On December 15, 1889, six weeks after election day, Lady Lettice Melland and Viscount Liskeard were married at St. Margaret’s, Westminster; and Ann Artingstall and Hamer Shawcross were married at St. Margaret’s, Frizinghall. There was a lot of éclat and orange-blossom at Westminster; and after the ceremony Buck Lostwithiel drove the young people to Victoria Station behind his four-in-hand. Thence they left for Italy, and he returned to an evening of lonely brandy-drinking in Belgrave Square.
The affair at Frizinghall was quieter. St. Margaret’s is a little church whose only distinction is that Hamer Shawcross was married in it. It stands right at the bottom of one of the streets that run from Manningham Lane down into the valley; and at that time you could see from it not only a great deal of industrial grime but also a wide prospect of green fields and the strength of many hills.
When Ann and Hamer walked out of the church, man and wife, there was a light powdering of snow on the fields and hills. There was only a hired four-wheeler to drive them to Ackroyd Park. Hawley Artingstall, Lizzie and Mrs. Stansfield followed in another four-wheeler, and, squeezed together companionably in a hansom cab, Arnold Ryerson and Pen Muff made the tail of the procession. Jimmy Newboult had no part in the cavalcade. No one had thought to invite him to the wedding. Hamer was moved on seeing him in the church. He stood on the kerb waving as the little party drove away, and then set out to walk the miles to St. Swithin’s.
It was a measure of Hamer’s sudden fame that the Yorkshire Post reported the wedding: very briefly, it is true, but that was only to be expected. A newspaper-man stopped Hamer in the porch and said: “What are your plans now, Mr. Shawcross?” and Hamer replied: “To oust Lord Liskeard from St. Swithin’s. It’s only a matter of time.” It took him eleven years.
Old Hawley behaved very well, considering the company he was in. All his life long, or at any rate from the time he began to “get on,” as he liked to call it, he had belonged to the “Gentlemen’s Party,” his favourite name for the Tories. And here he was in this company which didn’t include so much as one Liberal. They hadn’t even got a party. “Labour,” they called themselves; but what the devil did that amount to, the baffled old man demanded of his soul? There was no Labour Party: there was nothing but a handful of cranks and oddities bobbing up here and there, and that they would ever coalesce into anything that need be noticed he could not believe.
So Hawley couldn’t pretend to find his company congenial; the more so as this young chap with the side-whiskers and the subdued respectable Nonconformist appearance had been reminding him of a number of things. He would never have remembered that this was the Artingstall errand-boy in whose house he had found Ann that night when all the trouble started which led to Ann’s going away and Lillian’s death. And now this chap had been standing for Parliament! A queer lot of birds, Hawley thought, Ann and Lizzie had got in with. He’d never get used to ’em – or even try to. It was bad enough meeting Ann and Lizzie after all these years.
Well, he thought, glancing down the table in Lizzie’s dining-room at Ackroyd Park, Ann had turned out a fine-looking girl: nothing like him, nothing like bleak-nosed Lillian. He thought of his mother, that woman with the Viking touch who had come from the Northeast coast. She had probably looked like this on her wedding-day before the first “Artingstall-Leather” had brought her home to Great Ancoats Street.
There were two things he felt sure of about Ann: she loved this man, and certainly there was something about the feller beyond his grand size and proud looks. And Hawley was contented to know this. The other thing was, he ruminated, that exalted look about her – lit up inside. He wondered what would come of that. It wasn’t what he would call a stay-at-home-and-bath-the-baby look. It was the look of someone who would fly off the handle one of these days. He wouldn’t like to be in Ann’s way if she got on the war-path. He had given her five hundred pounds for a wedding-present, which he thought was decent and forgiving in the circumstances.
He got up and proposed the health of the bride and bridegroom; and he didn’t do it as well as he would have liked to do, because all of a sudden he remembered old Sir James Sugden doing the same thing – proposing his health and Lillian’s – when all his pleasant striving days were yet in front of him, so many good things before he fell into the clutches of that red-haired bitch who now ruled his life and rolled his name in the mud, and to whom he must promptly return.
