Ann,” said her mother. “I know you’ve only been foolish and that most of the fault was your Uncle Birley’s. Just apologise to your father and promise to be a good girl.”

“I shall not apologise.” Ann broke suddenly into sobs. “And I like Uncle Birley better than father.”

“Take her to bed!” Hawley commanded, and when Lillian had done so, he followed up the stairs, locked the door, and put the key into his pocket.

“Oh dear! Dinner’ll be ruined,” Lillian lamented as they went down again. She seemed not greatly troubled by what had happened. Hawley, who had a deeper understanding of his daughter’s character, was accordingly more deeply disturbed. “Damn dinner!” he snarled. “Ah’m going out.”

If he had examined his heart closely, he would have acknowledged a feeling of defeat.

One of the troubles with Hawley was that he did not examine anything. Like a bull at a gate, he had gone head down for whatever he wanted, and he had always found that the method succeeded. What was crushed underfoot in the process did not matter to him. By this brutal directness he had achieved his business success and civic eminence; by it, too, he had carried off old Sir James Sugden’s nose-in-the-air daughter Lillian; and he had had no doubt that the same methods would succeed with Ann.

But Ann, with her strange colouring, her resolute little jut of chin, her growing dissatisfaction with a world that seemed to Hawley well-nigh perfect, was no Sugden, and as certainly she was not much of an Artingstall. He could recall the lineaments of his mother, who died when he was in his early teens: a woman whom old Artingstall, the founder of the leather business, had met up on the north-east coast, where her father was a pilot. She was named Rika Petersen. That was where Ann came from, just as Birley did. But wherever Ann came from, he’d be damned, he told himself, as he sat morosely in a great leather chair in his club, if he’d let her have her way with him. He prided himself on knowing both the world and his way about in it. That was more than Ann did. In a few years, when she’d come to her senses and settled down, she’d thank him for having been the firm, intelligent father she had needed.

Comforted by these reflections, and by the porterhouse steak which he had consumed with a quart of ale, he leaned back in the chair, stretched out his stubby little legs as far as they would go towards the fire, and enjoyed his cigar in peace. He liked the club, with its rich red Turkey carpets, the dark oil-paintings of important-looking politicians on the walls, its stuffy opulence and dignified sleepy calm. An evening there occasionally was grateful, especially when Lillian’s nose looked longer and thinner than usual.

When he went out into the street, a thin cold drizzle was falling. There was no cab in sight, but he knew there would be one round the corner on the rank in St. Ann’s Square. He called to a boy who was lounging near the club door, evidently in the expectation of such errands. “Hi! Boy! Get me a cab.” Then he withdrew into the shelter of the club portico. Ann and her poor people! That was what poor people were for. Hi! Fetch! Carry! He was smiling to himself when he noticed that the boy was by his side. “Eh? Where’s that cab?”

The boy’s hair was a mass of wet tangled black curls. His eyes, as black as his hair, were lit with an impudent light. “I haven’t fetched it yet,” he said. “What are you paying me?”

Hawley stared at him in amazement. “Well,” said the boy, unabashed, “do you take on a job before you know what you’re going to get?”

The alderman burst into a guffaw. “Nay!” he cried. “Ah’m damned if Ah do! Tha’s t’reight sort, lad. It’s worth sixpence to meet thee.”

“Pay it then,” said Tom Hannaway, holding out his hand.

“Nay, lad—no cab, no tanner. Get along wi’ thee now and don’t try my patience.”

The dignified alderman was coming uppermost, and Tom Hannaway ran off into the drizzle, whistling shrilly with two fingers placed between his lips.

That’s the sort of lad we want at Artingstall’s, Hawley reflected; not a damned Methodist class-meeting tyke; and when Tom Hannaway returned, running alongside the shambling rain-polished horse, he said: “D’you want a job, my lad?”

“What sort of job?”

“Errand boy at Artingstall’s.”

“Nay, keep it,” Tom Hannaway said with uncompromising directness. “I’ll be no errand boy for you or any one else.”

Hawley flushed with displeasure. “What are you now, then? Son and heir of Lord Muck?” he asked with heavy sarcasm.

“I push a barrow for a rag-and-bone man,” said Tom.

“That’s a fine job, Ah must say! Is it so much better than what Ah’m offering?”

“It is an’ all,” said Tom. “It’d be a long time before I could buy Artingstall’s, but it won’t be long before I buy the rang-and-bone yard.”

