by A. J. Cronin
Chapter Two
In her frightful desolation he was beside her at last, her son, pressed against her. She felt tears of love and tenderness driving out the tears of misery from her eyes.
‘You’re not to cry, though Peter,’ she exclaimed, trying to smile at him, ‘or I’ll cry too.’
But her smile and the strange blackness of her dress racked him into fresh sobs, through which he stammered:
‘I’ll stop, then, mother; I’ll stop. Oh, yes, I’ll stop.’
She took his hand tightly and turned to Edward.
‘Come in, Edward,’ she said in a low voice. ‘It was good of you to bring him. Joe is here, too.’
The door closed behind them, and, passing through the hall, they entered the parlour.
‘Come along, Ned,’ said Joe at once, in a sad, hushed voice, speaking from the armchair in which he sat. ‘I was just wondering when you would be over, and Peter, too. It’s time we had a fambly talk. Well, well! You’re a fine big boy now, Peter. Don’t cry, Peter boy. Take a look at that brave little woman that’s your mother, and don’t cry another drop out of your eye.’
Obediently, Peter looked up at his mother, and, tightening his choking throat, nodded. ‘Yes, Uncle Joe.’
‘Good boy, good boy,’ replied the other approvingly, his short stumps of fingers playing with the seals on the heavy gold chain that glistened across his stomach. His eye, glistening too with a sad benevolence, swept the three in turn, and finally settled upon Edward, now seating himself with a melancholy solemnity.
Lucy, her arm around her son, drew him close suddenly to her knee; the small parlour seemed over-full and heavy with an apprehensive silence. A slant of sunlight broke through the window and gashed into the shaded room like a yellow blade. No one seemed to know what to say.
‘Well,’ said Joe at last, looking slowly around again, ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It’s a fair knockout.’ He sighed. ‘But there’s no way out of it. He’s gone now, poor fellow, and God rest his soul.’ He cocked his eye at Edward. ‘Can we look to the cloth to speak?’
Edward stirred uncomfortably. Should he put up a prayer? Hardly, he thought, with just the family here; besides, he had himself officiated at the funeral.
‘Well,’ repeated Joe, ‘what have you to say about it?’
‘Have you – have you gone into things?’ hesitatingly enquired Edward of Lucy. ‘For example, the bill for the funeral?’
He was, despite Joe’s patent affability, keyed to a less magniloquent note in his elder brother’s presence. And now, indeed, Joe lifted a hairy, arresting hand.
‘No!’ he exclaimed dramatically. ‘I didn’t mean you to start on that line. That’s my affair, if you please.’ He faced them in generous aggression. ‘God pity my soul!’ he cried indignantly. ‘What do you think I am? Didn’t I tell you I’m going to pay for the whole shoot? Am I a low-down begrudger? As if I couldn’t do that for my poor dead brother!’
His blunt nostrils heaved; his round paunch quivered spasmodically; a tear hung upon his eyelid. He was genuinely moved, and he continued impressively:
‘Yes, and I did give him a lovely funeral, didn’t I? Lovely!’ And his words passed over his lips with a slow deliberation as though he relished them. ‘Begod and I did! The best brass-plated coffin that money could buy! And lashin’s of flowers. And everything handsome and proper. And every farden of it I’ll pay myself! Money’s no object to me. And him dyin’ sudden on us like he done. God pity my soul! If I couldn’t have buried my own brother right, what kind of an object would I be?’
He drew the back of his hand across his eyes, and gazed towards Lucy for approval.
Pale and very silent, worn out by the anguish of the last two weeks, she bent her head whilst her eyes traced the pattern of the carpet. Would Joe never cease his effusive recollection of the funeral? He had insisted that Frank be buried in the family grave at Levenford – a proceeding involving a long journey by carriage; had declared vociferously that he would pay for all. And, prostrate, she had been unable to combat the vulgar ostentation of his grief.
