by A. J. Cronin
After that Martha went out of her way to humiliate Annie. She did not hesitate to “give Annie her character” in the Terraces. It was a strange reaction. Martha was never one for idle talk: as for scandal, she scorned and despised the mention of the word; but now she took a bitter pleasure in spreading the news of Annie’s trouble.
She made it her duty to encounter Annie as often as she could and she never passed without giving Annie that withering look. Nothing was said; but there was always that look. She discovered a favourite walk of Annie’s, a walk Annie took by herself in the evening, which was the only time she had a moment to herself, a walk which led along the shore and up the steep hill beyond the Snook. Martha, who never went beyond the Terraces of the town, began to take this walk too. Sometimes Annie was on the cliff first, staring out across the sea, and sometimes Martha was there first; but whatever the way of it Martha always gave Annie that silent look. Often Annie seemed to wish to speak to Martha, but Martha’s look froze all speech. For years she had suffered because of Annie; now Annie could suffer because of her!
Not that Martha gave a hint of the situation to Sammy; in her letters to Sammy Martha never said a word. She was too wise for that. She sent him more parcels than ever, most wonderful parcels she sent to Sammy; she made Sammy feel her worth. She had Sammy’s allowance every week on Sammy’s ring paper and that allowance enabled Martha to do what she wanted. She could never have got along without Sammy’s allowance.
The days and the weeks passed. Little enough was happening in Sleescale. At the Neptune they were well advanced with the new road into the Paradise. Jenny was still living in Tynecastle with her people and Martha never heard from her. Harry Ogle, son of old Tom Ogle, had been elected to the Town Council. Hans Messuer had been removed from the cottage hospital to an internment camp. Mrs. Wept kept her pie shop open on two days of the week. Jack Reedy had returned from the front with bad gas-poisoning. Letters from David arrived regularly, once a month. Life still went on.
And Annie Macer still went on hawking the fish which she and her father hand-lined in the early morning when the pale mist lay on the water. Everyone said it was a disgrace that Annie should go on hawking fish, but Annie could not very well do anything else. Annie’s brother, Pug, was not the kind to send allowances and hawking that fish was the livelihood of Annie and her dad. So Annie went on with it in spite of the disgrace.
But one day Annie did not go on with it. The day was the 22nd March and on that day Annie did not appear with her basket and her little bell. Martha looked for Annie in vain. And Martha thought with a savage thought, Is this her time, is she come to it at last?
It was not Annie’s time. In the evening Martha took the walk along the shore, past the Snook and up the cliff beyond. She took the walk partly from her newly formed habit and partly to see if Annie would be there. Annie was not there. And Martha stood erect and vigorous, looking down the path, thinking her savage thought that it was Annie’s time, that Annie had come to the bearing of her bastard at last.
But it was not Annie’s time. As Martha stood there she stiffened slightly, for at the foot of the cliff path she saw Annie, and Annie was coming up the path.
Annie came up the path slowly and Martha waited with her look ready, waited until Annie should come up. Tonight Annie took a long time. She climbed slowly, slowly as though labouring under a great burden. But at last she got to the top. Then Martha threw her look at Annie.
But Annie took no notice of the look. She paused before Martha, unusually pale and breathless from her climb and she stooped slightly as if tired, as though still she laboured under a great burden. She gazed at Martha, then she gazed out to the sea, as she always had done, gazing towards the place where Sammy might be. Then, as though she spoke the simplest fact:
“Sammy and me got married in August.”
Martha drew back as if she had been stung. Then she straightened herself.
“It’s a lie,” she said.
Still looking towards the place where Sammy might be, Annie said again, sadly, almost wearily:
“We were married, Sammy and me, his last leave in August.”
“It’s not true,” Martha said. “It can’t be true.” With a triumphant rush, “I’m getting Sammy’s allowance.”
Still looking towards the place where Sammy might be, Annie said:
“We wanted you to get the allowance, Sammy and me. We didn’t want it stopped on you.”
