The Stars Look Down

by A. J. Cronin

  “I am yet to be convinced.”

  David relinquished the Rev. Low. He fastened his eye upon Ramage again. He said slowly;

  “Let me make it quite clear. If this meeting refuses to sanction a new and adequate advertisement asking for tenders for meat I shall forward these statements to the County Medical Officer of Health and ask for a complete investigation of the entire question.”

  A duel ensued between the eyes of Ramage and David. But Ramage’s eyes fell first. He was afraid. He had been swindling the Council for the past fifteen years, selling bad meat and selling underweight; he was afraid, horribly afraid of what an inquiry might reveal. Damn him, he thought, I’ll have to climb down this time, damn the rotten interfering swine. I’ll get even with him one day if it kills me. Aloud, he said in a surly voice:

  “There’s no need to vote. Advertise and be damned. My tender’ll be as good as the rest.”

  A glorious wave of triumph swept over David. I’ve won, he thought, I’ve won. The first step on the long road had been taken. He could do it. And he would.

  The business of the meeting proceeded.

  THREE

  But, alas, the results of David’s election to the Town Council proved sadly disappointing to Jenny. Jenny’s ardours were invariably so sprightly that the afterglow was always a little tarnished at the edges. And Jenny’s enthusiasm for the election went up like a rocket, burst with a beautiful display of stars and then fizzled out.

  She had hoped for social advancement through the election, in particular she longed to “know” Mrs. Ramage. The afternoon tea parties which Mrs. Ramage gave were the haut ton of Sleescale: Mrs. Strother, the head master’s wife, was usually there, and Mrs. Armstrong, and Mrs. Dr. Proctor and Mrs. Bates the draper’s wife. Now if Mrs. Bates, why not Mrs. Fenwick?—that was the question which Jenny asked herself with quite a breathless eagerness. They often had music at these tea parties, and who could sing more nicely than Jenny? Passing By was such a beautiful song—quite classical in a manner of speaking: Jenny burned to sing that song before all the ladies of Sleescale in Mrs. Ramage’s elegant drawing-room in the big new red sandstone house on Sluice Dene. Oh dear, oh dear, chafed Jenny, if only I could get in with Mrs. Ramage.

  But no recognition came from Mrs. Ramage, not even the faintest shadow of a cross-street bow. And then, at the beginning of December a dreadful incident occurred. One Tuesday afternoon Jenny went into Bates’s shop to buy a short length of muslin—Cousin Mayrianne writing in Mab’s Journal had just hinted that muslin would soon be the dernier cri for smart women’s undies—and there, at the counter of the drapery, examining some fine lace, stood Mrs. Ramage. Caught in this unguarded situation she looked quite amiable, did Mrs. Ramage. She was a big hard-boned bleakfaced woman who gave the queer impression of having been knocked about a bit and of having stood up to it with remarkable determination. But on this afternoon, fingering the pieces of lace, she had less determination and more pleasantness in her face. And as Jenny edged close to Mrs. Ramage and thought of both their husbands on the same council, so to speak, Jenny’s social aspirations went completely to her head. She came right forward beside the counter and, smiling in her best company manner to Mrs. Ramage and showing all her nice teeth, Jenny said prettily:

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Ramage. Isn’t it a beautiful afternoon for the time of year?”

  Mrs. Ramage turned slowly. She looked at Jenny. The horrible thing was that she recognised Jenny, then ceased to recognise her. For, in one deadly second, her face closed up like an oyster. She said very patronisingly and formally:

  “I don’t think we’ve met before.”

  But poor Jenny, flustered and misguided, rushed on to her doom.

  “I’m Mrs. Fenwick,” she murmured. “My husband is on the Town Council with your husband, Mrs. Ramage.”

  Mrs. Ramage looked Jenny up and down cruelly:

  “Oh, that,” she said, and raising the shoulder nearest Jenny she went back to the lace, saying in the sweetest manner to Bates’ young lady assistant:

  “I think after all I’ll have the most expensive piece, my dear, and of course you’ll send it and charge it to my account.”

  Jenny blushed scarlet. She could have died with shame. Such an affront, and before the nice young lady in the millinery! She spun round and fled from the shop.

