Nellie did not like to see anything changed, but change enough soon came. Two years after Mark Harborough first went out, I had finished with Moscrop’s bakery for good. It continued to exist, but an efficient man ran it. All my time now was being given to Easifix Toys. In the office over the loft I had a clerk, a telephone, and a routine. Once I had thrown off the bakery, I gave my time to mastering the three elements of any trade: buying raw material, making the product, and selling. Anyone of average intelligence, given the capital to start with, can do these three things, and I have more than average intelligence.
By the time another year had passed, the office had shifted to a couple of rooms in Oxford Street. Old O’Riorden came in as chief of the office staff. The manufacturing part of the business was housed in a new building that covered the whole of the yard in which our original stable had stood. Throughout all the time I was connected with Easifix, that building sufficed for our purposes. It was a good two-storey affair; and you don’t want a great deal of room for toy-making.
We were all going ahead. Dermot had his fine new showrooms. They were under the Easifix offices in Oxford Street, and a sight they were, stored with the lovely furniture that carried out his ideas of strength combined with simplicity. They had never looked better than they did on a May morning in 1895 when even the sky of Hulme was like taut blue silk and in the grim and sooty soil of the All Saints churchyard a few shrubs were troubled for a while with a green dream of summer. We had only just moved into the new offices. Reports coming in from Harborough were beyond all expectation; and I had come belting down from home full of energy and enthusiasm. I paused on the All Saints side of Oxford Street and looked across the road at the two first-floor windows with “Easifix Toys” lettered upon them, and at the large plate-glass expanse beneath them. Dermot had fitted the whole window as a dining-room. The furniture was teak. The upholstery was green leather. The carpet was sage-green. The electric-light fittings were all in wrought-iron, the work of a craftsman Dermot now employed; and the only picture in the room was a thing I had not yet got used to. It hung over the fireplace. Dermot’s interest in ceramics had caused him to make a visit to Copenhagen. There he had drifted into an exhibition of paintings arranged by a Madame Gauguin whose husband was living and painting on a South Sea island. This thing had caught his eye—a thing of fierce burning colour: a pink beach, a Polynesian woman, a few palms—and he had bought it. There it was, a portentous thing to see in Manchester at that time. “It makes the room,” Dermot had said the day before, “and what’s more, it makes people stand and look. ‘Pink beach!’ they say. ‘Nonsense!’ And then they think: ‘But the furniture’s damned good,’ and so I get ’em. But that picture’s not for sale.”
I dashed across the road, bounded up the stairs to the office, and shut myself in my own room, pondering on the case of Dermot. He was always a goad in my side, a bit ahead of me in everything. This picture was a case in point. I couldn’t pretend at that time to like it, and I couldn’t bear Dermot’s easy laughter. “In ten years’ time, my dear Bill, you’ll probably be offering me a few thousand pounds for it.”
There was his house, too. He had left Ancoats. The client for whom he had remodelled and furnished that place in Withington had failed in business. Dermot had taken the house over from him, furniture and all. He had moved in last week. “I don’t want Rory to be born in Ancoats,” he said, because now Rory was on the way—once more. “And I want to show off, too,” he added, his fly-away eyebrows going up in a grin. “I’m having a grand party to warm the house. Grand for me, anyway. There’ll be six of us: me and Sheila, you and Nellie, and father and mother.” He paused for an almost imperceptible moment; and added: “If Nellie’d care to come?” People were beginning to feel like that about Nellie now.
She came, though. I think she felt rather uncomfortable in Dermot’s house. It was a great contrast to the cosy jumble of our own place. Dermot was passing through a mad phase of whiteness. The dining-room was panelled in white. There was a pair of candle-sconces over the fireplace, and between them the Gauguin picture looked exquisitely at home. “I can’t leave it in the shop,” he explained. “I’m always bringing it back and forth, and now, I think, it had better stay where it is.” Six candles without shades burned in a row down the long table which Sheila had laid beautifully. “Not that I ought to be here,” she said with a laugh. “The man’s mad, asking people tonight, with Rory expected at any minute. Ach, ye young devil, I wouldn’t be surprised if ye interrupted the party.”
Nellie gave her a shocked and wondering look; but Sheila took her gaily by the arm and led her away to see the little Maeve, who had been put to bed.
Old O’Riorden turned up in a shiny frock-coat and stiff cut-throat collar, looking rather intimidated. Things had indeed changed for him since the day when he first took me home to Gibraltar Street, Summerway’s new office boy, and Dermot was a gawky youth with sawdust in his hair. But Mrs. O’Riorden was not the person to be intimidated by anything. “Ah don’t know why you can’t live without all these faldelals, Dermot,” she said, when Sheila’s neat little maid had left the room. “Servants and candles, and yon picture that’s like nothing on earth.”
