_The_
TAMING OF NAN
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
HELEN OF FOUR GATES
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_The_
TAMING OF NAN
BY
ETHEL HOLDSWORTH
(“AN EX-MILL GIRL”)
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
Copyright, 1919
BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_All Rights Reserved_
_Printed in the United States of America_
TO
EDWIN HOLDSWORTH
IN
APPRECIATION
OF
STERLING WORTH.
_Spring, 1919._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE SWEEPING OUT 1
II. TRESPASS 23
III. POLLY HEARS THE NEWS 46
IV. THE RETURN OF CHERRY 58
V. CHERRY COMES TO A DECISION 82
VI. LIVING IT DOWN 99
VII. ADAM WILD 109
VIII. CHERRY TIDE 127
IX. CHERRY LOSES HIS CASE 149
X. NAN DISAPPEARS 171
XI. NAN’S RETURN 194
XII. POLLY’S CONFESSION 208
XIII. BOB WILD LEAVES HOME 232
XIV. ADAM SPEAKS 238
XV. POLLY’S DESPAIR 257
XVI. NAN’S FIGHT FOR POLLY 276
XVII. POLLY’S WEDDING 289
THE TAMING OF NAN
CHAPTER I
THE SWEEPING OUT
The voice of Nan Cherry, shrill and aggressive, sounded its war alarm
on the quiet, dawn-glimmering street. Whereupon a crowd of sparrows,
busy picking up from before that door of the unluckiest of unlucky
numbers what looked like a supper flung out the night before, flew
away with great commotion. Their panicky flight made a cloud of wings
against a long white cloud, behind which boiled the gold of a September
morn ready to overflow the world of Narrowfields. The town lay in a
hollow below the little street. In the imperfect light it appeared as
the body of a long dragon, from whose back rose half a hundred chimney
stacks. These stacks pricked into the opaline glimmer of the sky like
the charred fingers of some underworld giant, thrust smoking through
the earth to grab at sun, moon and stars.
The bent figure of an old man who could toil no more, crept from little
door to little door, rousing others to toil, then disappeared from the
street.
Through it all the voice went on.
A child’s rebellious cry rose sharply as it was roused to be carried
out to nurse--quavering away into little exhausted, sob-coloned murmurs
of acquiescence. Whilst the sound of a poker rattling the bars of a
fire that did not realise it must boil a kettle within ten minutes;
the banging of a door; the barking of a dog; were the first signs of
industrial Lancashire waking up.
Unawed by the echoes that shrilled back her voice, in the mocking way
of echoes, the shrew carried on her tongue-onslaught. To all its fire,
no defence answered.
According to Scripture a soft answer turns away wrath. But the man who
wrote the proverb had not met Nan Cherry. Possibly, as Granny Harker
said, Nan was familiar with that provincialism which states that
nothing said often means quite a lot.
Be that as it may--the fact has to be recorded that her rage leaped the
higher for not being fanned by back-words.
Her voice became such as only a man deaf and dumb, dead drunk, or a
philosopher could hear without a human desire to choke it into human
decency.
“Thee! As calls thysel’ a ’usband. Tha lazy son of a whilk! Thy tay’s
brewed. Mun I sup it for thee? Th’ world’s aired. An’ thee--our Polly,
if I come up to thee, bitch, I’ll scalp thee. Folk doesn’t know what
I go through. I don’t shout _my_ troubles off the housetops. For you
never get pity if you carry colour in your face.”
Then silence fell once more. The sparrows returned to their feast. The
sound of a woman beating carpets two streets away woke dolorous echoes.
Within the Cherry castle a chair was rocking. The sound suggested
gritted teeth.
A mighty yawn from an upper room was followed by a shower of
ceiling-plaster in the room below as a number eleven foot touched the
bedroom floor.
The shower fell on the head of a dark-haired, comely-featured,
blue-aproned woman rocking in the ingle-nook. Her body had a crouching
attitude. Daylight streaming through a red blind just behind her
spattered crimson bars and blotches over her.