  That evening she whimpered out her story to David. He listened with a set face, his lips drawn into a fine line, then he said patiently:

  “You can hardly expect the woman to fall on your bosom, Jenny, when Ramage and I are at each other’s throats. In these last three months I’ve blocked his rotten meat contract. I’m trying to hold up the grant of £500 he was calmly asking the town to whack out on the new road past his new house in Sluice Dene. A new road useless for everybody but him! At the last meeting I suggested he was contravening six different regulations in his filthy private slaughter-house. You can imagine he doesn’t exactly love me!”

  She gazed at him resentfully, with scalding tears in her eyes.

  “Why must you go against people like that?” she sobbed. “You’re so queer. It would have been so useful for you to be on the right side of Mr. Ramage. I want you to get on.”

  He answered compassionately:

  “But Jenny dear, I’ve told you getting on in that particular sense doesn’t exist for me now. Perhaps I am queer. But I’ve been through some queer experiences in these last years. The pit disaster—and the war! Don’t you think, Jenny, that it’s high time some of us set ourselves to fight the abuses that produce disasters like the Neptune disaster and wars like the last war?”

  “But, David,” she wailed with unanswerable logic, “you’re only getting thirty-five shillings a week!”

  His breast heaved suddenly. He stopped arguing, gave her a quiet look, then rose and went into the other room.

  This impressed her with the sense of his neglect, and the hot tears of self-pity trickled afresh. Then she brooded, became sulky and ill-tempered. David was different, completely different; her cajoling went for nothing, she seemed to have no grip upon him at all. She tried with a certain pique to make him passionate towards her, but in that way too he had turned curiously austere. She could feel that the physical side of love, unsupported by tenderness, was repugnant to him. She felt it as an insult. She could feel passionate in a minute, come right out of a violent quarrel to be violently passionate, to want a quick and urgent satisfaction—she called it modestly “making things up.” But not David. It was, she told herself, unnatural!

  Jenny, of course, was not the one, in her own phrase, “to stand being slighted,” and she got her own back in many ways. She completely relaxed her efforts to please: David began to come home at nights to an out fire and no supper at all. The fact that he never complained now and never quarrelled exasperated her worst of all. On these nights she tried everything she knew to provoke him to a quarrel and when she failed she started to taunt him:

  “Do you know that I was earning four pounds a week during the war?—that’s more than twice what you’re earning now!”

  “I’m not in this job for the money, Jenny.”

  “I don’t care for money and you know it. I’m not mean. I’m generous. Remember the suit I gave you to go on our honeymoon. Oh, that was a scream that was!—me giving you your trousseau like. Even in those days you hadn’t no gumption. I wouldn’t call myself a man at all if I couldn’t bring home decent money at the end of the week.”

  “We all have our standards, Jenny.”

  “Of course,” with supreme spitefulness, “I could get a position any time I wanted. I went through the paper this morning and there was half a dozen posts I could have applied for easy. Why! I could get to be a buyer in the millinery any day.”

  “Be patient, Jenny! Perhaps I’m not going to be such a dud as you imagine.”

  If Jenny had grasped the situation she might, by construing it to her own standards, have been reconciled to patience. David was proving a succes
s with Heddon—he accompanied him to all the Lodge meetings in the district and he was usually asked to speak. At Seghill he had addressed fifteen hundred men in the local Institute over the question of the Southport Resolutions. Heddon had been fogged by the findings of the January Conference and he had allowed David to handle the whole affair. The speech was a triumph for David: lucid, vital and alive with a passionate sincerity. At the end of the meeting, as he came off the platform, he was surrounded by a mass of men, who, to his amazement, wanted to shake him by the hand. Old Jack Briggs, seventy-six, beer- and case-hardened, the doyen of Seghill, pumped his arm till it ached.

  “By Gor,” croaked old Jack in the dialect, “tha wor a bloddy gud speech, lad. Aw’ve heerd mony a one but aw diddent niver hear better nor tha. Ye’ll go fawr, hinny!”

