THE room held a grand piano, a great fire and two men of fifty who were
playing chess. The stout, bullet-headed man with the mustache which did
not conceal the firmness of his mouth was Tom Bradshaw; the lean man
with the goatee beard, who wore spectacles, was Walter Pate. Both were
autocrats in their way. Tom ran the Spinners’ Union and was M. P. in his
spare time, Walter ran music in Staithley Bridge and had no spare time
except, on rare occasions, for chess.
Tom made a move. “That’s done you, you beggar,” he said, gleefully
rising and filling a pipe.
Walter’s fine hand flickered uncertainly over the board. He saw defeat
ahead. “If I weren’t a poor man, I’d have the law on you,” he said.
“You can’t play chess, Walter. It’s a question of brain.”
Pate shied the matches at him, and Tom sat at the piano and picked out a
tune with one hand.
“Stop it!” cried Walter.
“On terms,” said Tom.
“I hate you,” said Walter. “Come away.”
“The terms are the Meistersinger,” said Tom.
“On a piano! You’re a Goth.”
“No. I’m paying you a compliment you deserve. Get at it.”
Walter got.
Young Rupert in his Slough of Despond had been too busy with himself to
wonder why Sir Philip had corrected him when he described Tom Bradshaw
as a “beast.”
At his mother’s knee, Tom, like all the Bradshaws of the seed of John,
had lisped, “’A ’ate th’ ’epplestalls,” and, when he was a little
older, had learned that he hated them “Because they’re dirty thieves.
Because yon mills o’ theirn are ourn by rights.” This was not socialism
and had nothing to do with the doctrine that all property is theft; it
was the family superstition of the Bradshaws, and they believed it as
the first article of their faith.
They believed it blindly and perhaps none of them were eager to have
their eyes opened because other people’s eyes might have been opened at
the same time and, as things usefully were, it was romantic to be
the wronged heirs to Hepplestall’s. It excused so much, it invited
compassion for the victims of injustice, it extorted charity for these
martyrs to foul play. Details were conspicuously lacking, but the
legend had life and won sympathy for the view the Bradshaws took of
themselves--that they couldn’t be expected to go to work in the mills of
the usurping Hepplestalls. As a family, they were professional cadgers
whose stock-in-trade was their legend, and Staithley held enough people
who were credulous or who were “agin the government” on principle
(whether they took the Bradshaw claim seriously or not) to make the
legend a profitable asset. Repetition is infallible, as the advertiser
knows, and these ragged Ortons of the Staithley slums had plenty of
adherents.
There were several scores of ways of earning a livelihood in Staithley
without working at Hepplestall’s, but the average Bradshaw pretended
that as a natural pride prevented him from serving the despoiler, he
was barred from work entirety, though he did not object to his children
working for him, and Tom began as a half-timer in the mills. A bad time
he had of it too at first. He did not say it for himself, but the other
half-timers said it for him: he was the “lad as owned Hepplestall’s,”
and if there was any dirty work going, the owner did it, nursing anger
against his family and coming young to a judicious opinion of their
pretensions.
He had his handicap in life, but soon gave proof that if he was a
Bradshaw it was an accident which other people would be wise to forget,
fighting his way from the status of a butt till he was cock of the walk
amongst the half-timers. There is much to be said for a wiry physique as
the basis of success, but Tom shed blood and bruised like any other
boy and the incidents of his battling career amongst the half-timers
at Hepplestall’s did nothing to disturb that first lesson of his life,
“’A ’ate th’ ’epple-stalls.”
Hatred is a motive, like any other, and a strong one. It resulted in
Tom’s conceiving the ambition, while he was a “little piecer,” that he
would some day be secretary of the Spinners’ Union and in that office
would lead labor against the Hepplestalls. He was his own man now,
living not at home but in lodgings, hardily keeping himself on the wages
of a “little piecer” of eighteen, reading the _Clarion_, and presently
startling a Sunday School debating society with the assertion that
he read Marx and Engels in the original. It was not long after that
astonishing revelation of his secret studies that he became unofficial
assistant to the local secretary of the spinners, and might regard
himself as launched on a career which was to take him in 1906 to the
House of Commons.