Dermot smiled benignly. “One of these days that picture may keep us all out of the workhouse,” he told them.
“Time was,” she said, “when the only picture you wanted was that thing with the names of the Manchester martyrs. That used to give me the pip, but I prefer it to yon.”
“Ay, what’s become of that, my lad?” old O’Riorden asked. “I’d be glad to know you’d put it behind the fire.”
“Will you leave the boy alone?” Sheila demanded. “There was no place where it would fit in with his scheme of decoration. Dermot’s an artist now, not an Irishman.”
She spoke lightly. Was I mistaken in thinking there was a hint of bitter raillery behind the words? I glanced across the table, and saw what I had not seen for a long time: the green glint of anger and excitement flash for a second in Dermot’s pale eyes. It was gone even as I looked, and Dermot answered easily: “Just concentrate now on the blessings here provided. I shan’t discuss either of my two religions with unbelievers.”
Sheila took Nellie and Mrs. O’Riorden away to the drawing-room, and we three men sat on at the littered table, smoking cigars. It was the first cigar I had ever smoked, and somehow that, too, increased the nagging sense of inferiority I felt in Dermot’s presence. He produced them with an air, and invited us to drink port. I declined, but old O’Riorden took the wine gladly, holding his glass to the light and savouring the liquor lovingly upon his tongue. I couldn’t have put up a dinner like this. I had no such home as this, and Nellie could never preside in it, as Sheila could do, even if I had one. And this was not coming out of Easifix Toys, either. Both Dermot and I were now making a little money out of it, but not much. Most of the takings were still going back into the business. All this comfort and comeliness of Dermot’s was coming out of the work which primarily he wanted to do. That was where I felt a failure. Determined as I was that Easifix Toys should succeed and make much money, I still regarded it as a side-line. Writing meant as much to me as ever, though still I was doing nothing but fiddling little bits and pieces of work. Sitting there, chewing at a cigar which I failed to enjoy, I had another of those maddening urges to get on with my own job and worry it till I had broken its back.
These melancholy yet charming meditations were suddenly interrupted. Mrs. O’Riorden burst excitedly into the room. “Dermot! Dermot! Sheila’s started! The baby’s coming!”
This was where, according to the novels, a young husband should go to pieces. Dermot didn’t. He got up and flung his half-smoked cigar into the fire. “Get her to bed,” he said calmly. “Bill, go for the nurse. She was due to come in tomorrow morning anyhow. Here’s her address. I’ll go for the doctor. Dad, you— Well, you might as well stay where you are. Finish your port and cigar.”
A moment later I parted from him in the street, he going one way and I another, and he seemed far more collected than I was. I pictured myself rushing back, dragging a palpitating and eager nurse, but the staid and middle-aged Lancashire woman whom I found at the address that had been given to me was not to be flustered. “Nay, tha needn’t wait for me, lad,” she said. “Ah’ll mak misen a coop o’ tea an’ then ah’ll be along. When did ’er pains begin?”
The question embarrassed me absurdly. “They’re just begun,” I stammered. “Ah well,” she said, “she’s got it all to go through yet. But tha needn’t fret. Ah’ll be along.”
Half an hour after that, when the doctor and nurse were upstairs with Sheila, Dermot and I were in the small coach-house at the side of the garden. He had fitted it up into a lovely workshop. It was ten times the size of the old lean-to shed in Gibraltar Street. Nellie and the O’Riordens were gone. “You stay, Bill,” Dermot said; and I recognised in the words the strength of our friendship and the need that was in him, despite his pose of calm. So there we were, as we had been on the night so long ago when first we met, the night when he had fiddled with the work he was doing, and had blazed out suddenly about William Morris, and then later about the Manchester martyrs. I thought of those things as he moved about restlessly under the strong electric light, tinkering away nervously at a job that was on the bench. I sat on an upturned crate, smoking my pipe; and suddenly I said: “Did you ever see that fellow Flynn again, Dermot?”
“I did not,” he answered, rather sharply; and then added: “The man’s dead.”
He took up a pencil and began to draw with smooth-flowing lines on a panel of wood; and then he threw down both pencil and panel and swung towards me with his eyes shining in his pale face. “It’s all over, that,” he said harshly. “I had to choose one thing or the other. I’ve got no use for windbags. I got sick of ’em, sick to death. What do they do but meet and talk and belch out the wind that’s in their bellies? If I could have gone to Ireland, and worked for Ireland—in Ireland—and perhaps died for Ireland, I’d have done it. By God and all the martyrs, yes—I’d have done it. But I had to work for my living, and then I got married, and there’s Maeve, and there’ll be more. So what can I do? Go on being a windbag patriot? Not me! There was a time when I thought I’d be something else. But now I know I won’t.”
