LIVING IT DOWN
Nan did not come too near Cherry’s chair during the next day. Her
attitude was like that Rag had once shown, on being cuffed for eating a
chicken. In Nan’s case, however, it was fore-fear instead of aft-fear.
That Cherry would “have it in for her,” she did not doubt for a moment.
It was as she swept the hearthstone that she noticed its unusual
whiteness.
“There are angels hovering round,” hummed the man in the chair, and let
out further hints, with odd smackings of the lips and winking of the
eyes to say what a gem of beauty this feminine visitant of his had been.
Apparently, the ruse had not succeeded.
Everything was conjecture.
He was trying to get at Nan by jealousy. She must have a weak spot
somewhere. He was trying to find it. But beyond a look of utter
contempt, Nan gave no signs that she resented another woman’s invasion
into her domestic circle.
Cherry felt despondent at the result of his art. He went wearily back
to the bashful appeal of Paul to the Macedonians, asking them to give a
good collection. Cherry discovered that he liked Paul, his reasoning,
his pride in always following his trade of tent-making whilst he
continued as an agitator--his magnificent endurance, and cool defiance
of prison, lash and doom.
“If we’d had a son we’d have called him Paul,” he observed once to Nan.
She started at the confidence.
Their eyes met in a mutual memory of all those little sons, buried one
after the other.
Then--hers hardened.
“Every man as is born should be strangled at birth,” avowed the Amazon.
For, to Nan, every man born was the inveterate invader into a woman’s
liberty.
It was a cry worthy of those early Amazons of which the woman-hater is
the masculine reflex.
Cherry grinned at the idea of a manless world. But the brief flash of
his old humour faded on Nan answering a knock at the door, to return,
followed by a parson--one of those men with feminine voices, and look
of super-humility that comes from a sojourn in this wicked world.
Aunt Miriam had sent him.
Cherry anathematised Aunt Miriam as he endeavored to talk to Mr. Watts.
Because he was “downed,” weakened, these vultures were after his soul,
on the false pretence of giving him sympathy. He sat answering Mr.
Watts in “Ayes” and “Noes,” and as the parson went out Cherry, felt
that cut off as he was, the fibre of his manhood was yet of sterner
stuff than that of Mr. Watts. There was the atmosphere of tea-party and
mothers’ meetings about Mr. Watts.
Noon brought a bundle of literature from the Brand from the Burning
Publishing House.
This also, Cherry set down as Aunt Miriam’s work. But it was the letter
from the Company which engrossed him most. His hands shook as he
tore open the envelope. It was brief and business-like, in very clear
typewriting that left no doubt of the Company’s intention to award him
ten shillings per week--reckoning his earnings at the porter’s pound
they had paid him weekly for five-and-twenty years. According to the
Workmen’s Compensation Act, they were giving him half of his earnings.
He looked down on the paper, with knitted brow.
Nan was standing, trying not to look concerned.
Cherry told her the contents of the letter.
“When our Polly’s gone,” she said, “we shall ha’ clean teeth.”
Cherry blushed.
His body tinged with shame at the idea that before Polly “went” they
could feed on her. He had peculiar notions about parents feeding on
their children.
“Tha’ll ha’ to give the dog up,” yapped Nan, triumphantly.
For a whole year and a half she had agitated for the removal of Rag.
Persistence was one of her savage virtues. In this economic catastrophe
that would press heavily on herself, too, she could yet triumph in the
near accomplishment of a victory for the removal of the rickety dog.
Cherry stared at her.
He was realising the Titan she was.
He rendered her unwilling admiration.
What a soldier she would have made!
But--she was quite a misfit here.
That evening, as he sat smoking, the sticky Salvation labels bearing
the words, “The Meek Shall Inherit the Land,” and “Prepare to Meet thy
God,” which had been stuck upon the jamb-stones, in irony of spirits,
by Cherry, he thought out his letter to the Company.
