2

Mr. Oliver died on a Wednesday. Mr. Summerway told me to report to his office in Mosley Street on the following Monday. I disliked the idea of going home, but there was nothing else to do, so I went. Things were greatly changed since I had last been there six months before. There was no congestion now. My father had disappeared—had quite simply walked out of the house one morning and never come back. He is not exiled in order that he may dramatically reappear in these pages. He never did reappear. He was gone, mysteriously and for ever. My eldest brother, who was married, was now living in the house with his wife and my mother. There was no one else. My other brother had joined the army. One of my sisters had gone to “live in” at a large drapery store in the town; another had taken a position as “general.” Concerning the third I could get no information whatever. “Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies,” my mother said darkly; and to this day I have never discovered what happened to my third sister.

My brother was twenty-five years old and worked as a boilermaker. He did not receive me graciously, and I don’t blame him for that. His wife, whom I had never seen before, was a dark surly girl, big with her first child. They owed me nothing, and had no reason to want me about the place. I spent an intensely unhappy week-end, and when I set out on the Monday morning for George Summerway’s office I made up my mind to follow what seemed to be a family habit: to disappear without a word.

I did so. I was fifteen years old, in good trim after three years of fresh air and generous feeding, but thin as a lath, dark as night, as all our people were, and as melancholy as hell at the sudden overturning of my world. I had in my pocket thirty pounds, plus some odd shillings, my faithfully computed five per cents, and in a carpet bag I had a few clothes.

I was disappointed with George Summerway’s offices. I had expected that so splendid a personage would conduct his affairs in splendid circumstances, but, though his own room was airy enough, the rest of the premises was dismal and dingy beyond what I should have thought possible.

“Report to Mr. O’Riorden,” Summerway had said to me, and when I came in that morning out of the clear air of May I found Mr. O’Riorden before me, sitting at a very dusty desk set in the middle of a small dusty room that was not so much lighted as dimmed by one small dusty window. Mr. O’Riorden was himself small and dusty. When he stood up, I saw that already I was taller than he. He could not have been more than five feet two. He was as bald as an egg, and from the crown of his shining skull down to his chin his skin was of a dull parchment yellow. His clothes were black and formal, shiny with use. He wore paper protectors over his cuffs, and his silk hat hung from a hook behind the door. He looked at me from over the top of steel-rimmed spectacles, and said: “So you’re Essex? Young and blooming. The good God help ye.” He shook his head as though the sight of me filled him with intolerable sadness.

Having looked his fill, he took a snuff-box from his waistcoat pocket, sniffed vigorously at the brown powder, and said: “Ye’ll work in the outer office. I’ll introduce you to the clerks when they condescend to appear, the good-for-nothing limbs of hell. Ye’ll do just what they tell you. Ah, Mr. Sloper, ye’ve decided to give us the benefit of yer presence?”

I find it difficult at this distance of time to recall the individual characteristics of Mr. Sloper, Mr. Sykes and Mr. Sayers, the three clerks, and that is probably because they had no individual characteristics. They called themselves the Three S’s, and Mr. O’Riorden called them the Three Asses. My recollection is of three witless, cheerful blades who told the bawdiest stories of their nightly doings and whose clear eyes and guileless faces belied the saga of prodigal dissipation with which they regaled me and Mr. O’Riorden.

O’Riorden lived a harassed life, a buffer state between the Three Asses and Mr. Summerway. He called himself the confidential secretary and seemed, in practice, to be an overworked correspondence clerk, taking down innumerable letters in some shorthand system of his own and transcribing them laboriously in longhand into a carbon-copy book. Neither the typewriter nor the telephone was yet usual in such an office as that of Mr. Summerway, and for illumination in the often murky late afternoons we had crude gas jets singing dolefully in little wire cages.