An election incident accounted chiefly for Sir Philip’s good opinion
of Tom Bradshaw. Tom might forget the legend, but the legend could not
forget a candidate, and it was thrown into the cockpit by some zealous
supporter who imagined that Tom would ride that romantic horse and win
in a canter. Tom thought otherwise; a story obscurely propagated amongst
Staithley’s tender-hearted Samaritans was one thing, emerging into the
fierce light which beats upon a candidate it was another. He was out
to win on the merits of his case, not by means of a sentimental appeal
which, anyhow, might be a boomerang if the other side took the matter up
with the concurrence of the Hepplestalls.
But it was not that afterthought, it was purely his resolution that the
issues should not be confused, that took him straight to Sir Philip. Sir
Philip looked a question at him.
“It might be Union business,” said Tom, “but it isn’t. It’s the election
and I’m here, which is the other camp, to make you an appeal. There’s
a thing being said in Staithley that touches you and me. I haven’t said
it, but it was said by folk that thought they spoke on my behalf. You’ll
have heard tell of it?”
“I’ve heard,” said Sir Philip.
“Well,” said Tom, “there’s always a lot of rubbish shot at elections,
but the less the better. Will you help me to get rid of this particular
load of rubbish? Will you help me to tell the truth?”
“Is there question of the truth?”
“Not in my mind. But in theirs, there is. They believed what they said
of you and me.” And he went on to tell Sir Philip of the belief of the
Bradshaws and of its acceptance by others. “You can put it that it’s
never been an easy thing for me to be a Bradshaw in Staithley. We’re
known as the Begging Bradshaws and it’s been a load I’ve had to carry
that I’m one of them by birth. They’ve begged on the strength of this
story. But it’s only hurt me up to now. It’s going to hurt others
to-day, it’s going to hurt my cause and I’m here not to apologize for
folks that have done no more than said what they believe: I’m here to
ask if you will join with me in publishing the truth.”
“Shall I tell you the only fact known to me which may have bearing on
your family’s belief, Mr. Bradshaw?”
“I wish you would. That there’s a fact of any sort behind it is news to
me.”
“A man called Bradshaw was hanged for the murder of an ancestress of
mine. It is possible you are descended from this man.”
“By gum!” said Tom. “That’s an ugly factor. I didn’t know I was in for
one like that when I came here asking you to help me with the truth.
Well, we’ll publish it. It’ll not help me, but I’m for the truth whether
it’s for me or against me.”
Sir Philip crossed the room to him. “Shake hands, Mr. Bradshaw,” he
said. “We’ll tell the truth in this together, but at the moment we’ve
not gone very far. Your opinion of your family in general makes you
rather too ready to believe that they are in fact the descendants of
this murderer.”
“Thank you, Sir Philip,” said Tom. “But I’m not doubting it.”
“What we can do, at any rate, is to go together through the records of
the firm. Or I will employ some one who is accustomed to research and we
will issue his report. My cupboard may have a skeleton in it, but it is
open to you to investigate.”
Tom Bradshaw sweated hard. “It’s making a mountain out of a mole hill,”
he said. He had never, since the half-timers taught him commonsense, had
anything but contempt for the legend of the Bradshaws; at every stage
of his upward path it had embarrassed him, but never had he felt before
to-day that it pursued him with such poisonous malignity. He had no hope
that any point favoring the Bradshaws would emerge from an examination
of the records; it would be a fair examination of dispassionate title
deeds and its fairness would be the more damaging. And he had pleaded
for the truth, he had put this rapier into his political opponents’
hands! The Labor candidate was the descendant of a murderer!
“Thank you again,” he said.
“Oh, as to that,” said Sir Philip, “the existence of this belief
interests me. If our searcher finds any grounds for it here or in parish
registers or elsewhere, I shall of course acknowledge them. But the odds
are that the legend springs from a perverted view of the murder of which
I have told you, and if that is so, I fear the disclosure will hardly
profit you.”
“It won’t,” said Tom gloomily. “But it’ll shut their silly mouths.”
If, he reflected, it did not open them in full cry on a new and odious
scent.
“So we go on with it?”
“We go on.”
“May I say this, Mr. Bradshaw? That your attitude to this affair
increases an admiration of you which was considerable before? If you
beat us in this election we shall have the satisfaction of knowing that
we are beaten by a man.” Which was handsome, seeing that there was
the stuff of libel in the statements of Tom’s well-meaning supporter.
