How long it is since I last saw Manchester! I don’t suppose that even now it is a bright place at midnight, and then it was dead.
Midnight! When I told Nellie the time she nearly fainted. She had never before been out at midnight. Late hours and sin were almost synonymous in her mind. She rose hastily, and in the matter-of-fact atmosphere of departure the faint note of hysteria that had come upon the evening was dissipated.
Flynn said he was going, too. He wrapped himself up again into the unsightly bundle he had been when first our eyes fell upon him, and in the narrow passage-way, just as Dermot was about to open the front door, thrust his hand into his overcoat pocket. “Ye might like to see this,” he said. “That’s the revolver that shot the sergeant.” The light from the lamp glinted on the metal. Dermot laid his hand for a moment upon the gun that had released two men and hanged three—a good revolutionary proportion, I thought—the gun that had produced the Manchester Martyrs whose names had stirred him the night years before when first I shared a bedroom with him. “Thank you, Michael Flynn,” he said. “Give my love to my uncle. Tell him I’m a—a—patriot.”
Then we were out in the street—Flynn and Nellie and I. The rain that we had heard dashing the window was gone, and it had cleared away the fog. The stars shone high and cold above the humble Ancoats roofs. Nellie walked between me and Flynn, speechless. I could feel her shrinking from the man, edging nearer and nearer towards me. The poor girl was terrified. Soon she took my arm. Her fingers gripped hard into my flesh. We passed out into the main road, no one speaking, our footsteps echoing hollowly on the pavements. Presently at a street corner, Flynn stopped, and instinctively we stopped too. He looked up at the majestic sky, and in a low vibrant voice said:
“There’s not the smallest orb that thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins:
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But while this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
God bless you.”
His hand flickered across his breast, his fingers were raised for a moment as though it were his to bless, and then he was gone. The side-street shadows seemed at once to receive and annihilate him. I never saw him again.
Then, when we were alone, Nellie began to sob. Incoherent words tumbled out of her—the sinful lateness of the hour—her father all alone—that dreadful man with the revolver—that girl talking like that about a baby before it was born. Oh, it was all hateful, and they were all hateful people, and I must never take her to see them again. She clung to me and laid her head on my shoulder, and I patted her back with my one free hand and made comforting noises. A policeman strolled by with elaborate casualness, turned twenty paces on, and strolled back. I managed to propel Nellie across the road, into the side streets that led to Piccadilly. Once I had got her moving, things went better, but bitter sobs continued to shake her, and I hoped that, late as it was, there would be some sort of conveyance in Piccadilly. There was one hansom cab. I had never been in a hansom cab before. It was, to my mind, and still is, the most romantic of vehicles. To be in a hansom cab with a girl was, as a pure idea, dashing and debonair. And it was my luck to get into the hansom cab with Nellie Moscrop, a sodden bundle of misery and hysteria. It was with the greatest difficulty that I got her to use the cab at all. She had never used a cab—never in her life; and I think she had the gravest doubts concerning the propriety of what we were doing. But I got her in, the apron fell to, and off we went. It was a good cab, smart and well-kept, with a good horse who went trotting valiantly over the cobbles. I was able to appreciate all that, and to savour the bitterness of having this first experience diluted by the sorrowful presence of Nellie Moscrop.
So we drove through midnight Manchester, between the black crape walls of Portland Street, towering so high that the stars flowed over our heads like a river, along Oxford Street to All Saints, and so into the dark heart of Hulme. All the time, Nellie sat as remote from me as it is possible for one person to be from another in a hansom cab. She had regained some composure by the time we reached home, and, jumping out without ceremony, she opened the door and went into the house while I was still asking the driver to wait, as my money was indoors.
As soon as I followed Nellie into the house I sensed that something was wrong. The pungent smell of old Moscrop’s asthma pastilles filled the place as incense fills a church. I had expected the old man to be in bed, but, on entering the sitting-room, I found him, gripping the arms of his chair, his whole body rigid, the veins standing out on his temples, and sweat pouring down his face. The wheezing of his laboured breath filled the room. Nellie and I stood before him in consternation, helpless and frightened. We had never before seen him in so shocking a paroxysm. For a long time he struggled to articulate, and at last gasped the one word: “Heart!”
