CHERRY LOSES HIS CASE
Polly went back to Narrowfields in high spirits. Had she not left
behind her a challenge in that scented glove? She had likewise left a
copy of “Whisper, and I shall Hear,” on the Sagg Farm harmonium, the
said copy having her address in the left-hand corner.
She arrived home on the edge of dark. Involuntarily, as she entered the
little street, she listened for her mother’s voice, shouting anathema
at her Dad, the street, and the world in general. But all was calm.
Either the storm was over, or had not burst.
The odour of hotpot met her as she opened the door.
The drab kitchen had on it an additional gloom, arising from a cracked
lamp glass, and a consequently lower light. The economic struggle that
had always existed in this house was of so naked a character now, that,
skeleton like, it grinned and rattled.
Cherry was trying to read, by the firelight.
His strained intentness of expression faded somewhat as he perceived
Polly.
He winked to show that he observed her, and laid down his book on the
wash-boiler.
His winks had become “stagey” things now, hard to believe in.
“Well, how’s Granny Grunsticks?” he asked, trying to be sociable.
Polly was just opening her lips when Nan bounced out of the little
scullery.
“Oh, tha’rt back again, arta, bitch?” she asked. “Hunger brings th’
crows to the nest.”
Polly took off her hat.
Her countenance spoke a great reaction from a childish delight in
having had a good time, to a hopeless protest against having returned
to a bad one. Her way of setting her headgear on a blue ornament her
Dad had won at a Tide long ago showed the easiness with which she sank
under pressure of this negative atmosphere.
Nan dashed back into the kitchen, on some pretext or other.
Cherry mustered a smile.
It was sometimes hard to go on taking Nan as a joke. She was such an
interminable joke.
Then, he saw Polly suddenly recover her equilibrium.
She got out plates, proceeding to warm them.
“Where hesta learnt _that_?” quoth Cherry.
He never saw any one kneel on the fender and warm plates without
remembering his care-free life before he had met Nan--at the Tide. His
little mother had used to kneel so.
He felt a spur of interest in Polly’s following of the great cardinal
point in all good cooks. Sometimes he found himself getting interested
in things. But his interest was of a flickering, evanescent nature.
Before Polly could answer, he no longer cared to hear the answer.
“Oh--I saw some one do it, at Cherrydale,” said the girl.
As she spoke she had the vivid memory of Sarah, like a tired mummy,
kneeling on the fender of the great, sanded kitchen--and a companion
picture of Adam, handsome in dark blue coat, looking across at her
visioned self, like a man stock-taking.
It was Polly who set her hands to wheel her Dad’s chair to the supper
table. But Nan came up at that moment, gave her a thrust that almost
hurled her over, and took control of the chair herself.
Polly gave a faint giggle.
The man in the chair looked dazed--wonder at what was happening. Then
he sank back under the cloud-cap of physical and spiritual dejection.
In the old days he had liked his meals. They made strength--to go
on working. Now--he sat drumming whitened fingers on the table,
waiting for his portion. But he strove to cheer Polly up, after Nan’s
left-handed greeting.
“How’s Champion Ragus Divibus Rattibus, offspring of Champion Crompton
Orang?” he asked.
It was the first direct inquiry he had made about his once great
passion.
Forthwith, Polly gave a spirited account of Rag, the kennel, Rag’s
having been cured of worrying cock chickens by having one hung around
his neck for a week, of his leathern leggings, made by the village
cobbler, giving him the look of a dog turned commercial traveller.
Cherry smiled. He half felt he’d like to see Rag in those leggings.
But Polly was compelled to say that she didn’t see that he walked much
better, amending this, however, by the statement that he was jumping up
most of the time, so perhaps she couldn’t see improvements.
“We’re liable for licence,” said Cherry.
He stared down at his steaming hot-pot.
“I think we’ve enough on here, without dogs,” yapped Nan.
The commonsense remark, that in any other would have been a simple
reminder of the economic pressure, became an insult from Nan.
Cherry’s burden of dependence crushed him, like a concrete thing. He
went on eating, perfunctorily, but the savour had gone out of his food.