Amenities, but Tom did not doubt their sincerity, and his sentiment of
personal hatred, already weakened by contact with the Hepplestalls in
his Union affairs, merged into his general and tolerantly professional
opposition to capitalists.
In the event, what was issued was a statement simply denying, on the
authority of a historian, of Sir Philip and of Tom, that the claim
made by the Bradshaw family, and repeated during the election, had any
foundation whatsoever, and whether the denial had effect or not, it
cannot have made much difference to Tom’s candidature. He had a clear
two thousand majority over both Liberal and Unionist opponents, and had
held the seat ever since, while the legend of the Bradshaws, like any
lie that gets a long start of the truth, flourished as impudently as
ever. In Bradshaw opinion, Tom Bradshaw had been bought, and they found
fresh evidence for this view whenever Tom’s matured attitude toward the
Masters’ Federation earned for him the disapproval of extremists. They
did not cease to teach their children that if every one had their own,
Hepplestall’s was Bradshaws’. “A gang of wastrels,” Sir Philip had
called them to Rupert, and could have quoted chapter and verse for his
opinion. As he read the history dredged by his searcher, the Bradshaws
began with John, a murderer, and ended in a family of beggars; but he
excepted Tom. When the Union spoke to him through Tom, there was no
bitterness between them; there was a meeting on equal terms between two
men who respected each other. Sir Philip recalled the Bradshaws as they
figured in his historian’s report, and he recalled the Hepplestalls.
“Dying fires,” he thought; Tom Bradshaw was eminently the reasonable
negotiator.
Walter Pate crashed out the final chords.
“Aye,” said Tom, “aye. A grand lad, Wagner. And when I hear you play
him, it’s a comfort to know I can wipe the floor with you at chess.”
Which Mr. Pate accepted as a merited salute to a brilliant performance,
and unscrewed the stopper from a bottle of beer. A moment later Tom
stared at his friend in blank amazement; he was staggered to see Pate
raise the glass to his lips and put it down again.
“Man, are you ill?” he cried. The beer foamed assuringly, but, to be on
the safe side, Tom tasted it. “The beer’s fine, what’s to do?”
“Shut up, you slave to alcohol. Shut up and listen.”
Walter opened the window, the cold night air blew in and with it came
from the street the strains of “Lead Kindly Light,” sung in a fresh
girlish voice.
Fires are fires in Staithley, as Tom was in the habit of telling
Londoners who put coal by the dainty shovelful into a doll’s house
grate, and if he was commanded to shut up he could do it, but the open
window was a persecution. There was a silent pantomime of two elderly
gentlemen one of whom struggled to close a window, the other to keep it
open, then Tom turned to the defeated Walter with a “What the hangment’s
come over you?”
“Have you no soul at all, Tom? Couldn’t you hear her?”
“I heard a street-singer.”
“You heard a class voice, and you’re going to hear it again.” Mr. Pate
was at the window.
“Then bring her in,” said Tom. “I’ll freeze for no fad of yours. A class
voice in Staithley streets!”
“A capacity to play chess is a limiting thing,” was fired at him as
Mr. Pate left the room. Tom took an amicable revenge by emptying both
glasses of beer. “I’ve cubic capacity, choose how,” he said, indicating
their emptiness as Walter returned with the girl who had been singing.
“Get warm,” said Walter to her. “Then we’ll have a look at you.”
She had, clearly, the habit of taking things as they came, and went to
the fire with as little outward emotion as she had shown when Walter
pounced upon her in the street. She accepted warmth, this strange,
queerly luxurious room, these two men in it, as she would have accepted
the blow which Walter’s upraised hand and voice had seemed to presage in
the street--with a fatalism full of pitiable implications.
She was of any age, beyond first childhood, that went with flat-chested
immaturity; she was dirty beyond reason, but she had beauty that shone
through her gamin disorder like the moon through storm-tossed cloud. Her
tangled hair was dark auburn, her eyes were hazel and as the fire’s heat
soaked into her a warm flush spread over her pinched face like sunshine
after rain on ripening corn.
“Can you sing anything besides ‘Lead Kindly Light?’” asked Walter.
“Of course she can’t,” said Tom. “It’s the whole of the beggar’s opera.”
He was sore about that opened window and resented this girl who
had disturbed a musical evening. He had appetite for more than the
“Meister-singer,” and seemed likely, through the intruder, to go
unsatisfied.