Martha was harsh and pale with anger. Her masterful pride throbbed in her. Between her clenched teeth she said:
“I don’t believe it. I’ll never believe it.”
Slowly Annie withdrew her eyes from the place where Sammy might be. Her eyes were dry. A great shadow lay upon her face, she looked more than ever as though she laboured under a heavy burden. She handed Martha the telegram in her hand.
Martha took the telegram. The telegram was to Mrs. Annie Fenwick. The telegram said: Regret to inform you your husband Corporal Samuel Fenwick killed in action March 19th.
TWENTY
On the 24th of April, 1918, Arthur’s sentence expired and at nine o’clock of that day, dressed in his own clothes, he passed through the prison gates. He came out of the grey stone archway with his head down and walked cautiously away. It was a grey, dank morning, but to Arthur the sense of light and space was unbelievable. He could scarcely understand, his eyes blinked apprehensively. Why was there no cell, no wall to stop him? He walked faster, suddenly aware that the walls lay behind him now. He wanted to get away.
But soon he had to give over walking quickly; he wasn’t fit for that. He was like a man just out of hospital, very weak and easily tired, with a stoop and a sickly pallor ingrained into him. His hair was cropped close, too, right down to the bone—Warder Collins had seen to that a couple of days before, it was Collins’ last little joke—so that he looked as if he had been through an operation on his brain, a serious operation on his brain in that large hospital he had left behind.
It was this operation on his brain, no doubt, which made him glance nervously at everybody he met to see if they were looking at him. Were people looking at him? Were they looking? Were they?
He walked for about a mile until he came to the outskirts of Benton, then he went into a workman’s coffee-house: Good pull up for lorries was on the sign outside. He sat down, keeping his hat on to cover his shaven head, and his eyes on the table, and he ordered coffee and two poached eggs. He did not look at the man who served him, but he saw the man’s boots and dirty apron and yellow nicotined fingers. The man asked to be paid whenever he brought the coffee and poached eggs.
Bowed over the table with his hat on, Arthur drank the coffee and ate the poached eggs. The strong knife and fork felt clumsy in his hands after the tin cutlery of the prison, and his clothes sat loosely and awkwardly upon him. He had shrunk a little in the place back there. But he thought, I’m out. I’m out, he thought. Oh, thank God, I’m out.
The coffee and eggs made him feel better and he was able to look at the man on the way to the door and ask him for a packet of cigarettes.
The man had red hair and an expression of vulgar inquisitiveness.
“Twenty?”
Arthur nodded abruptly and put a shilling on the counter.
The red-haired man put on a confidential air.
“Been in long?” he asked.
Then Arthur knew that the man knew he had been in prison—probably most of the convicts stopped at this place on their release—and a wave of colour rushed into his sallow face. Without answering he walked out of the shop.
The first cigarette was not very good, it made him slightly giddy but it made him feel less conspicuous in the street. A little boy going to school saw him open the packet and ran after him asking for the cigarette card. Arthur fumbled eagerly for the card with his calloused and insensitive fingers and held it out. It helped him in some mysterious way to be spoken to by this little boy, to feel for an instant the warm contact of his hand. He felt
himself suddenly more human.
At Benton terminus he took the tram to Tynecastle and in the tram he sat thinking with his eyes on the floor. When he had been in prison he could think of nothing but the outside. Now he was outside he could think of nothing but the prison. The good-bye of the governor, of the prison chaplain, rang in his ears: “I hope this has made a man of you.” The doctor’s inspection: “Pull up your shirt, let your trousers down.” Hicks’s final pleasantry over the shoulder at exercise: “Little bit of skirt to-night, Cuthbert?” Yes, he remembered. He remembered particularly the last satire of Warder Collins. Something had made him offer his hand to Collins when the warder had made the key sound for the last time. But Warder Collins had said:
“Not on your bloody life, Cuthbert,” and expectorated neatly into Arthur’s hand. As he thought about it Arthur instinctively wiped his palm against his trouser leg.
