by A. J. Cronin
He held her arm tightly in his veined hand, and murmured his condolences gently. He had no Orders empowering him to the confessional, but this – this sensuous impression, powerful yet mellow – stole into him gracefully, like the bouquet of an old wine or the whisper of an old romantic melody.
When she had composed herself and controlled her voice to speech, despising, indeed, her own weakness, he talked to her about the school, how they hoped soon for a newer building, how he had been here for forty years. Attentively she listened. She had no idea of inspecting dormitories in the traditional manner, nor did he offer to conduct her thither; no matron appeared for her to interview – Brother Adolphus, the Infirmarian, held the matron’s post; he it was who sewed the boys’ trousers’ buttons when they so required him. Woman, inevitably, did not exist within that building.
‘The first term’s fees,’ she said; ‘ I would like to pay these now’; and she drew out of her purse eleven pounds, which was the necessary amount. Joe had not yet been to see her, but she preferred to discharge the obligation now, knowing that he could reimburse her at a later date.
Brother William waved away the matter and the money – yet somehow the deprecating hand received her sovereigns, and in a moment his stamped receipt was in her purse. She rose.
‘The boy!’ he exclaimed, and rang the bell again. Then he turned and gazed tactfully from the window. She stood quite still in the middle of the room, clasping her bag tightly in both hands, looking towards the door. It opened, and Peter came in, still animated by the excitement of the occasion. He had apparently encountered other boys, whom he had been very sorry to leave, whom he desired speedily to rejoin.
For her own sake, she refrained from embracing him, but kissed him lightly through her veil.
‘You’ll be all right?’ she enquired stiffly.
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ he assured her eagerly. ‘Certainly, mother.’
She said good-bye to Brother William, who, turning at the right moment, laid his hand on Peter’s shoulder before she swung round and with lowered head went out of the room.
The journey home was a succession of images: his childish face, moving in every expression against the background of the fleeting, darkening landscape. The separation, accomplished without bitter tears or protestations, had been so swift it left her with a sense of blankness, almost of unfulfilment, of a climax yet to come.
The house was cold and empty when she got home. The sad business of Netta’s dismissal had been achieved – regretfully but without recrimination: Netta had accepted the matter as inevitable – and now no fires, no meal, awaited her. But she had neither desire for food nor energy to cook it. She made herself a cup of tea and drank it. ‘Tea again,’ she thought dismally. She was taking too much tea these days. Still, a measure of comfort flowed through her with the warm drink, and, reassuring herself with the consideration of her son’s well-being, she turned her mind to the momentous question of her future work. She was to begin her duties on Monday morning. Sometimes the very idea of her attempting to enter, single-handed, without experience or talent, this world of business, startled her by its incredibility: sometimes its incongruity flashed upon her as ridiculous. She of all people to be attempting this! was the exclamation so continually before her mind, but tonight, although she felt herself inept, a tremendous desire swayed her and flowed into a determination to succeed. She went to bed in the lonely house hopefully, and not without the beginnings of a certain valiant cheerfulness.
Chapter Four
‘Do you know what you are to do now?’ said the man Andrews, gazing at her distrustfully.
‘I’m certain.’ she answered, as confidently as she could.
He looked at her doubtfully. He was an under-sized, middle-aged man, with a bushy but melancholy drooping moustache, and a mild cast in his left eye which intensified his air of pathos.
‘You’ve got the names of the customers?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the price list?’
‘Off by heart.’
‘You’ll mind all I’ve told you?’
She nodded, essaying to give herself courage by the thought: ‘If this under-sized creature can do his work, then I assuredly am capable of doing mine.’ But she was not so confident as she looked.
It was the fateful Monday morning, and she stood in the office dressed in a neat dark grey costume – reluctantly she had discarded the black as sentimental and inappropriate – awaiting the arrival of Lennox. She had been early, very early; he was late; and in the meantime Andrews had been grounding her in the simple essentials of her duties.
