|WHEN Anne Branstone set her hand to the plough she ploughed deep, and
it was not her fault if the harvest was not immense. But she did not
misdirect her energy; she made certain that the seed was good seed
before she harnessed her plough. To drop metaphor, she let young Sam
prove that he was worth troubling over before she took trouble--trouble,
that is, as Anne understood the word. Of course, she sent him “decent”
to the Grammar School, and if that meant that she and Madge went without
new spring hats that year, well, last year’s hats must do. It was no
great matter, and the greater pride swallowed up the less. Mr. Travers
paid the fees, so that her son could associate with his, and Anne saw to
it thoroughly that, in externals, Sam should be worthy to associate with
Lance.
That was the beginning, and Sam, so far, was untried metal. Then, at
the end of his first term, he came out top of his form at the July
examinations, and, after that, Anne began to take things seriously.
It was not pure ability which brought Sam to that proud eminence so much
as the fact that he had been put in a form whose standard was really too
low for him, and he had not worked over hard at lessons, being naturally
preoccupied, in a first term, with finding his feet. Nor had that
been too difficult. The Manchester Grammar School was a democratic
institution. Schoolboys, anyhow, are not all snobs, and, in this
instance, the presence amongst the paying boys of a leaven of Foundation
Scholars, often from homes as poor as Sam’s, made acclimatization easy
for him.
But his feat impressed Anne, though all she said, when the lists came
out with the name of “Branstone, S.” at the head of II. Alpha, was, “Of
course!” as if any other place were impossible for a son of hers; and
it decided her that Sam would “pay for” taking trouble. She proceeded to
take trouble.
Tom Branstone’s first real inkling of what was passing in Anne’s mind
came to that good, easy man when he mentioned that his holidays were due
in a fortnight.
“You’ll take a holiday at home this year, my lad,” she informed him.
“But why’s that, Anne?” he asked. “Blackpool’s in the same place as it
was, and I get privilege passes on the line.”
“Sam’s not in the same place, though,” she said. “He’s at the Grammar
School. It’s a place where other boys wear decent clothes, and I’ll see
that Sam shan’t fall behind them.”
Tom took a holiday at home, varied with trips on the foot-plates of
friendly engine-drivers, and fortified his soul with the consolations of
tobacco. They were consolations which were not to be vouchsafed to him
much longer. Tobacco cost money, and Anne had need of it.
In spite of Travers’ generosity--or of as much of it as she could bring
herself to accept--it was not an easy thing for Anne to keep her son at
the Grammar School. It was desperately difficult, but Anne was Anne. The
boy had his foot on the educational ladder, and she meant him to go to
the top, rung by rung and scholarship by scholarship. When Sam took
his honours degree at Oxford, Anne would relax; till then, she was
a crusader. She sacrificed all to that ambition. Sam should have his
chance, at no matter what cost to her, to Tom and to Madge. The boy must
be as well dressed as his fellows, and he must play their games. Games
are an essential part of English education, and Anne, with her constant
eye to the main chance, recognized the importance of the playing-fields
in cementing friendships with boys who might be useful to Sam in after
life. But games are expensive, and Tom gave, up smoking when Sam was
put into his class eleven. Anne gave up nothing. She had nothing more to
give.
Honestly, Sam was grateful. Anne did not boast to him of the sacrifices
which they all made, but with the candour which distinguishes
working-class homes where anything but bare necessity is exceptional, he
was aware of every move, of all their deprivation, and did his best to
square accounts. But it was not a brilliant best, and after that first
term, Anne never repeated the satisfaction of seeing her son carry away
a form prize on Speech Day at the Free Trade Hall. He was a worker, a
safe plodding “swot,” taking by sheer application a respectable place in
the lists, but never heading them again, and especially he was weak at
mathematics.