Lizzie had provided good wine, of which he alone had drunk generously, and he sat down rather fuddled and confused and self-pitying.
He was aware of his son-in-law speaking with gaiety and ease, referring to these other young people – this Ryerson and this Pen Muff – and hoping they would find in their own forthcoming marriage all the joy that he and Ann were going to find in theirs.
Well, my lad, old Hawley reflected, hardly realizing that he was filling his glass again, may it be so. I wish you luck, but marriage is a damned queer thing and women are damned queer cattle. If I were you, I’d watch that light in Ann’s eyes. I’d watch it, my son, and look out for squalls when it burns up like a beacon.
*
Hamer and Ann Shawcross did not leave for Italy or anywhere so romantic. At half-past three they shook hands with the little party at Ackroyd Park and set out on foot for Baildon. The snow in Manningham Lane was a smear of sludge, but in the gardens of the houses it was white, virgin, untouched. “Like my life,” thought Ann, “like my body”; and the exaltation that Hawley had seen in her eyes was there still.
Already the day was draining out of the sky. In the solid, grey stone houses lights appeared behind windows. As Ann and Hamer strode along, not touching one another, they could see fragments of many lives laid out for their inspection: a group round a tea-table; an old couple sitting on either side of a fire; a young woman walking out of a room with a baby in her arms. All sorts of things going on under the roofs with their fleeces of light snow. Small, insignificant particles of immense, significant life.
When they had passed through Shipley and were climbing the long hill to Baildon the snow began again, dumbing their footsteps, filling the air with grey wuthering flakes. They could not see the valley out of which they had climbed. They could see only themselves in a little cell full of whirling snow that powdered their eyelashes and coated their clothes: a cell out of which they never emerged, though moving always.
There was not a soul in the wide mouth of the village street when they got to the top. The old stocks had lost their outline; the Malt Shovel shone with hospitable invitation. They went on, through the short street, to the moor that had known so many winters, that had lain so deep in snow that many a time coffins carried on shoulders had passed, with no climbing, over the zigzag walls that now could be seen cutting their black lines into the deepening whiteness.
Then they left the path, striking away over the soft uncertain surface towards the intake wall. When they were nearly there, Hamer said: “Stay here.” He went forward, losing shape with every swift stride, and it was nothing but a grey silhouette that she saw vault the wall and disappear from sight. In a moment the window of the hut sprang to view, a square of dusky crimson, barely visible, but stable, unmoving amid the air’s confusion, bringing to her heart that immemorial comfort and reassurance with which a woman looks on her home.
She saw Hamer loom again, a gigantic insubstantiality upon the wall. He materialized through the flakes that were thickening and becoming bigger, and stood at her side, his arm round her, looking towards the light. “I wanted you to see it like that,” he said, and she was glad he had thought of a thing so simple and beautiful.
Our shelter from the stormy blast
And our eternal home.
I know, I know, her heart cried, that those words have nothing to do with a window lit on Baildon Moor in a snowstorm. But why shouldn’t they have? Eternal? The word daunted her, out there in the elemental night, on the moor that had never bowed to the mood of man, that had known neither ploughshare nor sickle since first it took form from chaos. So many lives had come and gone, leaving no more trace than there would be of the ling and bent-grass, when morning followed this night.
“My dear,” she said, “are you certain?”
“Certain?”
“That this is for always and always.”
“For always and always,” he said.
“It seems such a little light.”
“It is enough to love by.”
He helped her over the wall, and they half-climbed, half-tumbled on to the other side.
“Open the door,” he said, “and go in. Let love be there to welcome me.”
He followed her in and drew a heavy curtain across the window in front of the red muslin through which the light had shone. He had put a match to the fire. Dry heather-roots and pine-knots were blazing and the coal was beginning to splutter. The lamp shone down from the ceiling. He took off her snowy fur hat and coat and hung them with his own behind the door. Then he took her in his arms. “We’ve hidden the light,” he murmured into her hair that smelt like warm cornstalks and was their colour. “No wanderer can see us. We shall open to no one. This is the little warm space of our love. Tonight, it is for us alone.”