He pushed the half-empty plate away, listlessly staring at the picture
of “Wedded Love” on the wall, the ideal, the strength of the man
supporting the weakness of the woman. Nan had never been weak. But
he had provided for her. He had nothing to share with her, now--and
they were both of them living on Polly. He sat staring at the picture,
painted by some well-fed artist--and quite suddenly, it melted away,
and beyond it he saw a world of jungle law, where old age vampired on
the young, the young on old age, people feeding on one another as it
were, not just the rich on the poor, but the poor being made to feed on
each other--children, even, watching one another’s mouthfuls enviously,
young cannibals! For Cherry, scarred by great hurt on great hurt, was
now a mass of quivering sensations, morbidly quick perceptions, where
he had been a robust giant, without time for deep thought, or even for
deep feeling. Cherry, in his own words, was “off his trolley.”
“Aren’t ta eatin’ that?” queried Nan.
He felt sick.
“No,” he said.
He felt yet more sick.
The scraping of her spoon on his plate went through him.
Then, he had one of the quick revulsions of feeling common to him.
He became conscious that the fibre of his manhood was going. He was
feminising. Did all cripples feminise? Better to brutalise, he thought
savagely as he was wheeled to his corner.
Polly, after clearing the table, unpacked the generous parcel Granny
had sent with her. To her Dad she handed a colouring pipe and a quarter
of a pound of plug tobacco. There were a pound of Cherrydale sausages
for Nan and “Parted in the Church Porch.” For Polly there were six
bottles of scent, that Granny had found she could not sell.
Whilst Cherry stuffed the pipe with the tobacco, Nan was watching him.
She could not discover whether his “singing low” of this week-end was
submission, or diplomacy. Cherry looked up, and caught her glance. It
reminded him of the admixture of triumph and suspicion a cat shows
towards a half-killed thing.
He winked the comic-tragic wink in response to it.
For quite a long time there was silence in the kitchen, broke only by
the fluttering of the pages of Nan’s novelette, and the puff-puff of
Cherry’s pipe. He had been in tobacco-starved misery all the week-end.
Perhaps the pipe cheered him, for he again took up Southey’s “Life of
Nelson” which Billy had said was man’s meat.
“What’s that tha’s gotten, Polly?” asked Cherry.
Polly had given a little excited exclamation.
She flushed.
“I bought a ‘Raphael’s Almanac,’” she confessed, haltingly, “to see
if you’d won your case, Dad. Listen! It says, ‘A good day for seeking
favours, dealing with superiors, women, and the Law.’”
Cherry looked at the irresponsible one.
“One woman’s enough for me,” he said.
Polly giggled.
Nan looked at him suspiciously, as one pondering his sincerity.
“For _Law_, Dad!” said Polly.
Then she said, “I’ll brush your clothes.”
On the morrow was Cherry’s great ordeal in the Borough Court.
“Thee mind thy own clothes, bitch,” said Nan.
Which astonished Cherry a little.
But before he could do more than wonder, Billy Breeze knocked, and
followed his knock, cap in hand, and his usual amiable bashfulness in
his eye as he saw that Polly was in.
“Well, how are we?” he asked, in the excess of vigour he always used
now, so as not to appear down-hearted.
Cherry understood Billy.
“In the pink,” he said.
Billy sat down in the chair near the sewing-machine of the battered box.
“Ready for morning?” he asked, lamely.
Billy had his cap between his knees, like a little lad; he was studying
the floor critically. The Union had selected him as the fit and proper
person to ask William Cherry if his case failed on the morrow, whether
the Union should fight the thing for him in a higher Court. The Union
had been astounded to hear that it was possible that “earnings” might
be inclusive of tips, according to English Law, and that every man
hurt, therefore, might totalise his earnings as inclusive of such, and
claim double damages. It was worth a fight, if Cherry’s case could
create a precedent.
At last, Billy burst out with it.
Billy had no more tact than a guinea-pig, and was as transparent as
glass.
“If we don’t pull it off this time, Cherry, old man,” he said,
blushing, “better luck next time.”
Then, he unburdened himself of the task laid upon him.
Cherry stared across at him, with a little of the look he had turned on
Uncle Silas.
Billy suddenly got an inspiration.