She looked pertly at Tom. “’A can, then,” she said. “Lots more, but,”
her eyes strayed round the room, “’a dunno as you’d fancy ’em.”
“Go on,” said Walter. “There’ll be supper afterwards.”
“Crikey,” she said, and sang till he stopped her, which was very soon.
They had a taste in the meaner public-houses of Staithley for the sort
of song which it is libelous to term Rabelaisian. Her song, if she did
not know the meaning of its words, was a violent assault upon decency;
if she did know--and her hesitation had suggested that she did--it was
precocious outrage.
“Stop it,” cried Walter, horrified.
Tom spat into the fire. “My constituents!” he groaned. “Walter, it’s a
queasy thought.”
“I thought you favored education,” said Walter.
“I do, but--”
“Go on favoring it. It’s a growing child.”
“Thanks,” said Tom gratefully. “You’re right. This is foul-tasting
tonic, but it’s good to be reminded how far we haven’t traveled yet.”
Walter’s hand strayed gently to his friend’s shoulder.
“Short fights aren’t interesting,” he said, and turned to the
girl, whose patient aloofness through this little conversation, so
unintelligible to her, was, again, revealing.
“Go back to the hymn,” he said.
“A hymn?” The word had no meaning for her.
“‘Lead Kindly Light,’” he explained.
“Oh, that,” she said, and sang it through without interruption. It
was street singing, adapted to penetrate through the closed windows
of Staithley and by sheer shrillness to wring the withers of the
charitable. Tom Bradshaw, amateur of music, found nothing in this
insistent volume of song to account for Walter Pate’s interest; she
made, tunefully, a great noise in a little room, and he wished that
Walter would stop her, though not for the same reason as before.
But Walter did not stop her, he listened and he watched with acute
absorption and when she had finished, “again,” he said, gesturing Tom
back into his chair with a menacing fist.
“It goes through me like a dentist’s file in a hollow tooth,” Tom
protested.
“You fool,” said Mr. Pate pityingly, and, to the girl, “Sing.”
“Now,” he said when she had ended, “I don’t say art. Art’s the
unguessable. I say voice and I say lungs. I say my name’s Walter Pate
and I know. Give me two years on her and you’ll know too. If you’d
like me to tell you who’ll sing soprano when the Choral Society do the
‘Messiah’ at Christmas of next year, it’s that girl.”
“’Oo are you gettin’ at?” she asked.
“I’m getting at you, getting at you with the best voice-producing system
in the North of England--Walter Pate’s. And when I’ve finished with you,
you’ll be--well, you won’t be singing in the street.”
“Well, I can’t see it, Walter,” said Tom.
“You’ve the wrong letters after your name to see it,” said Walter, “but
I’ve made a find to-night, and I’m gambling two years’ hard work on the
find’s being something that will make the musical world sit up. Buy a
cheap brooch and it’s tin washed with gold. That voice is the other way
round. It’s tin on top and gold beneath and I’m going digging for the
gold.” Not, he might have added, because gold has value in the market.
If Walter Pate had discovered a voice which, under training, was to
become the pride of Staithley, that was all he wanted; he wouldn’t hide
under a bushel his light as the discoverer and the instructor, but all
he wanted else was proof in support of his often expressed opinion that
musically Staithley led Lancashire (the rest of the world didn’t matter)
and he thought he had found his proof in--he turned to the girl. “You
haven’t told us your name,” he said.
“Mary Ellen Bradshaw,” she told him, and “Lord!” said Tom. “You’ll waste
your time.”
“I shan’t,” said Walter. “There’s grit amongst that tribe. You’re here
to prove it.”
“Where do you live?” Tom asked her.
“Brick-yards, mostly,” she said. “I’m good at dodging bobbies.” There is
warm sleeping by the kilns, and the police know it.
“Got any parents, Mary Ellen?”
“’A dunno. They was there last time ’A went to Jackman’s Buildings.
There weren’t no baggin’ there, so ’a ’opped it. That’s a long time
sin’.”
“This gentleman is called Bradshaw,” said Walter, to Tom’s annoyance.
“Is ’e?” she said. “’A ’ate th’ ’epplestalls.” It might have been
a password, and Tom thought she had the intention, in speaking it,
to curry favor with a rich relation, but as it happened Mary Ellen
was sincere. She did not say she hated the Hepplestalls to please Tom
Bradshaw. She said it because it was true.
