The Stars Look Down

by A. J. Cronin

  He took his seat in the car with his head in a whirl. He did not know, he could not be sure, but he had the wild, impossible notion that he had made some sort of impression on Laura Millington. The idea was crazy, perhaps, but he felt it nevertheless and a tremendous exultation surged inside his chest. He was perfectly aware that he was extremely attractive to women; he could not walk down the street without being conscious of admiring glances flung towards him. Laura had said nothing, done nothing, her behaviour was altogether restrained and cold; yet Joe knew women; and he had seen something too firmly controlled, a flicker under the bored indifference in Laura’s eye. Joe, who had not one moral scruple in his whole composition, gloated inwardly. If only it were true? He had always wanted a lady to take a fancy to him. Often in Grainger Street, strolling as one of the common crowd, he would observe some car draw up and a smartly dressed, disdainful woman pass quickly across the pavement into an expensive shop leaving a peculiar exasperating perfume and the insufferable sense of her inaccessibility. In the past that had always goaded Joe, made him ram his hands in his pockets and, powerfully aware of his own virility, swear to have a woman like that, a lady, some day. By God, he would! Tarts were all right, but a real lady was different. And at the thought he would drift along with the herd again, shouldering his way forward, lip thrust out, pausing perhaps outside a window where gossamer lingerie was displayed. That was what they wore and his imagination, rejecting the cotton crudities available to him, soared towards a future time when he could command the full subtleties of his desire.

  All this recurred to Joe as he drove back to the works; he could hardly sit still for sheer excitement. He kept looking at himself in the driving mirror and admiring himself, running his hand over the glossy, natural wave in his hair. At the office he handed over the papers to Stanley and went into the melting-shop in a perfect glow.

  But as the days passed and nothing, absolutely nothing, happened, Joe’s complacency began to shrink. He waited for some sign, some vague indication of Laura’s interest. But for all the interest Laura evinced he might never have existed. He began to think he had been mistaken; then he was convinced he had been mistaken. He became surly and ill-tempered, took his spite out on the men in the melting-shop, and ended up with a wild night spent in the company of a blatant and unknown young female whose dirty toe-nails eventually disgusted him Three months passed and then, one frosty afternoon in late November, while Joe happened to be in consultation with Stanley over some defective moulds, Laura dropped into the office. She had her own car outside and had called to drive Stanley into Tynecastle. She entered quietly, a soft silver fox fur enhancing the pale oval of her face, and Joe’s heart took one enormous bound.

  Stanley glanced up from his papers with a slight irritation. During that autumn Stanley’s tendency to irritation had increased; in the steam-heated office he looked pale, wilted and moist. “Sheer overwork,” he would protest in a voice of grievance. “Think of it, I haven’t had Clegg inside the office in six weeks.” Actually, having given birth to the idea of conversion to munitions—as though the process of delivery had been too much for his enfeebled constitution—old Mr. Clegg had taken to his bed and the doctor had reported that his lying-in would be prolonged. There was, in fact, a possibility that he would not get up again. This worried Stanley. Lately, Millington had run a little to seed and he was liable to impulsive bemoanings of his waist band, his lack of condition and his inability to get his regular bi-weekly golf. His tone on these occasions was the tone of a man who has just lost his collar stud and indicts the entire household.

  “I’ll be ready in a minute, Laura,” he grunted. “You know Gowlan, don’t you? Joe Gowlan. Only man besides myself who works in this place.”

  Joe hardly dared to raise his eyes. He blundered out some formal remark and, as soon as he could, gathered up his papers and left the office.

  Stanley yawned and threw down his pen.

  “I’m tired, Laura,” he said, “damned tired. Too many gin and Its last night and not enough sleep. I’ve been like a washed-out rag all day. God! when I think how fit I used to be. I’m missing my golf I tell you. I must start my cold showers in the morning again. I’d like to have time to get really fit. I’m sick of this driving on. Money pouring in, but what the dickens of good is it? Clegg’s still laid up, you know. I can’t put up with it much longer. I shall have to pension him off and get a new man, a new works manager.”