“Cherry,” he said, earnestly. “A man should sometimes look on himself
impersonally. This is a fight for the next man.”
There was a long silence.
Billy realised it as Cherry’s assent. He had spiked the proud man’s
guns.
A great relief was on him as he went out. He had struck a blow for his
mates’ well-being, and still possessed his friendship.
Nan hung Cherry’s clothes over a chair.
Cherry had almost beggared himself in paying for them, out of pawn, for
this occasion of the morrow.
Polly carried a candle, and her new hat carefully upstairs.
“Good luck, Dad,” she called down, midway.
“Tooraloo, Polly,” he said.
The colouring pipe and Polly’s return had made him feel more of a man,
somehow. In these devitalised days little things made such a difference.
Nan was already undressing herself.
The way she ripped at her stay-laces made a sharp whipping sound in the
stillness of the kitchen.
“If it’s only ten shillings a week thee gets,” she threatened, “I shall
take a child to nurse.”
Cherry made no remark.
He got dog-tired at this hour.
He waited, in sick, demoralised fatigue, until Nan pushed his chair
to the bedside. Then she took off his coat with the impatient gestures
usual to her.
“Tha’d be in a poor way without me,” she said, unloosing his collar.
It was the triumph of the Amazon over the mere male.
She had got him under, now, and didn’t mean to let him forget it.
His blue eyes looked at her.
The dim light of the broken-glassed lamp was over them both--the woman
taunting, the man’s face giving no index to whatever he felt.
Then a contemptuous nobility flashed lightning in that blue eye--an
indescribable look of triumph even in debasement, before which Nan’s
sloe-dark eye dropped its lid. It was the look of one physically
bondsman to a lesser man, who was mean even in triumph.
It flashed for only a few seconds.
She gave his collar a peevish toss across the house.
Then--pushing his chair to the bed she watched his pitiful scramble
from chair to bed, hearing the gusty panting of fatigue--finally, when
she had let him know his full weakness, she gave him late, reluctant
aid that threw him, dog-tired, into the bed. She pulled the clothes
over him with a veiled triumph--as though she coffined him alive, till
she chose to aid him again.
His blue eye regarded her fixedly from the shadows of the red curtains
that screened the corner off in the daytime.
It had the same half-tortured, half-contemptuous look.
“I wouldn’t have done it by thee, Nan,” he said, like one stating a dry
fact.
The low quiet tone was calm as a lecturer’s on mathematics. Cherry was
training his will as he used to train his muscles.
Nan turned the lamp down.
“Jesus wept!” came her voice out of the darkness.
There was a defiant tone in the old phrase--burning, amazonish, but
under it was a faint sound of something like fear.
There was a manhood in this broken hulk which she could not degrade.
That old under-current of reason which she had ever hated was rising
to combat her undisciplined emotionalism. It was the cold quality that
divides the savage from the civilised. As she laid herself down by the
side of the physically broken one, who was still struggling with those
windy gusts of exhausted breath, she felt an almost superstitious sense
of a fetter which she could not see--the awe of a strength she could
not classify, the feeling that she was dwarfed and made petty--by this
man now almost as helpless as a child. It was the haunting awe of fear
wrung from the Stone Age, and rendered to an age that dissects life and
death, measures the star-spaces, and fathoms the sea.
Cherry was changing Nan’s fear of him--from a physical to a mental fear.
When the exhausted man was sunk into deep sleep, Nan tossed about. She
could dimly perceive Cherry’s countenance--weary, sleeping, with the
worn look of suffering, mental and physical.
She stared at it until it began to assume oddities of
expressions--agonising, awful, now fiendish, now glorious. She knew it
was the effect of the curtained gloom, and the way her mind had cowed
for a second only, before his. Yet she shivered. Then, turning her
gaze away resolutely, she made herself sleep.
When she awoke she found Cherry awake.
He watched her dress, light the fire, and saw Polly come down, drink
her hot tea, and hurry off, in a panic because the whistle was blowing.
Nan dressed Cherry at seven o’clock that morning.
It was, he thought, a diplomatic move on her part, an augury of some
grain of faith that he would win the day. His degree of economic power
was also domestic power.
