Archibald Cronin - The Stars Look Down

She gazed at him resentfully, with scalding tears in her eyes.

“Why must you go against people like that?” she sobbed. “You’re so queer. It would have been so useful for you to be on the right side of Mr. Ramage. I want you to get on.”

He answered compassionately:

“But Jenny dear, I’ve told you getting on in that particular sense doesn’t exist for me now. Perhaps I am queer. But I’ve been through some queer experiences in these last years. The pit disaster — and the war! Don’t you think, Jenny, that it’s high time some of us set ourselves to fight the abuses that produce disasters like the Neptune disaster and wars like the last war?”

“But, David,” she wailed with unanswerable logic, “you’re only getting thirty-five shillings a week!”

His breast heaved suddenly. He stopped arguing, gave her a quiet look, then rose and went into the other room.

This impressed her with the sense of his neglect, and the hot tears of self-pity trickled afresh. Then she brooded, became sulky and ill-tempered. David was different, completely different; her cajoling went for nothing, she seemed to have no grip upon him at all. She tried with a certain pique to make him passionate towards her, but in that way too he had turned curiously austere. She could feel that the physical side of love, unsupported by tenderness, was repugnant to him. She felt it as an insult. She could feel passionate in a minute, come right out of a violent quarrel to be violently passionate, to want a quick and urgent satisfaction — she called it modestly “making things up.” But not David. It was, she told herself, unnatural !

Jenny, of course, was not the one, in her own phrase, “to stand being slighted,” and she got her own back in many ways. She completely relaxed her efforts to please: David began to come home at nights to an out fire and no supper at all. The fact that he never complained now and never quarrelled exasperated her worst of all. On these nights she tried everything she knew to provoke him to a quarrel and when she failed she started to taunt him:

“Do you know that I was earning four pounds a week during the war? — that’s more than twice what you’re earning now!”

“I’m not in this job for the money, Jenny.”

“I don’t care for money and you know it. I’m not mean. I’m generous. Remember the suit I gave you to go on our honeymoon. Oh, that was a scream that was! — me giving you your trousseau like. Even in those days you hadn’t no gumption. I wouldn’t call myself a man at all if I couldn’t bring home decent money at the end of the week.”

“We all have our standards, Jenny.”

“Of course,” with supreme spitefulness, “I could get a position any time I wanted. I went through the paper this morning and there was half a dozen posts I could have applied for easy. Why! I could get to be a buyer in the millinery any day.”

“Be patient, Jenny! Perhaps I’m not going to be such a dud as you imagine.”

If Jenny had grasped the situation she might, by construing it to her own standards, have been reconciled to patience. David was proving a success with Heddon — he accompanied him to all the Lodge meetings in the district and he was usually asked to speak. At Seghill he had addressed fifteen hundred men in the local Institute over the question of the Southport Resolutions. Heddon had been fogged by the findings of the January Conference and he had allowed David to handle the whole affair. The speech was a triumph for David: lucid, vital and alive with a passionate sincerity. At the end of the meeting, as he came off the platform, he was surrounded by a mass of men, who, to his amazement, wanted to shake him by the hand. Old Jack Briggs, seventy-six, beer- and case-hardened, the doyen of Seghill, pumped his arm till it ached.

“By Gor,” croaked old Jack in the dialect, “tha wor a bloddy gud speech, lad. Aw’ve heerd mony a one but aw diddent niver hear better nor tha. Ye’ll go fawr, hinny!”

And Heddon echoed that historic sentiment. The incredible fact stood established that Heddon, a bitter and unlettered man, was not jealous of David. Heddon had few friends, his violent nature repulsed all but the most persevering of his acquaintances, but from the first Heddon had taken to David. Heddon saw in David a rare and disinterested spirit and he knew so much of the dross of humanity that despite himself Heddon came to love David. He felt instinctively, here is a man who has found his natural bent, a born speaker, unruffled, penetrating and sincere, a clever and passionately earnest man, a man who might do much for his fellow men. And it was as if Heddon had said fiercely to himself: for God’s sake don’t let me be bitter and mean and envious but let me do my damnedest to help him on!

It was Heddon who read with delight the reports of the Sleescale Town Council meetings which were finding their way into the Tynecastle papers. The Tynecastle papers had discovered David, and his attacks upon the excellent and well-established abuses of Sleescale were manna to them in a dull season. From time to time the Tynecastle papers gaily captioned David and his doings: “Rumpus in Sleescale Council Chamber,” and “Sleescale Trouble Maker at Work Again!”

Heddon dissolved in bitter laughter over the report of David’s repartees. Peering over the paper’s edge:

“Did ye really say that to the ucker, David?”

“Nothing like so good, Tom!”

“I’d have liked to see that Ramage’s face when ye told him his bloddy slaughter-house wasn’t fit to kill pigs in!”

David’s inveterate modesty helped him all the more with Tom Heddon. If he had displayed the first signs of swelled head he would have killed himself stone dead with Heddon. But he did not, which made Tom cut out the choicest columns from the Tynecastle Argue and forward them to his old friend Harry Nugent with a significant blue pencil scrawl.

Jenny knew nothing of all this. And Jenny was not patient, construing David’s absorption into neglect and being maddened by that supposed neglect. Jenny was so mad she had an excellent excuse for finding vicarious consolation in Murchison’s invalid port. By the spring of 1919 Jenny was drinking regularly again. And about this time, an event of considerable psychological importance occurred.

On Sunday the 5th of May old Charley Gowlan died. Charley had been ill for six months with Bright’s disease and finally, despite repeated tappings of his shiny, swollen abdomen, Charley went to God. It was a grim paradox that Charley, who had never cared for water much, should be water-logged at the end. But paradox or no, Charley did die, in mean, neglected circumstances. And two days later Joe arrived in Sleescale.

Joe’s coming to Sleescale fell nothing short of a sensation. He came on the morning of that Tuesday in a glittering Sunbeam motor-car, a new twenty-five green Sunbeam driven by a man in dark green uniform. Immediately Joe stepped out of the car at his old home in Alma Terrace the car was surrounded by a gaping crowd. Harry Ogle, Jake Wicks, the new checkweigher, and a few of the Neptune overmen were at the house — it was almost time for the funeral — and although rumours of Joe’s prosperity had reached the Terraces they were frankly dazzled by the change in Joe. Indeed, Frank Walmsley, who had once been his chargeman, straightaway addressed his as sir. Joe was discreetly but handsomely dressed, he wore spats, his cuff links were of dull gold and his watch-chain of fine platinum. He was shaved and manicured and polished. He shone with a bluff and enterprising opulence.

Harry shifted his feet awkwardly before Joe’s opulence, struggling with the memory of that young Joe who had been hand-putter in the Paradise.