He put out the lamp, and presently the roaring of the stove died down to a steady warmth. And the roaring of their hearts and nerves died down as they slept in one another’s arms, with the snow falling soundlessly upon their roof and upon the empty miles around them – falling pitilessly, remorselessly, like the obliterating years that have so much to give, that they may take all away in the end.
*
Tyler, Ball and Company was begun the next day. They woke to a white world, which changed before their fascinated eyes to a world of blue and white. For as the day strengthened they saw that there was not a cloud above them, and when at last they walked out of the hut the sky was a milky blue arched over the radiance of the snow. The cottages of Baildon looked somehow smaller, crouching upon the white face of the earth, with blue smoke rising as if from humble altars.
They breakfasted in the Malt Shovel. No one else was there. Alongside a new leaping fire they ate their eggs and bacon and drank their coffee, and because of their great content had nothing to say to one another. They were thinking with satisfaction of the empty house, called Moorland Cottage, which they had just passed in the village street. It was the house where Arnold had lodged. Now his landlord was gone, and Arnold was back in his old lodgings at Pen Muff’s, and Ellen was staying at Ackroyd Park. There had been a lot of shuffling about lately, Ann and Hamer had rented Moorland Cottage, and Hamer was wondering what would happen to the intake and its hut. Arnold’s old landlord had rented that, and now he was gone – one of those sudden mysterious moves that poor people make. Hamer had been happy in the hut. It had been the base of his historic sortie. He hated the thought that any day he might be cleared out.
Suddenly he said: “I love this little place, Ann. I shall always want to come back here. Even after we go to London. As we shall. Look at that roof.”
He pointed through the window to a spot where last night’s snow had glissaded to the ground and the sun was shining on the roof of an outbuilding. It was made not of slates or thatch or tiles, but of oblongs of stone, an inch thick; and at the corners, where the searching wind might catch it, hooks of iron clawed the stones into the end of the building. “Solid,” said Hamer. “There’s something honest-to-God and no damned nonsense about that; and, though I dislike generalizing, I’m not far wrong in saying the people about here are like that, too. My poor little hut,” he added with a smile, “is shameful in such company, but all the same I love it more than anything else in Baildon. I think I shall weep when I’m turned out. Especially after last night. Now it belongs to both of us. Now it’s part of us.”
“I know,” said Ann. “I know how you love it.” She handed him an envelope, and said: “Aunt Lizzie’s wedding-present.”
Hamer opened the document which the envelope contained and scanned its jargon: “All that part and parcel of land... comprising two acres bounded on the north...” He looked at Ann with a flushed face. “Then I’m a landlord,” he said, “like Lord Lostwithiel.”
“You’re a landlord,” Ann answered, “but not, I hope, like Lord Lostwithiel.”
“But the hut,” said Hamer. “That is Arnold’s.”
“The hut is Arnold’s present.”
He was more moved by that than by the gift of the land. The hut was something Arnold had made with his own hands, just as he had made, Hamer now remembered, those bookshelves in the house in Broadbent Street so long ago. “He’s too good to me,” he murmured. “Everyone’s too good to me.”
He sat there folding and unfolding the paper, then suddenly got up. “At least I can work,” he said. “At least I can show they’re not throwing themselves away on me. You’d better get down to Ackroyd Park. It’s no good staying here. That furniture’ll never get up through this. Tell Aunt Lizzie I’ll walk down tonight and join you all at dinner.”
It was not the way Ann had expected to spend the day. They had planned to arrange the furniture in Moorland Cottage. But Hamer was right. The snow was two feet deep on the road up from the valley and deeper far where it had drifted. The horses would never get a van through that. “Can’t I help in the hut?” she asked, a little crestfallen. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to begin to write a book.”
“So suddenly?”
“Not suddenly at all, my dear. It’s been in my head for four years. I’ve chewed it over and made notes for it in every part of the world.”
“It’s nearly twelve hours till dinner-time.”