He read Southey’s “Life of Nelson,” after breakfast until time to get
ready--the vision of the delicately-bodied lad with the titan soul
inside it, ever before his eyes, making those sensations his own,
whilst sometimes the vision of icefloes came to his sight, the crackle
of ice, and always he saw the struggle of the mighty will.
“Tha’ll ha’ to be shapin’,” yapped Nan.
She set him the dish of water on a stool.
He came back to the drab kitchen, in the morning light--its ugliness,
signs of poverty, and lack of anyone caring for it.
“Towel, Nan,” he said.
Whilst there was no humility in the tone--a sudden sorrow had sprung up
in him, for this mate of his, companion of this hand-to-mouth struggle.
For a moment he saw Nan as he had never seen her before, a captive
thing like himself. His tone conveyed a note of comradeship almost. For
a moment his personal limitations had broken down. He was wishing that
he possessed things to give to Nan seeing that her life in this drab
kitchen had been a cramped one--remembering wincingly all the occasions
he could have taken her out with him--and did not.
She dressed him with a little more care this morning. There was no
tenderness for him in it, though. She was turning him out decent--to
fight for that pound a week.
Then she put him on his tricycle, Cherry helping himself as much as
possible.
He trundled down the passage.
The step gave him that jerk he always feared. He went with difficulty
up the incline of the street. Several women were watching him from the
little door-ways, skimpy women in drab clothes, with brooms in their
hands.
He turned his head once, to look back at the woman in the doorway--his
own particular bit of poverty-limited womanhood.
“Tooraloo, Nan,” he called, on an impulse.
He saw her start at his publicly affectionate greeting.
She jerked her head, and went indoors.
Billy was looking down the street towards him.
At the end of the second street it started to drizzle with rain. They
were quite wet when they reached the Borough Court. A policeman, in the
little ante-room, informed Cherry that his was the first case. Billy
walked and Cherry was carried through the doorway into the echoing,
oak-floored little Court, with its high windows.
The confused mental picture Cherry always had of that ordeal, with the
magistrate’s clear voice succeeding his own mumbled words, of Billy
chipping in when he shouldn’t have done, and being called to order,
of the burning thought that they were being treated like children, of
the humiliation of being carried up into full sight of the Court, so
that they could hear him better, and of his voice almost failing him
entirely, remained a thing to shudder at the memory of, to the end of
his days.
The consciousness at last, of being in the presence of a
machine--trundling, without feeling, over human destinies, came to him
crushingly. The climax came when the magistrate gave the verdict, in
the dispassionate voice of the Law.
“That the findings of this Court, on this case, are, that the meaning
of said Act was that the word ‘earnings’ be interpreted as said wages
paid to an employee, and not, as plaintiff asserts, including the tips
that come to him by way of his work, and as marks of favour.”
Cherry had lost.
The option, however, of taking the case to a higher Court, was still
his.
He breathed a deep breath as he got outside.
Rain was still falling.
The tricycle wobbled a little under his nerveless guidance.
It seemed to him that every one who looked at him knew of his defeat.
The nearer he got home the more he dreaded Nan’s face--when she heard.
Billy walked by him in silent misery.
“Shall I come in with thee?” asked Billy.
Cherry shook his head.
He went down the street alone, rapping on the door to be taken in.
Nan gave one glance at his face.
Then she came out--and lifted the front wheel over the step.
“The dog-licence has come,” were her first words.
Cherry heaved a deep sigh.
For once, he did not feel the demoralisation usual to him when Nan
lifted him upon his chair by the wash-boiler.
He had been under the wheels of a great machine. All else was a
pin-prick.
Menson came down that evening, representing the Company. He spread
out thirty bright half-sovereigns on the little table with its smoky
lamp of the cracked glass, tempting them with the back pay of the last
half-year.
Cherry looked at it indecisively.
Then he said, “I can claim that, if the Higher Court says I’m wrong.”
“Thou silly devil!” yapped Nan, when he’d gone. “Why didn’t ta take it?”
Cherry pulled at the colouring pipe.
“Because--I’m going to have as much as I can get,” he said, with a
certain dogged fervour. Afterwards, he wondered if he mightn’t as well
have given in with a good grace. It was perhaps another half-year’s
uncertainty--another half-year of the humiliation of _living on Polly_.