That troubled Anne distressingly. Mathematics appeared to her the
corner-stone of education, though in truth they mattered little to
Sam, who had followed Lance to the Classical side of the school, where
mathematics were an unconsidered trifle. But Anne recked nothing of
that. She had found the heel of her Achilles, and set herself to make
that vulnerable place secure. You are to picture Anne, with her forty
years of a working woman’s life behind her, wrestling with algebra and
trigonometry, blazing a trail for Sam to follow. It was heroic and, by
some mental freak, successful. She taught herself, then tutored him,
and it was not Sam who scraped through to an average place in the
mathematics examinations, but Anne in Sam. Day after day, in the
intervals of cook ing, cleaning, washing, she studied the text-books
which so puzzled him, and at night explained their knotty points to him
with a wonderful clarity. She had no education in particular, nothing
but a general capacity and a monstrous will--a will that surmounted the
obstacle of acquiring knowledge at an age when few can learn, and the
greater obstacle of patient teaching to a boy who had a blind spot for
mathematics. She illumined his darkness, but perhaps she hampered his
classics and made her hopes of Oxford visionary.
Slowly and painfully, as the terms went by, with Branstone, S. rising
steadily in the school, but keeping regularly to his mediocre place in
class, Anne acknowledged to herself that her goose was not a swan. It
made her the more eager to cultivate what she called the social side;
and through that she met with a defeat.
From the beginning, Sam’s rise in the world had borne heavily on Madge,
his sister, who was of an age for gaiety and of a mind untouched by
ambition, personal or vicarious. When Sam went to the Grammar School,
Madge was in service and very content. Anne had her out of that at once;
she wasn’t going to run the risk of Madge being the servant in the house
of one of Sands school companions. It was unusual, but Madge preferred
service, where she was lucky in her employers, to the weaving-shed,
where she had free evenings, but strenuous days with no gossiping
callers at the back door to break their monotony. And it became a
considerable question in Madge’s mind whether she would now be able
to outface Anne in the matter of George Chappie. Anne required a
presentable brother-in-law for Sam.
Like Madge, George was unambitious, except that he wanted her, which
was ambition of a kind. Madge was small, like her mother, but derived
in most else from her father. She had freckles and carroty hair, and
the makings of a querulous shrew, but George saw otherwise, and desired
Madge to have and to hold, for better for worse, and didn’t perceive
that the odds were heavily against its being better. He was a wisp of
a man himself, and thought he was enterprising because he was a
window-cleaner; window-cleaning was a new trade then. But Anne did not
concur with that opinion, and Madge was in no very sanguine frame of
mind when George came in one night with an “It’s now or never” look
unmistakably in his eye. The trouble was that Anne was not the sort of
mother one defied with impunity.
He came in shyly enough--a determined George was a contradiction in
terms--but plucked up courage at once when he found that she was
alone but for Sam. Sam’s presence was inevitable, but need not be
acknowledged. In a house, not, indeed, of one room, but of one fire and
one gas-jet, Sam had grown apt at insulating himself when he sat with
his books at the table. The business of the house went on, so did Sam’s
studies, and neither interfered with the other. Sam, absorbed in his
construe of Cicero’s _De Senectute_ for the morrow, was absolutely
unconscious of Madge and George.
It was not Sam who troubled George, but Madge had truth with her when
she told her suitor that he looked worried. George jerked his thumb
vaguely streetwards. “It’s her again,” he explained. “I can’t think
why God made landladies. I ask you, Madge, is another blanket in this
weather a thing to fly into a temper about?”
“It’s cold,” said Madge. “Won’t she give you another?”
“I don’t know yet whether she’ll give me one or not. But she’s had my
last word. Another blanket or I’ll flit.”
“You’ve threatened that so often.”
He admitted it. “I know. It takes an earthquake to shift some folks, and
I reckon I’m one of them. I stay where I’m set.” And his tone implied
that conservatism was an admirable virtue.
Madge did not think so. “That’s what my mother says of you,” she
observed, a trifle tartly.
“It’s no lie, either,” he placidly agreed. “Seems to me,” he went on,
with a look, ardent but appealing, at Madge, “that there’s only one
thing will flit me from Mrs. Whitehead’s. You couldn’t give a guess at
it, could you?”
