Thus it was that I became deeply acquainted with the solid comfort of the Moscrop household. It is all so long ago that I cannot remember which of the many foolish jobs I had been doing I gave up in order to work for the baker. Whichever it was, I did not bother about formality. I simply did not turn up on the Monday and that was that. I was sorry to leave the O’Riordens, but there was nothing to be done about that, either. I hired a four-wheeler cab, put into it the clothes and books that were my only property, except fifty pounds which I had in the bank, and rattled and jolted through the grim Sunday streets of Manchester. All the way from Ancoats to Hulme there was not a tree, not a shrub, not a twig to be seen. Soot-caked buildings, shut shops, the occasional cracked melancholy of a church bell, an air soaked with moisture, though it was not at the moment raining. I sat back in the musty damp of the cab, wearing my best clothes, which were thick honest ugly things, the waistcoat adorned with a gold “albert” from which a meaningless medal depended, my neck enclosed in a collar that stood straight up like a low white wall, a bowler hat upon my head. I listened to the clop-clop of the dispirited horse, and tried to persuade myself that this was the prelude to adventure.
Just as Moscrop’s front window had seemed an oasis to me when I was younger, so Moscrop’s house seemed that day. Goodness knows, there was nothing attractive about the outside of it. It stood on a corner. Some of its windows were in one mean street and some in another. It was bigger than other houses thereabouts, and that was all. But when I had paid the cabby and watched the decrepit growler fade away into the sadness of the dying afternoon I was able to forget all that was outside the walls of Moscrop’s house.
Tea was ready, and Nellie made me leave my things in the passage and come straight in to eat. When she had carried the crockery to the scullery, she said she would show me my room. “You notice, William,” said Moscrop, one lid lifting from the hooded eyes, “she says your room, not your bedroom. She’s been having a high old time up there, shifting furniture and I don’t know what all.”
Nellie flushed and led the way upstairs. I followed with a suit-case in one hand and a bag of books in the other. My room was at the end of a short, oil-clothed passage. Now bedrooms had always till then been associated in my mind with a cold discomfort which you overcame by leaping into bed as soon as possible. Or, if you sat up, as I had done night after night in Gibraltar Street, you kept on your overcoat and pulled a quilt round your knees. I expected the same chill austerity to confront me when Nellie Moscrop opened the door at the end of the passage, but, to my surprise and delight, firelight dancing on drawn curtains was the first thing I saw.
“Why—!” I began, but Nellie hustled me into the room and closed the door. “Father doesn’t know!” she said in an excited whisper. She stood there with the fireshine on her pale face, looking triumphant and a little disturbed, as though she had achieved something of an unparalleled daring. “D’you think it was wrong of me?” she asked. She stood before a chest-of-drawers, leaning back with her hands on the knobs, breathing quickly.
“Wrong!” I said. “Why, I think it’s the most delightful idea. I’ve never had a fire in my bedroom in all my life.”
“Neither have I,” she said. “I mean, d’you think it was wrong not to let Father know?” She stumbled over her next words. “I wanted it to seem very welcoming. You deserve it.”
And now I knew that blushes as well as flames were colouring her cheeks. “Thank you very much,” I said. “It was a lovely idea—Nellie.”
She said, “Oh!” and then “I must go,” and went out very quickly. It was a fairly large square room. It was the best room I had ever had. The window, with its curtains hung on heavy wooden rings, faced the door, with the bed between. The fireplace was at the foot of the bed, with a good yard of passage-way dividing them. There was a little recess on each side of the fireplace. The chest-of-drawers was in one, and in the other was a table. This was fixed so that you did not face the wall as you sat at the table. The wall was on your left; you looked across the table towards the fireplace, and the gas jet was in the wall just over the table. Evidently the arrangement was not haphazard: it had been thought out. The only other furniture was a wicker chair with plenty of cushions on it.
I lit the gas and looked about me and congratulated myself on having obeyed my instinct of the night before. These were the cosiest private quarters I had ever struck. It remained to be seen whether I should have much time to spend in them. My hopes of writing soared. Doubtless, in the summer this window looked on a scene depressing enough, but now, with Hulme shut out, with my own walls about me, how I could get on with it! I began at once to make resolutions. I would buy my own coal and have a fire every night. A shilling a hundredweight, and a hundredweight ought to last for a long time if used only in the evenings. I would make my own fires and clear up my own grate. I wouldn’t presume on Nellie’s good nature.