That night, wet as it was, he trundled out into the rain.
He went along, until he reached his favourite house of call.
Four hours passed, in which the company in the kitchen became merrier
and merrier, Cherry amongst them. His moroseness was gone. He sang,
shouted and laughed with the best, with still an atom of himself, a
miserable, cold-blooded atom that he could not make drunk--that was
still sober, despite all his efforts, when he trundled out into the
dark, rainy night, towards home, with the fire out, as that sober atom
in him knew it would be.
Billy Breeze, who had learnt from Nan that he was out, saw something
whizz down the semi-gloom of the street. It was Cherry. The flickering
lamplight fell on him for a second. How he kept his seat became a
miracle. Then he stopped, three doors past his own place and began to
rap feebly at what he took to be the gate of his castle.
Billy went to the rescue.
Nan and he got Cherry inside.
He was placed on his chair, staring before him into a dead fire, like a
man struggling with a weighty problem.
“B--Billy,” he stuttered, after a pause in which he evidently found
it a little difficult to say just what he wanted to say. “W--what I
w--want to know is--‘Where’s--hic--G--God?’”
“Shut thy daft face,” Nan told him.
She pulled off his coat. As she did so the buttonhole Polly had got for
her father, fell on the floor--faded as his hopes.
Then, in full sight of Billy, after she had got Cherry on the bed, she
went through the pockets of the tragically short trousers.
Cherry was still lost in drunken ponderings on the whereabouts of the
God of the Universe.
“What’s this?” quoth Nan.
She held out a scrap of green paper for Billy’s inspection.
“He’s been buying a lottery ticket of somebody,” explained Billy, and
turning the ticket over explained that it was only a quarter ticket,
and about the great wheel at Hamburg that went round and round, making
a fortune for some one when it stopped. They were mostly frauds, such
things, he said.
Nan gave the shadowy figure behind the half drawn curtains a withering
look.
“If he’d been sober,” she said, with a deeper insight into human nature
than Billy could have supposed her capable of, “he wouldn’t have risked
a penny piece. Their lot was all born in chapel-vestries”--which unique
utterance regarding the line of Cherries, closed the conversation, for
Nan, taking charge of the solitary shilling in her man’s pocket, and
the scrap of green paper, turned her back rudely on Billy.
He left the melancholy little house where Polly’s beauty was like a
taper-gleam in an abyss of gloom.
Some day, when his pal’s economic position was secure, Billy was going
to ask Polly to marry him.
The next few weeks drifted by without event, save that Polly received
a letter and the music-copy back, from Bob Wild. Cherry was midway
through Southey’s Life of the splendid Horatio, and spent a few hours
out of doors, each day. For the rest, he sat in the ingle-nook,
planning now one way of escape from economic dependence, now
another--abandoning each by turn.
The squall had several times appeared on the horizon--but had not
broken.
One evening, as Cherry rapped and was taken in, after a run on the road
that ran to Cherrydale, under the stars, he found a white-faced Nan.
All that he could get out of her at first was that she’d seen a
“sign”--meaning, a sign of death. The knocker had lifted up, three
times, falling on the door like thunder. No one had been there.
Cherry did not tell her of the small boys he had seen at the game.
“Summat’s goin’ to happen,” she told him.
Cherry laughed.
He was feeling physically stronger.
The mighty courage that had stuck to Nan, but been almost killed, on
awaking on that never to be forgotten day in hospital, to find himself,
without legs, was reviving, stirring itself, becoming a vital thing.
Nan lifted him on the chair in the corner, and promptly prepared his
supper.
“When are we goin’ to have our next row?” he asked, meditatively. “I’m
missin’ ’em, Nan. I don’t feel at home, like.”
“Tha can ha’ one now,” she snapped, “if tha wants.”
The squall swooped near.
Then--Cherry saw that she was still thinking of the mystic knocks.
And--quite suddenly--her superstition, as her jealousy, became part of
the chain by which he would keep his male-rights.
“Is that kid comin’ in the morning?” he asked.
Nan nodded.
“We can’t live on air, an’ lie on the floor,” she said, moodily.
He stared across the supper table at her.