The tram blundered into Tynecastle, through crowded familiar streets, and finally stopped outside Central Station. Arthur got out of the tram and entered the station. He meant to buy a ticket for Sleescale, but when he got to the booking-office he hesitated. He could not bring himself to do it. He went up to a porter.
“When is the next train for Sleescale?”
“Eleven fifty-five.”
Arthur looked at the big clock above the bookstall. He had five minutes in which to take his ticket and catch the train. No, no, he couldn’t decide so quickly, he didn’t want to go home yet. He had been informed, at the time, of his mother’s death and now, with a queer self-deception, he tried to attribute his indecision to the fact that she was gone. He wavered away from the booking-office and stood before the bookstall, studying a placard. Big Push Begins. He liked the crowd about him, the bustle, movement, obscurity. As a girl brushed past him he remembered Hicks’s remark again: Little bit of skirt to-night, Cuthbert?
He reddened and turned away. To put off time he went into the refreshment-room and ordered a mug of tea and a roll. Why disguise the fact? He wanted to see Hetty. He was so weak, so tired, so sick with pain and longing, he wanted to be with her, to fall on his knees before her, put his arms about her. Hetty really loved him. She would understand, pity and console him. A melting tenderness consumed him, nothing else mattered, tears filled his eyes. He must, he must see Hetty.
Towards one o’clock he left the station and started to walk towards College Row. He took the slight incline slowly, partly because he was quite exhausted, but chiefly because he was afraid. The mere thought of seeing Hetty again drove the blood from his heart. When he reached No. 17 he was in a pale anguish of expectation. He stood on the opposite side of the street staring across at the Todds’ house. Now that he was here he shrank from going in, a host of unhappy thoughts deterred him. How pleased they would be to see him, walking in unexpectedly like this, straight from prison. No, he had not the courage to walk up these steps and ring the bell.
He hung about in an agony of indecision, longing with all his soul to see Hetty, hoping he might have the luck to find her leaving or entering the house. But there was no sign of Hetty. Towards three o’clock the faintness came over him again and he felt he must sit down. He turned towards the Town Moor, which lay at the top of College Row, making for one of the benches under the lime trees, telling himself he would return later and resume his watch. He crossed the road, his feet dragging languidly, and, at the corner, he walked straight into Laura Millington.
The unexpectedness of the meeting was quite startling; it made him catch his breath. At first Laura did not recognise him. Her face, wearing a look of preoccupation, almost of apathy, remained unchanged. She made to pass on. And then she knew him.
“Why, Arthur!” she gasped, “it’s you.”
His eyes remained upon the pavement.
“Yes,” he stammered, “it’s me.”
She gazed at him intently, her expression altered, shocked from its fixed melancholy.
“Have you been to see my father?”
He shook his head dumbly with eyes still averted. The hopelessness in his attitude gave her a renewed pang. Deeply touched, she came up to him and took his arm.
“You must come in,” she said. “I’m going there now. You look quite ill.”
“No,” he muttered, drawing away childishly, “they don’t want me.”
“But you must,” she insisted. And like a child he yielded and allowed her to lead him towards the house. He had the awful feeling that at any moment he might burst into tears.
She took a key from her bag, opened the door, and they went into the back sitting-room which he knew so well. The sight of his shaven head forced a gasp of pity from Laura’s lips. She took him by the shoulders and put him in a chair by the fire. He sat there with his prison pallor upon him and his clothes hanging on his drooping prison-shrunken frame while she hurried into the kitchen. There she said nothing to Minnie, the maid, but herself quickly brought him a tray with tea and hot buttered toast. She watched him with concern while he drank the tea and ate some of the toast.
“Finish it,” she said gently.
He obeyed. His intuition told him immediately that neither Hetty nor her father was in the house. Momentarily his mind detached itself from Hetty. He raised his head and for the first time looked at Laura.
“Thanks, Laura,” he said humbly.
