They came to the turn of the road : there were houses below them and houses on the opposite hill: the darkness was spattered with seeds of light. It was lovelier than the farm, lovelier than the meadows, the wood, the stream. A strange feeling in her breast, as though feathers were moving up and down, up and down. She could not help the sob. “Tired?” No, no; she had nothing to say. “She didn’t at all want to come home,” her mother said in a whisper. But the strangest part was that now she did not mind it in the least.
In the morning she went straight to the window. Nothing had changed: the houses with their soot-blackened walls were the same, a lean cat scraped its ribs on the street-lamp, and dirty torn paper blew round the railings. A stale smell rose from the street, smells of beer and closets.
She heard her mother raking the fire in the kitchen, and slowly, crossly, she began to do up buttons and drag a comb through her hair. She felt that she had been tricked.
The first thing she noticed was her hand. It lay on her thigh, a big, fleshy hand, with veins like welts and thick swollen knuckles. For a moment, she could not imagine whose hand it was.
The other the child’s hand had been crushing dead, sodden leaves. She gave her skirt a little jerk to rid it of them. The Park, the sky, sprang round her, a water-clear globe of blue and green.
“I haven’t done so badly,” she said out loud, stretching her legs out to ease them.
That year she was fifteen she began in the mill. She was awakened very early, in the dark, by her mother knocking on the wall between their beds. The cold, when she put back the bedclothes, welled over her, a flood indistinguishable from the darkness. She felt for her candle and lit it. The room struggled to come alive in the faint light.
As soon as she had dressed, fumbling with cold fingers, she went downstairs, raked the fire and made herself a pot of tea. She poured a cup for her mother and took it up. The stairs creaked in the darkness. Her mother had lit her candle and then dropped asleep again, lying on her side with a hand under her cheek. When she opened her eyes they were dilated with terror. “You did give me a start,” she said.
“I brought you a cup up,” the girl mumbled.
“I must have been dreaming.” She called out as the door closed : “I put your piece ready on the dresser. Don’t forget it.”
The girl went downstairs, and drank her tea standing by the table. The kitchen was warm and lived-in. She cut a good thick slice off the loaf, spread the dripping and ate it in large mouthfuls. She was afraid of being late on her first morning. As soon as she had swallowed the last bite she took her piece from the dresser and went.
It was still dark outside, the sky, when she looked up, invisible. Her foot slipped from under her and she saved herself by catching at the door frame. The road and pavements were covered with a film of black ice.
She saw and heard no one moving in the streets. There were lights in several of the houses, and her first shocked fear that she was the last dropped quickly as she realised that in fact she was very early. A single door opened and shut farther down the street. It made a noise like a shot in the brittle air. Then silence, not even footsteps.
She walked slowly, sideways, facing the wall of the houses, both arms stretched out hands flat against the walls to keep her from falling. After she had gone some yards like this her shawl slipped back off her head. She made a grab at it and fell, hurting her knees and grazing the side of one hand. Still she seemed to be alone in the street, the only creature moving at this hour. She got up, feeling the wall, and now the fear of being late sprang at her again. At this rate she would be hours reaching the mill. A feeling of helplessness invaded her, as though she were really alone. It was like the first day at school when she was given a slate and told to write, write down this, write; the same feeling of weakness and emptiness, not knowing what to do.
A hand touched her shoulder. She had not heard a sound. Her heart seemed to drop through her body and she stood still. In a moment, as soon as the woman spoke, she knew her. “You did give us a start,” she said, drawing confidence from the words, used so often that they were like the known sound of feet or of water dripping.
The older girl was wearing a pair of man’s socks over her boots. “It’s either that or your hands and knees,” she laughed. Doors opened and shut the length of the street, and the women threw their voices across from one to the other, until the darkness was filled with voices. At the end of the street she came on two girls crawling along on hands and knees. Suddenly one backed and gave the other a great dunch with her hinderparts, like a cow. A screech of laughter went off, and a man’s voice.
With some hesitation she got down then herself and crawled along, quickly and clumsily. She felt ashamed to be seen in such a posture.
A grey light had seeped through the darkness. There were people moving in all the streets and a cackle of talk. One voice flew above the others, coming down in a sputter of laughter. The faces of men and women had a grey shiny look in the sour light.
The girl had straightened up to walk into the mill and as she crossed the last yard of pavement she fell smack on her face. The shock brought tears in her eyes. She scrambled up, red with shame because of the good-humoured advice and the sniggers, and hurried through the door. Behind her the street clattered with people. The six o’clock whistles jumped up and began to split the air.
She put her coat and shawl with the other women’s. Her hands felt very cold. She found herself working with a big noisy woman called Kate, who showed her what to do. She was able to do it all right, though she was still uncertain of herself when the foreman walked past. He watched her for a moment, then big Kate spoke to him—“How’s your poor feet? “—and he went on. At eight o’clock they crowded into a sort of lean-to shed at the back of the mill, dark and very draughty, where there were benches and a dusty trestle table. She seated herself at a corner of the table and unwrapped her piece, two slices of bread and dripping and an apple. Big Kate had a bottleful of cold tea and offered her a drink. She refused, out of a feeling of awkwardness.
