I am not going on from this to tell you that a change came over my spiritual life from that night. Nothing of the sort. The significance of that night was that it was the first step towards my marriage with Nellie Moscrop. There was a warmth, a friendliness, about chapel-going in those days that appealed to me. Accompanying Nellie became a habit, and the habit landed me into marriage; but a good deal wars to happen before that.
To begin with, the morning after that Sunday service, there was the business of learning the bread round. There was room for two on the seat in front of the van. Wearing a vast overcoat and an almost square felt hat, and with a woollen muffler wound many times round his neck and a pair of woollen gloves on his hands, old Moscrop was heaved up alongside me and we started off. He was to accompany me till I got the round by heart, and as his immense body sagged across three-quarters of the seat, edging me to a precarious perch almost over a wheel, I prayed that that would not be long.
It wasn’t. A few days told me all I wanted to know about that mechanical business. On the Thursday I did the work alone. The van was at the bakehouse door. The old man who did the night baking had helped me to load it. It was a bitter day. The damp and mists were gone and suddenly overnight a frost keener than I had known for years had fastened its jaws upon the city. The old horse, with his head down, was blowing little clouds from his nostrils on to the stiff ground, and when I had banged-to the double doors behind the van I did not look forward to the day’s work with any pleasure. Sitting up aloft there, I should be clemmed: no two ways about it. I stood beating my arms across my chest when Nellie came round the corner from the shop. Her arms were piled with clothing. She looked at me with that short-sighted puzzled frown that brought the creases to her brow, and said: “You’re cold already. Put this on. It’s years since we’ve had such a day.”
She held up her father’s overcoat, which certainly was big enough to go on over my own. But I didn’t fancy wearing it, all the same. “What’ll Mr. Moscrop do?” I said.
“Don’t worry about that,” Nellie answered. “He won’t stir out on a day like this. Come along now.”
She shook her head at me with a little reproving smile, and ungraciously enough I put my arms into the coat she held. Then she stood on tiptoe, for she was a short woman, and twisted round and round my neck a muffler as long as old Moscrop’s; and then she handed me a pair of thick woollen gloves. My own were absurd kid-leather things, such as clerks liked to wear on Sundays. When I had staggered to the seat, I felt very much like one of the bundles of washing I used to haul through these streets. I said so to Nellie; and, trifling enough as the remark was, I realise, looking back on it now, that it was one of the few words I had ever spoken to her that were not mere formality. The little frown rubbed itself out from between her eyebrows, and her smile came strong and clear, puzzling me that so trite a comment should cause a face to light so gaily. Then I laid the whip gently along the old horse’s flank, and off we rumbled on iron tyres that stirred up the barren bitter dust of the road.
Soon my breath was congealing on the woolly hairs of the muffler under my mouth, but my hands and body remained warm, though my feet felt as if they were clamped in icy fetters. I pondered on things in general as we pottered through the streets, pulling up at houses where women came to the doors with shawls about their heads and their teeth chattering, and at others where the open door at the end of the passage showed a kitchen shining with the brilliance of Lancashire housewifery and seasonably glowing against that disastrous cold. I began to think in a mixed, unsorted fashion of all the various lives I touched so lightly each day: the girl in the dressing-gown, who obviously had got straight out of bed to come to the door and whose brazen smile was at once inviting and repellent; the old woman, dirty-looking and grey-haired whom I had once glimpsed scuttling furtively about the back parts of this girl’s house like one of the cockroaches that ran across the bakehouse floor when the gas was suddenly lit; the man with the grey, drawn face and the black-and-red check muffler, so cleanly-shaven, so horribly respectable and starved-looking, with his smile that was so polite and yet so frightened-looking. I knew already that he owed old Moscrop fifteen shillings. And there was the tiny woman, dressed always in white from top to toe, white ribbons in her hair, white satin shoes on her feet, who tore a piece from the loaf each day as soon as it was handed to her, put it into her mouth, and said: “Do this in remembrance of Me. I am the bride of Christ.” And there were innumerable drab, featureless people, living on the verge of hunger, and innumerable cheerful, happy, commonplace people, dauntless in the stone wilderness of Hulme.
Driving up and down the little streets, watching the grey plumes of smoke rise so numberlessly over the houses into the clear cold blue of that winter day, I began to feel the fascination of all these lives, to realise that here under my hand and eye were tales without end, the very stuff of all those books that for so long I had wanted to write and had tried to write. I thought with amusement and contempt of the high-flown, fly-blown romances over which I had toiled in the O’Riorden bedroom, the far flights of fancy among classes and conditions of which I knew nothing at all. Here, in these little houses, were my subjects. These were my own people, the blood and marrow of my own upbringing, and an impatience stirred in me to be back at Moscrop’s, to get to my room, and to begin some work that would matter.
I had not yet spent an evening in my room. Four nights I had passed with the Moscrops, one with Nellie at chapel, and three in polite but difficult conversation with the old man, whose asthma on one of those evenings had again struck him down into a sorry mass of flesh quivering and gasping over a burning pastille. I had asked Nellie to order a hundredweight of coal for me. She had done so, and the fire, I knew, was laid in my room, and the scuttle filled.