“Can’t help it. I’ve got a wife to keep. An obstinate Manchester girl. You’d never believe the arguments I’ve had with that woman in order to convince her of my devilish pride. She would have liked to keep us both. Never, I told her. I’ll earn money somehow.”
“Sounds a forbidding sort of person.”
“She’s not so bad when you know her.”
“Would she mind if you kissed me? Because I must be off. My husband wants to work.”
He gave her a hug and went to watch her start her floundering progress through the snow. Then he went in and paid his bill, and feeling extraordinarily uplifted in body and mind, he walked back to the hut. His hut! His field! He looked at the two acres of snow that were his domain, went in and lit his fire and began to work.
Tyler, Ball and Company had an extraordinary success. It was a history of popular revolt, threaded along the names of the people’s leaders: Watt Tyler, John Ball, and all the rest of them down to the tale of Orator Hunt and Peterloo. Hamer’s writing was like his speaking when he was making his hearers “see visions.” Historical pundits could have picked him to pieces, but he wasn’t writing for pundits: he was writing for the millions, and at least he reached the hundreds of thousands. Like Blatchford’s Merrie England, his book came at a moment most opportune, voicing a growing unrest, feeding it, and giving it an objective. In its blue paper covers it made its way into the homes of northern artisans, of miners in South Wales and Durham, of chain-makers in Cradley Heath, and of seamen in a hundred ports. It showed him that he had a pen which could earn him bread, and, as important, it made his name known and talked about in the years while he was waiting to take up the work which he was born to build and to destroy.
*
“The rumours that Viscount Shawcross’s health is seriously affected are without foundation. Lord Shawcross is well but tired, and as soon as Parliamentary business permits he will take a rest at his home in Yorkshire, for which he has a great affection.”
It was late, towards sunset of Hamer’s august day, when that was written. Everything was changed except his “great affection.” The dusty old road he had so often climbed from Shipley was a gleaming oil-planished track and huge buses ground their way up to the top. Not far from the Malt Shovel, posters outside a cinema hit the eye like running wounds. All round the little grey village houses, red villas were gashed upon the landscape. The moor was a golf links. His house in the intake looked grey and immemorial, and indeed it must be forty years old. At any rate, he hadn’t rushed upon the land and raped it, as everyone seemed to be doing now. The house was good-looking, of the local stone, with stone-mullioned windows and a roof of stone slabs like the one he had pointed out to Ann so long ago. There was a yellow lichen patching it, and houseleeks had taken hold here and there. The two acres of the intake were almost obliterated by the firs and larches he had planted. There was a big lawn in front of the house; a few flower beds were under the windows; for the rest, it was all enveloping trees; and in those latter days he was glad of that, because he could forget the scabs on the landscape, forget this brave new world that, God knows, he reflected, needs all the bravery it can find, and remember only his great affection.
It was a small house, still known with inverted pride as The Hut. “The Hut, Baildon, Yorks.” That would find the Viscount Shawcross of Handforth. It was just three rooms up and three down – he had never set up to be a country gentleman – but it was big enough. It would have been big enough if it were still veritably the old shack that Arnold Ryerson had built and where Hamer had lain with Ann that night when the snow came down and they were babes in a dark world that still had all the cards up its sleeve. Yes, that old shack would have been big enough now that Ann was gone, and Charles was on the way to Spain with Alice Ryerson, and Jimmy Newboult was God knows where, after his white-faced bitter outburst: “You’ve sold us all! You bloody swine! You Judas!” And then had added, all anger gone, only his broken heart in his voice: “I’m sorry, Hamer. God forgive me. God forgive you,” and had rushed out of the house in Half Moon Street, to disappear utterly.
