When Dermot was gone I began to feel miserable in Ancoats. I missed his fierce whispered talks in the bedroom, the long walks into the country, the hours we passed in his workshop, with me lounging idly, drawing shavings through my fingers, Dermot planing and carving and constructing, moving every day nearer to the mastery that was at last to make his furniture famous. Dermot was getting somewhere. He was no longer an employed man. He had taken a small lock-up shop in Deansgate, Manchester, and filled it with his furniture. Sheila looked after the shop. Dermot went every day to the shed in his father’s garden and worked there. They lived in two rooms in a street near Gibraltar Street. It was a small beginning, not much, you might think, to cause any dissatisfaction in me. But I knew Dermot. I knew he was embarked, and that he would reach what he was aiming for. I had an objective, too, but my scribbled exercise books were not satisfying things like Dermot’s chairs and tables and sideboards. And I wanted money. I did not think my writing would ever bring me much. But money I must have. From the time when I was a child gazing at the houses of the rich, the craving for money had bitten deeper and deeper into me. As I saw it, you didn’t need genius to make money. It was a matter of getting an Idea. You suddenly thought of something—something that millions of people would want once they saw it but which no one had thought of giving them before. I used to go about puzzling my head to devise such a thing. But thinking was no good. The Idea came to you: the thing was to see it when it was there under your nose.
There was a horse-omnibus at that time running between Manchester and Didsbury. I often travelled by it on a Saturday afternoon as far as the Old Cock inn, drank a glass of beer, and walked back along the Palatine Road into Manchester, turning over what seemed to me the unsatisfactory state of my affairs. During one of those walks I saw a funeral procession approaching me. It was in the winter after Dermot’s marriage. The day was bleak and cold, and as I stopped to stand with bared head, as other people were doing, the moisture from the boughs of leafless trees fell upon my hair. It was a poor sort of procession: a hearse, with one small wreath of flowers upon the coffin, and a solitary cab behind it. The sleek black horses looked altogether too magnificent for what was evidently an inconsiderable corpse. It was my brother’s face in the window of the cab that told me I was looking upon the funeral procession of my mother. Three women were with him, all veiled heavily in crape. I could not see their faces, but supposed that they were his wife and two of my sisters. A small girl sat upon the knees of one of the women and gazed with bright interest out of the window.
I stood there beneath the dripping trees, watching till the forlorn little procession was lost in the grey perspective of the winter afternoon. Then I went on my way, thinking with a strange impersonal sadness of the poor woman who had worked so hard and so long and was now hurried off the scene with the tribute of this shabby bit of pomp and circumstance. I remembered the look of strained despair with which she had gazed at the soiled and sordid linen I brought home from Moscrops’ that night when the boys had trampled it in the mud. I thought of her, as I had so often seen her, spitting upon the hissing iron, wiping it upon her coarse apron, and bending her wearied spine over the ironing-board, pausing now and then to push from her temples the thin strands of grey hair.
When I reached All Saints Church in Hulme, I struck away to the left, visited by a sudden desire to look again at the house in Shelley Street which I had not seen since the morning, years before, when I began to work for Mr. Summerway. The winter evening was closing in. The long main road stretched before me, grey and desolate. Byron Street... Southey Street... Shelley Street... here I was, looking down that brief and unappealing cul-de-sac. There were no front gardens. It was a short perspective of flat walls, pierced by doors and windows, rising straight from the pavement. Down at the far end a wan lamp had just been lit, and the lamplighter was lighting the other, in the middle of the street, as I stood there.
That lamp stood outside the house I had known so well, and as I watched the door opened and a man and woman came out. The woman was carrying a child in her arms. When they came to where I was standing I said: “Excuse me, but do the Essexes live at 28 now?”
“Essexes?” said the man. “Essexes? Never ’eard of ’em. I been livin’ there the last two years.”
Never heard of them! All her married life my mother had lived in that house, and so soon it was possible for no memory of her to remain. Though I hated the house, and though for so long I had consciously avoided it, nevertheless the thought that no one whom I knew was in it any more, that my mother was dead, and that my brothers and sisters were passed out of my knowledge, hung upon me like a cloak of lead. Dermot’s marriage, too, I suppose, had something to do with it. I felt inexpressibly lonely and sad.