  “Of course you must,” she agreed.

  He stifled another yawn, his expression peevish.

  “So damned difficult, getting a good man. They’re all booked up or at the front, lucky devils. I must advertise though. I’ll do it Monday.”

  Laura smoothed her soft fur with her pale flexible fingers as though enjoying the feel of its voluptuous silkiness.

  “Why don’t you give this man Gowlan a trial?” she remarked idly.

  Stanley stared at her in amazement.

  “Gowlan!” he exclaimed with a short laugh. “Joe Gowlan, my works manager! That shows how little you savvy about business, my dear. Gowlan was a workman himself not so long ago. Why, the thing’s ridiculous.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” she remarked indifferently. “I don’t understand.” She turned towards the door. But he did not follow.

  “Clegg’s job is a damned responsible post. It means looking after the whole show when I’m not here. It’s idiotic to think Gowlan could handle it.” He rubbed his chin indecisively. “And yet I don’t know. He is a damned capable fellow. He’s helped me no end of ways these last three months. He’s popular with the men and smart, yes, straight as a die, too. Think how he put me up to that swine Porterfield. Hang it all, Laura, I don’t know but what there might be some sense in the idea after all.”

  She looked at her tiny wrist watch, worn on the outside of her glove.

  “Oh, never mind your idea, Stanley, it really is time we were going.”

  “No, but listen, Laura. I honestly believe this solves my difficulty. There’s a war on, you know, and that’s when men do get promotion. I believe I might do worse than try Gowlan in the job.”

  “You must do exactly as you think best.”

  “Good Lord, Laura, as if I ever did anything else. But, honestly, I’m rather keen on this now. How would it do to ask him up to supper some night and see how he strikes us?”

  “Just as you wish. But we must go now or we’ll be late.”

  Stanley stood for a moment with his brow corrugated in thought, then suddenly he clapped on his bowler and reached for his coat. He followed Laura down the corridor and on the way across the yard he shouted to the machine-shop for Joe.

  Joe advanced slowly and Stanley, straightening himself inside the coat, remarked offhandedly:

  “By the way, Joe, I nearly forgot. I want you to come up and have supper with us some night. How about to-morrow? That suit you all right?”

  Joe stood incapable of speech.

  “Yes,” he stammered at last, “that would suit me perfectly.”

  “It’s settled then,” Stanley declared. “Half-past seven in case I forget.”

  Joe nodded. He was conscious of Laura’s dark eyes inspecting him non-committally over Stanley’s shoulder. Then they both turned and walked off.

  He gazed after them with a violently beating heart. He wanted to whoop for joy. At last! At last! He had been right after all. In a sweat of triumph he returned to his work.

  That night when he went home he could not be still. He had to tell someone, it was impossible to contain this delicious exultation within himself. A strange desire seized him, a temptation, and he could not resist it. He took a tram across the bridge to Tynecastle and carried his gloating along to Scottswood Road.

  He strolled in upon the Sunleys with a casual air while they sat at supper, Alfred, Ada, Clarry and Phyllis—Sally was not there, she was with a concert party which had just left for France—and their welcome caused him to feel even more magnificent.

  “W
ell, I declare,” Ada kept repeating. “It’s a regular treat to see you again.”

  He accepted his old chair by the fire and let her send out for some cold ham and give him a second supper—he called it a snack—and while he ate her sandwiches he informed them all of his success at Millington’s. Reaching for the mustard he added carelessly: “As a matter of fact, I’m having supper with Stanley and Mrs. Millington at Hilltop tomorrow night.”

  Their astounded admiration gave him a glorious thrill. Joe was a natural boaster, particularly when the audience was receptive, and now he boasted to his heart’s content. He expatiated on the beauty and nobility of his calling. Somebody, he announced through a large mouthful of ham, had got to make the bullets, bombs and shells for the boys at the front. There was a future in munitions, too. He had heard only the other day that they were going to put up a line of sheds at Wirtley on the waste ground at the top of Yarrow Hill, filling sheds, and quite near the foundry too. Mr. Stanley had said they would soon be employing hundreds of girls there, filling the shells with T.N.T. Mr. Stanley had got the news from London straight. Joe looked at Clarry and Phyllis in a friendly way. He said:

  “Why don’t you two get in on that? They’ll be paying you three times what you get at Slattery’s and the work’s a pinch.”