I spent a futile and unhappy morning. It was soon apparent that George Summerway, who had the reputation of having never done a generous thing in his life, had done one for me out of regard for his old friend Mr. Oliver. There was no place for me, there was no need for me, in the office. I was to receive fifteen shillings a week, and I saw no means of earning it. But I provided great fun for the Three S’s who were delighted to have someone to order about and who kept me busy washing their inkwells, dusting their desks and running their errands. When lunch-time drew near, Sayers’s enterprise rose. He handed me a bottle and charged me to go to the dairy and buy half a pint of pigeon’s milk, but when this time-heavy jest failed to get home, they left me alone, with nothing to do but mope idly about the shabby room.

At one o’clock O’Riorden came from his office into the clerks’ room, the Three S’s shut their heavy ledgers with triumphant slams, and four chairs were ritually arranged round the fireplace, though there was no fire in it. Sykes produced four cups from a cupboard, Sayers handed me twopence and a great jug and instructed me to fetch tea from a neighbouring restaurant, which was one small room, a couple of steps below street level, festering with steam and sweat and the smell of cheap food.

When I returned to the office, Mr. O’Riorden and the Three S’s had produced packets of sandwiches and had already begun their lunch; and Sloper was asking: “Well, gentlemen, what is the subject before the meeting today?”

“That Woman,” said Sayers, “is the End All and Be All of Existence; and when our fellow wage-slave William Essex has charged our beakers, I will begin the proceedings by asking you to drink to this toast:

Here’s to the girl with the bluest eyes

The darkest hair and the whitest—”

“William,” said Mr O’Riorden, looking at me uneasily over his spectacles, “haven’t you brought any lunch?”

“No, Mr. O’Riorden,” I said.

“Then you’d better come with me.”

Mr. O’Riorden put on his silk hat, took me by the arm and led me from the room amid the ironical cheers of the Three S’s. “Bravo, O’Riorden!” Sayers shouted, banging a cup upon a chair. “Bravo, the saviour of William’s youth and purity.”

We went to the stinking little restaurant from which I had brought the tea. Mr. O’Riorden’s was not the only silk hat there, for silk hats at that time had nothing to do with income. Mr. O’Riorden opened his packet of sandwiches upon the table that was covered with flaking American cloth, ordered tea for both of us and some sandwiches for me.

“Ye’ll take no notice of them three daft skites,” he said. “They’re all wind and blather and devil a bit of harm to ’em at all.”

I thanked him for bringing me out, and finding him in a friendly mood I suddenly blurted out the truth about my loneliness, of the life I had led for the last three years, and about my resolve not to go home again.

“’Tis a hell of a thing,” he said, looking at me compassionately and helping himself to snuff, “when ye’re not aisy with yer own flesh and blood. ’Tis the worst sort of trouble there is, and only a fool tries to cure it. Mr. Summerway told me most there is to know about ye, but he didn’t say ye’d not be having a roof over yer head.”

“I could sleep in the office,” I said, “till I find some rooms.”

“Ach, to hell with that. What would ye say now to coming home with me? There’s only me an’ the missus and Dermot. There was Fergus, too. But Fergus is away out to America to join my brother who’s doing a sight better than I am. So you can have Fergus’s bed. You’ll have to share a room with Dermot. He’s seventeen.”

I thanked Mr. O’Riorden fervently for thus removing a torment that had been in the back of my mind all day, but he silenced me with a wave of the hand, and the watery little eyes in his yellow face took on a pensive inward look. “It’s queer the way things turn out,” he said. “There was me and there was Conal—that’s me brother in America—without a tail to the shirt of us. And off he goes to America to become a policeman an’ off I go to England to become a rich man. For it was I that had all the learning there was between us, and he nothing but a pair of feet the size you could make tombstones of ’em. And now it’s he that’s rolling in money with a chain of stores the length of me arm, and me that’s takin’ the office boy home to pay a few shillings towards the rent. Ach, well; let’s be gettin’ back to see what them three young hell-rakers are after doing.”

I lived with the O’Riordens for five years, and very happy years they were. To look at, Ancoats was not much better than Hulme, but it was better for me in every way. From the moment I stepped over the O’Riordens’ threshold that first evening I was at home with them. I began on a satisfactory financial basis, which gave me status and did not make me feel like an interloper. I was to pay twelve-and-six a week for my share of a room and my food, and Mrs. O’Riorden was the sort of housekeeper who could do that and make a small profit. She was a Lancashire woman who had worked in a mill, but had no need to do so any more. She had a Lancashire woman’s pride in her house, and 26, Gibraltar Street shone, from the whitened front doorstep to the brass knobs on the bed in the room I was to share with Dermot.