“Yes, I could,” said Madge brazenly. After all, she was Anne’s daughter,
and direct. Then, despite herself, she fenced coyly: “You’re leaving the
town, I reckon, Mr. Chappie.”
He stood aghast at the revolutionary thought. “Nay,” he said earnestly.
“I’m set here and I’ll not leave willing. There’s something to keep me
where I am.”
“Your job’s not worth so much,” she said, misunderstanding wilfully.
“It’s steady, though,” he defended it, “and a growing trade. My master’s
getting a lot of window-cleaning contracts all over the town. But
it’s not my job that keeps me here. It’s------” He dropped his cap and
fumbled for it nervously, somehow finding a sort of courage in the act,
so that when he rose he faced her with a spirit which was, for him,
quite debonair. “Now, you’ll not stop me, will you? I’ve come on purpose
to get this off my chest and I’ve worked myself up to a point. I’m a bit
slow at most things and I’m easily put off, so I’ll ask you to give my
humble request a patient hearing.”
Madge looked at him acutely, and decided that his resolution was strong
enough to survive something that she very much wanted to say. “I’d
rather this didn’t come straight on top of a row with your landlady,”
she said.
“Aye,” he agreed, “I can see your meaning, but it’s that that roused me
to point. Love’s like a pan of soup with me. It’s got to seethe a while
before it boils. But I’m boiling now, and I’m here to tell you so. I’ve
loved you since I saw you, Madge. After Sunday School one day it was,
with a wind on that blew the bonny curls across your eyes. I always
fancied gold and you’re gold twice over.” Madge was deeply moved at this
idealization of her hair. She had been made more peevishly conscious of
its redness than ever by the unsparing comments of the weaving-shed, but
she did not see wherein she was gold twice over until he explained it.
“I didn’t notice that the first day. I only saw your hair. I hadn’t the
nerve to come close enough to see the colour of your eyes. But when I
did, and found them all gold-brown as well, that finished me. I was deep
in love to the top of my head. Drowned in it, you might say.”
“You’re talking a lot of nonsense, George,” said Madge, with a fond
appreciation that belied her words.
“I’m telling you I love you,” he said, “and I’m asking if there’s
anything that you could see your way to tell me in return. I know I’m
not smart, Madge, but I’d work my fingers off to make you happy. Can’t
you say you love me, lass? Not,” he added, “if it isn’t true, of course.
I wouldn’t ask you to tell a lie even to oblige me.”
“It might not be a lie,” said Madge softly, “but----” She paused so that
he was left to guess the rest.
“But,” he suggested, “you don’t care to go so far as to say it?”
He watched her timidly, with courage oozing out of him. She had all but
given him to hope, but now it appeared she had no more to say. “Well, I
can understand,” he said, half turning towards the door. “I’m not much
of a chap, and you might easily have put me down much harder than you
did. It’s soft letting now, by reason of your tactful ways. I’ll... I’ll
go and see if Mrs. Whitehead has given me yon other blanket.”
He was at the door before she stopped him. “George!” she said, “come
back. You’re getting this all wrong. You know about my brother.” George
nearly smiled. “It’ud not be your mother’s fault if I didn’t,” he said.
“No,” she said; “I suppose everybody knows about his going to the
Grammar School. They don’t all know what it means.” Madge was trying to
be loyal to the family ideal, she was trying not to be bitter, but it
wasn’t easy. It was one thing to go without new hats and the accustomed
ways of service, but another to go without George.
“I’d like you to understand that this family puts itself about a bit for
Sam’s sake. We think he’ll go a long way up in the world, and the rest
of us aren’t doing anything to keep him down. None of us, no matter how
it hurts. Are you seeing what I mean?”
He saw. “I’m not class enough for you,” he said.