It was that day when Ann had gone down to Bradford and he was alone in the hut beginning his book that Jimmy Newboult came churning through the sun-bright snow. Hamer had gone to the door to take a breath of air, and there was Jimmy, lifting his feet high as his thin soaked papery shoes carried him across that silver-shining field furrowed with ridges that were like violet brush-strokes. He had brought a wedding-present, roughly wrapped but most delicately carried lest its fragile complications should be injured – a fretwork model of the House of Commons with clock-tower and all, and a clock which, he explained earnestly, really went, up there in Big Ben’s place. From St. Swithin’s down into the heart of Bradford, and through Bradford, and along Manningham Lane to Shipley, and up the hill to Baildon he had carried his monstrous work of love through snow and sludge, having no pennies for fares. And there it was, the wrapping taken off, planked down among the manuscript on Hamer’s table, and Jimmy Newboult, having wound the clock and set it to the right time, standing back with his head on one side regarding it. “All to scale,” he said. “It took a long time. My father helped me. It fills in the day for him. He made Mother a model of the Bradford Town Hall.”
And Hamer said: “I don’t deserve this, Jimmy. I don’t deserve anything from anybody. But, by God, I’m going to. I’m going to be what you all think I am.”
*
Lizzie helped them to furnish Moorland Cottage. The house in Ackroyd Park was bloated with things she would never use. And there were things to come from Manchester, too. When Ellen went to live with Edith Ryerson she took the most cherished of her goods – the things that reminded her of Gordon – and sold the rest. She now declared that if Hamer wanted her to live with him he must find room for these things. It didn’t come to much: the books, and the table at which Gordon wrote his sermons, a plush-framed photograph of Gordon, his holly walking stick, and a picture which he had liked of John Wesley addressing a field meeting.
Ellen was given the front bedroom of the cottage for a bed-sitting room. There she could be at her ease with Gordon’s things about her, and a brand-new comfortable chair by the fire, and her new single bed against the wall. At her ease. It pleased Hamer to think that. No more scrubbing of offices, no more early rising and rolling of the coarse apron and donning of the old cap whose peak she had carried with an air. But he never thought what this ease would mean to Ellen. She had a nice fire, and a lamp on the table by her chair, and there were the books that she loved to read again and again. But, without Edith to share them, they didn’t seem the same. She left them lying on the table, unread, and her knotted hands lay in her lap, unused, and she stared at the fire, and realized with bitterness that for the first time in her life she was help-ing nobody. She missed the very fog of Ancoats; she missed the comfortable familiarity of her slum, and the clatter of clogs by her window in the morning, and the shout of children playing by the canal in the evening. Here, there was nowhere to go. She hated the moor and seldom walked on it. She had never before felt so useless or so lonely, and she wondered why it had happened, why the son who had always seemed divided from her had thus suddenly swept upon her life, torn it up by the roots, and laid it down again here where there was so little to nourish it.
The back bedroom was his and Ann’s. Downstairs, apart from the kitchen, there were only two rooms. In one they all met for meals. The other was Ann’s own private room. She had a typewriter there. She was typing the book as Hamer wrote it; and when she wasn’t doing that she was writing letters or reading. She seemed to be always up to the eyes, and Ellen had never seen so many letters as the postman brought to Moorland Cottage.
It was a strange household, Ellen thought. She liked a house where there was a day’s work and then an evening’s repose, with all the members of the family gathered together. But Hamer, she remembered, had never done that: he had always cleared off to his own room; and now Ann had the same trick. As soon as a meal was finished, in the evening as well as in the morning, Hamer would bundle a lot of papers into a bag and go off to that hut of his; and Ann would go into her own room, and Ellen, having washed up – and this, with cooking the meals, gave her some satisfaction – had nothing to do but go to hers.
Sometimes, dozing in her chair, she would hear him come in, and see to her surprise that it was eleven o’clock or midnight. She would hear Ann go into the kitchen to make tea, and she would long to go down and do it herself, but she never did. She felt that she would be expected to be asleep, but really she didn’t want much sleep now. She would be wide awake, listening to the clatter of the cups and the blurred sound of voices, urgent, earnest, going on and on. She never knew what it was all about; he never told her anything. She had only once asked him what he was doing in that old hut, and he laughed and said: “Oh, trying to knock out an old book. But don’t you worry your head about that. All your worrying’s over.” Not like Gordon, who let her arrange his pens and papers, and once, when she had asked him what his sermon was about, had gone through the whole thing, explaining it most patiently, and asked her what she thought of it.