“Here we go,” Kate said, tipping the bottle so that the tea poured down her throat. She held it there until the bottle was empty. This was a daily rite and she was excessively proud of her accomplishment.
“In at one end and out the other,” a girl shouted.
Kate wiped her mouth and said : “If you’d let nothing worse in you wouldn’t be laying off next month.”
“Let be,” another woman called out. “Poor lass, she’s had a misfortune—she’s none the worse for it.”
“Did I say she was?” Kate said loudly. She turned to the new-comer and laid a huge mottled hand on her. “If anyone tells you old Kate’s a liar and a——don’t you believe them. I’m not. And if there’s owt you want telling ask me right off and I’ll tell you. See?”
The girl thanked her and finished eating her piece, and tried not to yawn. She felt drowsy with the pressure of a new experience. The day before at this hour she was just getting up. She looked from face to face among the women, trying to find one she knew. But she had been forced to start at a mill a long way from her home and they were all strange.
Back at her machine she began to feel very uncomfortable. It was the excitement. She bore it as long as she could and finally asked Kate where the women’s closet was.
“Downstairs and along the passage. Turn to your left,” Kate said. “You’d better look sharp, though.”
She walked out of the room and then ran, holding her long clumsy skirt, down the stairs and along the passage. She found the place—it was no better than part of the passage walled off: there was no window and a little light and air came over the top of the door through a gap the breadth of a hand. When she came out the foreman from her room was waiting for her close to the door. He had his watch in his hand and he said sharply: “You’ve been in there four and a half minutes. I was timing you. Don’t do it again. I’m up to those tricks, see?”
She looked at him and rushed back to th
e room.
Big Kate saw that something was wrong. After a moment she came and stood by the girl, watching her movements. “You c’n do that without moving your arm. See? Saves trouble—you don’t want to kill yourself working for the——s.” Her voice, warm and not loud—it slid itself through some crack in the deafening noise—poured an amazing relief through the girl’s mind. She said nothing but she felt less disgraced.
By noon the ice had thawed in the streets. It took her only twenty minutes to get home, against the hour and more she was coming. She found her mother and the three younger children half way through their dinner. This made her feel at once that she was a wage-earner; she sat in to the table and let her mother fetch her her dinner from the side of the stove.
“Did you get on all right?”
This question, which she had dreaded, was after all easy to answer. “I got on fine,” she said, loudly. “A woman showed me what to do and right off I did it. It’s as easy as touch me. You on’y have to look sharp. Can I have a sup of tea with my piece in the morning, mother?”
She finished her dinner and sat on, elbows over the table. Her mother had to remind her of the time. Folding her shawl across, she stared foolishly round the room; the clock, the gleaming steel fender, the strip of rag carpet of many colours. She felt weak and little, though she knew she was a great girl, as big and strong and plump as a tub of butter.
“Do you wish you was back at school?” her sister asked.
“No I don’t.” That much at least was certain. She hurried off.
It was black dark at six when she left the mill. The stream of men and shawled girls and women swept her along the streets. At the corner where she turned up the hill—as steep nearly as the side of a house—she fell in with some girls she knew. It was icy cold, with a cold noisy wind tearing at the houses. Her cheeks smarted and all the blood in her body seemed pressed against the back of her head. She was very tired.
(Sitting in Richmond Park, she felt the cold of that winter in her body. It got between her and the sun. She saw, as though it were something hard, indestructible, behind the flimsy screen of grass and trees and blue sky, the night, the street of squalid houses, the unseen noisy wind, and then inside the house her mother bent over the low fire, and the yellow circle of the lamp.)
In a few months she was a changed creature. She held her own with the foreman and even invented a name for him that sent the others into paroxysms of rude laughter. They caught their hands to their sides and screeched. When she ate her piece, she yelled to her new friends across the voices of the others : one day she stood up on the table and danced, lifting her skirts. The men standing round in the yard crowded to the window and bawled their interest in the performance. She didn’t care, not she. She cake-walked the length of the table, head back, her behind well out, elbows sawing the air in time to the steps.
The noise and the constant throbbing of the looms played on her nerves. There were days when every vibration of the machines repeated itself in her body, until she was nearly crazy with excitement. The other young girls felt it the same way. In the evenings when they left work they could not go tamely home. They screamed and shouted to each other across the road. As soon as they had swallowed a meal they tidied themselves and rushed out into the streets again. Here until bedtime they paraded between the street-lamps, talking and giggling, five or six abreast with linked arms. Now one of them would start a song and the others snatched it and flung it back on their strong piercing voices.
Goodbye, my Bluebell, farewell to you
The older girls who had young men with whom they were “going”—there was a table of affinities on every derelict door and wall : Clara Lamb goes with J.T.—and the married women, looked angrily at these young fly-by-nights. But that was no use.
Her mother said nothing. She was so tired that she did not seem to care if her daughter paraded the town the whole night. Besides, she expected her to settle—as if youth were a jelly.
I was young and fond, the woman admitted. She opened her bag and held the small glass up to her face. It showed her the yellowed skin starting through the powder and the deep lines at her mouth. She tried to imagine the smoothness of her face those many years since, but it was no good, it was like struggling to recall her mother’s face after she died. Eyes, hair, a fold of loose skin—the rest a blur like a bad painting.
