The room which had been my bed-sitting-room became now my study. I moved into Nellie’s bedroom, and that was the only change in domestic habits brought about by the wedding. I was afraid that Nellie would be possessive, that she would want me now to spend all my spare time with her and Moscrop, but nothing of the sort happened. Marriage gave her a certain amount of self-confidence. She let her father see that his growing disabilities made him a handful, that with him and the house to look after, she could not look after the shop; and that, if I had to look after the shop and superintend the business in general, I could not do the round as well. So a youth was engaged to drive the horse and van, and I, for all practical purposes, became the boss of Moscrop’s.
When my day’s work was over, Nellie would chase me away to my study. “Get on with your book,” she would say, and old Moscrop would lift his heavy lids and say: “Ay, she’ll make a great man of you yet, Bill.”
But in my study, which I had managed to make cosy with bookshelves and a carpet, I was not working at a book. The paper called Tit-bits which Dermot had thrust into my hand that night when we met Flynn was occupying my attention. The sort of stuff it contained seemed so easy to write, and yet I think I tore up twenty efforts before I had completed one that I liked. It was called “Lodging-houses in Winter.” My experiences among the Blackpool angels gave me the material. Tit-bits accepted it, printed it, and paid me thirty shillings for it. Pasted on to a board and framed in narrow black, that article hangs in my study today. I suppose I am a sentimentalist, but I wouldn’t sell for a lot of money that framed article.
From that moment, I began to make money by my pen. Once I had tumbled to the knack of it, it came easily. I could get a pleasant humorous twist into those skits and sketches, and they sold readily. Soon I was doing two or three a week. Dermot’s advice had proved fruitful, but for years it kept me from the work I was made to do.
Made to do? Yes, I suppose so, for the itch never left me from the moment I began in the Gibraltar Street bedroom. It was there all the time, even when I was a rich and successful business man. For I became that, too. I must tell you about it.
There was great excitement at Moscrop’s when that first cheque came. The old man advised the opening of a bank account, venturing to coin a phrase about saving the shillings and the pounds taking care of themselves. Nellie was as pleased and excited as though another Jane Eyre had come out of the purlieus of Hulme. But I remembered my promise to give Dermot a present out of my first cheque. I bought him a silver-headed malacca cane, and on a February night I walked round to Ancoats with it.
“You’re just in time to see the grand performance,” said Sheila, who came to the door. “Go right through now to the kitchen.”
In the kitchen Dermot sat at the table on which were spread dozens of small pieces of carved boxwood. “Feel it,” he said, pushing one across to me. “It’s like ivory.”
It was: a minute but lovely bit of carving.
“The very devil to do,” said Dermot. “So small. I could have built a house in the time it’s taken to make these.”
“But what are they?” I asked.
“Toys for Rory,” Sheila said with a happy smile, leaning on the back of Dermot’s chair. “Just you watch now.”
Dermot began fitting the pieces together. Each one was made with slots or dovetailing, and now they assembled themselves under Dermot’s fingers. “It’s an old English village, you see,” he said, “every detail guaranteed true to the facts of the case.”
The walls of the inn dovetailed themselves together; the roof slotted on. So did the lovely little dormers. From a tiny peg Dermot hung the separate inn sign. “Good, eh?” he said, engrossed in his job.
It was. I watched him, fascinated, a sudden turmoil in my mind. Here, I kept saying to myself, here at last was that great Idea which wise men recognised when it was under their noses.
Dermot went on quietly with his job, his eyes full of humour, his long deft fingers loving the wood. The church rose up, wall by wall, roof, tower and tiny flagstaff. He placed it on a piece of green paper, with the inn on the other side. Cottages rose round the inn, a vicarage sprang up alongside the church, and, decently removed from all else, there appeared a great house. As arranged there by Dermot on the green paper, it was a lovely and alluring toy perfect in detail, exquisite in proportion. “The great fun for children,” he said, “will be not only in having this but in doing it. They love making things themselves.”
Sheila roughly tousled his hair. “Rory, will you be listenin’ to that now, ye spalpeen,” she said. “Here’s himself talkin’ as though he had a dozen of ye and had spent a lifetime studyin’ yer ways.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Dermot said confidently. “I know what children like. And this is so simply fitted together that any child can make it and unmake it.”