There were two bread rounds, morning and afternoon, and it was with great satisfaction that I put away the van and led the horse to his stable at the end of the second round. The cold had become more intense. The round coppery globe of the sun had plunged down in a violet haze at four o’clock, and now the sky was pricked with sparkling stars and a silent deathly cold was over the houses.
I went straight to my room and put a match to my fire; then I went to the scullery and washed myself; and then went in to supper. It was a meal that Moscrop enjoyed enormously. He loved to gossip, and any small details I could give him about the course of the day’s work delighted him. He assured me again and again how pleased he was with the idea of having his right-hand man “living in,” and for my part I pushed my questions as delicately as I could into the details of his business, on the score that there were all sorts of ways in which I could help him, apart from doing the round. I did not intend to content myself with being Moscrop’s van-driver.
When supper was cleared away, Nellie put the small table, with the book and spectacles on it, alongside the big armchair: a sure sign that she was going out.
“Would you like to go with Nellie tonight?” Moscrop asked.
I looked at her questioningly; and she explained: “I’m going to class meeting.”
“Class meeting? What class?”
“First class, my boy—the class of the Lord’s redeemed,” the old man said piously; and Nellie elucidated this more prosaically. “You see, every full member of the Wesleyan Church is what we call a class member. Every chapel has a number of classes, each with its own leader. We meet once a week, say prayers, sing a few hymns, and give our testimony.”
“Oh, I see. But I’m not a member of the Wesleyan Church.”
“But if you join a class you become one.”
“I’d rather not—not now.”
She looked crestfallen; and I thought I had better explain my refusal. “You see, I rather wanted to work tonight. I’ve lit my fire already.”
“Fire?” old Moscrop looked up sharply, and I resolved to get this over once for all. “Yes,” I said. “I hope you won’t mind, Mr. Moscrop. I’m paying for my own coal. I like to work in the evenings.”
“Work! Of course you can work,” he grumbled. “Who’s stopping you from working? But can’t you work here? Isn’t this comfortable enough?”
“It is, indeed,” I said. “But it’s rather private work, and I like to be alone when I do it.”
“Private, eh? Not just studying. I’m all for a young man studying. I studied myself when I was young, and I’d like to know where I’d be now if I hadn’t.” His fingers waggled on the chair arms. Then he put his spectacles on his nose, and took up his book. “Well, run along,” he said gruffly. “But it’s very mysterious.”
I thought I’d better out with it. “It’s some writing,” I blurted. “You see, I’m trying to write a book.”
Dean Farrar fell plop on the old man’s knees. One of his eyelids shot up. “A book?” he cried. “What sort of book?”
Now I was in a sweat of embarrassment. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “A sort of a novel, I suppose.”
Then I noticed Nellie’s face. It was lit up with excitement. She was gazing at me as though I had just been made poet laureate. “How marvellous!” she said. “A book!” She dashed to the book-case, pulled out a volume, and handed it to me. It was Jane Eyre. “That began to get written not ten minutes’ walk from here,” she cried excitedly. “Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, it’s true. Charlotte Brontë had brought her father to Manchester to see an eye specialist, and they lodged in a street off Oxford Street. And while they were there she began to write Jane Eyre. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your book were as good as that!”
“It would.”
“And there was Mrs. Gaskell.”
“Yes.”
“And the woman who wrote The Manchester Man. I always forget her name.”
“Mrs. Banks.”
“Yes. Mrs. Linnæus Banks. It seems to be all women who write novels in Manchester.”
“Yes. It’s time we had a man.”
“Perhaps it will be you!”
“It will be.”
I had never seen her so animated, but her excitement drooped a little at that presumptuous remark. She took up her muff. “I shall pray that it may be,” she said. And she meant that very sincerely.
Old Moscrop said: “But what about the bakery when I’m gone?” And there it was, the cat out of the bag, all that he had been turning over in his heavy mind during the last few days suddenly revealed. Nellie flushed and went quickly away.
*
The fire in my room had sunk to a warm glow. I did not for a moment light the gas, but, pulling back the curtains, looked down the street. The lamps were no longer blear. They burned steady and unwinking in the iron cold, and above the rooftops the stars blazed. There was the street, dingy and unimportant like a million streets in Birmingham and Newcastle, Liverpool, Leeds and London, a small frozen furrow in the waste of the city. Not a soul was visible. Not a footstep stirred. Everyone was gone to earth in the bitter cold like the beasts in a wood when the world is under snow.
I lit the gas and sat down before my paper, trying to bring them out from their little houses, to set them moving in some fashion of significance and beauty.
I heard Nellie come in; I heard her and her father go to bed; and still the scrawled and meagre words seemed dead on the paper. I sat back gloomily and saw a spider—the tiny sort of thing we call a money spider—appear suddenly upon the page and run quickly to the top edge of the writing-pad. He paused for a moment, peering over the precipice. I watched him breathlessly, saying to myself: “If he turns and runs back down the page, this book will be a success.” He made up his mind, plunged over the precipice and ran along the table. “Damn you!” I cried to myself. “Damn you! It shall be a success whatever you do.” Then I tore up all I had written, threw it into the fire and went to bed.