Holding her son closer to her knee, she shivered again at the recollection of that day. It had been wet. Strange how frequently the last dismal function of interment invokes the drabbest and most dismal complexion of the sky. But so it was. That day was very wet, and the rain poured ceaselessly with a hurrying patter, mocking Joe’s arrangements; pouring on the professional mourners, lugubrious and stiff, on the sumptuous hearse, black yet glittering with glass, on the sickly banks of white flowers, on all the show and futility of a pretentious funeral. The last thing Frank would have desired; the last thing that she desired.
But Joe was in his element: his top-hat set to a rakish slant, his thumbs straying seldom from his arm-holes, grief glistening in his excited eye.
Rain. Rain. Rain.
It poured mercilessly upon the elaborate cortège during the long journey to Levenford – a drive beginning with a slow solemnity through the town but whipping quite gaily into a quick trot at the end of Garsden Street. The carriages bumped and splashed along the empty country roads. Dully, she thought of the limbs of the dead man shaken and flung into strange and listless attitudes inside that wide and costly coffin. Why was he there? It made her shudder, that piercing thought.
At a bend of the road she saw perched on the hearse a cowering mute sucking his fuming clay, and within her something recoiled at the wretched incongruity of it all. It was well that she had opposed Peter’s coming: Joe had desired that he attend ‘ to take a cord’ at the graveside: for now she recognised this travesty of mourning was no fit exhibition for her son.
At the graveside the rain turned the soil to cloying mud, bruised the petals of the wreaths into a limp misery. Edward, in black stole, looked pale and fearful of the damp; Joe’s blubbering – for blubber he did at the last moment – froze her own grief; she stood stiffly whilst they pulled on the black cords and lowered the coffin into the raw gashed earth.
Afterwards they went to Joe’s house above the Shamrock Tavern – a fitting climax to the tragic day. The house itself repelled her – dirty, disordered, littered with clothes and food. Joe’s whippet leaping the air wildly, Polly’s fur coat on the dresser beside the raw pork steaks – the whole redolent of its own composite odour, the lingering smell of every rich meal that had been prepared within these greasy walls.
The room was full of smoke; the conversation rang in her ears:
‘True enough – that was the year Branagan came over.’
‘Even money it should have been’ – this from Joe as he sucked his cigar.
‘’Twas pulled if you ask me.’
‘The blazes it was!’ They were gathered in a genial coterie, all Joe’s friends, none of whom she knew.
Apart, with curious reserve, stood the others, her own friends: her brother Richard; Lennox watching her with a curious sympathetic eye.
She had seen them, seen it all dimly through the numb curtain of her wretchedness, the frightful misery of her spirit.
But it was over! Now abruptly she raised her head, straining to banish the recollection from her mind, striving, for her son’s sake, to face the future.
Joe was still speaking.
‘I tell you,’ he declared at last, with that intimate manner, lately increased, ‘I’m going to see that Lucy and the boy come out of this right. What kind of things are we if we can’t stand by our own?’
‘Well,’ murmured Edward diffidently, ‘if you mean it, Joe.’
He knew his brother to be comfortably off; he, naturally, was at a disadvantage: by virtue of his calling, he had no means, merely his paltry yearly competence.
‘Of course I mean it! What do you think I opened my mouth for?’ returned Joe, widening his eye aggressively. ‘So you can take that as gospel.’
There was a pause. Then Edward spoke again, now quite hurt at Joe’s monopolising an attitude which should, by virtue of dignity, devolve on him; and he sa
id rather loftily:
‘What exactly are your plans, Lucy?’
‘Yes,’ broke in Joe, hanging forward in his chair. ‘What are you thinking of doing? How much did Frank leave?’
Edward drew in his breath. Had Joe no decency, no respect for the precedence of the cloth, grossly to distort his questions like that?
Lucy blushed painfully, wincing from the words. Yet she knew that she must face this interrogation with courage; Joe did not mean his manner to be offensive.
‘I don’t know,’ she said in a low voice. ‘There’s various things to pay.’ She had herself proposed to indemnify the Bowies against the dinghy’s loss. ‘But when everything’s settled there should be – should be more than a hundred pounds left.’