“I’ll get the doctor,” I said, and thanked goodness the cab was waiting at the door. The doctor lived only a few streets away, and, as luck would have it, I hadn’t to get him out of bed. He was just opening his gate as I drove up. He was a young man, scarcely older than myself, and he seemed very tired. “I’ve just come from a childbirth,” he said. “They’ve got six already. God! Why do they do it?” He waved his hand comprehensively round the sleeping darkness of Hulme. “I must have a drink. Come in.” His face was pale with weariness when he turned up the gas in his little den. He gave himself a whisky and soda. I declined to drink. “Then give this to the cabby,” he said. I did so, and then we drove back to Moscrop’s.
The old man was breathing more easily. The young doctor’s boredom and tiredness were changed for smiling efficiency. “That’s how it is, Mr. Moscrop,” he said. “Gets you like a tiger, and then lets go almost as suddenly as it gets you. What’s all this about your heart—eh? Let’s have a look at you.”
He got out his stethoscope, and while he was running Moscrop over I noticed that efficient Nellie had already let fresh air into the room, pulled the fire together, swept the hearth, and made everything as ship-shape as a captain’s cabin. A sponge in a bowl of hot water suggested that she had been bathing her father’s rigid and perspiring face.
The doctor himself helped me to put Moscrop to bed. When we came down, it was half-past one. “Come and take a breath of air,” he said. “You might as well go to bed, Miss Moscrop,” he added. “He’s all right. There’s nothing to be done.”
In the street we walked for a while without speaking. Then he asked: “You a relative?”
“No, but I think I can call myself a close friend.”
“You ought to know that the old boy’s in a rotten way. Asthma’s bad enough. There’s nothing to be done about it, you see—not by a g.p. anyway. All the same, by itself it’s only troublesome—though it’s damned troublesome, as you have seen for yourself. But in this case it’s not by itself. The old man’s heart’s in a frightful state. I needn’t give you a lot of big words for it; but the fact is an attack like the one he’s had tonight puts an enormous strain on the heart. He may live for years. He may pass out next time he has an attack. That’s all. Cheerful life, isn’t it?” He grinned at me under the gas lamp outside his door. “Sure you won’t have a drink?”
“No thanks.”
“Neither will I. Bed. Good-night.”
For myself, I didn’t feel like bed. I was thoroughly awake. I had never spent a more emotional night: first that madman Flynn, then Nellie’s hysterics, and now Moscrop’s asthma. Bed, indeed! I felt like walking and walking; but I knew that, whether Nellie had gone to bed or not, she would be keeping an ear open for my return. So I went back. She was gone to bed, and, as there was a good fire in the sitting-room, I sat down in the old man’s big chair and pondered over the strange evening which had now shut down into a preternatural quiet.
One thing had been cleared up for ever in my mind. I had often wondered, seeing Dermot come home flushed and exalted from some secret meeting, just how much of the business was play-acting and how much was serious politics. Now I could have no further doubt that play-acting had no part in the matter at all. For good or ill, Dermot was meddling with something pretty serious. He was in touch with the actual plotters and makers of violence and treason, and his name as a “Patriot” must stand high, or a man so deeply implicated as Flynn would never have gone near him.
I was already impressed by Dermot’s resolute grip upon the job by which he meant to live. Now I was the more deeply impressed by the knowledge that both he and Sheila were real beings, committed to possibly dangerous action, ranged on a side in life that had called for resolution and decision. In every way, Dermot seemed to me to be a man, as I had not yet begun to be.
I was used to these moods of dissatisfaction with myself—the moods in which I called myself a shirker, a good-for-nothing, and once again I administered to myself a stout dose of good resolves. The winter was coming on; I would read steadily, write regularly, get something finished and done with, whether it were done well or ill.
In this not unfamiliar mood of high determination, I rose to go at last to bed, and, rising, I knocked off the arm of the chair Barnes on Revelation, which evidently the old man had been reading when the paroxysm came upon him. But not only Barnes. A sheaf of papers had lain neatly under the book, and as I picked them up my eye ran over a page covered with pencilled figures. “Say £5,250,” I read; then shamelessly read the whole thing through. “Learn summat about figures,” Mr. Summerway had said to me long ago; and I had learned enough to see pretty quickly what it was I held in my hand. Moscrop had been figuring out the pros and cons of his earthly goods, and had arrived at the conclusion that he was worth “say £5,250.”
It was a surprisingly large sum for a back-street baker, but the paper showed that he had made a few far-seeing investments. It would be a comfortable sum for a man to have behind him if he wanted to write. At that thought, I sat down again and pondered my position. In cold blood I made up my mind then and there to marry Nellie Moscrop.