Nature had given her a pleasant exterior. Her chin might thrust
itself out too prominently, but she did not look anything that could
demoralise ninety-nine men out of the hundred. Only as she turned her
face to the fire, under that pattering shower of plaster, an expression
crossed her face which stamped it. She was the untamable hooligan--the
Stone Age hidden under the veneer of Civilisation. She had neither
humour, imagination, nor protectiveness. She should have been an
apache’s mate. She had married a porter who gave her a pound a week and
bought his own clothes. With that look upon her it seemed miraculous
that this cramped, drab kitchen could hold her.
A jocular whistling of “Home Sweet Home” filtered down into the place
that was mainly wash-boiler, table and chairs--four badly blistered,
dun-painted walls, and a phonograph.
On the very first sound of the big voice there was a response of
doggy delight from the yard, which taken in conjunction with unframed
pictures from “Our Dogs” and a couple of framed pedigree forms hung
over a pipe-rack holding pipes mostly crippled, told its own story of
man’s ancient love for dogs.
Then more plaster fell.
The look cast upwards at the ceiling, just at the centre of its
trembling, was rapier-like enough to have made a hole--if a look could.
The boss of the show was hitching up his braces. Innumerable bumpings,
on the same spot, at the same tick of the clock, week in, week out,
had first shaken the ceiling.
Bump!
It really seemed as if the roof must give way at this last assault. He
was crossing the room.
His weight was set upon the stairs. They creaked under his fourteen
stone. Two steps were followed by a longer pause, as the man dodged an
angle of a dark staircase built for lesser men. On an afterthought he
called to the sleeper in the other room.
“Polly!”
The word was at once a caress and an apology.
“I’m up.”
Muffled as it was by bedclothes the voice had all the Harker
euphony--that curious, bird-like sound come down from generations that
had sung in choirs--and sometimes in pubs.
“Lyin’ little hell-cat!”
The viciousness from the one member of the Harker stock who had been
given no singing voice, was of the quality which only one female can
mete out to another.
“I thought I was up----”
A girlish giggle ended the admission.
It was a gush of light in a dark place, that trickle of laughter from
a little white feather-heart that might blow anywhere. It became a
symbol of the tenacity of youth to turn to the sun of life--to have its
day--in the mire of the pit, or on a cinder-heap of hell.
“Tha’s only once to get up,” said the big voice of the man on the
stairs, and he bumped down another step.
The reply was curious, the voice more bird-like on account of
bedclothes no longer muting it.
“Oh--some gets up twice,” was the remark on which her father pondered
as he went down the stairs. Had the tone not been so utterly frivolous
the words might have been interpreted into some dark hint of discontent.
“Bump--bump.”
There were thirteen bumps in all. Their steady way of coming on gave no
clue that Cherry wished to dodge the storm waiting for him. He must pay
this morning for that ten minutes game at draughts he played last night
with Billy Breeze, after which he had returned to find his shirt on the
doorstep, his supper laid out on the pavement.
“The Big Porter,” as he was known to Lancashire and Yorkshire
passengers, bent a massive head and passed into the drab cage of a
kitchen. He was almost a giant of a man, fair-haired, dangling in his
left hand a pair of boots ridiculously large in this world of dwindling
manhood. A stump-end of a cigarette was stuck in his close-shaven
mouth--a cigarette being economised to the last shred thereof. It was
a mouth that did not need covering up. Under it was a great depth of
chin. His blue eyes were of the sleepy order that Granny Harker had
once defined as being able “to see without looking.”
His first action was to spit out the cigarette a couple of seconds
before it would burn his mouth.
His second was to blow out the smoky lamp--with a saving instinct to
burn daylight.
The glance he had cast at the woman in the chair was one of
affectionate tolerance, mingled with that of a man who has lost all
illusions, but knows that he has his feet, if the worst comes to the
worst.