  And Heddon echoed that historic sentiment. The incredible fact stood established that Heddon, a bitter and unlettered man, was not jealous of David. Heddon had few friends, his violent nature repulsed all but the most persevering of his acquaintances, but from the first Heddon had taken to David. Heddon saw in David a rare and disinterested spirit and he knew so much of the dross of humanity that despite himself Heddon came to love David. He felt instinctively, here is a man who has found his natural bent, a born speaker, unruffled, penetrating and sincere, a clever and passionately earnest man, a man who might do much for his fellow men. And it was as if Heddon had said fiercely to himself: for God’s sake don’t let me be bitter and mean and envious but let me do my damnedest to help him on!

  It was Heddon who read with delight the reports of the Sleescale Town Council meetings which were finding their way into the Tynecastle papers. The Tynecastle papers had discovered David, and his attacks upon the excellent and well-established abuses of Sleescale were manna to them in a dull season. From time to time the Tynecastle papers gaily captioned David and his doings: “Rumpus in Sleescale Council Chamber,” and “Sleescale Trouble Maker at Work Again!”

  Heddon dissolved in bitter laughter over the report of David’s repartees. Peering over the paper’s edge:

  “Did ye really say that to the ucker, David?”

  “Nothing like so good, Tom!”

  “I’d have liked to see that Ramage’s face when ye told him his bloddy slaughter-house wasn’t fit to kill pigs in!”

  David’s inveterate modesty helped him all the more with Tom Heddon. If he had displayed the first signs of swelled head he would have killed himself stone dead with Heddon. But he did not, which made Tom cut out the choicest columns from the Tynecastle Argue and forward them to his old friend Harry Nugent with a significant blue pencil scrawl.

  Jenny knew nothing of all this. And Jenny was not patient, construing David’s absorption into neglect and being maddened by that supposed neglect. Jenny was so mad she had an excellent excuse for finding vicarious consolation in Murchison’s invalid port. By the spring of 1919 Jenny was drinking regularly again. And about this time, an event of considerable psychological importance occurred.

  On Sunday the 5th of May old Charley Gowlan died. Charley had been ill for six months with Bright’s disease and finally, despite repeated tappings of his shiny, swollen abdomen, Charley went to God. It was a grim paradox that Charley, who had never cared for water much, should be water-logged at the end. But paradox or no, Charley did die, in mean, neglected circumstances. And two days later Joe arrived in Sleescale.

  Joe’s coming to Sleescale fell nothing short of a sensation. He came on the morning of that Tuesday in a glittering Sunbeam motor-car, a new twenty-five green Sunbeam driven by a man in dark green uniform. Immediately Joe stepped out of the car at his old home in Alma Terrace the car was surrounded by a gaping crowd. Harry Ogle, Jake Wicks, the new checkweigher, and a few of the Neptune overmen were at the house—it was almost time for the funeral—and although rumours of Joe’s prosperity had reached the Terraces they were frankly dazzled by the change in Joe. Indeed, Frank Walmsley, who had once been his chargeman, straightaway addressed his as sir. Joe was discreetly but handsomely dressed, he wore spats, his cuff links were of dull gold and his watch-chain of fine platinum. He was shaved and manicured and polished. He shone with a bluff and enterprising opulence.

  Harry shifted his feet awkwardly before Joe’s opulence, struggling with the memory of that young Joe who had been hand-putter in the Paradise.

  “I’m glad you’ve come like, Joe, we clubbed together, a few of us officials, to get the money like, we diddent want your dad to have a guardian’s funeral.”

  “Good God, Harry,” Joe blew up dramatically. “Are you talking about the workhouse? D’you mean to say it was as bad as that?”

  His eye swept round the low, dirty kitchen where he had once licked pot pie from the blade of his knife, and fell upon the wretched black coffin where the dropsical corpse of his father lay.

  “My God,” he raved, “why didn’t somebody tell me? Why didn’t you write to me? You all know me, where I am, and what I am. Is this a Christian country or what is it? You ought to be damned well ashamed of yourselves, letting the poor old man conk out in this way. Too much trouble I suppose to even ’phone me at my works…”

  He was equally affected at the funeral. At the graveside he broke down and blubbered into a big silk handkerchief. Everyone agreed it did him the greatest credit. And he drove straight from the cemetery to Pickings in Lamb Street and ordered a magnificent headstone.

  “Send the bill to me, Tom,” he declared eloquently. “Expense is no object!” Later, Tom did send the bill: he sent the bill a great many times.