Again, that big softness for the little shrew, the softness that he had
thought quite dead, stirred in him, that compassion for the struggle to
make ends meet going on in this little house. There was a hole in her
blouse--a dowdy blouse. Daudling about the streets aimlessly, on his
wheels, he had seen well-dressed women, and drawn bitter contrasts. Nan
and he had never known they were born.
Nan found that compassionate look in her mate’s eyes more than she
could stand. Its spell was something to fear.
“If tha looks at me like that, I’ll throw summat at thee,” she said
fiercely.
Cherry’s hand went slowly into his pocket.
“I saw some ear-rings in a shop to-day,” he said, “would just ha’
suited thee, Nan.”
“Ay,” she remarked, caustically, “when tha’s no brass tha can see ’em.”
He brought something out of soft paper.
Nan stared--in unbelief of her senses.
He was holding up a pair of pearl ear-rings, with green glass drops.
Then--she had snatched them from him, and had them in her ears and had
the damp-spotted mirror out in a flash.
Nan was a woman--withal a hooligan.
Cherry was using missionary wiles.
But she gave him plainly to understand, in her subsequent manner, that
though she accepted them, she abated no whit of her power. After a
while, she wondered where he had got the money.
“Borrowed it,” quoth Cherry, nonchalantly.
He gave her evidence.
Then--she gave him a grudging look of admiration. He had “gone into
debt” to buy her ear-rings. She hadn’t thought he had it in him.
Next morning Cherry was awakened by the crying of a child, to the
chorus of clogs going past the door.
Peeping through the bed-curtains, he saw the child’s mother, in factory
shawl with a big bundle, and anxiety lest little Rob should keep on
crying, when she had gone.
Nan held the struggling child--a little lad of just over two years,
with a head kinked over with red-gold curls, two frightened eyes like a
young pup’s, and the rest was dishevelled blanket and red shawl.
“An’ I’ve brought his milk--” said Rob’s mother. “See, Rob. The lady’ll
be his mammy to-day. Eh--do you think he’ll cry long, missus?”
“Not he,” said Nan, decisively.
“An’ his little britches is here--an’ his waistcoat, an’----”
“Mammy, mammy!” shrieked little Rob.
The woman paused, distracted between his appeal and the sound of the
whistle screaming at her. “Late, late, late!”
“Eh--but we’re lite to work, aren’t we?” said Rob’s mother,
apologetically, to no one in particular.
“Mammy--!” shrieked the little lad.
Then----
Rob’s mother looked at the woman whom she had been told by some one
wanted a child to nurse.
“You’ll not hit him, will you, missus?” she asked pleadingly. “I’ve
never hit him in his life.”
Cherry saw Nan look back at the mother who was scarcely older than
Polly.
“Jesus wept!” she said, with emphasis. “What do you take me for?”
But she had winced.
There was a great outcry when the door closed, for “Mammy.” There were
two terrible hours in which little Rob would not be comforted. “_I want
my mammy_” was the one reply to all they could say. He was so tired out
that he slept at breakfast-time whilst Nan and Cherry breakfasted.
“Where’s this from?” quoth Cherry, as he opened a green envelope.
Nan watched him open it.
He stared at it like a man in a dream.
“It’s my name,” he said, at length. “But--I’ve bought no ticket in the
Great Hamburg Lottery. They say I’ve won.”
“Tha has, when tha were drunk,” said Nan.
They stared at each other.
Then, “How much?” asked Nan.
“Two thousand marks,” he said.
“Is that pounds?” asked Nan.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Billy Breeze had lent him a dictionary.
Nan reached it.
“We’re worth one hundred quid,” he said, dazedly. Then, querulously,
“Nan, why did ta pawn my phono’? We should have bin able to set the
‘Hallelujah Chorus’ on, now.”
<tb>
At the end of the week the street was amazed to see great things going
on in that front parlour of the Cherries--to hear men knocking, all
day, shelves being fixed, great box-like partitions being made in the
room, and finally a board being fixed under the window, then brass
rods, on which hung curtains. All was made clear when a sign appeared
over the door, on which was painted the following inscription:
W. & A. CHERRY,
Fent Dealers.