*
The old man was anxious that the marriage should take place soon. I think he felt that he had not long to live. Nellie went about in a sort of humble pride. Our appearances together at the Oddy Road chapel were occasions of torture to her. At home, she lived in a whirl of stitching, making her own clothes with the help of a dressmaker who came in. As for me, I was married, God help me, in a frock-coat. I still have a photograph of that astounding outfit; a coat (with satin lapels) double-breasted across me, striped trousers, buttoned boots, and a silk hat. There I stand, in that yellow and melancholy memento, a flower in my buttonhole, Nellie holding on to my arm. It was a lilac-coloured dress she wore, and there in the photograph you see it, flowing down into a train. She is carrying a parasol, though it was winter then, and wearing a great cartwheel of a hat, piled with horticulture. That is old Moscrop on the other side of her, dressed like me, except that his clothes seem all width while mine are all height. On low stools in front of us three sit Dermot and Sheila O’Riorden. Dermot looks thin and pale and earnest. He is nursing his silk hat, and probably worrying about Sheila, because her time is drawing near. But she looks happy enough. She is the only radiant one there. Time, that has taken Moscrop and Nellie and Rory, has not dimmed the smile with which, I expect, she was thinking of Rory. It used to shock Nellie to the soul to hear Sheila say: “Oh, Rory, me darlin’, don’t kick, or don’t flutter your wings, or whatever it is the dear Mother of God is lettin’ you be at now.” Usually, she talked English like me, but whenever she spoke to the child she would assume, or remember, this way of speaking, pressing her hands to her belly and gazing towards the future hung with merciful veils.
We were married by Mr. Pascoe at the Oddy Road chapel. No one but us five was present. When we got back to the house we found that Dermot had cleverly arranged to have presents delivered during the service. For me, already in place in my room, was a lovely writing-desk, smooth as silk, solid as stone, with no decoration whatever save an inscription in beautiful lettering round the edge on the top board: “Of the making of books let there be no end. D. O’R. In amicitiam. W.E.” Of the long list of my books and plays there is hardly a word that was not written on this desk. For Nellie there was a dressing-table, also made by Dermot, the first of a famous design that he repeated many times.
A glint of sunshine fell through the clouds of Hulme as Nellie and I came out to the four-wheeler cab that was waiting to take us to Victoria Station. Old Moscrop kissed his daughter and said: “If I may coin a phrase, happy is the bride that the sun shines on.” And that was all, except that, when we were both in the cab, Sheila’s dark face with dewy eyes shining came through the window, and she said simply: “God bless you, Bill. God bless you, Nellie.” We then drove off. It wasn’t an uproarious business.
I had recklessly reserved a first-class carriage for our journey to Blackpool. Not that I had any lover-like desire to be alone at the earliest possible moment with Nellie, but I knew that she would be full of the embarrassed feeling that everyone recognised in her a girl straight from the wedding service. I hoisted the luggage up on to the rack: my suit-case and the solid leather one I had given her for a present. There it was, with the initials “N.E.” staring down at me as a reminder of the irrevocability of what I had done—Nellie Essex.
The lights were already up in the great misty cavern of the station. When we drew out and at last got clear of the suburbs the day was fading over the lugubrious Lancashire plain. We had little to say to one another. We sat close together, my arm round her, all through the journey. It was quite dark when we got to Blackpool. The rooms we were to stay at for a week had been booked by old Moscrop, who was paying for the honeymoon. They were behind the front in a street whose silence and darkness when we came upon it, I carrying a suit-case in each hand, struck a chill to my marrow. The narrow-chested little house was called Mount Pleasant; and Mount Pleasant, when we reached it, was wrapped in aboriginal gloom. But the bell which raised a clamour in some remote fastness of the place called up a stirring of life. We heard slippered feet on linoleum, saw the coloured glass which decorated the door glow a faint yellow and ruby, as a gaslight went up in the passage. Mrs. Boothroyd opened the door, tall and thin, black and shining as a beetle’s wing.
Boarders had been part of Mrs. Boothroyd’s life too long for her to take much interest in us. Indeed, I felt all through the week that she resented our having stirred her from hibernation. Visitors to Blackpool were not customary in December, and all shortcomings she excused by saying “If it had only been in the summer-time, now—” as though in the summer-time Mount Pleasant were accustomed to blossom into delirious achievements of punctuality, comfort and convenience.
At the foot of the narrow stairs was a marble table that looked as though it had been made out of a tombstone, and on it were half a dozen tin candlesticks, enamelled in blue. “You’ll always find your candle here, and matches,” said Mrs. Boothroyd, imparting to the words a commentary on the unshakable efficiency of the Mount Pleasant machine. She lit the candle and preceded us up the stairs. “This is your room.”