It was this shining quality of the house that impressed me at once. My own house had been dim and dingy; Mr. Oliver’s house had been dim with a sort of faded grandeur, but Mrs. O’Riorden’s house was a riot of gleaming surfaces. Mirrors and crockery, steel fender and fire-irons, picture-frames, chests-of-drawers, linoleum, all filled the house with twinkles; and it was a treat to see her tackle the deal kitchen table with silver-sand and elbow grease, as though she were determined sooner or later to coax a smile even to its dull and unresponsive surface.

I have the clearest recollection of the great kindliness with which I was received, of the absence of embarrassing questions, of the simple frank acceptance of the fact that here was a boy whom father had brought home because he wanted somewhere to live, and somewhere to live he should have. I was taken upstairs to the room that contained two beds: one that had been Fergus’s and now was to be mine, and one that was Dermot’s; and then I went to the scullery where already Mr. O’Riorden, who had taken off his coat, waistcoat and collar, was making great play with soap behind his ears. I took my turn, and then returned to the kitchen, which was the living-room, and there found that Mr. O’Riorden had put on his waistcoat, but not his collar, a pair of carpet slippers, an old jacket and a smoking-cap with a rakish tassel. He looked a new, a more comfortable, an altogether different Mr. O’Riorden. It was evident that home was the place where Mr. O’Riorden was happiest, and that he knew it.

The fire was burning brightly; Mrs. O’Riorden had lit a lamp and set it on the table where already she had laid an extra place for me. Mr. O’Riorden stood before the fire on the thick rag mat, comfortably warming his behind and keeping his back to the portrait of Queen Victoria, in a shining frame, wearing a crown and a blue sash, and the Order of the Garter, and a fat sulky frown. Mrs. O’Riorden, whose bosom was as comfortable as the Queen’s, but who looked an altogether more cheerful and companionable person, was fussing here and there between the fire and the table.

We were waiting for Dermot, and soon he came in, a thin, rather pale-faced red-head, quite unlike either of his parents. His eyes were pale, and he had long gawky wrists covered with fine gold hair. He had fly-away eyebrows, rushing up like little opened wings. When he saw me, a stranger, they flew up higher, as though they would rush away altogether with surprise and agitation. He accepted me with the friendliness his mother had shown. There was a great courtesy about Dermot, cloaked in a great shyness. I never forgot him as he stood there that night, anxious to fly from the unexpected, constrained by his good manners to stand his ground and give himself to me in friendliness. He was working for a cabinetmaker, and as we shook hands I saw that there was a fine powdering of sawdust in his eyebrows and in the hair on his wrists.

We ate Lancashire hot-pot, and then we ate apple dumplings and then we all had a hot strong cup of tea. It was a satisfactory evening meal as Lancashire understood it; and for my part, though I’ve eaten the faldelals of the most famous restaurants since then, I don’t know that I prefer them to that.

Washing-up was a communal activity. I carried the things to the scullery; Mr. O’Riorden washed them, Mrs. O’Riorden wiped them, and Dermot put them away. The white cloth was whipped from the kitchen table, a red one was put in its place, and Mr. O’Riorden took a book from the book-case. He sat on one side of the fire and Mrs. O’Riorden, with a basket of darning, on the other. “Now, mother,” said Mr. O’Riorden, “we’ve just got up to the death of Little Nell.” He began to read.

I had read no novels with Mr. Oliver. I had never read a novel or heard one read; and I didn’t hear much of The Old Curiosity Shop that night. Dermot made a sign with his head. I followed him into the scullery. He shut the kitchen door. “Let’s leave ’em,” he said. “They’re happy. Come and have a look at this.”

