CHAPTER 4
Mrs. Jamie Clair, competent and sure as always, “sold up” her household goods, and armed with a few retained lares and penates, set sail for America in January. But Francis Clair secured a “post” in a larger chemist shop in Reddish, with an increase of fifteen shillings a week, and Maybelle, overjoyed that the threatened hegira was at least postponed, accompanied him happily to the little suburb of Manchester.
The house on Mosston Street was almost identical with the ones in Higher Broughton and High Town, except that it was somewhat sootier and a trifle more dreary, if possible. There was a cotton mill in Reddish, where young children, youths and maidens, men and women, toiled at the looms in wet and steaming heat, almost unclothed, and coughed themselves into bronchitis or “the consumption.” The neighbors of the Clairs were composed of these poor people, but Maybelle was contented. There were shops nearby, and one could purchase fish and chips conveniently, and there were the eternal stone yards and walls and green wooden doors to take away the sting of homesickness. She was by nature a friendly soul. She was soon standing on the outside of the green door, her arms folded under her apron, exchanging symptoms, gossip and “receipts” with the wives of the cotton-mill workers. She hypocritically bewailed her sad lot in not producing more children, carefully refraining from announcing her age, but, in truth, she was really complacent at the benevolence of nature. One had only to look upon the anaemic, half-starved, rickety children that flocked, whining, about the bedraggled skirts of the envious neighbors to understand that one was blessed of God. Moreover, all this gave her an opportunity to exercise that egotistic and really cruel “virtue” called magnanimity. She was enabled, by reason of Francis’ better wages and her one-child condition, to run into the neighbors’ sordid kitchens and there leave a pot of jam, a loaf of bread, a “bit” of meat, or a head of cabbage, as a kind of offering to the Moloch of nature, who had been so inexplicably kind to her. Sometimes, evading Francis’ watchful eye, she would present some worn shoes, some out-grown clothing of little Frank’s, as an additional offering to the malignant gods of all the poor and the child-ridden and the hungry.
It gave her a happy glow when she saw some poor woman “traipsing” down the street in one of her mended shirtwaists or discarded serge skirts or old, moth-eaten shawls. It pleased her to sit in some stricken kitchen, wailing and rocking, and comforting a mother of many children on the occasion of the calamity of her man being “sacked” from the mill. Sometimes she could afford a shilling or two, or a bottle of cod-liver oil for a racked man coughing his lungs away in a dirty bed, or a new christening robe, made of coarse cotton and coarser machine-made lace, for a newborn infant. Once, she had the delicious opportunity of ministering to a collapsed mother, whose little girl of ten had lost three fingers of her right hand in the mill. Maybelle thought the occasion merited a whole pound of tea, and she heroically put aside the sad thought that now she could not buy those white kid gloves for church on Sundays.
Frank could remember her singing happily as she ironed in the kitchen at night:
“Before I was married, I used to wear a shawl,
Now I am married, I haven’t one at all!
Oh, what a life, a very hard life;
It’s better to be single than a poor man’s wife!”
To the end of his life, that foolish song was to haunt him, to make the rain, the soot, the agony of the poor, the cotton mills, and all the misery of the helpless as poignant in his memory as when he had first heard it. It seemed to him that it was the real song of England, the real song of the people, the song of those who labored, time out of mind, and whose mute voices could not express their anguish.
How clearly, even at forty, he could remember that house on Mosston Street!
There was a small “garden” outside, a strip of moldy moss eight feet by twelve, carefully guarded by a low iron railing. The steps to the house, scrubbed every Saturday morning, glimmered like snow, for it was a matter of pride to the local housewives to be first on their knees on that day with pail and scrub-brush and a brick of whiting. A woman who neglected that public task was considered entirely worthless and contemptible, and received only curt nods from the neighbors. Only childbirth constituted an excuse.
