Archibald Cronin - The Stars Look Down

He looked at her doubtfully, closely, as she lay in his arms; her eyes were shut — under the lids they seemed full; her pale lips were moist and a little apart as if vaguely smiling; her breath held the generous fume of port; her body was soft and very warm.

“Go on,” she murmured. “Pull down the blinds. All the blinds.”

“No, Jenny… wait, Jenny…”

The train jolted a little; shook up and down as it took some point on the track. He rose and pulled down all the blinds.

“That’s wonderful, David.”

Afterwards she lay against him; she fell asleep; she snored gently. He stared straight in front of him, a curious look upon his set face. The carriage reeked of stale pipes, port and engine smoke; someone had thrown orange peel upon the floor. Outside it was black as pitch. The wind howled, battered the heavy rain against the carriage window. The train thundered on.

At the beginning of April, when David had been coaching Arthur Barras at the Law for close on three months, he received a message from his father. Harry Kinch, a small boy from the Terraces, brother of that little Alice who had died of pneumonia nearly seven years before, brought the note to David at New Bethel Street school one morning. Dear David will you come up the Wansbeck — trouting Saturday yours Dad. It was clumsily written in copying-ink pencil on the inside of an old envelope.

David was deeply touched. His father still wished to go fishing with him as in those days when he had taken him, a little boy, up the Wansbeck stream! The thought made him happy. For ten days Robert had been out the pit with a flare-up of tubercular pleurisy — he passed it off lightly as “inflammation”—but he was up now and about. Saturday would be his last free day; he wished David to spend it with him. The invitation came like a peace offering straight from his father’s heart.

Standing at his desk in the humming class-room, David’s thoughts flashed swiftly back over these past months. He had gone to the Law against his own inclination, partly because of Jenny’s importunities, certainly because they needed the extra money. But it had upset his father greatly. And, indeed, he felt it strangely unreal himself, that he should now be on familiar terms with the Barrases, who had always figured in his mind as apart from him and his life. He reflected. Aunt Carrie, for instance, so curious and worried about him at the start, inclined to look at him as she did people who came into the house with muddy boots or at Ramage’s bill when she thought he had overcharged her for the sirloin. Her nearsighted eyes had worn that worried distrustfulness for quite a while.

But the look had faded from Aunt Carrie’s eyes in time. She had “taken” to David in the end and would send up hot milk and biscuits to the old schoolroom about nine-o’clock when Arthur and David were due to finish their work.

Then Hilda, strangely enough, had started to drop in with the hot milk and the biscuits. She had begun by treating him — not like the person who came in with dirty boots — but like the actual dirt upon the boots. He took no notice, he was quick enough to see it as the symptom of Hilda’s conflict. Hilda interested him. She was twenty-four; her forbidding manner and dark unattractiveness ingrained more deeply now. Hilda, he thought, is not like most unattractive women. They will go on deluding themselves, dressing up, making the best of themselves, reflecting before the mirror, this blue does suit me, or my profile is really quite good, or isn’t my hair charming with this middle parting? deluding themselves until they die. But Hilda from the start had resolutely made up her mind that she was ugly, and with that forbidding manner, she resolutely made the worst of her ugliness. Apart from this, he saw that Hilda lived in conflict: perhaps her father’s strength fought against her mother’s weakness within her. Hilda always struck David as the unwilling union of these two elements, as if she had been conceived unwillingly, fought with herself in embryo and came into the world finally in a state of threshing discord. Hilda was not happy. She revealed herself gradually, not knowing that she revealed herself. She was missing Grace, who was now at school in Harrogate, acutely. Though her remarks usually took this form: “They’ll never teach her anything, she’s a perfect little jay!” or, as when reading a letter: “She can’t even spell yet!”—David saw that Hilda adored Grace. She was a queer sort of feminist, she was militant within herself. On March 12th the papers were full of a campaign of destruction organised by suffragists in the West End of London. Windows had been smashed in all the principal streets and many hundreds arrested, including Mrs. Pankhurst. Hilda glowed. She started a magnificent argument that night, quite taken out of herself. She wanted to be part of the movement, she said, to do something, go into the active whirl of life, work madly to relieve the crushing oppressions on her sex. Her eyes flashed as she instanced the Armenian women and the white-slave traffic. She was disdainful, magnificent. Men? Of course she detested men! Hated and detested them. She launched into arguments, she knew her Doll’s House by heart. It was another symptom of her conflict, her ugliness, her psychosis.

Though she never openly revealed the fact, it was evident that Hilda’s aversion to men was rooted in her father. He was MAN, the phallic symbol, her father. His calm suppression of all her wishes inverted her more fiercely, magnified and deepened her repressions. She wanted to get away from the Law and out of Sleescale, she wanted to work for her living — anything and anywhere so long as she was amongst her own sex. She wanted to do something. But all her frantic desires beat themselves out against her father’s calm detachment. He laughed at her, made her feel a fool with one inattentive word. She swore she would get away, that she would fight. Yet she remained, and the fight took place only within herself. Hilda waited… waited for what?

From Hilda, David got one view of Barras. The other, of course, came from Arthur. At the Law David never came in contact with Barras, he remained a remote and unapproachable figure. But Arthur talked a great deal about his father, he was never happier than when talking about him. After the quadratic equations were disposed of Arthur would begin… anything would serve to set him going. But while Hilda’s disclosures wore the taint of hatred, Arthur’s rang out like an ecstasy.

David grew very fond of Arthur — yet through his fondness lingered that same sense of pity which had come to him in the pit yard when he first saw Arthur upon the high seat of the dogcart. Arthur was so earnest, so pathetically earnest. And yet so weak! He would waver even upon the kind of pencil he must use — an H or an HB. A quick decision comforted him like a kindness. He took everything to heart, he was inordinately sensitive. Often David tried gently to move Arthur from his shyness with a joke. It was no use, Arthur had not the faintest sense of humour.

As for Arthur’s mother, David came to know her too. One evening Aunt Carrie brought the hot milk into the schoolroom with an air of conferring a favour even greater than usual.

She said with dignity:

“Mrs. Barras, my sister, would like to see you.”

Lying back upon her pillows, Harriet wanted to know about Arthur, just his “opinion,” of course, about Arthur. He was a great anxiety to her, Arthur, her son, and a great responsibility. Oh, a great responsibility, she said, asking him if he would mind handing her the bottle of Cologne from the little side table. Just there, if he please, by his elbow. Cologne soothed her headaches when Caroline was too busy to brush her hair. Yes, she went on, it would be such a disappointment to Arthur’s father if Arthur did not turn out well. Perhaps he might try, in his own way, since Caroline spoke so highly of him, to influence Arthur’s character for good to prepare him for life. And, without taking breath, she asked him if he believed in thought healing. She had felt lately that she might try thought healing for herself, the difficulty being that in thought healing the bed should, strictly speaking, face to the north and it was awkward in this room from the position of the window and the gas stove. She could not, naturally, dispense with her gas stove. Impossible! Now, she continued, since he knew mathematics did he honestly believe that thought healing would be equally effective if the bed faced north-west which could be managed with a little difficulty by moving the chest of drawers against the other wall.