She heard them coming upstairs, and she could tell from the sound of their feet that they were on the same step, not coming up one behind the other but with their arms round one another’s waists, their voices whispering. She wouldn’t get into bed then for fear they should hear her and wonder why she hadn’t gone to bed long ago. She pulled a shawl round her shoulders and dozed off in her chair.
So it went on when Hamer was at home, and often enough he was away, sometimes for a couple of nights, sometimes for a week. He would kiss her good-bye with some meagre explanation which Ann would fill out with talk of meetings, by-elections, conferences, at all of which, it seemed, he was someone who could not be permitted to be absent. And Ann would show her bits in newspapers – Mr. Shawcross does this, Hamer Shawcross says that – and, with her eyes glistening, would look at the paper as though she could see Hamer himself there on the page, doing wonderful things. When he came home she would greet him with rapture, and he would explain that he had been made a member of some committee or elected president of some council.
They were so wrapped up in one another and in all this work of which she knew nothing that sometimes she longed to shout: “Yes, but what about me? Talk to me. Tell me something.”
There came a night in February when it was raining hard. Hamer, wrapped to the eyes in a greatcoat, with his papers tucked beneath it, had gone off to the hut, and Ann had gone to her room whence soon the staccato clatter and ping of the typewriter sounded. Ellen went up to her room and sat by the fire, listening to the wind whimpering down the lonely little street like something lost headed for the great emptiness of the moor. Occasionally the rain spattered her window sharply like a thrown handful of shot, and in her chimney a throaty rumble came and went.
She looked at Gordon’s photograph on the mantelpiece, and at the table that had been his, and then she got up with a smile and began to layout the paper, the pen and ink, the Bible and the hymn book. She got no farther. Suddenly she stopped, realizing with a shock that made her heart give a painful thump that she had not willed to do this, that she was acting under some compulsion that she could not control. She was scared. She stood still in the middle of the room, both hands clutching her head. “I’m going mad,” she muttered; and then, alight with fear, rushed to the landing, downstairs, and into Ann’s room.
The fire was purring softly. An oil-lamp with a green shade hung down from the ceiling, throwing its light on Ann’s typewriter and on the sheen of white silky hair as her head bent over a pile of manuscript. It was a tranquil and reassuring scene. Ellen felt that it was somehow miles away from her room upstairs, where she was so comfortable, so warm, so pensioned, so utterly useless and forgotten. She stood on the threshold staring for a moment at Ann, then a sob brought the girl to her side, strong young arms about her waist. “Oh, Ann, I can’t go on,” she cried. “I can’t stand it. I can’t live like it. It’s driving me mad. It’s killing me.”
*
“Sit down,” Ann said. “Let’s have a good long talk. But first of all, let me make some tea.”
Ellen cried eagerly: “Let me make it,” and Ann had the sense to do so. There was always a kettle simmering on the damped-down kitchen fire, and in a moment or two Ellen was back with the tea and biscuits.
Ann clearly sensed the elder woman’s need. It had been a cry of utter loneliness, a cry from beyond the pale wherein she and Hamer worked so happily, that had reached her from the door. It pierced her heart, bringing illumination, explaining a deepening mask of frustration that she, but not Hamer, had perceived to be growing upon Ellen. Unceremoniously, she swept up Hamer’s manuscript and the pages she had typed, and threw them to one side, so that Ellen should see that these things did not matter tremendously. She dumped the tea-tray down where the papers had been, and refrained from fussing Ellen into the easy chair. Let her sit where she liked. Let her sit on the floor if she wanted to. She guessed Ellen had had fussing enough.
“There!” she said. “That’s enough of that for tonight. A bit of a talk for a change will do me good. Will you pour out the tea?”
Ellen poured out the tea, and already she felt more tranquil. She did not feel now that something was driving her mad. “This is like the nights I used to have with Mrs. Ryerson,” she said with a smile. “We used to drink tea, and she’d knit, and I’d read to her. Did you ever read David Copperfield? That Heep!”
