Archibald Cronin - The Stars Look Down

“No. I’m as well here!” When she turned with the plate of watercress her face was stiff.

He knew better than to press her. Sitting down on the sofa by the window he picked up the current number of the Workers’ Independent . His weekly article, a series he had been contributing for the past twelve months, was on the front page, and a speech he had made at Seghill on Tuesday was given verbatim on the middle sheet. He read neither. He was thirty-five years of age. For the last four years he had worked like a nigger, organising, speaking, getting about the district, not sparing himself. He had increased the Edgeley membership by over four thousand. He had the name for tenacity and strength and ability. Three monographs of his had been published by the Anvil Press, and his paper The Nation and the Mines had won him the Russell medal. The medal was upstairs, lost somewhere, behind a drawer. He felt a momentary sadness come over him. Down in the Dunes this afternoon he had listened to the lark, and the sound of the lark had reminded him of the boy who used to come to the Dunes nearly twenty years before. Then he had fallen to thinking of Jenny. Where in the name of God was Jenny? Dear Jenny — in spite of everything he still loved her and missed her and thought of her. And the thought of her striking through the sunshine and the song of the lark had saddened him. Meeting Annie and Sammy had lifted up his spirits, it is true, but now the sadness was come on him again. Perhaps Martha was responsible — her attitude! Was it not futile for him to keep striving to change the movements of great masses of humanity when the secret heart of each human unit remained secret and unassailable and unchanging? She was very unforgiving, Martha.

He felt better after his tea — the watercress in spite of Martha’s unforgiving heart was good — and he sat down to write to Harry. Dudgeon and Bebbington and Harry had all kept their seats in the election that year. A very near thing it had been for Bebbington; there had been some scandal over divorce proceedings brought by Sir Peter Outram, when Bebbington had been named, but the affair had been hurried over, and Bebbington had just managed to come through. David wrote a long letter to Harry. Then he took up Erich Flitner’s Experiments in State Control . He had been interested in Flitner lately and in Max Sering too, especially Assault on the Community , but to-night Flitner rather dodged him. He kept thinking about the coming assault on Whitley Bay and he decided that it would be uncommonly good fun to take Sammy for a swim. There would be ice-cream too; he must on no account forget the ice-cream. It was just possible that Annie might have a secret weakness for ice-cream, the real Italian stuff, a slider. Would Annie remain immutable if confronted with a slider? He lay back and laughed out loud.

In fact, for the whole of the next ten days he couldn’t get Whitley Bay and the swimming and Annie and Sammy out of his head. On the morning of the 19th when he arrived at Central Station, Tynecastle, where he had arranged to meet Annie and Sammy, he was genuinely excited. He had been detained by a last-minute compensation case and he came in with a rush to the booking-hall where Annie and Sammy stood waiting.

“I thought I’d be late,” he exclaimed, smiling and breathless, and decided it was good still to be young enough to feel excited and breathless.

“There’s plenty of time,” Annie said in her practical way.

Sammy said nothing, his instructions were to say nothing, but his shining blue eyes in his beautifully washed face expressed a whole philosophy.

They got into the train for Whitley Bay, David carrying the suit-cases. Annie did not like that; she wanted to carry her own suit-case, or rather the suit-case she had borrowed from Pug — it was heavy, and too shabby for David to be seen with. Annie looked distressed, as though it were the most improper thing in the world for David to be carrying the suit-case when she had often carried a fish creel three times the weight herself, but she thought it not her place to protest. Then they were in their compartment, the whistle blew and they were off.

Sammy sat in the corner seat next to David and Annie sat opposite. As they rolled through the suburbs into the flat countryside Sammy’s enthusiasm was enormous and, forgetting that he had been vowed to silence, he shared it generously with David.

“See that engine, an’ the waggons, and that crane!” he cried. “Oh, and look at the size of that chimney. By gosh, I’ve never seed a chimney bigger nor that afore.”

