Archibald Cronin - The Stars Look Down

“You haven’t heard about Jenny?”

“No,” Joe said. And taking out his case he busied himself in lighting a cigarette.

Ada sighed.

“She’s expecting next month, yes, I’ve got to go through and see to her myself. At the beginning of December.”

The smoke from his cigarette got into Joe’s throat. He coughed and choked and got quite red in the face. After a pause he said:

“You mean there’s going to be an addition?”

Ada nodded mournfully.

“It’s just about the limit, poor Jenny, and he will have it he’s going in the army. And after that Gawd knows what’ll happen. He’s got the chuck from the teaching. Can you beat it? I always said she threw herself away that time, Joe. And now to think she’s been and went and let herself get caught.”

Joe’s cough convulsed him again.

“Well, well. These things do happen, I suppose.”

After that Ada became more confidential with Joe. They had a pleasant intimate talk in the half darkness of the room. At the end of it when Joe had to go Ada was greatly consoled, she felt that Joe’s visit had done her a power of good.

Joe walked back to Beech Road, Yarrow, with a curious expression on his face. Thank God he’d got out of Sleescale when he did! He was unusually agreeable to his withered landlady that night, spoke to her kindly and seemed generally to congratulate her that she was old and ugly and daughterless.

The next day came and Joe could think of nothing but his engagement in the evening. When he had finished work he slipped into Grigg’s the barber’s at the foot of Beech Road and had a shave, very close, and a hair-trim. Then he went home to his lodgings and took a bath. He sat on the edge of the bath quite naked, whistling softly and doing his nails. To-night he was determined to be at his best.

When he had bathed he padded into his bed-sitting-room, dressed extra carefully in his very best suit, a light grey with a faint pin stripe, a pattern copied from a suit he had once seen a heavy swell wearing in a musical comedy at the Empire. He had ambitions for a dinner suit, terrible tearing ambitions for a dinner suit, but he knew that the time for the dinner suit was not yet. Still, even in the ordinary grey he looked splendid, chin tenderly smooth, hair brilliantined, eye bright and vital, his thin watch-chain girded high on his waistcoat, a paste-pearl stud in his tie. He smiled at his scintillating reflection in the mirror, tried a bow and a few positions of careless elegance; then his smile became a grin and he thought to himself: “You’re in amongst it at last, my boy, just you watch yourself and there’s nothing can stop you.”

He became grave again and as he walked up the road to Hilltop he rehearsed the right note, deferential yet manly; his expression as he went up the steps, ready to conquer, was masterly.

The same neat maid, Bessie, showed him into the lounge where Laura stood alone with her bare arm resting on the mantelpiece and one slipper extended to the fire. She was dressed very plainly in black and she made a marvellously effective picture with the firelight warming her pale face and glinting on her beautiful polished nails. Joe suddenly had a thrilling admiration for her. She’s great, he thought to himself, by gum she’s it ; and, gripped by a most familiar tenseness of his middle, yet with a touching humility on his face, he advanced and greeted her.

Then an awkward pause occurred. He rubbed his hands, smoothed his hair, straightened his tie and smiled.

“It’s been cold to-day, terrible cold for the time of year. Seems to be freezing outside to-night.”

She extended her other slipper to the fire, then she said:

“Is it?”

He felt snubbed; she thrilled and overawed him; he had never known anyone like her in his life. He persevered:

“It certainly is good of you to ask me up to-night. It’s a real honour, I assure you. When Mr. Stanley gave me the invitation you could have knocked me down with a feather.”

Laura looked at him with that unsmiling smile, taking in his flashy chain, fake pearl, his deadly emanation of hair-oil. Then, as though wishing him free of such atrocities, she looked away She said to the fire:

“Stanley will be down in a moment.”

Damped, he could not make her out. He would have given everything he had to know absolutely and completely the nature of her real self and how he stood with her.

But he did not know and he was half afraid of her. To begin with she was undoubtedly a lady. Not “ladylike” in Jenny’s silly sense — he could have laughed when he remembered Jenny’s shallow gentility, the crooking of the little finger, the bowing, the “so good of you” and “after you please” nonsense. No, Laura was not like that, Laura had real class. She did not have to try; in Joe’s memorable phrase, she was already it .

She had a curious indifference, too, which pleased and fascinated him. He felt that she would never insist; if she did not agree she would simply let the matter drop and keep her own opinion with that queer unsmiling smile. It was as though Laura had a secret, mocking self. He suspected that she was extremely unconventional within herself, that she probably disagreed utterly with the set ideas of life. Yet she was not unconventional outwardly; she was extremely fastidious in her person and her taste in dress was quietly perfect. Nevertheless he could not help the feeling that she was contemptuous of convention; he had a crazy half-formed intuition that she despised everybody — including herself.

His thoughts were interrupted by Stanley’s entry: Stanley came in breezily, shook hands with Joe and clapped him on the back, too obviously trying to put him at his ease.

“Glad to see you in my house, Gowlan. We don’t stand on ceremony here, so make yourself at home.” He planted his feet apart in the middle of the hearthrug, exposing his back to the heat of the fire, and exclaimed: “What about it though, Laura? What about the rum ration for the troops?”

Laura went over to the walnut cabinet where a shaker stood with glasses and some ice. They each had a dry martini; then Joe and Millington had a second; and Millington, who drank his quickly, had a third.

“I get outside too many of these, Gowlan,” he remarked, smacking his lips. “Don’t get enough exercise, either. I want to get thoroughly fit one of these days, get my old form back, exercises, aha! Harden myself up like I used to be at St. Bede’s.” He flexed his biceps and felt it with a frown.

To cheer himself up Stanley had another drink and they went in to supper.

“It’s very curious,” Stanley lamented, spreading his napkin and addressing himself to his cold chicken, “how soon you can get out of condition. Business is all very well, making money and chaining yourself to an office, but hang it all health is the best wealth. Shakespeare or somebody said that, didn’t they?”

“Emerson, wasn’t it?” suggested Laura, with her eyes on Joe.

Joe did not answer. His library at his lodgings consisted of a tom paper-backed edition of Saucy Stories from the French , and Mrs. Calder’s Bible, planted encouragingly in front of the glass case of waxed fruit, out of which Joe, on Sunday afternoons when feeling especially pious, would read what he termed the dirty bits.

“I wish I could have joined the army,” Stanley meditated complainingly. He had the dull man’s habit of worrying a subject to death. “That’s the place to get you really into shape.”

A short silence. Stanley crumbled his roll in a momentary discontent. Interspersed with his breeziness he was much given to these bouts of grumbling, the peevish regret of a man who sees himself approaching baldness and middle age. But Stanley had always been liable to impulsive dissatisfactions with his present lot in life. Six months ago he had longed to make money and re-establish the position of the firm; yet now that he had done it his sense of unfulfilment still persisted.