In this happy, and hopeful mood, I put my few clothes away, arranged my books on the top of the chest-of-drawers, and sat down for a moment in the wicker chair to give myself a sense of proprietorship. Then I put a writing-pad and a pen on the table. Yes; it looked very workmanlike. I put out the gas and before leaving the room went to the window and raised the curtain. Grim and desolate, the Hulme street stretched before me, its few lamps blear in the winter night. Assuredly, here, if anywhere, a man who wanted a world must make one for himself. This one room, I decided, would do very well to be going on with.
When I got downstairs, I found that Nellie had finished the washing-up, had mended the fire, and placed old Moscrop comfortably in his chair beside it. A small table was against the chair, and on the table was Farrar’s Life of Christ, with a pair of spectacles folded on top of it. Evidently Moscrop was settling down for the evening. His lids went up for a moment as I entered the room. “Well?” he asked.
“You’re being too kind to me, Mr. Moscrop,” I said. “It’s a lovely room, and I’m going to be very comfortable in it.”
“I’m glad,” he said. “You see, William, I want someone we can trust. Since I haven’t been able to get about very well, it’s been one makeshift after another. We can’t go on like that. Nellie and I have often talked it over and wished we could have someone to come in and live with us and look after things. But who was there? And then you came along. I think we’ll get on all right.”
“I’m sure we shall,” I said. “You’ve put enough comfort in that room to chain me down for a long time.”
“That’s all Nellie’s doing. And now I want you to do something for her. Just go along to chapel with her this evening. You’re not doing anything?”
Nellie came into the room at that moment, dressed for going out, with a Bible and hymn-book under her arm. “It’s a great loss to me,” said old Moscrop, “but I can’t attend the House of God as I used to. Sometimes in the summer. But these winter nights—no.” He tapped his wheezing chest. “And after all,” he said, “this is Hulme. I don’t like Nellie coming home from the evening service alone.”
The proposal took me aback. I had never attended a chapel in my life. Always, while I lived at Mr. Oliver’s, I had attended service in church twice on a Sunday. Since leaving him I had gone nowhere. I was impelled to blurt out some excuse; but Nellie, standing there as though in no possible doubt of my compliance, weakened me. “Right,” I said, “I’ll go up and get my overcoat.”
When I came down, the old man had put on his spectacles and opened his book. Nellie placed a box of matches and one of his pastilles in a saucer on the table. “Mind now,” she said, “it’s only in case. You’re not to imagine you want it.”
Then Nellie and I set out for the Wesleyan chapel. It was not a long walk, but it was a miserable one. The night was raw, oozing a cold dampness that seemed to search out our bones. Neither of us spoke. I slouched along with my hands in my overcoat pockets, and Nellie paddled in her ungainly fashion at my side with hers stuffed into an astrakhan muff.
The Oddy Road chapel was a large, soot-furred building that had the advantage of being the only place in sight that looked comfortably lit. And it was comfortable. It was almost reeking in comfort. A man with a professional smile was in the vestibule. He shook Nellie’s hand and inquired about her father. He shook my hand and dazzled me with his smile. Then he opened a door covered with red baize figured all over with round-headed brass nails, and we went into the chapel. The building was cruciform. Two long aisles led down to the transepts that were on either side of the tall white stone pulpit. Behind the pulpit were the choir seats, rising in three rows, and above them was the organ. In front of the pulpit was a semi-circular carpeted space containing a communion table. Rails shut it in, and outside the rails was a step covered with thick red cushions.
I was horribly conscious of the squeaking of my boots as I followed Nellie up the aisle, which was carpeted with cocoanut matting. Along each wall of the chapel gas jets were burning in white globes and from the high ceiling depended two great rings of jets. I could hear the gentle singing of all that gas till suddenly it was extinguished by a low moan from the organ that shuddered through the building.
The Moscrop pew was the front one in the transept to the right of the pulpit. It was carpeted in red and had red hassocks and a strip of red carpet on the seat. Nellie knelt upon one of the hassocks and sank her head upon her hands. I did so, too; though I had nothing to pray about. I waited till Nellie sat up, then I sat up. She opened a little cupboard in the front of the pew and gave me a hymn-book and a Bible. I placed them on the ledge in front of me, and looked fairly about me for the first time.
