by A. J. Cronin
She had, of course, lied about her work. The whole day lay before her, a generous donation from Miss Tinto; she was free until – naturally, and from necessity – she should present herself at the office at five o’clock to collect her wages. Why then was she here, numb, miserable, straining towards some unknown bourne, when she might have been at that luncheon-party with Peter, drinking champagne?
She moved restlessly, stung by a jealous pang. It was so unjust, so iniquitous – the whole affair! Peter was hers – by stronger ties than the mere accident of birth. Since that day when, a little boy of eight he had flung himself into her arms on his return from Port Doran, she had bound him to her by a chain forged by her own hands.
She closed her eyes; the tender perfume of the rose upon her heart rose gently to her nostrils – so exquisite it was, like a pang, like the pain of an insatiable longing.
At one o’clock she rose, made herself some strong tea, drank the dark and bitter brew. She felt better, calmer. Meditatively she removed the damaged shoe and torn stocking, observing that her foot was cut and had apparently been bleeding. It was nothing – a mere trifle; she had not even felt it; but she washed the cut, darned her stocking, rehabilitated the shoe (on the former principle), and resumed it. She saw now that she had been unduly upset. This party, this sudden congregation of these unwanted relatives was merely an incident, an event which would soon be finished, and would never again occur.
Her calmness strengthened. In this mood she pottered about the house, tidying things up, placing the rose in a tea-cup of water, and finally, at four, she went out, took tram for the office. There she was reticent and composed. Everything, she declared under Miss Tinto’s scrutinising eye, had passed off admirably. But when she had received her wages she took the first opportunity to leave the office. The reason she advanced was the necessity for immediate shopping, and here, at least, her excuse was just. She made, indeed, the round of her favourite shops, making a surprising variety of purchases. Nor was it her usual penurious bargaining that she now indulged in, but a different, altogether a more reckless, marketing. Her mood, mellowing still further, caught something of a spirit of abandon. Clearly, she had been surprised into losing her temper this morning – the shock, the unexpectedness of it all, had betrayed her into quick resentment. ‘ That temper of mine!’ she thought wryly. Then, her spirits quite recovered, she smiled, for the first time since the morning. And really it was exciting to spend money recklessly like this! She even bought a bunch of wall-flowers from the old woman at the corner of James Square. Flowers! Wild extravagance, induced by this new humour and, perhaps, by the memory of Bessie Finch’s rose. Could anything be more preposterous?
She jumped off the tram at Kelvinbank, and, laden with her parcels, passed quickly along the street – a manner different from her usual meditative progress. He had not yet returned, a fact which strangely rejoiced her, and, with all possible dispatch, she removed her hat, changed into her felt slippers, and began her preparations for the dinner.
Yes; it was to be no wretched high tea, but actually a dinner. He had lunched at the Grosvenor, apparently. Well, he should judge now between the merits of that expensive cuisine and hers. This dinner would be at once a celebration, a vindication, and an atonement.
It was the rare luxury of a chicken which she had bought, and, when the promising pullet was stuffed and sizzling in the oven – it was small, and sizzled quickly – she set about preparing the accessories of the feast. Her menu was ambitious: cream of tomato soup, roast chicken with potatoes in their jackets – none, he had often averred, could render a tuber so indubitably flowery as she – a Swiss tart fresh from the Colville Bakery, and, finally, coffee, rich, black, aromatic. It was a menu. Could Miss O’Regan have done better?
With sleeves rolled up and face engrossed, she had an almost youthful eagerness.
Whilst the dinner cooked, she laid the table, choosing the least chipped of the assorted crockery, covering the patch in the middle of the cloth with the blue vase of wallflowers. Then, at last, she was prepared to receive him. She sat down, pleasantly fatigued, pleasantly expectant her eye upon the clock, which lacked but one minute to seven. He would soon be in; he was punctual, and he had that morning, in answer to her query – she had even then entertained vaguely the purpose of the celebration – mentioned the hour of seven as the time of his return.
There she sat, waiting, listening for his step upon the stairs.