A fond fool, she said. Yes, you were that. Still I’d do it again—every turn and moment. You don’t know till you’ve tried, you don’t know anything, anything. She shut the glass angrily away into her bag and smiled, a sly, childish smile. Girls—what did girls know? They talked rubbish, nasty rubbish some of it, and thought they knew more than their mothers. A lie. It was only living it taught you. It was—a vague gesture swept up her life to this moment and thrust it in the eye of the world. See? What I did I did. If you don’t like it don’t look.
Her hand strayed pulling at the short delicate grass near the trees. She felt confused. Little currents of feeling ran under the surface of her thoughts, darkening it, as in a spent wave the undertow darkens the surface of the water. She was suddenly certain—but the certainty was inexpressible, too remote from anything she knew to be fixed in words—that the young do know more. Some moment of her childhood came close to her, time doubling back on itself; not so close that she saw either shape or colour of the objects that peopled it, but close enough for its light to fall round her. Blinding, that light. Her eyes no longer accustomed to it were able to endure its peculiar intensity for less than a minute. In that minute she saw nothing, understood nothing, but she felt that for which she had no words, the irrecoverable sharpness of young senses.
When she was a child, the whiteness of marguerites in the long grass, the pale fawn of buds thrust between her and the sky, absorbed her whole being through her eyes. Too early she lost this gift of complete response. Her mind saw no farther than the surface of her eyes. What she could have been (if the writ of the kingdom of heaven ran on earth) fell away quickly into what she was. She began to die when she was still very young: as we all do.
The mill did worse to her than bring her to be familiar with lewdness. She was not innocent when she began there. You wouldn’t expect it had you lived where she did. (To be innocent one must be a little private.) But the mill, with the curious disintegrating assault it made on her mind, on the fibres of her body, subtly hurt and confused her. The yelling, the cheap songs, the jokes, the swaggering about the town at night, were defensive. Within, she was expectant, lost.
She lived two years in this way. Then—she was seventeen—she let herself be seduced, her mind (which was the readier for it) first, and then her body.
She was with the other girls outside the mill, waiting for the horse buses that were taking them to Staveley Forest for their Bank Holiday. A young man, but older and better dressed than the rest, came over to speak to them. He knew one of the girls. He talked to them all, made jokes, and was very obliging and pleasant. When the bus started she was the last in and he climbed in with her, squeezing himself into a corner where, since he was the only man in that bus, he came in for a great deal of notice. He was not abashed; he had a ready tongue and sat smiling, with his long legs stretched out.
They played Up Jenkins, in which a button is passed frenziedly from hand to hand, and even in the excitement of it she felt that his hand stayed in hers. Before the day was out she was gone on him. She was so gone that she saw nothing except his long body and his face : she could not help looking at them and she had lost the use of her tongue. When he spoke to her she turned red and mumbled an answer. He saw that she was put out, and had no doubt that he was the cause. He was not much surprised.
The next evening he was strolling along the street where she and her friends paraded. He took off his cap and spoke. Obeying a strict code, the other girls walked on, leaving her with him. They talked. She had flamed up at seeing him and had almost nothing to say. They strolled together to the end of the street. He invited her
to walk by the canal but she was crazy to be seen with him and kept him standing where four streets meet until everyone had noticed them. The following day he waited for her at six o’clock and saw her home. It was a declaration.
She did not join her friends that evening. They did not expect her. The streets are all very well when what you want is noise and light and company but for serious walkers the lanes and the canal bank. There was a walk that led round the brow of the hill and down, by dusty narrow lanes, to a valley of green fields. The fields led to a wood and the wood to a slender hillock known locally as King Arthur’s Seat.
The Seat itself was a rock, worn away in the centre by much plebeian sitting. It must have been visited by generations of lovers, since the story about it ran that no young woman who sat there with a young man would die a maid. Very few of them did, but there may have been less virtue in the stone than in the deep dark wood.
She was willing for anything. Her body, possessed by an energy which the machines wearied without satisfying, so that it was renewed each morning, asked to be used. Her mind was full of imaginings. All the tales she had been told, the jokes, the chafing of her imagination since childhood by scenes enacted almost under her eyes, increased her excitement. She wanted what she could think of only as an act of the body. The curious thing is—it would have been curious to an onlooker who could see into her mind—that her thoughts and her desires were not simple. They were muddied and confused by the thinking of other people, her mother, the young women who as she was had been debauched by the machines, the men and women and children, street on narrow street of them, heaped together in rooms much too small for them, scarcely separated by walls too thin to keep back a sound, forced to abandon privacy, to deny the decencies, like animals penned together, and their souls a burden to them. No, no, she was not simple. She was sly, coarse, pliant, fanciful (in a useless way), slatternly, undisciplined, timid, ignorant, experienced—and still malleable, still, in spite of herself, fresh and warm, still young. If nothing was to be made of her—or if what was made of her is nothing—why go to all that trouble? The answer may be that there is no answer. Life is meaningless.
A Day Off Page 4