We stumbled down the dark path which cut the tiny garden into halves. At the end, Dermot said: “Stand still while I get a light.” A latch clicked, a match was struck, and presently I walked into the small shed which leaned against the end wall of the garden. “This is my place,” Dermot said. “What d’you think of it?”

I looked about me by the light of the lantern swinging from the roof. A work-bench almost filled the shed. There was just room to move round it. Shavings were everywhere, shavings and sawdust, and the air was full of the lovely smell of wood. There were hammers, planes, chisels, gouges, saws, and there was a glue-pot and a small oil-stove for heating it. “There’s no screw-driver,” I said.

“I never use screws,” Dermot answered with a smile. “You wouldn’t insult a lovely job like that with a screw.”

He ran his hand lovingly over a piece of work that stood on the bench. It was a cupboard flanked by bookshelves, and the door of the cupboard was not yet on. It lay alongside the other work, with a rough scrawl of pencil markings upon it. Here and there gouges had bitten into the marks. A design was beginning to take shape. “For Father to keep his old Dickens in,” Dermot explained. “It won’t be finished before Christmas at the rate I’m getting on. No time. I ought to give all the time I’ve got to this sort of thing.”

He moved about in the scanty room of the workshop with the light from the lantern falling on his high cheekbones and his freakish, fly-away eyebrows. He rubbed his hand caressingly up and down the planks that leaned against the wall. “Oak. Ash. Walnut. Teak.” His voice sounded as Mr. Oliver’s had done when he was reading a poem. Suddenly he asked: “What do you think of William Morris?”

I had never heard of William Morris, and said so. Then Dermot’s pale eyes lighted up with a missionary fervour, and I began to think that, if I lived long with him, William Morris was someone of whom I should hear a great deal. But it was characteristic of Dermot that, having flared like a rocket and shot his fire, he never mentioned William Morris again except in the most casual fashion. But that night, kicking to and fro among the shavings, feeling the edges of his tools, rubbing his hand over his planks, and taking a gouge or two at the design on his cupboard door, he preached the gospel of William Morris with a hot and eloquent tongue. Beauty in every home, each stick of furniture lovely and appropriate, every workman a craftsman glorying in his craft, loving his material, such was the burden of the song into which Dermot broke lyrically that night. He never sang it again, but I never forgot it, never had any doubt of the joy he found in that little shed, or of the passion he could impart to a thing that lay close to him.

It was a fruitful passion, too. Let me go ahead here a little and say that during the five years I lived with the O’Riordens I saw the furnishing of the house change under Dermot’s hands. He finished the book-case for his father; and after that, one by one, appeared an oak refectory table for the kitchen, with bulbous legs, sumptuously carved, chairs to match it, covered with leather which he stinted himself to buy, and in Mr. and Mrs. O’Riorden’s bedroom occurred a bed of such gothic splendour that Mrs. O’Riorden declared she was afraid to sleep in it: it looked too much, she said, like the bed in which Henry the Eighth had murdered all his wives. These were but the main waves of a tide of craftsmanship which Dermot let loose upon 26, Gibraltar Street.

I had evidence that first night of another passion in Dermot’s life. Mr. and Mrs. O’Riorden had gone to bed when we came in from the workshop. They always went early. Dermot took a candle and preceded me up the stairs to our room. He had a way of moving with extraordinary stealth. I didn’t hear his hand on the knob before the door was open and there we were in the bedroom. He put the candle down on a chest-of-drawers and began at once to undress. I stood looking about me in the unfamiliar roughly comfortable room. The light of the candle fell upon a carved frame that hung on the wall. I guessed that the carving was Dermot’s work. There was a harp with broken strings, and there were shamrock leaves sprouting round the foot of a gallows. It was a strange, moving bit of work. The frame was round a piece of parchment on which three names were inscribed in red ornamental lettering. I read them aloud: Allen, Larkin, O’Brien.

Dermot was already in bed. “Ever heard of them?” he asked. I turned at the strange harshness of his voice and saw that he was sitting up, his eyes glinting green in the candlelight.

“No,” I said.

“You’ll hear about them some day. They were the Manchester Martyrs. God damn England. Put out the candle.”