His interest was purely and exclusively selfish. He had no regard for Lucy, nor any altruistic desire for her success; but he had a strong regard for himself, and a pressing urge to retain his own position. At one time he had known the vicissitudes of ‘travelling’, and Lennox had hinted that in the event of Lucy’s failure Moore’s round might be his. It was an uncomfortable thought for Andrews, who, in his own idiom, was sick of the road.
For many reasons, indeed, he cherished his present post, not the least being that his house lay in the Gallowgate, near to the office, and he liked, above everything, to get home regularly for his meals. But he had small hopes of her success. What good was a woman outside of her own kitchen? And his opinion was clearly shared by young Frame – the office-boy – who, busy with his morning task of filing the previous day’s letters, fixed her from time to time with an almost patronising stare.
A curious and inappropriate figure, she seemed, standing in that office. There was a neatness about her dress and a lustre upon her hair; her face was calm, but it was a calmness that was slightly strained, and in her tightly clenched fingers she felt the rapid running of her beating pulse. So much depended upon her now – actually upon herself, for no one else could help her. That was a curious thought, and it filled her with a sense, not, strangely, of impotence, but of strength: some force unlocked within her, liberated, and rushing through her veins.
‘Anyway,’ said Andrews, turning away with gloomy finality, ‘I can do no more.’
She made no reply, but, detaching her eyes from his retreating figure, she let her gaze travel round the office. In a sense even this office disconcerted her. Always she had imagined ‘Frank’s office’ to be something elaborate, refined, dignified; but this – this she felt to be sadly lacking in distinction. There were two rooms: the office and an inner room marked ‘Private’, but stuffed chiefly with cases that had spilled their straw randomly: and the rooms were old, untidy. She stared at the fixed windows, the cracked cornices, the drab green walls, at that vacant desk which must in truth have been Frank’s and to which now, with a sudden pang, she apportioned his lanky, stooping form. Even the approach to the office had dismayed her: the entrance from the Saddleriggs guarded by the sign Lennox & Galton on a rounded rib of brass – not polished, alas, but yellowed, greened in parts with verdigris almost to illegibility – had been dingy, dark, leading to a circular stone stair round which she had guided herself by a rope banister. And the door itself, with one cracked panel, had been in keeping with the rest – holding almost the shambling decrepitude of senility. Clearly Lennox wasted little on the upkeep of his premises.
With a start she collected her forces, conscious of the office-boy’s stare: Frame, she knew his name, Dougal Frame – an under-sized boy of about fourteen, untidy of hair and collar, suspiciously sombre about his neck, his ears added like an after-thought, the one balancing a pen, the other a nipped stub of cigarette, his eyes holding a hostility which defeated the density of his large steel spectacles. At least vaguely she suspected that hostility, and in an effort to master her nervousness she turned to the boy.
‘Is this place never cleaned?’ she enquired mildly.
He stared at her broodingly for a long time, answered cryptically:
‘Whiles.’ Then with laconic urgency he resumed his filing.
‘You should clean it oftener,’ she persisted. ‘It’s s
o dusty.’
‘I’m not paid to clean it,’ he retorted coldly, without looking up.
For a moment there was silence. Then into that silence came the sound of a step upon the stairs.
‘Here’s Lennox himself,’ said the boy, still distantly, but with less asperity, as though perhaps already he repented the full blast of his frigidity.
Her heart leaped, and abruptly she turned as the door swung open and Lennox entered. His face, set already to an unusual severity – it was not the expression with which he entered her house – soured further at the sight of her; pushing back his hat from his brow, he immediately exclaimed:
‘You’ve turned up!’
The rebuff stung her – why did he speak like that, when the matter had been arranged, confirmed even by his own word, only a week ago? But she forced herself to smile – the smile of a woman too anxious, too eager to please.
‘Mr Andrews has told me everything,’ she replied with a specious briskness. ‘ I’m ready to begin right away.’
‘I’m a fool,’ he returned in a crabbed voice. ‘You’ll never do it.’