I walked on, my feet almost unconsciously following accustomed trails, and presently I found myself standing in what had once seemed so golden an oasis: the patch of yellow light in front of Moscrop’s shop. It had always been a friendly place to me, and, impelled by a craving for company, I pushed the door. The well-remembered bell gave its unmusical “tang”; the warm familiar odour of new bread and spiced cake came to my nostrils. But the dear little squat figure of Mrs. Moscrop was not behind the counter. Instead, there was a girl whom I did not recognise, a plain and dowdy creature, who did not look any the more handsome now because she was trembling with fright.
The cause of her fright was on my side of the counter. He did not recognise me, but I knew him at once for one of my tormentors in days of old. He was one of the two who had pursued me into the alley—it must have been eight years before—and trampled upon the washing. The whole scene rushed back upon me; I savoured again the agony of humiliation, called up again the memory of the deepening tiredness of my mother’s face when she looked upon the filthy mess that I brought home. Then I thought of the sad and meagre funeral that I had just seen, and of the long grey road that had led to so ignoble an end. I could hardly see the man before me, because of the tides of hate that surged suddenly into my head and clouded my eyes.
Of all this the young man was unaware. In a loud voice he was addressing the girl who shivered behind the counter: “And you can tell Mr. Bloody Moscrop that in future ’e can drive ’is own bloody ’orse—see? If you can call the spavined wind-broken, galled bloody creature an ’orse—see?”
The words fell like blows upon the girl. She clapped her hands over her ears and was near to sobbing.
“Dainty, ain’t yer?” the man went on. “Yes, dainty an’ religious, too. I know. Yer don’t like my bloody language, do yer? An’ I don’t like this bloody job. Tell yer old man that. I won’t be ’ere on Monday. Wot about a nice bit o’ cake for a partin’ gift?”
He strode towards the counter and made a grab at a fine Dundee cake. The girl grabbed at the same time, and the cake was crumbling beneath their pulling hands. Then the man lifted a hand to strike, but at that moment all the emotions that were tormenting me came to a head in a red fury. I had never struck a man in anger before, and instinct rather than science went into the blow. I caught him under the chin with all the weight of my body behind my fist. He went down with a grunt, and didn’t move. There was an empty flour sack lying in a corner of the shop. I pulled it over his head, stuffed the cake in after him, and, without a word to the girl, who was now quietly crying, hauled him out on to the pavement. I remembered that I had seen Moscrop’s hand-cart there. I lifted him on to it, and set off almost at a run for the dark entry that had been the scene of my old humiliation. I pulled him from the truck when I got there, dragged him to the far end of the entry, and then took the sack off him. He was groaning, but was not fully conscious. I could almost feel the rage running up my trembling arms and bubbling in my head. I pulled off his coat and his waistcoat and his trousers and every rag he had on. Then with my feet I rolled his naked body in the mud of the entry and jumped his clothes into the mire. I stood looking down upon him, with my hatred ebbing away. He sat up, and a last paroxysm came upon me. I took the crumbled cake from the sack, forced him flat upon his back again, and stuffed handfuls of the cake into his mouth till he choked and spluttered. Then I picked up the sack, threw it upon the hand-cart, and ran. So I worked out upon another the horror and loathing I felt for myself because my mother was dead, because for the last few hours I had felt her hearse heavy on my heart, and I knew that for eight years I had been a swine.
*
When I got back to the shop, old Moscrop was sitting in an armchair in the middle of it. The girl was still behind the counter, reading now. I could see at a glance that the book she held was the Bible. Old Moscrop had changed. He had always been a stout man. Now he was immense. He overflowed his chair like a Buddha. His eyes were hooded, and everything of him flowed downward in sagging lines. Under his eyes were blue sagging pouches; his flaccid cheeks sagged like a hound’s flews; and his sagging belly rested on his knees. His arms were laid along the arms of the chair, and the hands, projecting beyond the chair’s arms, hung downwards like broken fins.
He didn’t stir when I came into the shop. Only the lids of his eyes went up, and he said in a voice that seemed to come whistling and wheezing out of a complicated series of tubes: “Well! William! Isn’t it? William Essex?”