He began easily to pull the lovely picture to bits.
“Any child?” I said.
“Well,” he laughed, “any child that’s lucky enough to have it, and that’ll be Rory.”
But I was thinking far beyond that now. “Dermot,” I said, as he packed the pieces into a box he had made. “Let me take these home to show them to Nellie, will you? Rory won’t be here for a month, you know, and he won’t be fitting these things together for a bit after that.”
“Go on then,” said Dermot, “but mind what you’re doing with them.”
Then I produced the malacca cane and told him about the article in Tit-bits. He and Sheila were full of congratulations. We drank to it in a glass of stout apiece—stout which had been laid in because it was supposed to be good for Sheila then—but if they had known how far that article was by now from my mind! With the precious box under my arm I hurried away, my head swimming with grandiose dreams.
*
Harry Platts was one of the people I had met when doing the bread round. He had been out of work for a long time and owed us a good deal of money. I think he feared, when I called on him suddenly that night, that I had come to demand a settlement. When I said: “Look here, Harry, I want to put you in the way of earning a bit of money,” his face brightened. I added expansively: “And you can consider that bread debt wiped out to begin with.” At that he looked almost scared. “But Mr. Essex—” he began.
“That’s all right,” I said. “May I come in and talk to you?”
“Ay,” he said with a grin. “T’missus is down at t’Salvation Army barracks prayin’ for my soul.” It was drink that had lost Harry his job. He was a moulder. We went into his cheerless little kitchen. I opened the box and took out all the pieces that went to make the village inn.
“Look here, Harry,” I said. “I know nothing about the processes of moulding, but I do know that if you chaps are given a good model you can reproduce it in metal.”
“Ay, that’s so, Mr. Essex.”
I handed him the bits of boxwood. “Are those good models?”
He fingered them carefully. “They are that,” he said. “That’s a champion job, that is.”
“You could make the moulds, get them reproduced in quantity?”
“Oh, ay,” he said. “That’s a routine job to me.”
“All those slots and things? You see, that’s important. The reproductions have got to slot together as easily as these.” I fitted the model together.
“Oh, ay. That’s routine,” he repeated.
“What metal would you use?”
“We’ll have to think that over. There are plenty of light alloys.”
“The lighter the better.”
“Ay. What abaht brass?”
“Brass? You don’t call that light?”
“Nay, Mr. Essex,” he said, bursting into a laugh. “Ah mean the doin’s, the spondulix. There are things Ah’ll have to buy.”
“Work it out,” I said, “and call on me tomorrow. I’ll let you have whatever’s necessary.”
That was how the business began which was known as “Easifix Toys.” A week after that talk with Harry Platts I sat in my study slotting together again and again a dozen metal copies of the village inn. And, of course, Dermot was right. This was just what any child would love to do: to have the sense, when the whole village was spread before him, that he had made it.
That was the appeal, I said to myself, trying to think like a clever commercial plotter. And any child who had once discovered the joys of the old English village wouldn’t want to stop there. We should have to go forward, once Dermot saw the point of the thing. Elizabethan town. That would be a one! Elizabethan Town, Set 1, the Playhouse. Elizabethan Town, Set 2, the Guildhall. Elizabethan Town, Set 3, Burghers’ Houses. Why, you could make a dozen sets of that alone. Something progressive, irresistible, luring the buyers on.
Absolute accuracy, I mused, sitting down by the fire, just as in this first set that Dermot had made. Let the thing be educational. Perhaps schools would take it up. With a bit of archæological research, we might do actual cities. “Lincoln in the fifteenth century.” That sort of thing. Every detail good enough for a museum. And we could make a dash into the future. “The City of Tomorrow.” Plenty of scope there.
I handled fondly the pieces that Harry Platts had made in a light grey metal that looked rather like the linotype metal of today. The things must be coloured, of course. Pantiles must be red and stone towers grey and cottage walls must have creeping plants upon them. Now who on earth could do that? Never mind. I’d soon find that out. Lord, what a lot of details there were! They’d all cost money. Never mind. This was not going to be a cheap toy. No cheaper than I could help, anyway.