‘Don’t say that, Mr Lennox,’ she answered quickly, still with that forced air of brightness.
‘Mind you, off in a week if you don’t get results!’
What kind of a sentimental fool had he been to take on a woman like this, or a woman at all, in fact? To think that once over her teacups he had said with incorrigible rashness: ‘If you want the post, let me know!’ – to think that now actually she was here, in his office, about to take up that post – the monstrous turn of circumstances pricked him sharply. Yes, in the cold light of this Monday morning he was questioning the wisdom of his compact. And so he declared:
‘And if you lose me a customer, don’t show your face here again!’
‘That’s the last thing I’ll do,’ she answered, at once, decisively.
‘Humph!’ he said impatiently, and turned to Andrews. ‘ Where does she start?’
‘Linton,’ said Andrews, ‘and I’ve put her up to it all I can.’
With his feet planted wide, Lennox gazed in moody abstraction out of the window. Then suddenly he turned upon Lucy, who was watching him anxiously.
‘Well, what are you standing there for?’ he shot out testily. ‘You’re not paid to do that! Get away and get on with it!’
‘I was waiting on you,’ she returned, upset more than ever at his manner. ‘I thought –’
‘Don’t think. Do!’
He grinned sourly at his aphorism, and, taking a pencil from his waistcoat pocket, he stuck it beneath his hat, where it projected aggressively, like a cannon.
She looked at him indignantly, but no word left her lips. Yes, she controlled her rising temper, collected her new book and papers from the desk, then, with cheeks burning, went slowly from the room.
Humiliating, it was, to be constrained to submit to such an indignity. She had half a mind to return and throw his wretched post back into his grinning teeth. Half way down she heard a clattering of footsteps, and, turning abruptly, received the full impact of Dougal’s flying figure.
‘You forgot your pencil,’ he said clumsily, recovering himself.
She took it, looking up at him in silence. He glanced at her self-consciously.
‘I’ve sharpened it for ye,’ he declared, colouring to the ears. Then, before she could speak, he jerked his thumb, and added: ‘Never mind Lennox. He’s aye in a bad temper on Monday mornings. You’ll get on fine!’ Then swiftly he turned, and, three steps at each stride, was gone.
She stood for a moment, then slowly her lips twitched; her brow cleared, she smiled faintly as she went out into the street.
It was a fine fresh morning, whetted by a crisping of early frost; the breeze, bustling through the Saddleriggs, bowled her along towards the station. At the swift change from the dingy office into the brightness of the day a sudden emotion, mingled of courage and resolution, came to her with intensity. Around her streamed the quick flow of the city, the incessant impulse of the restless streets: a string of stallions straining at their drays; the lumbering swing of brightly coloured clanging trams; the quick rattle of a hansom cab: in everything some vital quality which she unconsciously absorbed. And, propagated by this flowing stream, the low insistent note of the city’s noise – clipped by the toot of a tug from the near-by river, the whistle of an engine, the shout of a huckster at his barrow – came to her vividly through the resonant air.
She crossed the road and cut into Young Street; the pavements here more crowded, the road more cluttered by its traffic. She went on into Queen Street Station, traversed the cloudy, subaqueous light of the glass-roofed high-level station, descended through the sulphurous smoke which choked the dripping, vaulted arches of the low-level platform.
Here she took train for Linton, and again during the rattling journey she had a quick impulse of resolution, a thrusting forward of her endeavour. Again she thought:
‘I must forget the past. I’ve got Peter – and the future.’
At her destination she drew a deep breath, set a determined face towards the town. And it was a busy town. The air rang with the chink of a thousand hammers: the endless rat-a-tat-tat of the riveters’ beat and the ring of the platelayers’ sledge; against the skyline a fretted framework of half-formed ships carried the swarming figures of men like ants; giant cranes swung out prodigious arms from which hung huge linked chains, the thickness of a man’s thigh. Across the road from the shipyard gates a squat engine puffed, leaving behind a ragged pennant of steam. The earth reverberated to its passage. Crude and vital it was, raw as the turned-up clay where they were building a row of houses. But it thrilled her. The batter of steel upon iron; the roar of steam; the creak of a windlass; the rattle of a winch; she felt it all, and the power of it. The air rang with a high purpose, and she had a purpose, too, in life: not the mere barter of this wretched margarine – something behind that, vital, intense.