The woman returned the look with one only explainable by the fact that
this was the man who had married her--who, for twenty years, by the aid
of Laughter and of Feet, was still unvanquished, yet outside what he
sarcastically termed “th’ Henpeck Club.”
With the persistency that is the virtue of the savage, she still
maintained her attacks, whilst with the patient geniality of a
Yorkshireman he as stubbornly resisted.
“Top o’ the mornin’,” was his greeting. His attempt at the brogue would
have turned an Irishman sick.
“Jesus wept!” was the response of the woman in the chair.
It would be impossible to say how this shortest verse in the Bible
became in Nan’s mouth a challenge, anathema, and war-cry. The tone
of the delivery was utterly divorced from the subject-matter. It had
passed into a new language.
The big man sat down and laced his boots, thrusting the holes in his
socks respectably out of sight--his bending position showing a neck
like a gladiator’s and the great back of him that carried more boxes
than any other man’s on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway.
There was a magnanimity about him only to be compared with that shown
by a big dog attacked by a little one.
He went off into the scullery, where his rendering of “Queen of the
Earth” sounded through a great and cheerful splashing, combined with a
blowing against the water.
Whilst from a kennel in the yard came a pandemonium of undisciplined
dog-emotions which broke off the song into short ejaculations of “Good
little dog, Rag--” “Goin’ to show ’em what tha are, Rag, eh?” “Top
of the mornin’, Rag”--whilst the scratching at the kennel door, the
barking delirium of worship, grew more frenzied.
When it could no longer be withstood, Cherry went out, opened the
kennel-door, and out blundered the pedigree dog--one ear cocked at its
topnotch of joy, its body rolling along, its great feet making the
slipper-like sound, as it trotted before him utterly unconscious that
it was not the finest dog in the world. Perfect in colour, a good head
on it, its overlarge ears that could perform weird gymnastics, its legs
defined by a small boy as “bow-legged in front, knocker-kneed behind,
an’ walks like Charley Chaplin”--for some mysterious reason, Rag had
got rickets and fallen short of his glorious ancestry. That it was a
dog of spirit no man could have denied. There was no cringing sense of
its own long short-comings.
Cherry sang out in full voice as he watched Rag trot before him. His
face was softly paternal. It had upon it the faith in its regeneration
which made him the unconscious laughing stock of the whole street on
his Sunday morning parades, to straighten Rag’s legs.
“That dog’ll come into its own, yet,” he observed to the shrew. Whilst
he rolled shirt-sleeves over muscles that might have been used as art
photographs.
Nan’s look was aimed at shattering his morale.
Cherry met without blinking the super-contempt that would have
submerged the insensibility of a brass monkey.
More than that, as it maintained its steady, shrewish attack, he
winked, with the query as to whether he was not a good-looking man when
he was scraped.
Ominous silence greeted these overtures at friendship.
Chirping to the pup he wound up the blind. The sordid untidiness of the
kitchen lay bare under the eye of day. Cherry looked out on another row
of houses, and behind them the stone-yard with its stone-piles that
almost blocked out the sky.
“Everything in th’ garden’s lovely,” he remarked, genially sarcastic,
after his survey.
Nan’s language in reply to this was fitted for the apache’s mate.
The big man, hands in pocket, turned round from the window. Without
appearing to do so he was staring across at a railway almanac on the
wall opposite. At various intervals on the date-margin were little
black crosses. These were the marks he had set to mark the epochs of
their domestic cyclones.
There was quite a big gap between the last cross and the present date.
Therefore----
His shoulders squared themselves.
He hurried to get down bite and sup--before the burst.
“Tha greedy devil! Tha’s ta’en th’ biggest cake,” shouted the woman in
the chair, as he took one of three pieces from a plate with a snip in
it, set on a table that appeared none too friendly to soap and brush.
Cherry made no answer to this mis-statement.
He sat down, eating quietly; the pup settled down also, looking
expectantly for crumbs.