At her words Joe’s mouth hung down slackly; then he let out a long whistle and lay back in his chair, fixing his gaze pointedly at the ceiling. Edward, too, looked somewhat startled.
‘Frank was just beginning to get on,’ she said in that low, strained voice.
She faltered slightly, looking from one to the other, her colour still high upon her pale cheeks.
‘Was he not insured?’ shot out Joe.
She shook her head; as if Frank would have troubled about insurance!
‘Well, it isn’t a great deal,’ said Edward slowly, in a logical sort of voice. ‘No, it isn’t a great deal.’
‘Pah!’ cried Joe contemptuously, jingling the loose change in his trouser pocket. ‘It’s nothing, nothing at all. It’s less than nothing. What in God’s name Frank was thinking of I don’t know, but it’s pure suicide leaving a wife and child with only a hundred pound. I’d have put him in the way of making a bit myself if he had only asked me, but he was one of them kind that wouldn’t look near you, wouldn’t ask a favour off the Pope himself.’
‘I tell you, Frank was getting on well,’ said Lucy with a full throat.
‘I know, I know. I’m not saying a word against my poor dead brother.’ He lowered his eye towards her. ‘But that doesn’t alter the case – not at all, not at all.’
A sudden thought struck him, and he jerked out:
‘Is that brother of yours going to help you?’
Lucy’s eyes, still moist, clouded over at his tone.
‘I don’t intend to ask him for help – or anybody else, for that matter,’ she said slowly. A vision of Richard’s cold, detached look at the funeral suddenly confronted her. Even now she could hear his guarded condolences.
‘I’m grieved, you know – grieved about the whole affair. Eva – Eva has been deeply upset.’
Though Richard had talked to her agreeably, his enquiries into her position had been cautious. He had given her clearly to understand that it was only just that Frank’s family should safeguard her interests in the future. As to himself, he stressed the liabilities that lay heavily upon his own shoulders. It was no surprise, this attitude.
‘I’ve got a certain amount of independence, Richard,’ she had then replied, ‘and I think I’ll keep it. I’ll be under obligation to nobody.’
He had nodded his head without speaking, concurring with this sentiment, expressing thus his approval of this manifestation of the Murray pride. Now, looking at Joe, she added quietly:
‘My brother has his own family and his own responsibilities. He’s got enough to do without me troubling him.’
Edward moved restlessly. He had been meditating, and now he felt that it was time for a little discourse.
‘There’s sure to be some way out,’ said he. ‘There’s no need for anxiety. God is very good. Something is sure to turn up for you, Lucy.’
He knew that it would be in the worst possible taste to suggest that she should marry again, but this was indeed at the back of his mind, and he inferred it blandly.
‘Tell us what you mean to do, then,’ said Joe slyly, who, from behind the shadow of his hand, had been all the time observing her.
‘I can work, surely,’ she returned.
‘Work?’ His tone was incredulous.
‘And why not?’ she asked defensively. ‘I can’t sit down and look at my fingers.’
The two brothers gazed at each other with an equal astonishment. It was not the age when women went freely into the world to work, except in the most subordinate positions. And she had no qualifications. A shop assistant? Something in the line of domestic duties? Unthinkable, reflected Edward; and with this in mind he queried dubiously:
‘Have you anything particular in view?’
‘Yes, I have,’ she replied, striving to make her quivering voice composed. ‘I have the chance to carry on Frank’s work, I’ve asked Mr Lennox. And he’s promised to let me have the chance.’
It was a fact. Faced by the urgent necessity of combating her grief, of facing the future, of safeguarding her son, she had approached Lennox. And he, at length, had consented to give her a trial.
‘He’d never let you do it,’ broke in Joe incredulously. ‘No, bedam, and he wouldn’t.’
‘But it’s conceivable,’ said Edward, pursing his lips, placing his finger-tips together. ‘And not uncongenial work, either. Quite ladylike – yes.’
Joe said nothing, and for a moment there was silence.
‘You’d never do it,’ said Joe again. For some reason he seemed aggrieved at her intention.