He was making a bid for the whole of his porter’s earnings, and
justifying it on the grounds that his reading of the word “earnings”
included also the tips by which he had doubled his meagre wage. Billy
Breeze came in to play a game of draughts, and posted the letter on
going out after supper. Billy had suggested that Cherry instead of
rotting in the corner, by the wash-boiler, should have a machine made
specially for him, similar to one used by a legless man he had seen at
Cloughford. In this Cherry acquiesced, saying he would “see Bill right”
if he’d order the machine.
Thus started the great battle in the heart of William Cherry--the
battle against the sense that ever ridiculed his broken body.
Owing to Billy’s assiduous efforts, the machine came in the middle of
the following week. For two days Cherry made no attempt to go out on
the thing. The wash-boiler assumed havenish qualities he had never seen
in it before. It was on a wet morning, two hours before noon, that
Grandma Breeze saw him coming laboriously up the flagstones. He had a
chalky hue of countenance that alarmed her, and his attempt to smile in
the old way hurt her so much that her eyes were full of tears when he
reached her.
“Do you think you’re fit to be out?” she queried.
Cherry smiled the twisted smile.
“In the pink,” said the dwindled voice.
After he had gone she sat down in the yellow-stoned kitchen, and had
what Grandad Breeze defined as “a good bawl.”
Cherry proceeded on his way through the town. Heavy mist clogged the
air of the streets as he passed through them. He had the strange,
almost uncanny feeling that he was in a foreign land, so changed and
painful was his journey through the old town. The market-clock was
lit up, owing to the murk. It was like a great, leering face laughing
at him. He met a few people he had known, and they shed more sympathy
on him. He tried to believe that he did not hate them, as they gave
their narratives on their personal feelings on hearing of his accident.
They were people of Narrowfields, genuine, well-meaning, warm-hearted
people. Yet--he hated them. He zig-zagged along on the flagstones,
like a man in a bad dream. Women peeped at him, sometimes, through the
misted windows. They were sorry for him. Some men would have enjoyed
it. He hadn’t been built for a cripple. Now, if he had been made like
that chap in the next bed to him when in hospital--the chap who didn’t
want to go home because he was tucked up six times a day by a pretty
nurse, and fed and washed like a big baby--how much easier it would
have been!
He had all the hard temper of the man facing possible ridicule for the
first time.
Every eye that rested on him seemed to prick him like red-hot needles.
He passed outside the police-station.
Some hazy idea of seeing the Inspector about the episode with Nan
had been in his head all morning! But, this irritant new sense of
self-consciousness unmanned his resolve. He trundled back to the haven
by the wash-boiler.
The exhaustion of his journey, physical and mental, was upon him as he
rapped at the door.
Nan came and opened it.
She helped him ungraciously up the step with a “Oh! back already” sort
of face.
For a moment he wished she had been of the soft sort. Then--with a
swift revulsion of feeling he began to think that he was becoming
feminine, in his crippled state.
Mechanically he ate his dinner.
But he could not read afterwards, when Nan had pushed him into the
corner.
He lay back with closed eyes.
On one occasion, opening them suddenly, from a brief sleep, he
encountered the steady gaze of Nan. There was in that flash of a look
he caught, triumph, mixed with something he could not fathom.
Whilst the old apathy of weakness--reaction from his first endeavors to
grapple with life, that had become a giant all at once, was back upon
him, rain set in. In the dead of the night it was always raining. In
the morning the dull sound of rain gurgling by the street kerbs came to
him. Mist hung on the walls of the stone-yard opposite, and the mallets
of the workers in the sheds, stamp, stamp, became to the man sitting
motionless in the corner, curiously like the sound of stone men, on
stone feet, marching with stony boots forwards, on a great stone road
that was--the world. It was a curious fancy. He recognised it as such
himself, but he was not sufficiently analytical to trace in his fancy
the stirrings of his mind, under the apathy of physical weakness,
making a symbolic picture out of those common sounds made by the
stone-workers, a picture wherein he was typifying the yet subconscious
determination to march on, spite of all obstacles, to some new place in
the world, to conquer all things, by sheer will, courage, and “sticking
it.”
Nan went to Tanner Fold some little time afterwards. Cherry had sent
a postcard to the little charwoman, asking her to come in if she saw
a chalk mark on the window-sill. As soon as Nan had gone, Cherry got
Polly to chalk the window-sill, before she went out to the practice.