  Ada looked interested. She said:

  “Is that a fact, Joe?”

  Joe said largely:

  “Certainly it’s a fact What do you take me for? I know, don’t I? I know!”

  Ada pondered flabbily in her rocker. House painting in Tynecastle in those early days of the war was inclined to be slack; there was not as much money coming into the house as Ada would have liked, certainly Clarry’s and Phyllis’s money was very small. She said:

  “I wish you’d let me know if you hear anything further, Joe.”

  Ada had always had a weakness, a soft maternal tenderness towards Joe. To-night she thought he looked wonderfully handsome—quite the gentleman, sort of dashing and alive. Ada sighed; she had always wanted to have Joe her son-in-law; it was pitiful the chance Jenny had thrown away now that things had turned out so well for Joe.

  When Clarry and Phyllis had gone out and Alf was busy with his pigeons in the back, Ada looked across at Joe and breathed very sadly and confidentially:

  “You haven’t heard about Jenny?”

  “No,” Joe said. And taking out his case he busied himself in lighting a cigarette.

  Ada sighed.

  “She’s expecting next month, yes, I’ve got to go through and see to her myself. At the beginning of December.”

  The smoke from his cigarette got into Joe’s throat. He coughed and choked and got quite red in the face. After a pause he said:

  “You mean there’s going to be an addition?”

  Ada nodded mournfully.

  “It’s just about the limit, poor Jenny, and he will have it he’s going in the army. And after that Gawd knows what’ll happen. He’s got the chuck from the teaching. Can you beat it? I always said she threw herself away that time, Joe. And now to think she’s been and went and let herself get caught.”

  Joe’s cough convulsed him again.

  “Well, well. These things do happen, I suppose.”

  After that Ada became more confidential with Joe. They had a pleasant intimate talk in the half darkness of the room. At the end of it when Joe had to go Ada was greatly consoled, she felt that Joe’s visit had done her a power of good.

  Joe walked back to Beech Road, Yarrow, with a curious expression on his face. Thank God he’d got out of Sleescale when he did! He was unusually agreeable to his withered landlady that night, spoke to her kindly and seemed generally to congratulate her that she was old and ugly and daughterless.

  The next day came and Joe could think of nothing but his engagement in the evening. When he had finished work he slipped into Grigg’s the barber’s at the foot of Beech Road and had a shave, very close, and a hair-trim. Then he went home to his lodgings and took a bath. He sat on the edge of the bath quite naked, whistling softly and doing his nails. To-night he was determined to be at his best.

  When he had bathed he padded into his bed-sitting-room, dressed extra carefully in his very best suit, a light grey with a faint pin stripe, a pattern copied from a suit he had once seen a heavy swell wearing in a musical comedy at the Empire. He had ambitions for a dinner suit, terrible tearing ambitions for a dinner suit, but he knew that the time for the dinner suit was not yet. Still, even in the ordinary grey he looked splendid, chin tenderly smooth, hair brilliantined, eye bright and vital, his thin watch-chain girded high on his waistcoat, a paste-pearl stud in his tie. He smiled at his scintillating reflection in the mirror, tried a bow and a few positions of careless elegance; then his smile became a grin and he thought to himself: “You’re in amongst it at last, my boy, just you watch yourself and there’s nothing can stop you.”

  He became grave again and as he walked up the road to Hilltop he rehearsed the right note, deferential yet manly; his expression as he went up the steps, ready to conquer, was masterly.

  The same neat maid, Bessie, showed him into the lounge where Laura stood alone with her bare arm resting on the mantelpiece and one slipper extended to the fire. She was dressed very plainly in black and she made a marvellously effective picture with the firelight warming her pale face and glinting on her beautiful polished nails. Joe suddenly had a thrilling admiration for her. She’s great, he thought to himself, by gum she’s it; and, gripped by a most familiar tenseness of his middle, yet with a touching humility on his face, he advanced and greeted her.