Ann admitted with shame that she had never read David Copperfield, and Ellen’s tongue was loosened in praise of the book.
“One of these days,” said Ann, “you’ll have to read it to me. On the nights when Hamer’s away and hasn’t left me anything to do. I feel lonely sometimes then.”
“Now isn’t that daft!” said Ellen. “You lonely down here an’ me lonely up there! I never imagined you were lonely, Ann lass.”
“Oh, yes, I am, when he’s away,” Ann said. “When he’s at home he keeps me on the run and there’s no time to be lonely.”
“What does he keep you on the run about?”
For the first time Ellen listened to a patient, reasoned explanation of what Hamer was trying to do, of what his intervention in the St. Swithin’s by-election had done for his reputation, of the way he now was here, there and everywhere, fomenting strikes, speaking at elections, growing all the time a figure of more and more significance.
“And one of these days,” said Ann earnestly, “there’ll be a real Labour Party, just like the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, and when that happens the Labour Party may have to form a government. And Hamer would have to be in it. Goodness knows what he might be. He might even be Prime Minister.”
But now Ellen felt she was entering the region of myth and fantasy. “Eh, Ann lass!” she cried. “Our Hamer? A lad out of Ancoats? Prime Minister, like Mr. Gladstone?”
Ellen was of those who said “Mr. Gladstone” as one might say Jehovah. Mr. Gladstone, the very chips of whose tree-felling axe none but the worthy and devout might receive and cherish! “Nay, nay, Ann. ’Ave a bit o’ sense, lass.”
“Mother – shall I call you Mother? I’ve never known what to call you.”
“Aye. Call me that, lass. I’d like that.”
“Well, Mother,” said Ann with conviction, “let me tell you this. I know very well how you felt when you came down here tonight. You felt lonely and unhappy and neglected. You felt that Hamer had pushed you into that room to be out of the way, just as I’d push a hat into a box because I might want it some day but had no use for it at the moment. Didn’t you?”
Ellen nodded.
“Yes,” said Ann. “And you thought there was no sense or reason in it. And the reason simply is this: that your son is as important a man as Mr. Gladstone any day. If you think he’s neglecting you, it’s because his days are full of terribly important things. There’s so much to do. Mr. Gladstone! He’s got everything – a party ready-made, a tradition, an adoring mob. Hamer’s got to make everything out of nothing. Don’t worry him. Why, he’s doing the work of two Gladstones,” cried the passionate little advocate. “Don’t you know he’s wonderful? Don’t you know there’s no one else like him? Would Mr. Gladstone be where he is if he had started in an Ancoats back street?”
Ellen was borne off her feet by Ann’s eloquence, her conviction, her love – inspired fervour. “Well, there’s one thing I don’t like,” she said. “You shouldn’t send out his washing.”
Ann crashed down from her heights and dissolved in laughter. It was an old sore point with Ellen. Sending out the family washing had been one of the ideas for giving her a good time. “You let me do that washing,” she now said. “I can turn out his shirts as good as anybody.”
Ann, with her new insight, conceded the point. “Very well,” she said, “if it will make you happy.”
“Of course it’ll make me happy – sittin’ up there, gawping out o’ t’winder at nowt.”
“And, remember, next time Hamer goes away we’ll have a good read. Will you come down here or shall I come up to you?”
“Turn an’ turn about,” said Ellen. She got up and put her arms round Ann, who so lately had put her arms round Ellen. She kissed her and said: “Tha’s a good lass. I like thee. Tha mun stand up to everybody for ’im like tha stood up to me.”
She went back to her room. The noise of the typewriter began to come up almost at once. It no longer annoyed her or made her feel isolated. She felt happier than she had been since leaving Broadbent Street, and with no agitation of mind she put away the pen and paper and books that she had laid out earlier in the evening. The rain on the window, the moan in the chimney, seemed to give her room a friendly, harboured intimacy. She mended the fire and said to herself easily: “I’ll have a good read.” It was Dombey and Son. That Captain Cuttle!