She did not answer, but once again that quick sympathy flashed into her pale face as though a sudden gleam from the fire had illumined it. He could not help thinking how much older she looked; there were shadows under her eyes, she was dressed indifferently, her hair quite carelessly arranged. Through his daze, the change in her reached and astounded him.
“Is anything wrong, Laura? Why are you here, alone?”
This time a deep and painful emotion broke through the surface of her eyes.
“Nothing’s wrong.” She bent and stirred up the fire. “I’m staying with father this week. You see, I’m closing up the house at Hilltop, in the meantime.”
“Closing your house?”
She nodded, then added in a low voice:
“Stanley’s gone down to Bournemouth to a rest home; you probably didn’t know he’d been shell-shocked. I shall join him when I have settled things up here.”
He looked at her helplessly; his brain refused to operate.
“But the works, Laura?” he exclaimed at last.
“That’s been arranged,” she answered in a flat voice. “That’s the least of it, Arthur.”
He continued to look at her in a kind of wonder. This was not the Laura he had known. The fixed sadness in her face was quite startling, that droop to her mouth, ironic yet pained. A deep, mysterious instinct, born of his own suffering, made him sense a wounded spirit, behind this outer, indifferent crust. But he could not work it out just now, the insufferable fatigue bore down on him again. A long silence came between them.
“I’m sorry to be a trouble to you, Laura,” he said eventually.
“You’re no trouble.”
He hesitated, feeling she might now wish him to go.
“But now that I’m here, I thought—I thought I might as well wait and see Hetty.”
Another silence. He could feel her looking at him. Then she rose from the hearthrug where she had been kneeling, staring into the fire, and stood before him.
“Hetty isn’t here any more,” she said.
“What?”
“No,” she shook her head. “She’s down at Farnborough now—you see—” A pause. “You see, Arthur, that’s where Dick Purves is.”
“But what—” He broke off, a barb twisting in his heart.
“You don’t know,” Laura said in that same flat voice. “She married him in January.” Her eyes slipped from his, she put her hand on his shoulder. “It was a sudden affair; when they gave him the V.C., it was just immediately after your mother died, after the inquest. He got the V.C. for bringing down the Zeppelin. We never thought, Arthur… But Hetty just seemed to make up her mind. The wedding was in all the pape
rs.”
He sat perfectly still, in a kind of graven stolidity.
“So Hetty’s married.”
“Yes, Arthur.”
“I never thought of that.” He swallowed and the spasm seemed to pass over his entire body. “I don’t suppose she’d have had anything to do with me in any case.”
Wisely, she made no attempt to console him. He made an effort in the chair.
“Well, I ought to be going now,” he said in an unsteady voice.
“No, don’t go yet, Arthur. You still look seedy.”
“The worst of it is… I feel it.” He got shakily to his feet. “O Lord, I do feel queer. My head’s full of feathers. How do I get to the station?” He raised his hand stupidly to his brow.
Laura took a step forward, intercepting him on his way to the door.
“You’re not going, Arthur. I can’t let you go. You’re not fit. You ought to be in bed.”
“You mean well, Laura,” he said thickly, swaying on his feet. “I mean well, too. We both mean well.” He laughed. “Only we can’t do anything.”
Resolution formed in her. She put her arm round him determinedly.
“Listen to me, Arthur, I refuse to send you out in such a state. You’re going to bed… here… now. Don’t say another word. I’ll explain to father whenever he comes in.” Supporting him she assisted him into the hall and up the stairs. She lit the gas fire in her bedroom, quietly but firmly helped him out of his clothes and into bed. When this was done she filled a hot water bottle and put it to his feet. She considered him anxiously: “How do you feel now?”
“Better,” he answered, without meaning it.
He lay curled up on his side, realising that he was in Hetty’s room, in Hetty’s bed. How amusing!—he was actually in dear little Hetty’s dear little bed. Nice bit of skirt tonight, eh, Cuthbert? He wanted to laugh but could not. Recollection twisted the barb in his heart again.