It was the sort of room one would expect. The washstand was another graveyard masterpiece. The linoleum was harsh and chill. The great double bed dominated the room, cold-looking as a snowdrift. There were lace curtains to the windows, and behind them Mrs. Boothroyd let the venetian blinds down with a bony rattle. “There,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s nice?”
“I think it would be much nicer with a fire,” I said.
“A fire? In a bedroom?”
Clearly I was entering regions of insanity where Mrs. Boothroyd found it difficult to follow. We eyed one another with hostility across the bed. “If it was summer, now—” she began.
“If it were summer we could do without a fire,” I said, “but we’d like one tonight.”
“Very well. But please remember I have no staff in the winter.”
“If you’ll show me where the stuff is, I’ll light it myself. It’s five minutes’ work.”
“I’ll light it. It’ll be a shilling a night.”
“And worth every penny.”
Mrs. Boothroyd retired. “Your supper will be ready as soon as you come down,” she said at the door.
The house was infested with angels. I had noticed one in the passage—just simply an angel in an off-moment, engaged in an afternoon’s untrammelled soaring. Elsewhere they were on definite jobs. Here in the bedroom was a whole posse of them giving a helping hand to Christian souls that were rising from bodies laid in decorous attitudes about the floor of an arena full of prowling lions. In the dining-room to which we presently descended there were no fewer than three illustrations of angelic usefulness. There was a white flock of them, some swooping like albatrosses round a sinking ship, others alighted gracefully in the rigging, looking down with encouraging glances at the distraught mariners who were clearly “In Peril on the Sea,” as a caption informed me. A smaller picture showed an angel laying a friendly hand upon the shoulder of an old man at a graveside; and yet another depicted a soldier, prone on a battlefield, one hand thrown negligently across the neck of his fallen horse, the other extended to an angel who pointed upward with a coquettish “Come hither” look.
It was not a cheerful dining-room. The fire was a smoky smoulder, and over the mantelpiece was a card upon which embossed silver lettering said: “The Lord is the Head of this house, the unseen Guest at every meal, the unseen Listener to every conversation.” I gathered an impression in the course of the week that, so far as the last clause was concerned, the Lord was ably abetted by Mrs. Boothroyd.
Nellie and I sat down to mutton chops seethed in grease, and to potatoes, and to the bread pudding which wasn’t at all bad, and to lashings of tea. As we ate, we could hear Mrs. Boothroyd raking with incensed vigour at the fireplace above.
“D’you think you ought to have worried about a fire, Bill?” Nellie asked in a whisper.
“Of course I do. If you want anything in this world you’ve got to ask for it and see that you get it.”
“I’m afraid it might make her not like us.”
I laughed. “D’you care whether she does or not?”
“I like people to like me. That’s all.”
“I don’t like ’em to sit on me,” I said.
When Mrs. Boothroyd came down, puffing and giving a general impression of having stoked a liner, we were standing in the hall with our coats on. Nellie had asked to be taken for a walk by the sea.
“Remember I lock up at ten,” Mrs. Boothroyd said shortly. With a grotesque attempt to be arch, she added: “I should have thought you’d want to get to bed tonight.”
“We shall get to bed tonight. Make no mistake about that,” I said. “And don’t call us in the morning. We’ll get up when we’re ready.”
I took Nellie’s arm, and we went out into the cloudy night.
I’m no apologist for Blackpool, either as it was then or as it is now. I don’t like the place—can’t stand it at any price. Without its blatancy, it would be a bleak and miserable thing huddled in front of a grey and uninspiring sea. With it, it is the crown of a crazy, cowardly age that can’t bear to be alone, or to be still, or to be silent. I didn’t like it that night. There were, of course, no visitors at that time of the year. When we got down to the front the wind was blowing from the north. We turned and walked in the teeth of it towards Norbreck. There was hardly a soul stirring, hardly a light save from a pub here and there. We walked, bowed to the wind, Nellie’s arm in mine, the sea, which was full, pounding in rhythmic reverberations on the beach to our left. We walked till we reached the inconsiderable rise of land at Norbreck, and then we halted, alone under the night, with the wind whistling and the sea lamenting. Nellie put both her arms around me and pressed her head against my breast. I got my arms round her too, and there we stood, clinging to one another. “Oh, Bill,” she said in a smothered voice, hugging me tighter, “I do love you. I do love you so. We shall be happy, shan’t we?—so happy!”
I did not answer, but pressed her closer to me, there on the cliff, with no light anywhere, and before me nothing but the sea, restless, dark and menacing.