But she did not reply, and again he was silent.
‘What about Peter, though?’ exclaimed Edward suddenly. ‘You’ll be away all day, and late sometimes.’
At the words Joe’s manner relaxed; he slapped the arm of his chair.
‘Yes, you’ll need to put the boy to school,’ said he, ‘and I’ll give you a hand over him. We’ll send him to the Brothers’ College at Laughtown. That’s where my own boy was – a fine place; there’s Spaniards and everybody there. I know Brother John Jacob meself – had him down at the Green’s sports last year; he can lift a football with his one hand, can John Jacob; big lump of a man, J. J.! Big as a house! Of course I’ll help you with Peter.’
Dully, she looked at Joe; vaguely she had hoped that he would take an interest in the boy’s future; she was not satisfied with the school Peter was attending; and yet – was she to lose her son too?
‘Quite a good school,’ assented Edward judiciously. ‘They are not ordained, of course, the Brothers – still, quite passably good.’
‘Ah! It’s a fine place, I tell you,’ broke in Joe shortly. ‘Set up my Barney, it did. And you can leave the paying to me.’
Edward raised one eyebrow, but made no further comment. He felt indeed that some definite decision had been reached, that the awkward obstacle of the future had been surmounted. He detested trouble; although he was just, although his conscience never failed to function adequately, he nevertheless abhorred any contingency which might threaten to disturb his own peace of mind. He looked towards Lucy tolerantly, implying the truth of his assertion that the Almighty would disclose the proper pathway for the future.
With her arms still around her son, speaking to him through the tenderness of her touch, Lucy returned that gaze in silence.
‘Well,’ said Joe at length, ‘we’ve settled something. Peter’s for Laughtown and I’m payin’ the whole shoot.’ Again he looked at her slyly. ‘And you – you’ll see how you like the travelling, maybe. You’ll get tired of it soon enough.’ He paused importantly. ‘And now I’ll take a squint at the time,’ said he, pulling out his large gold watch and puckering a beady eye towards it. ‘Bedam, I’ll need to get along or I’ll miss my train.’ He stood up, took her hand in his, patted her shoulder effusively. He did not speak of his return, but his manner inferred intimately that he would return, and, after an affectionate leave-taking, he shook his head, tiptoed with obvious grief from the house.
Nor did Edward remain long after his brother had gone. The conversation had found him less assured than usual, left his manner a little over-stretched, as though his own mellow tones, after Joe’s downright brag, echoed somewhat weakly in the room and filled him with a
sense of bathos. As he rose he shot a cautious look at the boy.
‘Anna,’ he said guardedly; ‘have you heard from her since she got back?’
She shook her head, her eyes suddenly cast down.
‘No,’ she answered, in a quivering voice, ‘I don’t – I never want to hear from her again.’
He made no answer, but took his departure in subdued yet dignified manner, promising to come over shortly to satisfy himself as to her comfort and well-being. The door closed behind him gently, suavely.
They were alone, then, Lucy and her son, a constraint upon them through their very love and the awful strangeness of their situation.
Tenderly she looked at him. His return, the sight of him standing in gawky timidity upon the doorstep, had come as a consolation almost divine. The frightful tragedy of Frank’s death had torn her like the sudden evulsion of a limb. Prostrate, she had abandoned herself to an intense grief which clouded her vision to everything but her loss, and the irrevocable finality of that loss. But she had, after all, something to live for. She had her son; an inspiration towards fresh hope. His face was the face which she saw through the encircling haze of her sorrow, and she turned towards it passionately. A realisation of the future, the future before them both, dawned upon her and filled her with the growing knowledge that her life was not over; a new epoch it was which had begun, in which she would bind herself more closely to him.
Moved as by a sudden weakness, she did not know how she could part with him to send him to school. She wanted him beside her always. As she gave him his tea – and from time to time they looked at each other across the table almost diffidently – she felt this passionately. They did not speak much, though occasionally she made a little conversation, trying to put him at his ease. No mention was made of the awful forbidden subject; nothing, not by a word or even by a look between them.