At the corner of the High Street and a narrow lane running to the shipyard she came upon her first place of call – a baker’s shop, with a small fly-blown window holding a row of loaves and two circular glass cake-stands. One cake-stand was empty; the other bore some oleaginous pastries: strange bloom upon a stunted tree; and above the window was the sign: Danl. Harbottle & Nephew. She would never forget that name or this moment. The name of Harbottle, transcending all other names, became to her of paramount significance as through those glaucous panes she observed the figure of a man standing behind the counter. He stood meditatively upon one foot, rubbing a floury leg with the opposite boot. His bare arms, daubed with dry dough, pressed upon the counter, threw back his aproned body and elongated his thin neck. He had an almost stork-like abstraction. The nephew or Danl. himself? It was of little consequence. She perceived in him her immediate victim, and she marched into the shop determinedly.
‘Good morning, Mr Harbottle,’ she exclaimed. ‘ I’m from Lennox’s.’
Her manner was firm, outright, even uncompromising. ‘Have you an order for me today?’ she demanded brazenly.
Shades of the unobtrusive Andrews! Where, oh, where, was the evidence of his advice, that she edge effacingly into the shop and initiate insidious converse upon the weather?
‘An order?’ he repeated. Immured in his underground bake-house since four that morning, and now dozing in the shop while his daughter breakfasted upstairs, he confronted her mazedly, as though doubting the evidence of ears and eyes.
She opened her notebook.
‘I’ll be calling on you in future,’ she declared with factitious confidence. ‘ I’ve taken my husband’s place, you see.’
He continued to gaze at her. Then at last the light of understanding broke over his floury features.
‘I see! I see!’ he exclaimed. ‘Yon fella! So that’s it, and you’ve got his job. Well, well! Funny days we’re living in to see a woman come into my shop and speir like that for orders!’
She took up her pencil and looked to
wards him.
‘I’m needing something, mind you,’ he responded guardedly; ‘ I’ve no prejudice. I could do with something from Lennox.’
Her pencil poised eagerly above the paper.
‘Ay, ay, you might send me a tub of the usual.’
Swiftly she wrote – she knew from Andrews what was his ‘usual’; there was a silence.
‘Some oleo?’ she suggested. ‘We can do it at fourteen/ three.’
A master stroke, that quotation, she afterwards reflected, and one indicative of her profound knowledge of the intricacies of the business.
‘Well, when ye’re about it,’ he averred slowly, ‘you can send me a half-tub of the marge an’ all.’
Her fingers trembled slightly as she made the final entry. When she had finished, then only did she smile and thank him briskly.
He stared after her almost sheepishly as she went out of the door. ‘ Well!’ he thought to himself. ‘Did ye ever?’
Outside, she paused. Yes, she had demanded that order and she had obtained it. Her heart thumped excitedly under her outward composure. It was a beginning – it was success! She knew that she could do it. Her triumph with this small, insignificant baker convinced her of the tremendous excitement of life. She was elated, but she calmed herself. Deliberately she forced herself to be tranquil as she moved off towards her next call.
She went through the town assiduously. Not always did she find a receptive ear attendant in an empty shop for her enquiries. She had to wait; she had to cool her heels whilst master bakers – sometimes impatient, sometimes inquisitive – emerged from subterranean depths. In the larger shops she had malapert young ladies to confront. Not always were her enquiries so downright. She had her rebuffs; but that beginning had been auspicious – almost an omen. She gained confidence, if this was necessary, and slowly she accumulated a list of commissions. In a sense it was inevitable; she was no fool, and Lennox’s was a good firm, a firm with a reputation. Their stuff, as Frank had once phrased it, sold itself.