*
It was just a year later that the one commercial traveller of the Easifix Toy Company went out on the road. He took the old English village with him. Not far from the bakery I had found a disused stable with a good loft over it. Harry Platts set up his end of the business in the stable. An office of sorts had been started in the loft. There, early that winter morning, Mark Harborough, the traveller, had a final consultation with me. He was a good man. I had thought often about how I should set to work to become rich, once the great Idea came. One point that had always been firm in my mind was: employ the finest experts you can buy. And so I bought Mark Harborough. I bribed him away from an old-established firm which he had served for ten years. His salary was to be the same as the one he was receiving; his commission was to be slightly higher. But the bribe went deeper than that. Once the Easifix Company had made a given profit for three successive years, Harborough was to be made a director, in charge of the sales staff which, with luck, we should then need. So long as I remained associated with Easifix Toys, we went on that principle: the highest reward we could afford at the moment, with the promise of even higher rewards for those whose efforts helped to make them possible.
It worked. In five years Mark Harborough was off the road, running his staff from the head office, and in ten years that staff was working the continent of Europe as well as England. When Dermot and I finally sold out of Easifix Toys, Harborough became the controlling shareholder and a very rich man.
But what could we know of all that, as we sat facing one another, sitting on hard wooden chairs in the office-loft that bleak winter morning! Harborough was thirty years old at the time, a thin, dark and strikingly handsome person with perfect manners and a natural gift for “getting on” with people. There was nothing about him of the rough-and-ready, rather bawdy good humour that was the stock-in-trade of most “commercials” of that time. His qualities went deeper than that. His bag, filled with boxes of toys, was on the table.
“Well, good-bye and good luck,” I said. “And thank you for coming to us. You’re taking a lot on trust.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ve worked for Wilbraham and Sugden for ten years. If I work for them for another twenty I’ll still be where I am today. I’ve never had any means of laying my hands on a bit of capital, and till you employed me I didn’t think I’d ever get into big things without capital. You’ve shown me how to do it. And now I shall do it.”
He spoke confidently but without arrogance. We shook hands on it, and he climbed down the stairs. His smiling face had success written all over it as he gave me a final glance through the raised trap-door.
I heard Harry Platts come in to his work down below, and then I sat under the buzzing gaslight and made some anxious calculations on a writing-pad. Rent of premises, cost of metal, cost of packing, wages of Harborough and Platts and other workers, whole or part-time. It mounted up to a pretty penny, and it would be a long time before there was anything coming in. It was a good thing that I had faith and that Harborough had a worth-while incentive. No one else believed in Easifix Toys. Dermot thought it was an amusing pastime. Certainly he’d carve his little toys. It gave him something to do in the evenings. Especially now that Sheila couldn’t go out. For there was Maeve to look after now. Not Rory, but Maeve. Oh, they were disappointed at first. But you couldn’t be disappointed for long with Maeve about the home, with a black down on her head and her little monkey face puckered in a grin half the day. And there’d be Rory all right some day. Never doubt it. “It’s waitin’ till I’ve had some practice at motherin’ he is, the spalpeen,” Sheila would say, hugging Maeve to her breast, “and oh, you wee darlin’, what could I want better than you to be goin’ on with, if I was Queen of Ireland?”
So Dermot didn’t go out much in the evenings, but carved away at his beautiful toys and his pale eyes lighted with laughter at my enthusiasm. “Ach,” he said, “it’ll be money for jam—if it comes off.” And then, more gravely: “But, Bill, honest to God, man, I don’t like it. There are you, putting your capital into this thing, and all I have to do is what I’d be doing anyway. And besides your capital, you’re putting all this time and work. And yet you call me a director of your comic show, and we split fifty-fifty. It’s not sense.”
How often we had that out in those early days, sitting there in his kitchen, smoking our pipes as he worked at his toys! “It’s the biggest sense ever,” I argued. “These are the grandest toys ever made. They’re bound to find an enormous market. You’re making ’em. I’m reproducing them and selling ’em. Fifty-fifty’s fair. You showed me an outlet for my capital that I’d never have thought of without you.”
“Your capital, my hat!” Sheila mocked; and of course that was a sore point.