Hawley smiled again, amused by the boy’s confidence. He handed him his sixpence. “Perhaps you’ll buy Artingstall’s some day,” he said.

“I shouldn’t wonder. Stranger things have happened.”

The money in his palm, Tom shot away and disappeared round the misty corner. Hawley stood for some moments looking at the place where the boy had been. He thought of Ann; he thought of this handsome, cheeky youngster. “Well, the children are teaching us something,” he reflected as he climbed into the little mouldy cage that bowled him home to Fallowfield.

Ann continued to teach him. The next morning he unlocked her bedroom door and advanced into the room with the air of one ready to bestow forgiveness and expecting it to be gladly received. The curtains were across the windows; the room was in twilight. Ann lay with her back towards him, nothing but a mound under the bedclothes and a shock of bleached disordered hair.

“Come, come! Not up yet, lass?” he cried gaily. “Can’t you smell the kidneys and t’coffee?”

There was no movement, no word, from the bed.

“Ann, are you awake, lass?” He laid a hand on her shoulder and shook her gently. “Come, lass,” he said. “Tell thi old dad tha’s been a little fool and that tha’rt sorry.”

Ann wriggled her body from under his hand. Her muffled voice came from beneath the bedclothes. “Go away.”

Hawley thought of the Artingstall diligence by which men set their watches. He had never been late. He was not going to be late this morning. “Ah’ll tell ’em to send summat up, lass,” he said, “and Ah’ll see thee at dinner.” He patted her shoulder. He was half-way across the room when, like a jack-in-the-box whose spring has been released, Ann sat bolt upright in bed. He turned and looked at her, sitting there straight as a young tree, one hand pressed hard down on the bed on either side of her, her hair flowing like shining white silk down to her waist. It had drooped across her eyes, which glared at him through the lovely mesh. Her nightdress had fallen open and he could see her young breasts, rosy-tipped, firm and round. She was unconscious of her exquisite appearance. He thought: “My God! She’s a woman, and she hates me.”

She sat there for a moment like a venomous little statue; then she said: “I don’t want anything sent up, thank you, and I shall not see you at dinner.” With one gesture she enveloped herself in the bedclothes and lay huddled with her back to him again.

“Ah must go,” he said weakly. “Ah’ll send thi mother up to thee.”

Lillian did not hurry. Hurry, fuss, excitement, would never have permitted her to preserve the thin, languid, genteel air which she opposed to circumstances. To Hawley’s cluckings and flutterings at breakfast-time she replied that he could go to town, put Ann out of his head, and leave things to her. Calmly, when he was gone, she prepared a tray with her own hands, calmly she carried it upstairs. She tapped at the door, and asked in her sweetest voice: “May I come in, Ann?”

“You can try,” Ann answered.

Lillian tried, and found that the door was locked. But this time it was locked on the inside. Lillian’s calm did not fail her. “Ann, you foolish child, what joke is this?” she asked equably.

There was no answer. Lillian put the tray down on a table near the door and gently rattled the knob. She dared not make much noise. She both despised and feared her servants. She flushed at the thought that one might come by at any moment and find her pleading with her own daughter to open the door.

She took the tray down to the kitchen and said that Miss Ann was unwell: she did not want any breakfast. Then she set her cold brain to work. She had told Hawley that all would be well when he came home. She was going to keep her word. She decided that Ann would have to come out of her room sooner or later, and so she betook herself to her bedroom, sat with the door open a crack, and waited as unexcited and implacable as the Sphinx. She waited for two hours. Then Ann left her room and Lillian tiptoed into it. When the girl returned, her mother was sitting on the bed. Ann was still wearing her night-dress and a blue silk dressing-gown and fluffy bedroom slippers. Hawley had seen in her a woman; Lillian thought her an absurdly defenceless-looking child.

“Well?” said Lillian. “When is this nonsense going to stop? You have missed a dancing lesson this morning, and this afternoon you have your music.”

Ann did not answer that. “Do you think I did wrong yesterday, Mother?” she asked.

“There was so much fuss and talk, I hardly know what you did do,” Lillian answered.

“Well, let me tell you, because I want to know,” the child answered.

“All right, then. Come and sit here by me.” Lillian moved up on the bed, and Ann knew that if she sat down an arm would be round her. Instinctively, she did not want that. She had come to a crisis with these grown-ups. She was prompted to keep emotion out of it. She pulled the dressing-gown tighter round her.