The parlor, carefully shaded, was not a “living” room, in any sense of the word. Frank could not remember ever having sat in there for a single moment, until the day arrived when he was allowed to perch on the wooden crate containing the family belongings, a crate already stamped: “Baltic. White Star Line.” But he did remember the rubber plant in the window, tall, lanky, repulsive, in its green majolica pot, the Nottingham curtains parted carefully, and slightly to inform the neighbors that within everything was orthodox and in order, and a rubber plant in residence. He remembered the red Turkey carpet on the floor, the red plush chairs and settee, the plated silver candlesticks on the stone mantelpiece, which was draped in red crimson velveteen, and the sprawling red roses on the wallpaper. Mrs. Clair had bestowed that large round table in the center of the room, with its crimson balled cover, and the china lamp with its odor of kerosene. Above it was the cheap gas chandelier, lately installed. Mrs. Maybelle, who had a penchant for red, was enraptured by her parlor. She would often stand reverently in the doorway, and murmur: “Rich.” She would turn to Frank, lurking at her skirts, and say, proudly: “Rich, lovey, isn’t it?” She never lit the fire on the stone hearth, but the fender and the andirons were polished religiously.
The family lived in the room behind, which was entered by a short narrow hallway. Here there was less “richness” but more comfort. It was an ugly room, but enlivened by a constant fire, and the mantelpiece was a clutter of bric-a-bric, glasses containing wax tapers, an imitation marble clock, and a few photographs. A cheap rug covered the floor; the dining table stood in the corner, between two windows set at right angles to each other. There were wooden rockers, with cushions, and the glaring gas chandelier, and a steep staircase leading to the bedrooms, always cold and bleak, and, best of all, a bathroom, without water closet. The latter ugly utility was, as in Higher Broughton, in the stone yard. Frank never remembered having a bath in the shining white monster upstairs. He, as well as his parents, bathed in a tin tub before the living-room fire, an ordeal accompanied by pungent harsh soap and stiff hard towels.
Beyond the yard was the Common, where the children played, and beyond the Common, the elevated street called Sandy Road. This road led to “town,” on the left. To the right, it led to the cotton mills, the open country, and, over a mile away, the free school.
He remembered some of the neighbors vividly. To the left, the Wordens. The father, Jim, was a worker in the cotton mills, the mother, a hag-ridden and desperately silent woman who spent her life in a fever of “making ends meet.” There was the older daughter, Bertha, a grown woman of sixteen, already a worker in the mills, a frail pretty girl with a white face and a crown of fair curling hair and protruding blue eyes. There was Will, fourteen, who came home at noon, to enter the mills without the preliminary of halting for a meal, then Jim, eleven, who was to die in France in 1916, then Jack, eight, then Helen, seven, who was fat, bold and noisy, then Lassie, a pretty child of five. There was a nebulous child in arms, who whined constantly and died of rickets before he had seen his first birthday. This, then, was the Worden family, who dined almost exclusively on fish and chips, boiled potatoes and cabbage, limp carrots and boiled onions, tea, flabby white bread and jam, and, on Sundays, a “bit” of boiled beef or mutton.
The neighbors opposite, across the red-brick road, remained nebulous to Frank, except for the Durhams. He, the father of one lone child, was a physician, and was denounced enviously as a “quack.” But he wore a black broadcloth coat with a velvet collar, an elegant derby hat, carried gloves and cane, and went on his rounds in a rented carriage. His wife, petulant, well-dressed, snubbed the neighbors very effectively, and guarded her son, Eddie, an obnoxious snob of a boy who went to a private school far up on San
dy Lane, from the encroachment of the “common” children.
This school, attended by Eddie Durham and a few other children in Reddish, cost only four shillings a week, and Francis Clair, flushed with his larger wages, decided that young Frank also must attend it. He discouraged Frank’s frightened overtures to the Worden children, and was acid in his comments on his wife’s traffickings with them. “Have some pride, Maybelle,” he would say. “You’ve got to hold your head up. I’m not a snob, but after all, there are limits.” Young Frank was not allowed to wear clogs, like the other children, though he thought the clatter fascinating, and was envious. He must be washed and brushed meticulously when his father returned home for dinner and tea. He must not play on the muddy Common, which he did, naturally, on every occasion when his father was absent. Maybelle had no snobbery whatsoever, and she thought Mrs. Worden a “good, respectable woman, poor soul,” and preferred the hot dirty kitchen next door to sitting in the elegant Durham parlor, sipping tea from bone china and eating caraway-seed cake. She allowed Frank to go with her, and often left him with the Wordens when she went on her “messages,” her market basket over her arm.