  After the funeral Joe made a short sentimental tour of the town, evincing all the successful man’s emotion at visiting his old haunts. He impressed Harry Ogle with the need for getting him a photograph of the house in Alma Terrace. Joe wanted a photograph, a big enlarged photograph; he must have a photograph of the humble home where he was born. Let Harry get Blair the photographer to do it and send the bill and the photograph to Joe!

  Towards the end of the day, about six o’clock, Joe dropped in to see his old friend David. The news of Joe’s visit to Sleescale had preceded him, and Jenny, besides informing David, had prepared lavishly and excitedly for Joe.

  But Joe declined Jenny’s hospitality point blank; he had a dinner engagement at the Central, Tynecastle. Jenny flinched; but she persevered. Then Joe took one calm and competent look at Jenny, up and down, like that, and Jenny saw that it was no go now—no go at all. The gladness went right out of her eye, the coquettishness vanished and she sat silent—quivering and envious.

  Yet she was all ears, and, hanging on every word of Joe’s account of himself, she could not help comparing the two men and what they had achieved: the glittering success of Joe, and the dismal failure of David.

  Joe spoke very openly—there was always a magnificent frankness about Joe. It was clear he had regarded the end of the war as premature—it hadn’t been such a bad old war after all. Yet things were looking great even now. Pulling out his gold cigarette case Joe lit up, breathed a Turkish aroma down his nostrils, then, leaning forward, tapped David confidentially on the knee.

  “You knew we’d bought out Millington at the foundry—Jim Mawson and me. God, I’m sorry for poor Stanley. He’s living down at Bournemouth for good now, him and the wife, he couldn’t get out Platt Lane quick enough. A nice chap, mind you, but no stability at all. He’s a wreck, they tell me, a nervous wreck. Oh well, maybe it was the best thing that could happen to him, us taking the works off his hands; he got a price too, oh yes, he got a price.” Joe paused, inhaled cigarette smoke and smiled guilelessly at David. His bragging had acquired subtlety now, he covered it with a bland indifference. “You knew we’d got the order for the new Neptune equipment? What? Yes, sure enough, we turned over again the minute the war went west. While all the mugs sat on their dumps of whizz-bang castings and wondered what was happenin’ we got back to tools and shackle bolts and roofing-bars and haulage. You see,” Joe became more confidential, more expansive than ev
er, “while the war was on it was all production at the collieries; not a red one of them had time to recondition their plant, even supposin’ they could get the equipment—an’ they couldn’t. Now Jim and me figured it out they’d be yellin’ for stuff when peace came on, and there wouldn’t be nobody to answer the yell, except maybe the early birds like Jim and me.” Joe sighed gently. “Well, that’s how we got the Neptune order. Ah-ha, fifty thousands pounds of stuff we’ll sell them at the Neptune before the year’s out.”

  The tremendous, the almost fabulous sum, fifty thousand pounds, resounded in the small room filled with pinchbeck furniture and the smoke of Joe’s Turkish cigarette and almost burst poor Jenny’s eardrums. To think that Joe was handling such colossal business! She shrank down into her seat, consumed with envy.

  Joe saw the effect he was creating, the famished stare in Jenny’s eyes, the cold hostility in David’s, and it all went a little to his head. With patronising fluency he ran on.

  “Mind you, although we’re busy at the works—Mawson and Gowlan I ought to say, it’s a good name, don’t you think?—Excuse me, I can’t help being a bit struck on the firm. Well, as I was sayin’, Jim and me has all sorts of side lines. Take this, for instance. You’ve heard of the Disposals Board. No?” Joe shook his head regretfully. “Well, you surely ought to have heard of that. You might have made a bit of money if you’d heard of that, although, mind you, there’s got to be capital behind you to do anything. You see the Government, more power to them, has bought and ordered and commandeered a whole pack of things they don’t need now, everything from gum elastic boots to a fleet of merchant ships. An’ seein’ the Government don’t need these things naturally the Government wants to be rid of them!” Joe, loyal subject of the Crown, lolled back in his chair, permitting himself a gentle grin at his manner of helping the Government, in his own small way, to be rid of them. “You see that little car of mine outside?”

  “Oh yes, Joe,” Jenny gulped. “It’s a beauty.”