Tom certainly wasn’t pleased. He reached for his hat. “I’m off out of
this,” he said, and when Walter looked at him with surprise, “Man,” he
said, “it’s beyond all to find that old ghost jibbering at me when I’ve
sweated blood to lay it. You do not hate the Hepplestalls,” he roared at
Mary Ellen. “They’re decent folk and you’re mud.”
“Aye,” she said submissively. That she was mud, at any rate, was not
news to her.
“Aye, what?”
“What yo’ said.”
“Come,” said Walter. “There’s tractability.”
“I call it cunning. Beggar’s cunning. She’s a Bradshaw.”
“Not to me. She’s a Voice, and, by the Lord, I’ll train her how to use
it.”
“What are you going to do, Walter?” Tom put his hat down, feeling that
it was ungenerous to leave his friend in the grip of a mistaken impulse.
“Steal her. Well, no. That’s not to do; it’s done. She’s here. Mary
Ellen, you’re going to sleep in a bed to-night, with sheets and a
striped quilt on it like you see in the windows of the Co-op.”
“Oo--er,” said Mary Ellen.
“But,” said Walter, “you’re going to be washed first. The water won’t be
cold. It’ll be warm, and it’ll be in a bath. You’ve heard of baths?”
She nodded. “Aye,” she said, “you ’ave ’em when you go to quod.”
Tom turned suddenly away and when he looked round there were marks of
suffering on his face. “I’ve been living too soft, Walter,” he said.
“I’ve been forgetting.”
“No,” said Walter, “your whole life is remembering. Education, Tom.
Isn’t that the sovereign remedy?”
“I’m believing in nothing just now,” said Tom Bradshaw.
“Then I am. I’m believing in the voice of Mary Ellen and I’m going to
educate it.”
“Will it ’urt?” asked Mary Ellen.
“No,” said Tom, “but I will if you’re not grateful to Mr. Pate. I’ll
break your neck.”
“Tom, Tom!” protested Walter.
“Eh, lad,” said Tom, “I’ve got the heartache for the waif, but you’re
aiming to sink two years’ good work in her, and she a Bradshaw. Man,
they’re the Devil’s Own. They’ll take and take and--do you fancy this
is like me, Walter? Me arguing against one of the downs being given
a chance to get up! But when it’s you that’s giving the chance and a
Bradshaw that’s to take it I’ve a sinking feeling that the risk’s too
big. They’ll bite the hand that feeds them, they’ll--”
“Well, I’ll be bitten then. There are times when I doubt if you’ve a
proper sense of the place of music in the world and I tell you, this
is one of them. If I’m vouchsafed the chance of giving that voice to
mankind, I can do without having her gratitude thrown in. I’m doing this
to please myself, my lad, and for the honor and the glory of Staithley
Bridge. If she goes on to where I’m seeing her, she’ll wipe her boots on
me in any case, but she’ll not wipe out the fame of Staithley that bred
her.”
“She was bred in Jackman’s Buildings. The beastliest slum in the town.”
“They’ll go pilgrimages to her birthplace.”
“You don’t believe that. Music’s as bad as drink for damaging a man’s
sense of proportion.”
Mary Ellen fidgeted, not with, the distress which may be supposed to
assail a sensitive child who is discussed before her face, but because
the conversation missed her main point. “When’s supper?” she asked.
“After your bath,” said Walter, defying Tom with his eyes. Tom took
up his hat again. “I’m off,” he said. “I’ve never found the cure for
fools.”
“All right,” said Walter. “In two years’ time, you’ll be the fool. I’m
going bail for that Voice, and it’s neither here nor there that the
Voice goes with a Bradshaw.”
“Good night,” said Tom, and went.
Mary Ellen “pulled bacon” at the door he closed behind him. “’A ’ate
th’ ’epplestalls,” she said cheekily, but her impudence fell from her
as he returned. She thought he had heard her and had come to inflict
punishment.
But Tom had not heard. “Walter,” he said, “if you value my friendship,
there’s a thing you’ll not deny me.”
“Well?”
“I pay half. Let’s be fools together.”
Walter sucked meditatively at an empty pipe. “Aye,” he said, “we’re both
bachelors and,” holding out the hand of partnership, “I’m generous by
nature, Tom. Tell Mrs. Butterworth I want her as you go downstairs.”