Arguments, the porter had long since discovered, were of no avail.
Best to keep quiet--whilst the tide came on and up, and then to breast
it at its flood.
As he licked his fingers clean of the cake, the massiveness, the
placidity of this half-literate British workman lent to him a
paradoxical, fleeting resemblance to the gods in statued galleries.
The shrill clapper of the woman’s tongue raged against him. A
chant-like rhythm sounded in her voice. Her breast heaved. She spat out
vicious, corrosive words interspersed with oaths selected specially to
attack his Yorkshire pride in coming of respectable folk.
“A pound a week, to be a slave for a b----y Yorkshire tyke!”
With this exclamation she rose from her chair.
The sound of Polly Cherry overturning a chair in her hurry to get
dressed and out of the house before the storm came on, was heard from
above--a protesting, youthful nervousness in the incident.
Cherry was watching his mate closely now. Out of one of these lulls
would come the attack.
But she went on again, hurling mud on his family, his living mother,
his dead father--the respectability of the whole lot of them--the
hooligan flood rising, shouting, shrieking, roaring, bursting down the
barriers, until a hoarse raven note sounded in her voice, her face
showed whitely instead of its high colour, the kitchen dwindled and
became a cage she was flinging herself against, this Amazon, nursing in
her breast the unquenchable desire to get him down--yet.
Even as his eyelid flicked expectantly she rushed at the table--seized
something--hurled it.
He ducked his head with the easy skill of long use.
A swift glance revealed that the thing sent was the milk-jug with
Disraeli painted on it. A long china splinter had impinged itself in
the nose of the prophet Moses, still, however, surveying the Promised
Land through a baptism of milk, very steadily. Grandma Cherry’s
wedding-present had witnessed many of these scenes.
“Bad shot, Nan,” was his comment.
Another woman would have collapsed and wept at his cheery ignoring of
her attempt to quarrel with him.
Nan usually began where other women left off.
“Ooo!--At it again?” came from the doorway.
A big fair girl, whose colouring lent her a likeness to the porter
which her vivacity of expression tended to destroy, was looking in on
them.
Her parents were too engrossed to hear the disrespect in her tone.
She regarded them both out of eyes yet sleep-heavy--a look of youthful
antagonism, mingled with something despairing. Then, with a certain
callousness of demeanour, a movement of detachment from the house
altogether, she edged away from them, and took up her pot of tea.
Being too hot to drink she blew it, with an over-full indeterminate
little mouth that seemed hard to close. The dog came tugging at her
blue mill-apron. After picking Rag up her face wore another look. She
was divided between shielding the dog and the task of sipping her tea.
Indeed, her face had as many swift expressions as a piano has keys. She
was too childish or too careless to try and disguise them, as yet.
“I don’t want to bother wi’ thee,” said the Yorkshire man, in genial
tones. “So--cheese it.”
He might as well have tried to stem the sea.
Apparently this was his usual preliminary, to keep a clean conscience.
“Polly,” he said suddenly, without turning his head. “Lap my best
clothes up--everything--my tie wi’ th’ blue spots.”
A glance at his mate’s face told him that he had put his finger on the
motive for this row before breakfast. She had hoped he would forget his
clothes in the chaos. She wanted to pawn them, and have a holiday down
in Tanner Fold with the hooligan folk of Fiddle Row.
Polly went off, dog in arms, her back expressive of flapper patience
taxed to its utmost.
Cherry did not notice it.
He was watching.
Even as Polly gained the threshold of the parlour Nan rushed upon him.
He reeled, despite his size.
Her head only reached his top buttonhole.
But her strength was a wild cat’s.
“Cheese it, Nan,” he said calmly.
One great hand loosed her from him, put her gently away, in masculine
reverence for woman. His tone had the jesting ease of a man who knows
he is top-dog.
As if this magnanimity of his enraged her beyond endurance the shrew
came on again. And again, with a show of fierceness that half-covered
the determination not to hurt her, he threw her off.