But she heard nothing: no step, no whistle of greeting. At half-past seven she rose, went into the front room, and looked out of the window, down the street; but he was not in sight.
She came back into the kitchen, and looked at the clock. Quarter to eight! She was disturbed, but, her eye straying towards the table, was soothed from the momentary disquiet. Everything was perfect; the dinner was waiting in the oven. She straightened a spray of wallflower, and sat down.
But she could not sit still. She got up, paced up and down the room, hesitated, went once more to the window, contemplated with anxiety the prospect of the empty street, then came slowly back.
Again she was seated, her eye once more upon the clock, waiting with a growing dismay.
Gradually the bright edge of her anticipation became dulled; a furrow creased the centre of her forehead; the eagerness died out of her face. What had happened to him? It was now after eight o’clock. A rush of uneasiness flooded her. She strove to calm herself, but tranquillity would not come to her. She was up again upon her feet, moving about restlessly, looking at the clock, standing with straining eyes at the window, hovering about the door; yes, even opening it, as though to anticipate the quick sound of his step upon the stairs: waiting, waiting, waiting, her ears straining for his step.
Nine o’clock came without his arrival. She forced herself to sit down. Half-past nine, and still he had not come. The dinner was ruined – the fowl done to a stick, the potatoes leathery, the coffee a puddle of muddy grounds in the bottom of the pot.
Chilled by the empty greyness of the falling darkness, the joy of the day finally extinguished, she rose at last, cleared the table, threw out the coffee, poured the soup into an earthenware jar, placed the chicken in the cupboard – effaced every evidence of her presumptive banquet. Her lips drooped with an inexpressible pathos; but her eye, full and humid though it was, would shed no tears.
When he came in at last – just on the stroke of ten – she was seated knitting; her brow firm, her face inscrutable.
‘I couldn’t get away from those people,’ he exclaimed immediately; he was breathless but smiling, in a brilliant good humour. ‘Did you think I was never coming? Were you worrying?’
Never pausing in her knitting, she looked at him fixedly. ‘ No – I knew you would come,’ she answered; then she added slowly, each word concentrated and intense: ‘And why should I worry? There’s all the future to look forward to!’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Five months later, with the end of his hospital appointment in sight, she had quite made up her mind as to what they should do. To his not infrequent hints that someone should finance him in a practice she had returned a tolerant smile. He was only twenty-two; and where, pray, was the money to come from? No; only one course was feasible, and a pleasant course, though involving perhaps the prospect of hard work. But work was essential if a young man were to get on, and, as for its hardness, surely both she and he were used to that?
He would take an outdoor assistantship in England – somewhere in the provinces – and there she would keep house for him. England appealed to her for two reasons: salaries paid there were higher than in the north, and she desired above everything to sever completely her connection with her present locality. She had drudged too long in Glasgow to cherish it, and she was, moreover, so known a figure in certain districts that always the chance existed that the stigma of her occupation might fall upon her son and blight his growing practice. So they would get away to England. She visioned a small neat house in a comfortable m
arket town – nothing pretentious it could be to start with, but neat and decent, yes, with a square brass plate upon the door. And how she would have that brass to shine! She had actually in her mind at the moment a truly brilliant idea. Studying the Lancet – she investigated this periodical regularly in the Mitchell Library – she had last week come upon an advertisement which made her eyes sparkle suddenly. Two assistants were required by the North Stafford Medical Aid Society, two active young men – actually Glasgow graduates were preferred – and, in return for his whole-time services, each would receive a free house, coal and lighting, together with a salary of £350 a year. An assured income; all this without having to advance a penny piece of capital. It made her gasp. And two posts vacant. Surely Peter could obtain one of them.
Immediately she had rung him up at the Royal Eastern, filled with her project – hers because she identified herself inevitably with him. He too had seen the advertisement; but, strangely, he demurred. Contract practice did not appeal to him; the B.M.A. did not approve of it; it was killing, that club work, and work, moreover, which stamped a man and lowered his professional standing. On the whole, he had expressed himself, rather judiciously, as being against applying for the post.