Even so few words seemed to exhaust him. His great chest heaved and he gasped for breath, the fins flapping helplessly over the arms of the chair. The girl pushed up the hinged part of the counter and came and knelt beside him. I recognised her now. She was Nellie Moscrop, the ugly shy little girl whom I used to see sometimes peeping from the parlour into the shop, always with a finger in her mouth. Or I would come upon her in the bakehouse, and then suddenly she wouldn’t be there. She disappeared like a rabbit down a hole when a stranger came. Not that anyone minded. She was so negative, insignificant. As she came out now from behind the counter I saw that she really had hardly changed at all, except to become bigger and ungainlier and, if possible, shyer. She had a shambling walk, and her big flat feet made me think of a cow wading through pastures. But she gave me a timid smile, and said “Thank you for helping me just now,” and then to her father, she said: “This is the young man I was telling you about.” Old Moscrop’s eyelids went up again. A glint of thanks came to me out of his eyes, and his fins seemed to waggle appreciation of what I had done.
“You’d better come into the parlour, Father,” Nellie said. “I’ll light one of your pastilles.”
Moscrop managed to raise one arm entirely from the chair and beckoned to me. “Under my arm, William,” he wheezed. So I got hold of him under one arm, while Nellie took the other. We gently raised him to his feet, and there he stood for a moment, leaning on the two of us, feeling amorphous, boneless and very heavy. Then we began a slow, shuffling progress, through the raised flap of the counter, where Moscrop had to fend for himself, for he was a tight fit, through the lace-curtained parlour door, and across the parlour carpet to a red-plush armchair by the fire.
I had never before been in the Moscrop parlour. The first thing that caught my eye was an enlarged photograph of pleasant little Mrs. Moscrop. It was in a heavy oak frame over the fireplace, and it was the sort of picture you don’t hang while the subject is alive. I knew at once that Nellie Moscrop, like me, was motherless.
We got old Moscrop into his armchair. Nellie put a cushion behind his head, and he remained still and exhausted. From a box on the mantelpiece she took a pastille, placed it on a saucer, and put a light to it. Heavy fumes began to fill the room, and Moscrop’s large nostrils flared as he breathed them in.
“I’m afraid this isn’t very pleasant for you,” Nellie Moscrop said, “and I hate to seem to send you away after the way you helped me. But would you rather go now, and come back to supper? We have it about nine. The shop will be shut then, and I expect father’ll be better, too.”
I said that I had done little enough, and that I didn’t see why I should worry her any further, her hands being full enough, and I should have gone and never returned if old Moscrop had not said, fighting to get the words out, and achieving at the same time a dreadful but gallant smile: “Yes—come back, William. Come an’ have your pennorth.”
I remembered his old friendly gesture—“There’s a pennorth for you”—and gave him back his smile and said I would return.
I was glad I did. I was never sensitive about the feelings of other people, but I was soon struck by the utter loneliness of old Moscrop and Nellie. They were delighted to have a visitor and made much of me. The fumes of the pastille—ah! those fumes I was soon to know so well!—were gone, and Moscrop though wheezy, was articulate. I saw that Nellie had changed her dress, and her hair looked as though it had had some special brushing; but it was nothing much, anyway, poor girl; and her plainness and awful humility were as oppressive as ever.
It was a pleasant room. The fire burned bright and shone on well-polished mahogany surfaces. A gas jet, in a glass globe, was lit on either side of Mrs. Moscrop’s photograph. There were lots of books in a solid mahogany book-case. They were all religious: a vast series of Bible commentaries, novels with a religious twist, the Pilgrim’s Progress, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, lives of Christ and of St. Paul. But it was all very cosy. The Moscrops had always had the reputation in the district of being “warm” people, and I saw about me no reason to doubt it. When I got to know the old man better, he was fond of quoting a hymn verse to me:
’Tis religion that can give
Solid comfort while we live.
’Tis religion can supply
Solid comfort when we die.
A little observation convinced me that solid comfort had been the rule of Moscrop’s life, and that he would have had very little use for any religion unless it could give him not only comfort but solid comfort when he came to die.
We enjoyed solid comfort that night. Nellie put a beautiful white linen cloth upon the table, with an ornate and complicated silver contraption in the middle. There were little vases sticking out here and there holding paper flowers, and above them towered three mythological creatures whose uplifted wings bore the weight of a tray containing apples and oranges. The china and cutlery were excellent. The silver kettle simmered upon a spirit stove; and the food was as good as the appointments and almost grossly plentiful. Moscrop asked a blessing upon it, and then insisted on hearing over again the story of the one blow which I struck in all my life. “I was terrified—terrified,” Nellie kept on saying, “but Mr. Essex didn’t seem afraid of him at all.” Whether I had wanted to or not, it was clear that I had made an impression on the mind of Nellie Moscrop.