  Then an awkward pause occurred. He rubbed his hands, smoothed his hair, straightened his tie and smiled.

  “It’s been cold to-day, terrible cold for the time of year. Seems to be freezing outside to-night.”

  She extended her other slipper to the fire, then she said:

  “Is it?”

  He felt snubbed; she thrilled and overawed him; he had never known anyone like her in his life. He persevered:

  “It certainly is good of you to ask me up to-night. It’s a real honour, I assure you. When Mr. Stanley gave me the invitation you could have knocked me down with a feather.”

  Laura looked at him with that unsmiling smile, taking in his flashy chain, fake pearl, his deadly emanation of hair-oil. Then, as though wishing him free of such atrocities, she looked away She said to the fire:

  “Stanley will be down in a moment.”

  Damped, he could not make her out. He would have given everything he had to know absolutely and completely the nature of her real self and how he stood with her.

  But he did not know and he was half afraid of her. To begin with she was undoubtedly a lady. Not “ladylike” in Jenny’s silly sense—he could have laughed when he remembered Jenny’s shallow gentility, the crooking of the little finger, the bowing, the “so good of you” and “after you please” nonsense. No, Laura was not like that, Laura had real class. She did not have to try; in Joe’s memorable phrase, she was already it.

  She had a curious indifference, too, which pleased and fascinated him. He felt that she would never insist; if she did not agree she would simply let the matter drop and keep her own opinion with that queer unsmiling smile. It was as though Laura had a secret, mocking self. He suspected that she was extremely unconventional within herself, that she probably disagreed utterly with the set ideas of life. Yet she was not unconventional outwardly; she was extremely fastidious in her person and her taste in dress was quietly perfect. Nevertheless he could not help the feeling that she was contemptuous of convention; he had a crazy half-formed intuition that she despised everybody—including herself.

  His thoughts were interrupted by Stanley’s entry: Stanley came in breezily, shook hands with Joe and clapped him on the back, too obviously trying to put him at his ease.

  “Glad to see you in my house, Gowlan. We don’t stand on ceremony here, so make yourself at home.” He planted his feet apart in the middle of the he
arthrug, exposing his back to the heat of the fire, and exclaimed: “What about it though, Laura? What about the rum ration for the troops?”

  Laura went over to the walnut cabinet where a shaker stood with glasses and some ice. They each had a dry martini; then Joe and Millington had a second; and Millington, who drank his quickly, had a third.

  “I get outside too many of these, Gowlan,” he remarked, smacking his lips. “Don’t get enough exercise, either. I want to get thoroughly fit one of these days, get my old form back, exercises, aha! Harden myself up like I used to be at St. Bede’s.” He flexed his biceps and felt it with a frown.

  To cheer himself up Stanley had another drink and they went in to supper.

  “It’s very curious,” Stanley lamented, spreading his napkin and addressing himself to his cold chicken, “how soon you can get out of condition. Business is all very well, making money and chaining yourself to an office, but hang it all health is the best wealth. Shakespeare or somebody said that, didn’t they?”

  “Emerson, wasn’t it?” suggested Laura, with her eyes on Joe.

  Joe did not answer. His library at his lodgings consisted of a tom paper-backed edition of Saucy Stories from the French, and Mrs. Calder’s Bible, planted encouragingly in front of the glass case of waxed fruit, out of which Joe, on Sunday afternoons when feeling especially pious, would read what he termed the dirty bits.

  “I wish I could have joined the army,” Stanley meditated complainingly. He had the dull man’s habit of worrying a subject to death. “That’s the place to get you really into shape.”

  A short silence. Stanley crumbled his roll in a momentary discontent. Interspersed with his breeziness he was much given to these bouts of grumbling, the peevish regret of a man who sees himself approaching baldness and middle age. But Stanley had always been liable to impulsive dissatisfactions with his present lot in life. Six months ago he had longed to make money and re-establish the position of the firm; yet now that he had done it his sense of unfulfilment still persisted.