The chimney led to profound and exciting talk of steeplejacks and how wonderful it must be to stand on the top of a chimney “that high” with nothing between you and the earth two hundred feet below.

“Perhaps you’d like to be a steeple-jack when you grow up, Sammy?” David said, smiling at Annie.

Sammy shook his head.

“No,” he said with a certain reticence. “I’m going to be like my father.”

“A miner?” David asked.

“Ay! That’s what I’m going to be,” Sammy said sturdily. Sammy’s air was so solemn that David had to laugh.

“You’ve plenty of time to change your mind,” he said.

It was a pleasant journey, though not a long one, and quite soon they were at Whitley Bay. David had taken rooms in Tarrant Street, a small quiet street leading off the promenade near the Waverley Hotel. The rooms had been recommended to him by Dickie, his clerk at the Institute, who said that Mrs. Leslie the landlady often took Federation delegates when the district conferences were on. Mrs. Leslie was the widow of a doctor who had lost his life in a colliery accident at Hedlington about twenty years before. A timberman had been pinned by a fall of roof and it had been impossible to free his forearm which was caught and mangled between two masses of whinstone. Dr. Leslie had gone down to amputate the timberman’s forearm and get him out. He had almost got through the amputation which he had heroically performed on the equally heroic timberman without an anæsthetic, lying on his belly in coal muck, squeezed under the fall, in a sweat of blood and dirt, when quietly and suddenly the whole roof caved in on them, and the doctor and the timberman were both crushed to death. Everyone had forgotten about the incident now, but it was because of that fall of roof that Mrs. Leslie kept lodgings in the downtrodden little road with its row of red-brick houses each having four square yards of front garden, Nottingham lace curtains, glass overmantels and a much-abused piano.

Mrs. Leslie was a tall, dark, reserved woman; she was neither comic nor ill-tempered: she presented none of those features which are traditionally associated with the seaside landlady. She made David and Annie and Sammy quietly welcome and showed them to their rooms. But here Mrs. Leslie made an unexpectedly awkward mistake. She turned to Annie and said:

“I thought you and your husband could have this nice front room and the little boy would take the small room at the back.”

Annie did not blush; if anything she paled; and without the slightest trace of awkwardness she answered:

“This is my brother-in-law, Mrs. Leslie. My husband was killed in the war.”

It was Mrs. Leslie who blushed, the difficult blush of a reserved woman; she coloured to the roots of her hair.

“That was very stupid of me. I ought to have understood from the letter.” So Annie and Sammy had the front room and David the small room at the back. But Mrs. Leslie felt in some odd way that she had wounded Annie and she took a deal of trouble to be nice to Annie. In no time at all Mrs. Leslie and Annie became friends.

The holiday went well. Sammy galvanised the holiday; he was like an electric needle pricking David on, though David did not need pricking — he was having just as lovely a time with Sammy as Sammy was with him. The weather was warm, but the fresh breeze which always blows at Whitley Bay prevented the warmth from being oppressive. They bathed every morning and played French cricket on the sands. They ate unbelievably of ice-cream and fruit and went for walks to Cullercoats to the queer old-fashioned crab-parlour kept by the old woman in Brown’s Buildings. David had inward remorse that the crab was not exactly good for Sammy’s stomach, but Sammy loved it and with a guilty air they would sneak into the little front parlour in the two-roomed house that smelled of tar and nets and sit down on the horse-hair sofa and eat the fresh crab out of the rough shell while the old woman of the establishment watched them and called Sammy “hinny” and sucked at her clay pipe. The crab tasted marvellous; indeed, it tasted so good David felt it could not possibly do Sammy any harm. On the way back from Cullercoats, Sammy would take David’s hand as they walked home along the promenade. That was question-time. David allowed Sammy to ask him any question under the sun and Sammy, trotting alongside, simply bombarded him with questions. David answered correctly when he could and when he couldn’t he invented. But Sammy always knew when he was inventing. He would look up at David with those twinkling, disappearing eyes and laugh.