He sat on the bench and swung his long thin legs, and the light burned down on his red hair. “And there’s all this,” he went on, waving his hand round the room. “Sheila says I’m an artist now, not an Irishman. Well, I am an artist. No one’s taught me to do a thing, but I can do it, and do it well; and by God, I’m going to do it better. You believe that, Bill, don’t you?” he suddenly appealed, with a great need for comfort in his eyes.
“Yes, Dermot,” I said. “I wish I could be as true to my job as you are to yours.”
“You see,” he went on, “wherever it came from, it’s there. I know about these things. I know when a thing’s right and when it’s wrong, and when it’s wrong I know how to put it right. I knew, as soon as I saw those pictures in Copenhagen, that they were great pictures. Nobody I’ve met agrees with me—not even you, you dense old fool. But they will. And I not only know great things when I see them; I can do great things in my own line. Can’t I?” he challenged me hungrily.
“Yes, you can,” I said, and I meant it.
“Well then. I’ve had to choose what channels I should put my energy into. And I’ve chosen for good and all. But I’m no less a patriot for that. I’m no less an Irishman for that. I can still give something to Ireland. All that I should have liked to do can still be done. If I have a son, it shall be done. I am not satisfied, I shall never be satisfied, with the position of Ireland under the muddy feet of your bloody country. My son shall not be satisfied with it. He shall go to Ireland, he shall learn to be an Irishman as I am not, as my father is not, as my Uncle Con is not, doling out his dollars like all the other damned American-Irish who wouldn’t come back if Ireland was a republic tomorrow. So now you know all about it. Now you know what I want most passionately in this world for my son.” His rare pale smile lit his face. “And what about you, Bill?” he said. “What’s your scheme for the next generation?”
I re-charged and lit my pipe before answering. “Well, Dermot, it comes to roughly what you want yourself. That is to say, I want to realise in my son all that I’ve missed myself. I’ve been poor in a way that even you have never known. I’ve been lonely and miserable and lacking in all that children should have in a decent world. If I have a son, I just want him to have everything. I’ll work my fingers to the bone to give him every damn thing he asks for, and seeing him enjoying it I’ll enjoy it myself and live my life over again from the beginning, but differently. Do you approve?”
He looked at me gravely, swinging his legs on the bench. “I don’t know,” he said. “You’ll spoil him.”
“I’ll chance it. I’ll give him a lovely life.”
And so, Rory, and so, Oliver, we settled your destiny for you, Dermot and I, sitting there in that room at midnight, with the smoke from our pipes dimming the light, and the merciful veils of the future dimming our eyes.
*
But Rory was not born that night. That time it was Eileen; and when Rory was born I was not so excited about it, because Oliver was born the same night.
Before we were married, Nellie always called me Bill. After we had got back from Blackpool she began to call me William. I hated being called William, but Bill was too frivolous for Nellie when she had fully entered into a matron’s estate. To everyone save Dermot and Sheila she called me Mr. Essex. “Mr. Essex says...” “Mr. Essex thinks...”
When little Eileen O’Riorden was three months old, and Dermot had resolved that Sheila must have a nurse for the children on whose room he was expending all his craft, I walked home from his house in Withington full of discontents. It was an August day, and the pavements sweltered. The nearer I approached to the heart of the town, the hotter I became, and when I turned left at All Saints and faced up the long street that led in the direction of home, my heart suddenly shrank within me. Everything was black and blistered, bone-dry and giving back the day’s heat like a desert. Not a tree, not a leaf, not a flower anywhere in sight. In all the side streets I could see men in shirt-sleeves and weary women sitting on their doorsteps or on chairs which they had dragged out on to the pavements. Pale, pinched children squabbled or played in the dust of the gutters. Strident voices from upper windows were calling some of them in to bed. The thought of Dermot’s home with its little garden, its few trees and bushes—not much, goodness knows, but so different from this—suddenly rushed upon me with a force which made me resolve there and then to have done with Hulme for ever.
In this mood I reached home, and walked into the living-room—the room that could be so cosy in winter with the curtains drawn and the firelight falling on polished wood and metal. But now, with the heat of the day imprisoned amid the plush upholsteries, with nothing but barren brick to be seen through the window, it struck me as intolerable. Nellie was reading with her back to the window. She got up as soon as I entered the room and said: “William, I’m going to have a child.”
I felt neither glad nor sorry, simply surprised, so surprised that I said nothing. Nellie asked: “Aren’t you glad?” and I said: “Yes, my dear. Of course. I hope it’ll be a boy.”
“I want a daughter,” she said.
“Well, whichever it is,” I told her, “don’t let’s have it born here. We’re well off, Nellie, and we’re going to be better off. Let’s get out of Hulme—now—right away—and let the child have a start in fresh air with something beautiful to look at.”