It was with trepidation that she tearfully watched her husband march Frank to school on the first day. In spite of her maternal stoutness of mind, she remembered her mother-in-law’s warnings. She was quite convinced that the afternoon would see Frank ignominiously rejected. How, then, would she be able to hold up her head? The law demanded that a child begin school at the age of five, but what if he was “touched”? But Frank was not rejected. He was brought home that evening frantic, bewildered, tearful, and completely disheveled, his new white blouse stained with ink, his new blue serge jacket and trousers crumpled, his black stockings hanging dolorously, and his sailor hat on his neck, strangling him with its elastic.
Francis Clair was infuriated. He came down the street, jerking the child viciously by the hand, so that sometimes the small feet were lifted clear of the pavement, and muttering fiercely to himself. “I’ll clout you, I’ll clout you!” he would say, gritting his teeth. “I’ll show you! Wait till I get you home!”
Upon entering the house, and carefully closing the doors and all the windows against the “neighbors,” Francis assaulted the frightened Maybelle with furious shouts.
“D’ye know what he did, this fine lad of yours? Sat like a lump all day, and then just before I came, he picks up an ink-pot and throws it at some kid, and knocks a lump up on her head! Gets it all over him, too! Look at him! And I lay it all at your door. You’ve spoiled him beyond repair.”
Frank was soundly thrashed, of course, first by his father, then by his mother. The latter thrashing was administered less in anger than in an attempt to placate Francis. Frank uttered no cry during the rough ordeal, though his small face turned ashen. He was sent to bed without his tea, and there he lay, shuddering and shivering, a ball of terrified misery, a loud roaring in his ears. He did not sleep until morning.
He had no words. He had no speech at all to make articulate his boundless and frightful terror and wretchedness. He knew what hatred was. He had encountered it in his grandmother. But he had made his first, large-scale acquaintance with it that day, and its smell was in the very folds of his fragile flesh.
The school had been established by a decayed gentlewoman of a faded but malicious temperament, and consisted of two large rooms over her lower living quarters. The first room was the classroom, fitted out with a long narrow table surrounded with chairs. A lithograph of the late Queen adorned the plaster wall. There was no fireplace, and the chill damp of autumn filled the room with a fetid, chalk-like, dusty smell. The second room had another long table, also surrounded with chairs, on which the children were served lukewarm and weak tea, sweetened with condensed milk, and stale cake and biscuits. There the children would dine, their hands dusty from their slates, their faces intent and wary.
There were only eight children, the offspring of those who had pretensions to gentility, such as Francis Clair. Their fathers were small shopkeepers or public-house owners, bookkeepers, or starveling clerks. In comparison, the poverty-ridden Worden children were buxom, healthy and strenuous; each wizened face was completely pallid, every nose ran with Lancashire catarrh, or colds, every thin throat coughed incessantly. But no sturdy clogs protected any foot; buttoned boots, thin but well-polished, clothed the pedal extremities that hung over the sides of the chairs. The girls wore neat, ruffled pinafores. The boys were immaculate.
Suppressed, poorly fed, constantly shivering with cold, the children ranged in age from five to fourteen. All were ardent snobs, all envious and full of malice, all carefully elegant of speech. Their natural childish instincts, so well concealed and denied and corrupted, turned from a normal robustness to thin and poisonous cruelty. With the prescience of children, they had only to glance once at Frank Clair to know him as an eternal alien, as strange and threatening. They did not know what it was in themselves that he threatened, but they felt his difference from them, and hated him, and immediately began to plot torments for his separateness, for his daring not to be one of them.
Nor were they alone in their hostility. Miss Elizabeth Ballister recognized Frank immediately. Her meagre instincts bristled at the sight of him. Her hackles rose. She hated him at once. She could not say to herself: “Here is a stranger, and strangers are dangerous, particularly a stranger like this. He menaces something in me. He fills me with uneasiness and discomfort; why, I do not know.” She merely looked at him and thought: Here is a very stupid and unpleasant child, and I simply do not like those staring, empty blue eyes and that open, drooping mouth. He does not look very intelligent, and I shall have trouble with him, I daresay.