“Hit me, Bill! Hit me!” she screamed at him. “For God in heaven’s sake,
hit me. I can fight. I’m not a toffee doll. Hit me. An’ let me hit
back. Beat me, if tha can, beat me. Oh--hit me. Like I were a pal. Hit
me. Jesus wept! Hit me.”
The motive of her attacking him was now forgotten. The rage in
her sprung now from a deeper source, the source of all human
drama--character.
The rising flood was bearing her away. She was conscious of nothing but
the desire to goad this cold-blooded, commonplace Yorkshireman near to
murdering her, to break up the alien, quiet reserve that divided him
from her. She wanted to wake devils in him, to make him like the mate
she should have had.
Protected by the tolerant chivalry in his blue eye--she attacked his
manhood--driven on by the irresistible desire to draw some big danger
into this monotonous, skimpy life.
“Cheese it,” he warned her again.
Her nails had come perilously near his eyes.
“Hit me,” she almost sobbed.
“Look here,” he asked mildly, seizing her wrists, “What’s it all
about?” Then he added, whilst she struggled, “When are we goin’ to live
like other folk?”
A faint note of exasperation sounded in his voice on the last words.
Before breakfast! To start on a man before breakfast!
He flung her away a little more roughly, yet with the same iron control.
But for the whiteness of her face, its vicious menace, and a certain
weariness on the face of the big porter, an onlooker could have taken
it for a friendly marlock between husband and wife who were yet
something of children.
“Like other folk,” echoed the shrew. “Jesus wept! Do I care for other
folk?”
Standing there, as she spoke these words, they became not so much
individual antagonists, as two opposite clans. A blaze of intense
passion on the woman’s face gave it a momentary beauty, a bigness not
seen in her before. She rushed at him again.
“Hit me,” she persisted. “Forget I’m a b----y woman. Fight----”
It was the cry of an Amazon pinned down in a narrow world she was not
made for.
Whilst the man’s frown was growing as he threw her from him again.
He was regarding her much as a tamer keeps his eye on a savage thing
that may tear him. The thought that she had started on a man before
breakfast became more intolerable.
“Ooo!” exclaimed Polly.
Parcel in hand she had reached the threshold just in time to see Nan
apparently bury her teeth in the man’s arm. He jerked his arm. A long
tatter was suspended from his elbow.
“Another job for th’ lad to do,” he said calmly.
His incorrigible commonsense drove the woman frantic.
She came on again.
As she did so she met the full glance of his eye.
With a swift movement he locked his hand round her jaw. She had seen
him handle Rag so when he didn’t want it to bite him as he looked at
the progress of its feet. Her eyes expressed the indignity she felt.
“One of these days--one of us will get hurt,” he warned her placidly.
“It’s a long run has no turnin’, they say.”
The shrew could make no answer.
He was letting her feel how easily he could hold her so--what an atom
she was--how little he feared for the worst she could do--a giant with
a giant’s strength, pitiful for her futile attempts to oust him from
his rightful position in the household.
Then he let her go.
Her hooligan laughter filled the house.
There was the sound of a pair of clogs pausing outside the little door.
At that sound the face of the man changed.
Half his placidity fled, pell-mell.
A light was kindled in his eyes.
“Shut thy mouth. Afore I shut it for thee!” he breathed.
The vulnerable spot had been touched--his hatred of them opening their
mouths to fill everybody’s.
Myriads of well-conducted ancestors clamoured against her loud
laughter, her shout to the whole world, and he turned his head
involuntarily, listening disgustedly to the sound of a second pair of
clogs stopping outside his castle walls.
As he half turned back, swiftly, some instinct warning him, her teeth
caught his hand. He made no sound, but gave his first blow--a smart,
light cuff that toppled her hair down and did little more.
“Shut that,” he asked of Polly, nodding towards the inner door.
The girl shut it.
Her look of dark dissatisfaction had deepened.