It was a part, but not the whole, of her meaning, and Madge wanted
no misapprehensions. “You’re class enough for me,” she said, “but I’m
telling you where the doubt comes in. It’s a habit we’ve got in this
family. We think of Sam.” That made the matter plain; she loved him, and
while he granted there was a certain impediment through Anne’s habit of
subordinating everything to Sam’s interests, he saw no just cause why he
should not marry Madge. “I wouldn’t knowingly do anything to upset your
mother,” he said, “but I’ve told you I’m boiling with my love for you.
I’m easily put off my purpose as a rule. I mean to say, supposing I ask
Mrs. Whitehead for a kipper for my tea, and she tells me eggs are cheap
and she’s got an egg instead, I don’t make a song about it--so long as
the egg’s not extra stale. But I’ll own I didn’t think of Sam in this. I
thought it was for you and me to settle by ourselves.”
“Sam’s in it,” said Madge dully. “He’s in everything in this house.”
Then Anne came in and the disturbance of her entrance, together with the
fact that he had finished his passage of “_De Senectute_” made Sam aware
that something was toward. He kept his eyes discreetly on his book,
but fluttered the pages of his dictionary no more. He found youth more
arresting than old age.
Anne’s quick comprehension took the situation in at once. She had been
shopping, and as she put her parcels on the dresser she gave Madge the
benefit of a wordless reproof. She could say a good deal without opening
her mouth, and said it. But Madge was not going to be parted from her
George without a fight. Sam apart, George was eligible, and Madge saw
this as an unique occasion--the occasion for leaving Sam out. At least,
she meant to try.
George was turned craven at sight of Anne and sidled to the door. “I’ll
be getting on home, I think,” he said.
“You wait your hurry,” said Madge hardily. “Mother, George has been
asking me to wed him.”
It was the gage of battle, for Anne knew the fact already. The statement
of it was a challenge. She met it coolly. “Has he?” she said. “Well, I
hope you told him gently.”
And at that George found his second wind of courage, and intervened like
a man. “She’s told me nothing with her tongue. Nothing for certain. But
a blind man on a galloping horse could read the thoughts of her. Mrs.
Branstone, I love that girl as if she’d put a spell on me. It’s the
biggest feeling that’s come into my life, and I’m full and bursting with
it, or I’d not have the face to expose my inside thoughts to you like
this. And if you’ll only tell me I can take her, the Mayor in his
carriage won’t be happier than me.”
“You know how steady George is, mother,” Madge seconded him.
“He needs to be,” said Anne dryly. “He’s a window-cleaner.”
“I’m steady by nature, Mrs. Branstone, as well as trade. I don’t drink.
Somehow one glass of ale is enough to make me whimsical, so I take none
at all. I know I’m being bowdacious in my love, but I’m moved to plead
with you. We’d not be standing in Sam’s way. We’d live that quiet and
snug you’d never know we’re in the town at all.” Anne looked at him with
a faint trace of appreciation drenched in her profound contempt. A
poor creature, but he had his thimbleful of spunk! “It would need to be
quiet,” she said, “with two to keep on your wage. Are you contented with
it?”
Disastrously, he was. “It’s a regular job,” he said, voicing his pride
at being above the ranks of casual workers. In Anne’s view, a hopeless
case.
“It’s a regular rotten job,” she retorted, but spoke more softly than
her wont. “I’ve Sam to consider, Madge. You might live quiet, but Sam’s
brother-in-law has got to make a better show of it than to be seen all
over the place at the top of a ladder like a monkey on a stick. I’m not
being hard on you, George Chappie, and I’ve nothing against you bar that
you’re not good enough. You better yourself and you’ll do. Stay as you
are, and Madge’ull do the same.”
George opened his mouth to speak, but found that nothing came. It _was_
a regular job, it satisfied his ambitions, and her objections were
inexplicable. He had shot his bolt and, having no more to say, he went,
relapsing to such invertebracy that when he found that Mrs. Whitehead
had not added the other blanket to his bed he had nothing to say to her
either, but spread a threadbare overcoat on the coverlet and shivered
unhappily to sleep.