Archibald Cronin - The Stars Look Down

David gazed from one to the other: encouraged by Joe’s grave attention, by Jenny’s bright eyes. He plunged into it.

“It’s just like this, then. Don’t think I’m drunk, or a prig, or a candidate for the City Asylum. When I’ve got my B.A. I may have to take up teaching for a bit. That’ll only be for bread and butter. I’m not educating myself to teach. I’m not cut out for teaching — too impatient, I suppose. I’m educating myself to fight. What I honestly want to do is different, and it’s hard, terribly hard to explain. But it just amounts to this. I want to do something for my own kind, for the men who work in the pits. You know, Joe, what the work is. Take the Neptune, we’ve both been in it, you know what it’s done to my father. You know what the conditions are… and the pay. I want to help to change things, to make them better.”

Joe thought, he’s mad, quite bleeding well barmy. But he said, very suavely:

“Go on, Davey, that’s the stuff to give them.”

David, glowing to his subject, exclaimed:

“No, Joe, you probably think I’m talking through my hat. But you might get a better idea of what I mean if you take a look at the history of the miners — yes, the history of the miners in Northumberland only sixty or seventy years ago. They worked under something like the feudal system. They were treated as barbarians… outcasts. They had no education. Learning was checked amongst them. The conditions were terrible, improper ventilation, accidents through the owners refusing to take precautions against firedamp. Women and children of six years of age allowed to go down the pit… children of six, mind you. Boys kept eighteen hours a day underground. The men bonded, so they couldn’t stir a foot without being chucked out their houses or chucked into prison. Tommy shops everywhere — kept usually by a relative of the viewer — with the pitman compelled to buy his provisions there and his wages confiscated on pay day to settle the balance….”

All at once he broke off and laughed awkwardly towards Jenny.

“This can’t possibly interest you! I’m an idiot to bother you with it.”

“No, indeed,” she declared admiringly. “I think it’s most awfully clever of you to know all that.”

“Go on, Davey,” urged the genial Joe, signalling another port for Jenny. “Tell us more.”

But this time David shook his head definitely.

“I’ll keep it all for the Fabian Society debate. That’s when the windbags really get going. But perhaps you do see what I mean. Conditions have improved since those terrible days I’m talking about, we’ve marched a certain distance. But we haven’t marched far enough. There still are appalling hardships in some of the pits, rotten pay, and too many accidents, People don’t seem to realise. I heard a man in the tram the other day. He was reading the paper. His friend asked him what was the news. He answered: ‘Nothing. Nothing, at all. Just another of these pit accidents.’… I looked over his shoulder and saw that fifteen men had been killed in an explosion at Nottingham.”

There was a short pause. Jenny’s eyes dimmed sympathetically. Jenny had swallowed three large ports and all her emotions were beautifully responsive; she vibrated, equipoised, ready to laugh with the joy of life or weep for the sadness of death. She had come to like port quite a lot, had Jenny. A ladylike drink she considered it, a wine , too, which classed it as a beverage infinitely refined. Joe, naturally, had introduced her to it.

Joe broke the silence:

“You’ll go far, Davey,” he said solemnly. “You’re streets ahead of me. You’ll be in Parliament while I’m puddlin’ steel.”

“Don’t be an ass,” David said shortly.

But Jenny had heard; her attention towards David increased. She began, really, to devote herself to him. Her demure glances now became more demure, more significant. She sparkled. She knew all the time, of course, that she was playing David against Joe. It was extremely fascinating to have two strings to her bow.

They talked of lighter things; they talked of what Joe had done; talked and laughed until ten o’clock, all very merry and friendly. Then with a start David became aware of the time.

“Heavens above!” he exclaimed. “And I’m supposed to be working!”

“Don’t go yet,” Jenny protested. “The evening’s young.”

“I don’t want to, but I must, I really must. I’ve got a History Class exam. On Monday.”

“Well,” Joe declared roundly, “we’ll see you on Tuesday, Davey lad, like we’ve arranged. And ye’ll not get away from us so easy next time.”

The party broke up, Jenny retired to “tidy up,” Joe paid the bill with a flourish of five-pound notes.

Outside, while they waited on Jenny, Joe suddenly stopped masticating his toothpick:

“She’s a nice lass that, Davey.”

“She is, indeed. I admire your taste.”

“My taste!” Joe laughed quite heartily. “You’ve got it all wrong, lad. We’re just friends. There’s not a thing between Jenny and me.”

“Really?” David sounded interested all at once.

“Ay, really!” Joe laughed again at the very idea. “I’d no idea you were getting hold of the wrong end of the stick.”

Jenny joined them and they walked three abreast to the corner of Collingwood Street, where David branched off along Westgate Road.

“Don’t forget now,” Joe said. “Tuesday night for sure.” The final handshake was cordial; Jenny’s fingers conveyed just the politest sensation of a squeeze.

David walked home on air to his scrubby room; propped up Mignet’s Histoire de la Révolution Française , and lit his pipe.

Simply grand, he thought, meeting Joe so unexpectedly; odd, too, that they should not have met before. But Tynecastle was a big place with, as Joe had said, only one Joe Gowlan in it.

David seemed to be thinking quite a lot about Joe. But the face which danced through the pages of Mignet was not Joe’s face. It was the smiling face of Jenny.

David called at 117A Scottswood Road on the following Tuesday. It was unfortunate, considering how much he had looked forward to the evening, that Joe should be detained at Millington’s working overtime. But there it was and couldn’t be helped: poor Joe had to work his overtime. David, nevertheless, enjoyed himself hugely. Though his opportunities had been so few, his nature was really sociable, he came prepared to enjoy himself and he did. The Sunleys, pre-informed by Jenny, were inclined at first to treat him with suspicion. They expected superiority. But soon the atmosphere thawed, supper appeared on the table, and hilarity filled the air. Mrs. Sunley, shedding her lethargy for once, had made a rarebit — and, as Sally remarked, Ma’s rarebits were a treat. Alf, with the help of two tea-spoons and the pepper pot, had demonstrated his own especial method of dovecote construction. A fortune it would have made him, if he’d only patented it. Jenny, looking delicious in a fresh print frock, had poured the tea herself — Ma being too flushed and flustered from her exertions in the kitchen.

David couldn’t keep his eyes off Jenny. Against the slipshod background of her home she bloomed for him. During his years in Tynecastle he had hardly spoken to a woman; at Sleescale, of course, he had been far from the stage of “walking out”—as it was traditionally known in the Terraces. Jenny was the first… absolutely the first to lay the spell of sex upon him.

A warm air wafted in through the half-open window of the back room; and though it bore the exhalation of ten thousand chimney pots it held for David the scent of spring. He watched, waited for Jenny’s smile: the soft crinkling of her lip was the most delicious thing he had ever seen. It was like the unfolding of a flower. When she passed him his cup and their fingers touched a divine softness flowed into him.