“Shut up,” the porter commanded his wife.
There was a white restraint on his face.
“Let ’em listen! Penny a week to bury theirsels, Christian cats, let
’em listen,” shrilled the shrew.
“At it again,” came ironically from the street. “By th’ Mass, if she
were mine----!”
What she was going to say in answer to that other male Cherry could
only guess. Before it could be said, he had taken her by the throat. He
had cast off his robe of restraint, now, save for a few patches.
The big fair girl standing with her back against the door, the dog held
in her arms again, had a helpless, forlorn look.
“When are we goin’ to live like other folk,” he asked the shrew.
“Nev-er!”
The little indomitable word came chokily.
The Yorkshireman tossed her away from him in disgust.
“What does ta live wi’ me for, then?” she asked, in a loud, hysterical
voice.
It was the query the street had asked itself a thousand times since
their coming there.
Cherry ignored it utterly, as outside the question.
As he saw her coming on again, heard her burst of laughter that was
purposely to draw a crowd round their door, a resolve leapt into his
face.
His eyes became terrible in their quiet smiling.
He allowed her to get quite close to him, then his great arm shot out.
He handled her as if she had been a dumb-bell. Up and up she went,
into mid-air, to Polly’s shriek of terror. Whereupon there was quite a
patter of clogs, running, running.
“Drop that din,” commanded Polly’s father to the shrieking girl.
He had become a resolute giant, with great knitted brows.
“Murder! Help! He’s killin’ me,” screamed Nan.
She almost touched the ceiling.
The floor had become a dizzy thing far below her.
She could hear the creaking of the mighty muscles.
Whilst looking down she saw his upturned face, white in its effort not
to dash her to the ground, this thing that had been a thorn in his
flesh for twenty years.
“Help! Murder!”
Her appeal rang out again.
Some one shook the door gently.
Panic was in her cry now--but away down under the panic hooligan
malice, proud triumph that she had got a crowd round, scorn of it and
of him who cared for it, consciousness that every one of her cries was
a stab at his Yorkshireman’s pride.
He merely raised her several inches.
Her hair brushed a dangling cobweb on the ceiling.
Beneath her she could feel the great strength of him--the Stone Age man
she had evoked from the genial, prudent, rational being whose meals she
prepared.
He did not look unlike an apache now.
Whilst as he looked back at her she saw his look of scorn that this was
the only force she recognised--brute force.
“B--Bill,” she ejaculated. “Set me down.”
His great forehead was still knit in that magnificent frown of disdain.
He did not answer that appeal.
“Dad----” said Polly.
He did not hear her.
“An’ to think,” he murmured, that puzzled frown upon him, that
searching for reasons why, “better women nor thee are murdered--every
week.”
In a sudden reaction from his rage, he set her down on her feet, still
giddy, blanched to the lips--apparently tamed. A half sigh of relief
escaped him. He imagined that it was going to blow over without him
having to give her a licking. Even as he sighed, she wavered towards
him--her expression unmistakable.
She had not had enough.
With his old calm upon him once more he put her from him, again,
again, and again. He parried her blows with a natural ju-jitsu learnt
by trying to stop her from marking him without hurting her. She was
laughing again, laughing and coming on time after time, tirelessly,
indomitably, towards his face, with the old rational look she hated,
his face with the deep chin that counterbalanced the brute passion
that had flashed in his eyes--his chin that divided him from her by
thousands of years, proclaiming him her better.
Polly made little helpless cries and occasionally told them she would
have to go, though she did not move an inch. She had put on her factory
shawl.
“Whatever I do, you can’t blame me,” she said vaguely to the
combatants, once. But they did not hear her.
Cherry was flinging Nan off every few seconds now.
The moment came when his heaviness was beaten by her cat-like
suddenness. Her nail flayed his forehead, scrawked its way down to his
eye-corner, made as though to plough through his eye-ball.
At that moment the devils woke in him.