But she felt very differently; yesterday she had telephoned him, and now on this Saturday afternoon, she was resolved that they would thresh out the matter when he came up to see her. It was his habit to come at this hour and on this day, but lately, owing to the exigencies of his duties in the wards – ‘sweated labour’ he proclaimed it – he had been somewhat irregular in his visits. Lately, also, a vague uneasiness had ebbed and flowed within her, but from what cause she could not discover. She seemed hardly to know how she stood with him; he had become elusive, a quantity which she strove fiercely to grasp and could not.
She had missed him these five months infinitely more than she admitted. In her loneliness, seeing him so infrequently, she took comfort even from the fact that the Royal Eastern was so near to her; and often at nights she drew sentimental solace from this nearness, sitting in the darkness of the front room watching the lights of the hospital break out beneath the University against the opposite hill.
Now, as she sat, her elbow resting on the arm of her chair, her cheek cupped in the hollow of her palm, she had still that strange, unsatisfied feeling; and that frown of perplexity – almost constant now – lingered curiously upon her brow. Her face was plumper, as though recently her meals had been more regular. And she wore a neat serge dress – the home-made gown had long ago been dowered upon a grateful Mrs Collins – but still she did not look at ease. Her eyes were restless. Perhaps she needed a holiday! She had indeed arranged to take her fortnight’s leave early in the following month. Thereafter she would be definitely abandoning her work, and, on Miss Tinto’s subtle implication, had agreed to the wisdom ‘of taking the holiday out of H. & S.’ before she left. For her own part, she would hardly have troubled – her mind was set so fixedly upon her future with her son.
Suddenly, as she sat, there came a pull at the bell. She rose slowly, conscious that it was not Peter, who had still his own formula of announcement, and, going into the hall, she closed the front-room door, which stood ajar. Lately she had become more sensitive of the emptiness of her house, and this void apartment – easily visible from without – demanded the continual necessity of concealment. Then she answered the bell.
It was an elderly, red-faced man who stood upon the doorstep, his features fixed in an enquiring smile which displayed a golden tooth, and crinkled the shiny skin of his bulbous nose to a fine-scored network of wrinkles. He was short, his overcoat of smooth black cloth with satin-faced lapels, his collar low, lapped by the creases of his ruddy neck, his wide cravat bearing a glowing garnet pin. His fingers, decked by three rings, deeply embedded in the flesh, carried upright by its middle a heavy silver-topped Malacca cane, and on his head, set roundly above his ears, was a cap of astrakhan fur shaped almost like a turban – a curious cap, which made the little man at once a figure.
‘Mrs Moore?’ said the stranger, still keeping up his smile, identifying her with a shrewd gleam of his puckered eyes.
‘Yes!’ she answered rather brusquely, not too well taken by the oddity of his air.
He nodded his head at his own cleverness, and said, after a short pause: ‘I’ve a notion to speak to you.’
She stared back at him, then exclaimed:
‘What do you want? I don’t know you.’
He shook suddenly with a sort of internal merriment, as though the idea of their not knowing each other afforded him intense amusement; then remarked:
‘We’ll soon know each other – surely – surely!’
‘What do you want?’ she threw out again.
He half closed his eyes, slyly.
‘It’s about your son I wanted to see you.’
She arrested the movement of the door, which she had been about to close in his face.
‘That’s better now! Don’t,’ he exclaimed, wrinkling again his shiny nose – it was his smile – ‘don’t be so stiff with me. I’ll come in and have a word with you.’
She hesitated, then, almost in spite of herself, she stepped back. The talisman of her son’s name had afforded him an entry.
‘What is it?’ she said again abruptly, facing him inside the house with a beating heart. This was a rude interruption to her mood of quiet meditation. Was he some moneylender, some disreputable individual into whose hands Peter had fallen?
He sat down, widened his knees, placed both hands upon the knob of his stick.
‘I had a job to find you,’ he remarked agreeably, leaning forward. ‘He’s as close as can be, is that boy of yours – about some things, anyway. Other times butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Fine young fellow though.’ He beamed on her. ‘Stylish as they make them!’