But she had to be let into the secret. How she giggled. Polly was
very busy these days. She was making herself a new dress out of pink
zephyr, and a new hat for the Charity, whilst singing-lessons and lads
alternately took up most of her nights. The reluctant spell Adam Wild
had put upon her was almost vanished, though she looked forwards very
much to the Cherrydale Tide that was approaching. She would sit down
in the drab, dirty kitchen, sewing away at the pink dress on the old
box of a sewing-machine that Cherry called a “crushing-engine” from its
din, singing bits of Grand Opera and dreaming flapperish dreams. For
her life in the hap-hazard house had never yet been an integral part.
On this night, before she went to the practice, she made Cherry a cup
of Oxo.
“A1, Polly,” Cherry commented, as she took the cup from him.
“Dad!” she said, as she stood quite ready for the practice.
“Humph!” said Cherry.
Polly blushed.
“Do you think I don’t care?” she asked, looking at him very straight.
In the sheen of the lamplight her eye took a resemblance to Aunt
Dinah’s when Aunt Dinah was young.
Cherry looked up, smiling--almost his old smile.
“Well, I do,” she avowed, suddenly, passionately.
She had come up to his chair, put her arms round his neck, and was
kissing him, whilst something wet touched his cheek.
She was gone, leaving him with an impression of still waters under the
froth of this flapper exterior, and with a feeling of surprise, not
altogether unmixed with fear. She was the child of that line of Harkers
who at times cared too little, at times too much. She had the warmth of
heart that belonged to the Cherries. What a combination!
Whilst he pondered it, Jane arrived, with the brown bag--and--a black
eye, which she apologetically half-blamed herself for. Tim had done it.
But she had been to blame for not covering it up from the air.
Cherry watched her in the same old cloud of dust, a ministering
angel of the queerest order. The black eye gave him an odd feeling
of revulsion--became an offence, crying out against the light of the
twentieth century that could yoke iron to steam. Whilst as she poured
out the story of her struggling life, its persistence of endurance, of
passive courage that would make all fiction fall before its fact, his
indignation made him feel quite sick, until he remembered--that the way
of brute force had been his way of dealing with Nan. He stared at the
black eye until it made him feel quite sick. He sat in thought after
Jane had gone.
Polly came in before her mother.
Nan had not got drunk this time.
If she noticed the change in the kitchen she did not show it--or get
wild. Cherry’s heart sank. She was not jealous. It was like being
against a stone wall, to which one could find no entry, a door to which
there was no key.
Every morning for another week she got him up with the same attitude
of resenting the job, and every night she lifted him into bed, whilst
he gritted his teeth at being lifted by any one--most of all, Nan.
There was no danger of the cyclone for another week. Nan was studying
election literature. Nan took after Pa Harker in her political views.
Nan would vote Blue. She was a great upholder of the Royal Family.
To Cherry it seemed that the grey days were all alike--excepting that
washing-day was a little worse than the others. He would say to Nan,
sometimes, looking at the clock, “It’s like to be after that time.”
But it was not.
He discovered that Greenwich time is not the way to reckon time at all,
in the matter of living. He struggled painfully to read a little, but
his attention wandered. There were so many things to conquer. Nan--and
the Company--and, last but not least, himself, the dejected, hating,
sensitive, morbid, inward-driven self that was as much of a stranger
to him as though some other man’s soul had crept into his broken
body--with only this exception--that there was the load of bitter
memories brought from that past life of his, six-foot-one-life, manly
and glorious, to this--wherein he wandered round and round, in a maze
of thought, wondering how to get over difficulties that were so simple,
when one had--feet.
The days went by without his being the least bit aware that in an
infinitesimal degree, he was adapting himself slowly and painfully to
his changed conditions--that this agony was killing itself, as do all
agonies.
Least of all did he realise that the sight of Jane’s blackened flesh
was changing his whole philosophy of life. It took another week before
that revulsion of feeling he had felt took definite shape in a weak
resolve not to hit Nan again.