“What did you do with him, William?” the old man asked.
“Oh, I just ran him round a few blocks, and then dumped him out,” I said. How could I tell the Moscrops that what I had done had no reference to Nellie at all, that a personal anger had overwhelmed me? And how could I tell the girl, anyway, that I had stripped the man naked and rolled him in the mire? One look at her was enough to convince me that such a story would send her shrieking from the room.
One look at her... I can give that look now, and see Nellie as she was that night, so proud and so efficient, presiding at the teapot. She was dressed entirely in black satin which rustled in a matronly way when she moved. It swathed her arms to the wrists. It closed upon the base of her firm ungraceful throat, where a heavy cameo brooch pulled it together as though suspiciously guarding a portal. It fell flat in front and flounced out a little behind her when she walked, hiding her heavy feet. A thin gold chain was round her neck and the small watch attached to the end of it was tucked into her belt. Her hair was of a nondescript and unattractive brown, pulled down from a central parting and gathered into a “bun” on her neck. She was short-sighted, but did not then wear glasses, and this caused her, when she spoke, to peer at you anxiously with her kind and rather unintelligent eyes, above which a small frown gathered. The kindness, the gentleness of her face was its attraction; but she was completely lacking in the qualities which make a man look twice at a woman. She was twenty-one then, about a year older than I was.
“He’s a bad lot, yon Ackroyd,” old Moscrop said. “He’s been driving the van for a month, forgetting half the customers, and coming back drunk as often as not. If he hadn’t cleared out, I’d have cleared him. And now there’s Monday.”
He murmured “Christ’s sake, Amen,” over the table, and then waddled to his armchair. “Now there’s Monday,” he repeated, looking worried, “and no one to do the round.”
Nellie put on a print apron and began to gather the supper things together and take them to the scullery. I offered to help, but she said: “No. Sit down and talk to Father. He doesn’t often have anybody.”
So we talked, and it was evident that the old fellow was pleased to spread out his little worries. His wife had been dead for two years. His own health was very bad. He could no longer do anything but supervise. He had a man working in the bakehouse. “It all takes a lot of money,” he wheezed, “but Nellie’s very good in the house. You don’t need anyone to help you in the house, do you, Nellie?” he asked, raising his voice.
“No, no; I can manage very well,” she called back amid the clatter of cups, and a brightness of relief appeared in his face, as though he had feared she might insist on paid help. I began to see that old Moscrop’s “warmness” was something he would be careful to guard, and only the memory of his “pennorths” stilled the thought of miserliness.
“And then there’s the man to do the round,” he said. “That’s more money. And no one to do it, anyway, on Monday. And what about you, William? What have you been doing all these years?”
I told him as much as I wanted him to know. He looked at me shrewdly. “You sound restless. You don’t sound settled,” he said.
“Well, Mr. Moscrop,” I said. “If you mean by settled have I found the job I want to go on doing for the rest of my life, I certainly haven’t. So far, I’ve gone from one silly job to the next and not liked any of them. I shall give up what I’m doing as soon as I find something that suits me better.”
“What about doing the round on Monday?” he asked.
The question took me so much by surprise that I broke into a roar of laughter. The idea of driving a baker’s van as the next step in the career of a man who intended to be very rich seemed gloriously comic. In the midst of my outburst Nellie came in from the scullery, wiping her hands on a cloth. She looked at me reproachfully. “It was my idea,” she said. “I suggested it to Father. You’d live in, of course.” Then she fled again, as though she had said something improper.
“Yes, live in,” old Moscrop affirmed, his fins flapping on the chair. “We know each other, William. We can trust each other.”
And suddenly I perceived that the old man and the girl deeply desired this to happen. They were lonely and helpless. My blow a few hours before had introduced me in the character of a hero. I should certainly come to them as a rather favoured being. Something in the situation suggested to my mind that it had advantages, and instinct urged me to say Yes. So I said: “Forgive my laughter, Mr. Moscrop. It was just the idea of laying a man out and then stealing his job. I’d like to come to you. I don’t know anything about the work. But I’d like to come.”