But four shillings a week were four shillings a week, so she smiled with languishing affection at the terrified child, who was straining back against his father’s grip, and simpered daintily at Francis. “What a dear love,” she cooed. “And how delighted I and all these dear children ate to have our little Francis with us. I know he’ll be very happy, indeed.”
She was a tall spinster of some forty years, emaciated but very elegant in her blue silk shirtwaist, with her gold locket, wide black belt, and blue serge skirt. Her faded pompadour was incredibly neat. Not a wisp of hair escaped pins and combs. She exuded an odor of intense gentility and of Pears’ soap and eau-de-cologne. She had bony cold hands, damp and lean, and her waist was as thin as a stem. Her faded skin creased into a score of fine dry wrinkles when she smiled, and this smile displayed a row of suspiciously fine big teeth, too large for the long thin face, which was without a vestige of color. Her pale blue eyes were framed in red rims, and the prevailing catarrh had reddened the nostrils of her great bone of a nose. But Francis, overpowered by the gentility, by the saccharine condescension, by the thin swaying figure and high-born airs, thought of his ruddy, plump Maybelle with distaste.
Frank had previously been lectured on the importance of school, and warned that he must not cry, that he must be a little gentleman, and behave himself. Silently, with docility, he had listened. He had been neither attracted nor repelled by the discourses of his good luck in having been accepted at this school. He felt, and thought, nothing at all, sunken, as always, in his nebulous dreams. But when the school became a sudden and terrible reality, when he was actually there, when he saw Miss Ballister’s eyes, and the watchful, piercing eyes of his dear new schoolmates, he burst into screams. He could not control himself. He screamed wildly and tearlessly, quivering with terror, straining away from his father, impelled only by a blind impulse to escape.
Francis lifted his hand in an impulsive gesture of threat, his face turning the dull purple color of his mother’s ears, visions before his eyes of being hurried ignominiously into the street and being forever shamed before the neighbors. But before the blow could fall, Miss Ballister, fearing for the new four shillings a week, had deftly whisked the child away from his father, and was bending over him like an angel of mercy. The delighted children watche
d avidly.
“There, there, now,” crooned Miss Ballister, stroking the disheveled chestnut curls. “We are just strange. We shall be calm in a few minutes. We shall send his papa away at once, and everything will be just splendid, won’t it?”
Francis, sweating and quaking, took the hint, and went rapidly out of the room and down the stairs, the shrieks of his son in his ears until the closing door mercifully shut them from him.
Suddenly, Frank knew that he was alone, that his father was gone, and he subsided abruptly, trembling violently from head to foot. The handkerchief which mopped his tearless face sickened him with its sweet scent, but he stood and endured it. The gentle touch had become vicious now. It scrubbed and flayed. The languishing voice had lost its crooning quality. It was hard and hateful: “Now, you’ll sit down and behave yourself, and no nonsense, sir. We know what to do with bad laddies, and I warn you you won’t be pleased.”
He found himself sailing through the air. He was set down with a thump on a chair; the table loomed, chin-level, before him, with its papers and its slates. He saw the faces of the children, gloating, greenish, disembodied faces, spaced in a row on the opposite edge of the table. He saw the blank, curtainless windows, and the eyes of Miss Ballister glaring down at him. He saw it all, in a clear, glittering crystal light which seemed inimical and appalling to him. He saw it all, and was still.
Miss Ballister, her lips compressed and spiteful, sat down. She lifted a lead-pencil, tapped it peremptorily on the table, and said, “Children, we will get at our lessons at once.”
She had quelled more obstreperous children than this odious little wretch. She was mistress of the most distressing situations. She opened a book, began to give out sums. She watched Frank out of the corner of her gelid eye. She’d endure no nonsense from this horrid monster. She saw him staring at the children opposite, and thought: He is completely off. Whatever shall I do with him? All I ask is that he sit quiet. I have no fear of that, however. He hasn’t the intelligence to do otherwise, with that silly face of his, and those awful gaping eyes.
There Was a Time Page 4