Yet though they woke he gave them only so much leash. With a minimum of
passion and the maximum of reason, he thrashed her.
Whilst the girl in the shawl circled round them now, saying babyishly,
“Mam! Dad!” the dog under her shawl adding to the general din.
She was crying--crying easy, girlish tears, and rubbing them away with
her shawl-fringe.
Then she sat down disconsolately in a chair, stroking Rag, and waited
until it was over.
A great quiet fell upon the house.
The shrew was sobbing in her chair--subdued, ready to carry out his
every wish now.
But Cherry’s face had all the demoralisation of a man who has thrashed
a lesser man than himself.
He moved about the house; put on his coat; fed the dog; drank up his
tea, picked up the dog again, as one who intends to leave nothing
behind for revenge to work on, and with his nebbed cap on jauntily to
show the crowd outside that his manhood was intact, he strode up the
passage.
It was then that the shrew ran after him.
Tear-blurred, penitent, her face asked him to--forgive.
He looked at her fixedly.
Then he turned back, into the kitchen.
But it was for no reconciliation.
Three days was his usual time for becoming his genial self again after
these frays. There was no mercury in his make-up.
The shrew watched him approach the almanac, take out a pencil, wet
it--and add another to the number of crosses.
“Happen,” he observed, “we’se ha’ peace for a bit.”
He went down the passage again, Polly taking the tea-can with her.
Cherry still held the dog. Nan followed them again.
“Bill!” she said.
On the doormat Cherry turned.
“Wants to lick my boots, because I thumped thee,” he said disgustedly.
Then, “No--a!”
A hearty force was in the negative.
He pushed Polly gently out before him.
The crowd edged away as he appeared unto them.
But it cast a furtive, interested look at his face.
It was not the face of a humiliated man.
Polly hurried on. She was too young to stand the staring so well as
Cherry. Her head was high, but her cheeks burnt. She walked a little
unevenly.
“Mornin’, Polly,” said Cherry.
“Mornin’, Dad,” she replied.
“Not after ten o’clock, Polly,” he said gently.
She nodded obedience, and went off sharply.
But the dark look of dissatisfaction had returned.
She was wondering, and quite reasonably, what there was to come home
early for.
Whilst Cherry was thinking that ten o’clock of a Saturday night was
quite late enough for any girl of seventeen--particularly for one who
couldn’t fight her way out of a sugar-bag.
He opened the door of the last house in the street.
“Billy!” he shouted.
Billy came, took in the parcel of clothes, the pup, and assured some
person within that everything was all right.
“Best keep the door locked, though,” warned Cherry.
Whereupon an old man came out, a gentle-faced, docile creature with
white hair and a long pipe.
“If she were mine, lad,” he said in a voice like a drowning kitten’s.
“If she were mine----”
Billy and Cherry looked at Grandad Breeze contemplatively. The jaunty
air shed itself from Cherry as he looked. The man of humour appeared
again. Billy also was trying not to laugh.
“Tha couldn’t tame a louse,” indignantly cried out Grandma Breeze, and
followed her voice.
Grandad Breeze looked darkly across the street as much as to say what
he’d have done with Nan Cherry.
Cherry slapped him on the back.
“There’s only two things I haven’t tried, Dad,” he said.
“Ay. What’s them?” he was asked, curiously.
Cherry pulled Billy by the sleeve.
“Hypnotism an’--chloroform,” he said gravely.
Then they heard the signal drop--and set out at a mighty run, seeing
Grandad Breeze dragged inside the house by Grandma Breeze, lest the
vixen should come and besiege the house in an attempt to get Cherry’s
clothes.
During the running Cherry’s face gradually became that of a man who had
come down the stairs.
His sense of moral loss cast no shadow over him.
“Billy,” he said, as they ran along, like two lads, “I’ve a lot to be
thankful for. After a’, a chap on our job doesn’t need to be much at
hoam.”
Billy nodded.