For it wasn’t my capital at all. It was Nellie’s capital, and though they never said a word, Sheila and Dermot, I could see, were shivering in their shoes lest I should pour it down the drain.
I was thinking of that as I followed Harborough presently down the ladder and walked through the dank morning streets of Hulme to breakfast. Alone with Nellie. There was no Moscrop now. Nellie’s filial piety had put his portrait up alongside Mrs. Moscrop’s. Of course there was no Moscrop, or there would have been no capital. In a sense, he brought his death on himself. It was at the time when first my head began to fill with the Easifix plans, a Sunday night in March. At teatime I told Nellie that I should not be going with her to Oddy Road that night; I should be working in my study. It was the first time since our marriage that I had stayed at home on a Sunday night.
“Eh, Bill? What’s that?” the old man asked. “But Nellie can’t go alone.”
I didn’t realise that they would both take the thing seriously. “Perhaps Nellie’d like to stay at home and read to you,” I said. “It’s a dreadful night.” It was. All day long snowy-looking clouds had filled the sky, and now a sharp east wind was blowing.
“But I’ve never missed on a Sunday night—not for years and years,” said Nellie. “And it’s the chapel anniversary. Surely, Bill—”
“I don’t see why we should go everywhere together,” I said. I felt that very keenly, and spoke sharply—the first time I had spoken sharply to her since our marriage. She began to cry. Old Moscrop rose with an alacrity that was astonishing in a man of his size and condition. He put an arm around her and glared at me across the table. “You don’t see why?” he demanded truculently. “Well, let me tell you, Bill, it’s expected that a young married woman should have her husband with her.”
The old man’s sharp tone suddenly made me feel a stranger in the house—a dependant. And I said to myself that I’d be damned if old Moscrop should speak to me like that. “Because people expect a thing,” I retorted, “it doesn’t follow that it’s common sense.”
“It’s common sense that someone should go to chapel with Nellie,” the old boy declared stoutly, “and since you won’t, I will. The means of grace won’t come amiss to me. Perhaps you will be so good, before you retire to your study, as to order a cab.”
He sat down with dignity, Nellie mopped her eyes and fled upstairs. I put on my overcoat, walked to the cab-rank at All Saints and ordered the cab to be at Moscrop’s at a quarter past six. The roads, you know, were not asphalted then. I noticed that the keen wind had stretched a film of ice on all the puddles.
The old man, who had not been out on a winter night for a long time, obstinately wrapped himself up in overcoat and muffler. He glared at me in a fierce “I’ll show you!” fashion, and certainly it would be an Oddy Road sensation for a worshipper to defy his bodily ailments, arrive in a four-wheeler, and depart in the same reckless and spendthrift fashion. I saw them into the cab, helping old Moscrop across the pavement which sparkled with frost. “You needn’t bother!” he exclaimed impatiently. “Get to your study. I’ll manage.” Both hostility and derision were in his tone. He was beginning to think that little enough was coming out of that study.
I did not see him alive again. He made an Oddy Road sensation all right. Half-way through the sermon he was seized with one of his paroxysms. I have pointed out before that the Moscrop pew was right against the vestry door. A couple of stewards got him under the arms and helped him into the vestry, gasping like a landed fish. If he had stayed there till the attack was over, he might have lived; but he managed to articulate the word “cab.” A volunteer ran to the cab-rank and brought back the four-wheeler which would have been there, anyway, half an hour later. Moscrop and Nellie were got aboard, the old man fighting for his breath in the black wind that whirled round the corner. The hack that pulled the four-wheeler, nearly as broken-winded as Moscrop himself, went clickety-clack over the ice-bound road. He was turning the corner to Moscrop’s front door when the accident happened. From my study I heard the sudden wild slither as the poor beast’s hoof met an icy rut, heard the sound of the cab swerving as the horse tried to recover himself, heard the smashing blow as the cab went broadside-on into the street lamp at the corner.
When I got down, a few people had already gathered among the splintered glass on the pavement. The cabby was kneeling at the fallen horse’s head. I helped Nellie out of the cab. She was frozen with fright. “Father!” was all she could say. She had noticed that his grim fight for breath had stopped. It had stopped for good. The shock of the collision had finished him off, as the doctor had expected some such affair would do.