The Moscrop pew seemed to me a dreadfully public place, poked out there under the nose of the parson, under the gaze of the choir, of the opposite gallery and of all the front seats of the chapel. The place was filling up. Noisy children abounded in the gallery. Down below family parties came by the dozen, nearly all the men holding silk hats in kid-gloved hands, all the women pictures of urban elegance in their furs and feathers. There was much kneeling and gentle rustling of hymn-book leaves, and over it all the organ maintained a sort of sonorous purring that was soothing and satisfying.
Just to the right of where I was sitting a door led into a vestry. A bald-headed steward in a frock-coat came through this, mounted the pulpit steps and placed some notices on the Bible, and at the same time the choir of men and women, old and young, came in up above. When they were seated, the organ fell to silence, and the silence spread through the building. You could once more hear the gas singing its gnat-like song, and you could sense an expectation that thereafter I was often to know. It was the expectation that always fell upon the congregation at Oddy Road when the Rev. Samuel Pascoe was to preach.
He came in through the vestry door which a steward held open, and mounted the pulpit steps: a man in his early thirties, dressed in formal parson’s black, lithe as a greyhound, thin of face, but, as one could see at the first glance, vibrating with an athlete’s fitness. His light brown hair was cropped close, and after standing for a few moments in prayer he swept round the congregation, which now filled every part of the building, a slow glance from dark piercing eyes. Then he gave out his hymn and read the first verse, and I liked the way he read it, with a full voice that made the poetry in it sing:
Lord of all being, throned afar,
Thy glory flames from sun and star;
Centre and soul of every sphere,
Yet to each loving heart now near!
There’s a good tune to that hymn, too, and those people liked singing. The organist knew his job, and so did the choir, and so did the congregation. I’m no singer myself, but put me with a singing crowd and I’ll let it go with the rest. And so I did that night, and so did Nellie at my side. Her voice was good, a clear soprano of no great power but extraordinarily true.
Then the parson prayed, and after that we sang
O for a thousand tongues to sing
My great Redeemer’s praise.
That one has an even better congregational tune than the other, and it seemed as though the building would not contain the great volume of song that lifted to the roof.
But I don’t want to recall every detail of that service. I’ll go straight on to the slight shock I got when Mr. Pascoe announced his text. I know nothing about it now, for many a year has passed since I set foot in church or chapel; but it was a great moment then: the moment when the pièce de résistance of the service was about to be dished up. I can still see that evening’s scene: everybody settled comfortably back in the pews, Bibles in hands, ready to turn up the passage when it was announced so as to confirm that there indeed, at the place named, were the words which the preacher proposed to expound. Nellie, like the rest, had the book in her kid-gloved hands, when there fell into the silence Mr. Pascoe’s three words: “He made summer.”
He dropped them out like three pebbles into water, each clear and articulate. He made summer! All about us were the stony wastes of Hulme, desolate as the stricken cities of the plain, and over Hulme lay the winter’s sooty weeping, and the text was: “He made summer!”
It was a simple sermon on the theme of compensation. Here was Hulme. Here was winter. Yet—He made summer. Day follows night. Summer follows winter. And heaven follows Hulme. I remember he quoted Spenser:
Is not short payne well borne that brings long ease
And layes the soule to sleep in quiet grave?
Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.
And he quoted the text: “Now in the place where He was crucified there was a garden,” pointing out that only John, the beloved disciple, had recorded that, because perhaps only John would know that a garden might help to assuage an agony. It seemed to me, then, and still seems, a beautiful thought.
I don’t know how that sermon would affect me now; and, in any case, I shall not be such a fool as to try to dissociate the words from the man who said them, and the way he said them, and the moment at which he said them. I only know that at that time they affected me profoundly. The Rev. Samuel Pascoe could make you see things, and through the stifling heat that now was in the chapel my mind went out to the green fields of Cheshire and the wide strong reaches of Derbyshire, with the summer sun pouring down on lush grass or glancing among the sallies of the little moorland waterways. The preacher himself made summer in my heart that night, and when we sang the last hymn:
For the joy of ear and eye,
For the heart and mind’s delight,
For the mystic harmony
Linking sense to sound and sight
I felt strong and uplifted and passed out unseeingly through the bobbing bonnets and silk hats in the vestibule.