Cherry had made the shrew his partner. He was trying new tactics,
breaking down the barriers of antagonism by trying to introduce
co-partnership. He didn’t believe in it industrially. But he did in the
domestic realm.
The exchange was synonymous with the change of the name in the
rent book. Cherry was once more a citizen, with a vote. Nan had
half-reluctantly sold a vote for partnership in the shop.
The street was skeptical about the business.
But when Cherry went forth on his wheels, with a box in front of
him containing his wares, it began to believe a little. There was
something in the countenance of the once ruddy giant that told he was
out to try. Struggling with his limitations was his will--bigger than
his body now.
“If only he’d had a decent wife,” Nan heard on the other side the
baize curtains, one morning, “a helpmeet, as you might say, I daresay
he’d have done very well. But she’s so--heathenish--as you might say.
They’ll never make it pay.”
Nan withdrew.
She was a fighter by nature.
Previously, she had fought Cherry.
It was still only a dubious truce that existed between them. But she
was now concentrated on her hatred of the little street. She was
determined to make it eat its words. Their shop should be a success.
When Cherry came back, tired, and a little dejected from a morning of
poor results, he was surprised to see in the window a square card, on
which was written in Nan’s giant pot-hookish writing:
“_Shirts and working aprons made to order._”
She only yapped at him in response to his query as to why she had done
this.
“Tha’ll ha’ to give th’ little lad up, now,” he said.
“Nowt at t’ sort,” she said.
And a light leaped out at him from her eyes.
It was the first flash of motherhood he had seen in Nan. He could only
reconcile the change in her towards children to the slow change that
comes to human beings, in the space of fourteen years. Little Rob
called her “Mammy Cherry” and had all that innocent fondness for her
an animal gives to the hand that feeds it. Cherry sometimes thought
that if the lads had lived, she would have been like a lioness with
her cubs. But the great inconsistency was, she had let them die,
without realising it. More and more the ex-porter was wonder-filled at
the anomalies of human nature, his own in particular. He was still
only a shadow of the man he had been--but, he was getting used to it,
and--they had not had a row for five weeks. He had the date in his
breast pocket-book. He wondered, sometimes, if the sight of those
crosses on the almanac had not sometimes enraged Nan into outbursts.
Polly regarded the shop as a child does a new toy.
And a great advertisement appeared in the _Narrowfield Herald_.
Cherry was doing the thing “_large_.”
The door bell began to tinkle quite frequently.
Meanwhile, the N. U. R. put the proposal before its members that
Cherry’s case be taken up.
Meanwhile, through the law’s delays, Cherry trundled about his
business. He had not much faith in law, now.
As for Nan, she snapped and sewed on the sewing machine that made a
noise like a crushing-engine, sewed and snapped--often wondering as to
the meaning of the three knocks that had fallen on the door that night.
One day she went down into Tanner Fold. She came back early--shaken,
and white.
The “three knocks” according to Nan, had been given by the departing
soul of the repentant Lizzie, who had died, after a drinking fit.
Whether she took it as a warning or not, Cherry could not tell. But
she kept a civil tongue, and a big fire, that evening, and made a
potato-pie for supper. Whilst his mind realised that when the storm did
break, long delayed as it had been, it would be one of the fiercest
they had known.
Meanwhile--he was having a rest.
His colouring pipe was tinted a golden brown now. Little Rob called
him “Daddy Cherry.” Rag had caught his first rat, and was reported in
glowing colours, Polly had got a quarter of a column’s critique in the
_Herald_ on her rendering of “I know that my Redeemer Liveth,” and--the
shop was steadily making headway.
Cherry’s misery was now of an intermittent character. His life was
being reconstructed--slowly, painfully. There were odd moments when he
found himself forgetting his infirmity. But they were only moments.
He was conquering himself no more quickly than he was conquering Nan.
Somewhere, when he was quite, quite old, he sometimes thought, he would
come to a quiet, twilight place, where he would regret nothing. For
Cherry did a lot of thinking, now. There was quite a little woof of
thoughts running through his days and his evenings. They all tended
one way, to a greater sense of being indivisible with the rest of the
world, and towards a greater tolerance to Nan, a firmer resolve, when
the storm did burst, NOT TO HIT HER.