*
I walked back through the murk of the Hulme morning after seeing Mark Harborough set off with the Easifix samples. The gas was lit in the living-room; the fire was bright; the breakfast was ready. Everything looked good, everything smelled good; but the sight of the room did not cheer me. Nellie sat at the table, reading her morning chapter from the Bible. I had persuaded her to see an optician about that frowning stare, and now she wore pince-nez. She put the silk marker into the book, shut it, and looked at me through the glasses. “I’ll put the water on the tea,” she said. Whenever I appeared she had some dutiful remark to make. “I’ll put the water on the tea.” “The joint’s just done.” “Can I sew those buttons on for you now?” But one thing she never did. She never came forward and threw her arms round me and hugged me and kissed me, as I had so often seen Sheila do to Dermot. And, of course, now she never would. Her father’s death lay like a sword between us. She had not spoken of that matter, but in her complete submission there seemed to lurk reproach. Even now, nearly a year after the old man’s death, she was in black from top to toe. She had taken, too, to wearing a vast cameo brooch that had belonged to her mother: a thing that depicted a maiden, vaguely Grecian, sitting beneath the drooping hair of a willow. She seemed to be doing all she could to add to her age and to bid good-bye to the fleeting joys of youth.
I had been unable to interest her in the affairs of the Easifix Company. Moscrop had left nearer six than five thousand pounds. He had died intestate, and Nellie was without a relative in the world. Every penny was hers, and I found it no easy matter to open the subject of throwing the money upon the waters in the hope of a goodly return. But once I had done so, she was acquiescent. That was her mood now in everything: acquiescence, resignation. Thy will be done. If I wanted the money, there it was. Was I not her husband? There were mornings when this attitude kept me awake at nights, shivering with apprehension. If she had heartily backed the gamble, I could more bravely have faced failure. But to lose the money of this spiritless woman would have cut me deeply. Every atom of my pride was engaged in making Easifix Toys a winning venture.
Nellie believed in feeding me well. She placed before me a plate containing rashers of bacon, a fried egg, and a fry-up of yesterday’s surplus potatoes. I had begun to grow a moustache, and she handed me my tea in one of those monstrous creations, unknown to the present generation, called a moustache-cup. There was a china ledge to prevent the moustache from being waterlogged, though my own adornment was not of a size that made precaution necessary. A portrait of Queen Victoria, backed by the Union Jack, decorated the cup. This was the first I had seen of it; but Nellie was always doing me these small kindnesses, as though determined to fulfil all the duties of a wife.
I used the occasion to try to put some spirit into her. “Thank you, Nellie,” I said. “This will do fine till we’re drinking out of silver beakers. I hope that won’t be long now. Harborough’s on the road this morning.”
“I shall pray for your success,” she said austerely.
“Far better to work for it,” I cried, but at that she shook her head. “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of,” she quoted.
“Very well, then,” I agreed, laying into a rasher. “You pray and I’ll work. That ought to make a winning team. And I bet that within three years we’ll be closing down the bakery, or, better still, putting it up for sale.”
“You wouldn’t do that!” she cried in alarm. “You wouldn’t close the bakery!”
“Like a shot I would,” I answered. “If Easifix turns out a success, why carry on with this? Why go on living in Hulme? It’s never been my idea of paradise.”
“I’ve always been used to it,” she said. “And father was here ever since he was a boy. He remembered when there were green fields in Hulme.”
“Well, there are none now, nor anything else that makes life worth living. The sooner we’re out of it the better.”
“I shouldn’t like to leave Oddy Road. I’ve always attended there. I should like to go on there, even though you’ve given it up.”
Now we were back at a sore point. I wiped my mouth with my handkerchief and pushed back my chair. “I’d better go and see that they’re loading the van,” I said.
I had given up attending Oddy Road. I don’t know why. The wish to go there went as suddenly and inexplicably as it had come. The place no longer meant anything to me, and so I didn’t go. That was all there was to it. So Nellie went alone. This was a real break, because Oddy Road meant so much to Nellie. It was half her life, and now it was a half I could not share.