“I would never have left Uncle Birley’s,” she said, “if he hadn’t had an engagement. He’d promised to go to a boy’s birthday party, and he took me along with him.”

“He ought to have had more sense. That man always was a fool. He could have cancelled it.”

Ann shook herself impatiently. “Anyway, he didn’t, and we went, and every one there was very nice. One of the boys was from Father’s shop, but I couldn’t have known that, could I?”

“You could have cleared out when you did.”

“And then we heard that the boy’s mother had hurt herself with the mangle, so some of us went to see what was the matter. It was a terribly poor house. I’ve never seen such a poor house, and I put the children to bed.”

“You what!” Lillian’s calm was beginning to fail her.

“Someone had to, and that poor woman couldn’t. You visit the poor yourself, don’t you, Mother?”

“Visiting the poor the way I do it is one thing,” said Lillian stiffly. “They know their place with me. What you’ve been up to, I imagine, is another matter.”

“Well, you’d better let me finish telling you. When I came down after putting them to bed, Uncle Birley and Mrs. Stansfield—that’s where I’d been to the party—had taken Mrs. Ryerson to the doctor. I had to wait till Uncle Birley came back, so Arnold Ryerson made me some tea.”

“And you were alone there with that boy in that house!”

“Yes. We drank tea, and he told me about books he’d been reading.”

Lillian sprang up impatiently from the bed. “I don’t want to hear any more,” she said sharply. “I think your conduct was infamous and disgraceful. How long were you there with that little guttersnipe before your father—caught you? I expect this—this Arnold Ryerson, as you call him, enjoyed the little—interview.”

Ann was no fool. She was aware of all the unsaid things that wavered behind her mother’s words. Her own cheeks suddenly flamed. “Do you think we were being—indecent?” she asked.

The word knocked Lillian off her perch. She hated to see her own insinuations crystallised. She seized the child by the shoulder and shook her violently. “How dare you use that word to me?” she demanded. “Have done with all this nonsense. Come downstairs and eat some food, and when your father comes in to-night see that you apologise for your abominable conduct.”

“So you think what I did was wrong?” Ann persisted.

“I only hope it will never reach the ears of your friends.”

“Well, I don’t think it was wrong. I think you are wrong and Father is wrong, and Uncle Birley is right and I am right. And I should do it again.”

Lillian could not believe her ears. Never before had Ann spoken to her like that. All that was primitive under her veneer suddenly flamed to life. “Now, my girl,” she said, “this is something your father can’t do to you, so I’ll do it for him.”

She swept out an arm, taking Ann completely by surprise, and bent the girl face-down across her knee. She pushed back dressing-gown and night-dress, exposing the bare flesh, and slapped till she was herself breathless with exertion and excitement. Then she thrust Ann away, and the girl rolled to the floor at her feet. Rising, with her knees trembling, Lillian looked down at the hair spread along the bedside rug and at the still exposed and smarting flesh. Hardly able to articulate in her excitement, she said: “I was older than you the last time that happened to me, and, what’s more, my father did it. It cured me of my tantrums. Now get up. Get up! Do you hear?”

She was shouting now. Ann lay still for a moment. Then she got slowly to her feet. She was not crying. Her face was bloodless and her eyes burned. She shook down her clothes, pulled her dressing-gown about her, and said: “You beast! You filthy beast! I’ve finished with you.” She walked to the window and stood there with her back to the room till she heard her mother go. Then she got into bed and stared stonily at the ceiling. She knew that the door was unlocked, but she remained in her room all day, hungry and rebellious.

Lillian was surprised when she got downstairs to find that her knees were still trembling. Her heart, too, was pounding. She could feel it quiet clearly knocking against her ribs. She stood for some time holding on to the brocade-swathed mantelpiece in the drawing-room, hoping that the unpleasant oppressive feeling in her breast would pass. It did not. She became alarmed, and lay down on the sofa. Gradually the hammering died away. Even when it was nearly gone, the ear pressed into a cushion could hear the suck and pump of blood with disconcerting clearness. When Hawley returned at night, she did not tell him that she had thrashed the child. She said that Ann had argued so furiously with her that she had been quite ill. “My heart was in a terrible state.” It was this which caused Hawley to say later that Ann had been the death of her mother. But that was a year ahead. Now, on that December evening, Lillian said: “I can’t bear having her about the house while she’s like this. I’ve written and asked Elizabeth to take her over Christmas.”

Elizabeth Lightowler replied promptly that she would be delighted to have Ann as long as she cared to stay.