“From now--till neet--I work on the finest job on earth,” he said
reflectively, keeping pace with Billy. “Ay. Thank God for trains.”
Billy nodded.
He could understand that.
“An’--for feet, Billy--feet,” said the porter. He looked reflectively
at his own, as he ran. Then he said, “Where would I ha’ bin, Billy, but
for--Feet?”
There was a gratitude in his big voice.
Then they saw Mr. Menser.
“You’ll report yourselves for lateness--write it out and hand it in to
me to-night,” he said.
“My wife,” said Cherry, in a trembling voice, “has had a fit.”
“Oh--in that case,” said the stationmaster.
Cherry winked at Billy.
Billy grinned admiringly.
“It isn’t as if we get paid for that sort o’ overtime,” said Cherry.
“I’m not a bloomin’ clerk. I’m a porter.”
Whistling a sea-chantey he passed into the porters’ room with Billy.
A minute later he was rushing along by the train--swinging himself on
the footboard--transposed into the man who took the most tips on the
Narrowfields line.
<tb>
Grandma Breeze, stepping out to sweep her flags, with a great show
of courage that covered a quaking heart, saw that the shrew also was
sweeping out. Something white had evidently been spilt upon the flags.
The mouth of the shrew was moving--then the words stopped. Her lips
thinned out. Grandma could see the flash of her eyes, and wondered for
the thousandth time why suchlike were born.
But seeing Nan look in her direction, she finished hastily.
“She didn’t say aught, did she?” asked Grandad Breeze, puffing at his
pipe in the yellow-stoned kitchen where Billy’s books were the chief
feature.
“If she said aught to me----” said Grandma, like a Spartan.
Then Grandad Breeze said, between the puffs, “I’ve sometimes thought
our Billy were a bit sweet on Polly.”
Grandma drew herself up angrily, at the idea.
Part of her apron-string showed itself as she did this--emerging from
the crevasses where it was usually buried deep, too deep to be seen.
“Naught at a’ of th’ sort,” she snapped.
“She might take after her father,” said old Breeze. “He’s a daycent
lad.”
“If yonder lass lands herself where lasses should,” she prophesied,
“it’ll be more luck nor management.”
“She’s a nice lass----” said Grandad Breeze.
“Ay. A bit o’ rosy cheek an’ breet eye--that’s a’ chaps cares,” said
Grandma. “An’ after a’--beauty only goes skin-deep.”
Grandad looked at her slyly.
“But ugliness goes to t’ boan,” he finished neatly.
There was coldness between them for a full minute and a half.
Then Grandad Breeze said, “Tha allus ware jealous,” and puffed his pipe
in great enjoyment.
Which Grandma repudiated indignantly.
She returned to the subject of the shrew.
“Somebody’s spilt either flour or saut on yon flags of hers,” she said.
“An’ she’s sweepin’ away on it like it were poison.”
“Eh--if I had her!” said Grandad.
“She’d ha’ put three o’ thy sort into th’ grave long sin’,” said
Grandma.
Grandad Breeze’s love of posing as a wolf in sheep’s clothing always
amused and made her cross, at the same time.
“I wonder,” she said, after a long pause, “if it were flour or saut
were spilt.”
In the full light of day in Christian England Nan was performing a
rite from the Dark Ages. She was sweeping her husband out, with salt,
sweeping him, according to the black wish, out of her life, whilst the
Lord’s prayer, chanted backwards, made the spell efficient. Even so, as
a wide-eyed child, in Tanner Fold, those slums where Granny Harker had
lived for some years, she remembered a drink-sodden Irishwoman sweeping
out a lazy husband who would not keep her in home comforts.
Pat O’Brian had come home despite the spell, it is true. But Nan
reiterated hers three times over, to make quite sure. The moment of her
turning to go within, broom in hand, synchronised with that whereon
Cherry remarked to his pal, “Thank God for feet, Billy.” Which, after
all, says nothing at all. Life is full of coincidences.