“But, William, I’d be lost. I’ve spent all my life here...”
I knew it all. I could have recited it for her; and I said no more that night. But the next day I wandered southwards along the Wilmslow Road. I came to a milestone which said “St. Ann’s Square 5 miles,” and that seemed to me a satisfactory distance. One wanted to be five miles from the heart of Manchester. I walked on again till I came to a little lane leading down to the Mersey, and just beyond that was a house standing back from the road at the end of a long narrow garden. A notice board said “To Let” and told me where I could get the keys. The agent wanted to accompany me, but I said I would rather see the house alone.
It was called The Beeches, and I knew I was going to live at The Beeches as soon as I had pushed open the front gate. It was a small friendly-looking house, and the length of its narrow garden gave it a remote and quiet air. So long was the garden that, though the two beech trees that gave it its name stood just within the gate, their shade was not daunting to the garden. The close-cut grass was thick and green; rosebeds had been cut in it and were full of blooms. The house was flat-fronted, of good red brick, with a window on either side of the porch and three windows above. Standing in the porch and looking back, I thought the road seemed a nice long way off, and the tall graceful beeches were both grateful to the eye and an assurance of privacy.
Before I had opened the door, I had begun to tell myself what I should do with the house. If there were no bathroom, one must be fitted. There must be four bedrooms: one for a maid, because Nellie would need a maid when she had a child to look after, one for the child, one for our bedroom, and one for my study.
As it happened, there were four bedrooms, and there was a bathroom. Under Dermot’s advice, I had the place decorated from top to bottom before a word was said to Nellie. It was not till November had come that I made pretence of wanting to take her for a drive. She thought it mad extravagance, but I protested sternly against the way she was carrying on: straining her weak eyes over the sewing of baby clothes from morning till night. “I don’t know why you don’t buy the lot,” I said. “We can well afford it.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “Catch me putting my baby into bought clothes. Men don’t understand these things.”
“I understand that it’s time you took an afternoon out of this house,” I protested, “and that’s the cab. I can hear it at the door.”
So we rolled in the musty old cab southwards along Oxford Street and the Wilmslow Road till we came to The Beeches. There we alighted. “Dermot’s got a job on in here,” I said. “Let’s go in and see him.”
I told the cabby to be back in an hour, and Nellie and I walked arm-in-arm for the first time up the long garden path of the house where Oliver was born. A few russet leaves still clung to the beeches and a carpet of them spread in gold and brown upon the lawn. It was a still day; it seemed to belong rather to late autumn than to winter. Chrysanthemums were still blooming before the front windows and under a tender blue sky the air was full of the sharp fragrance of burning leaves.
The house had an occupied look, for all the curtains were up. Though I had a key in my pocket, I knocked at the door and Dermot opened it. Nellie and I stepped into the little square hall, which looked more welcoming than I had hoped. Dermot had had a small stove fixed there, and the fire in it now glowed upon us through amber talc. There was room for a little table on slender legs, on which a vase of roses was standing, and for a book-case and an easy chair which stood now companionably upon the carpet beside the stove. Dermot lit the candles on the table. “D’you like this, Nellie?” he asked. “I’m working for a very particular sort of gent.”
Then we went into the drawing-room. It was not yet furnished save for a table and a few chairs, but the fire was lit, and when we had drawn the curtains and produced lights the room looked inviting, especially as Sheila was there, kneeling at the fireplace toasting muffins. She had already prepared the tea.
We let Nellie into the secret bit by bit, and she rather grudgingly allowed herself to be persuaded. There was a Wesleyan chapel a few hundred yards down the road, and I think that helped. But Nellie was firm about furniture. I had for some mad weeks been contemplating a clean sweep of all that had been dear to the heart of old Moscrop. But we had at last to throw in the furniture to soften for Nellie the blow of removal. The one room that was completely new was my study. Dermot worked upon that with his own hands and made it beautiful. And when he had finished he took me to the door, landed a foot in my behind, and kicked me over the threshold. “There it is,” he said. “Now work in it, you lazy devil.”
*
On a May midnight in the following year when the beech leaves in the garden were in their loveliest green, I walked up and down, up and down, while a cold moon climbed over, and the leaves sighed and murmured, and a light burned steadily on in the window on the first floor. When they told me I could see Nellie and the child I crept upstairs with a heart near to bursting. I could feel it lamming my ribs, and it was not till I had left the room again that I realised I had hardly looked at Nellie. I brought out with me nothing but a memory of a small face with eyes serenely closed, and a little down-tufted skull, and a long thin hand, small and exquisitely shaped, into which I longed to pour the world.
A few hours earlier Sheila’s third child was born, and that time it was Rory.