She was utterly confounded.
‘What do you want?’ she pressed, in a hard disagreeable voice.
‘Come, come, now, ma’am,’ he expostulated. ‘Don’t be so stand-offish – you and me are going to be friends.’ He chuckled with a knowing air, tapped the knob of his stick lightly against the golden tooth, then suddenly exclaimed: ‘Tully’s the name.’ He watched the effect of the word, then added: ‘ You know the name – Tully the jeweller – in Alston Street. That’s me.’
Dazedly she stared at him. Her glance swept over him, taking in his tiepin, his rings, his cane, evisaging even the ridiculous hat that lay upon the table beside him. So this was Tully; this smug, grotesque little man bedizened by unredeemed pledges. Somehow, despite her amazement as to his presence in her house, her lip curled, and she exclaimed:
‘Yes, I know who you are; you’re not a jeweller. You’re a pawnbroker – and a slum-landlord.’
He broke into a roar of laughter, and tapped his stick upon the floor. ‘Good, good, good,’ he cried, quite unperturbed. ‘That’s right. I like it straight – like my John Jameson.’ He paused, and wiped his eyes with a canary yellow handkerchief. ‘Yes – they told me you were a tartar, and, by Gord, so you are.’
‘Who told you?’ she shot out fiercely.
He winked at her amiably.
‘Some friends of yours in Ralston, my dear. But mum’s the word. That’s where I live, you see. I’ve a fine house out there, and a couple of acres of ground laid out in beautiful gardens – you’ll need to come and see it – and it’s all done out of pawn-broking and property. Ha! Ha! Ha!’ He shook again at his little joke.
With an effort she controlled herself. She sat down at the table directly opposite to him.
‘Will you be so good as to tell me what you require?’ she said in a hard voice. ‘I suppose my boy has got into your wretched moneylending clutches. How much does he owe you?’
At her words, more especially at her tone, his manner altered at once; he blinked at her, then exclaimed:
‘Good Gord, no, woman. I’m not a moneylender.’ He paused. ‘Your boy’s running around after my daughter Rosie –
that’s all.’ And he lay back in his chair with an offended air, as though awaiting her apology. But she made no apology; she was stunned; her lips drew together as she faced him speechlessly. It was he, indeed, who first broke the silence.
‘Yes, he’s come around after my girl. And a beautiful thing she is too, by Gord. The image of her dead mother that’s with the angels. She’s the very core of my heart, is that girl of mine.’ He sent a look at her pale, set face, and resumed indulgently: ‘ Mind you, I’ve nothing against your boy. He hasn’t got a brass – but that don’t matter. I’ve got plenty. Plenty, plenty. My Rosie will have a pretty penny to her name. And he’s got the position. Yes, he’s worked himself into a fine profession. I like him properly, for all his blarney.’ She flinched; but unobservantly he went on: ‘ It says a lot for him to have done it, but he has his head screwed on right; he knows that two and two make four. That’s in his favour.’ Still she sat numb – bewildered; but through the haze of her conflicting thoughts she had a dim recollection, then all at once she remembered. Rosie! The tennis-parties! Eva’s friends at Ralston. And that tall, reddish girl at the graduation, looking down at her a little nervously beside the car: ‘ Won’t you go in first, Mrs Moore?’ And again the brother’s laughing voice, ‘Peter’ll sit on your knee, Rosie.’
A frightful spasm transfixed her. Rosie Tully – the daughter of this wretched pawnbroking slum-landlord for whom she had slaved and slaved, extorting iniquitous rents from pauper wretches to pay for his villa and his gardens, to put money in his purse and fine clothes on his detestable daughter’s back! She shivered, then her teeth came together.
‘Has my son anything else to recommend him?’ she said in a restrained tone of bitterness.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he agreed largely. ‘He’s got the right faith. That’s another thing in his favour I’m having no mixed marriage for my Rosie. When she does go to the altar, it’s got to be the right one.’
