The Stars Look Down (20 page)

“You’re a dear, Arthur,” she breathed, with downcast lashes. “A perfect dear. And you know how fond I am of you. But I do think we’re both a little young for anything, well, official. We’ve got our understanding, of course. Everything’s all right between us.”

“You do like me then, Hetty?” he whispered.

“Oh, Arthur, you
know
I do.”

An immense elation possessed him. At the facile intensity of his emotion tears came into his eyes. He felt unbelievably
happy. He felt mature and manly, capable of anything, he could have thanked her on his knees for loving him.

A few minutes passed.

“Well,” she said with a sigh, “I suppose I must get back and see how old man Todd is getting on.”

He looked at his watch.

“Twenty to five. I promised to meet father at the five-ten train.”

“I’ll walk with you to the station.”

He smiled at her tenderly. Already her devotion to himself, as to her invalid father, entranced him. He beckoned to the waitress with a lordly confidence and paid the bill. They rose to go.

On the way out they stopped for a moment at Alan’s table. Alan was a good sort, a big heavy smiling fellow, inclined perhaps to be lazy and a little wild. But there was no real harm in him. He played football for the Northern Nomads, was in the Territorials and knew a few barmaids by their Christian names. Now amidst a certain amount of chaff and laughter he began to jolly Arthur for taking Hetty out to tea. Usually Arthur was painfully shy under banter, but this afternoon he scored off Alan right and left. His spirits bounded higher. He felt strong, happy, confident. He knew that little things would never worry him again, his flushing, his fits of lassitude and depression, his complex of inferiority, his jealousy. Purves, for instance, “glad-eyeing” Hetty, trying “to get off with her,” was no more than a silly little bank clerk, completely negligible. With a final repartee that set the table in a roar he lit a cigarette and gallantly escorted Hetty to the street.

They walked to the Central, Arthur bathed in a warm, unusual glow of self-approval, like an actor who had given a brilliant performance in a leading part. Yes, he had done well. He understood that Hetty wanted him to be like this: not stammering and sheepish but full of confidence, assured.

They entered the station and walked up the platform together, a little early, for the train was not in and Barras had not yet arrived. Suddenly Hetty stopped.

“By the way, Arthur,” she exclaimed, “I’ve just been wondering. Why did your father come to see mine to-day?”

He drew up, facing her, completely taken aback by the unexpectedness of her remark.

“It’s rather odd,” she smiled, “now I come to think of it. Dad can’t bear seeing any one when he’s seedy and yet he
got on the telephone to Sleescale three times this morning. Why was it, Arthur?”

“I don’t know,” he hesitated, still staring at her. “As a matter of fact I was wondering why myself.” He paused. “I’ll ask father.”

She laughed and pressed his arm.

“Of course not, silly. Don’t look so serious, what in all the world does it matter?”

At half-past four that afternoon David emerged from Bethel Street School and crossed the hard concrete playground towards the street. The school, already known as New Bethel Street to distinguish it from the old shut-down school, was a building of shiny, purplish bricks erected on a high piece of waste land at the top of Bethel Street. The opening of New Bethel Street six months ago had caused a general shuffle around amongst the county educational staff and a vacancy for one new junior teacher. It was this appointment that David had received.

New Bethel Street School was not pretty. It was semidetached severely into halves. Upon one half, in grey stone inset, was carved the word
BOYS
; upon the other, in equally huge letters,
GIRLS
. For each sex, separated by a menacing spiked fence, there was a vaulted entrance. A great many white tiles had got into the construction of the school and a smell of disinfectant somehow managed to permeate the corridors. Taken altogether the school succeeded in resembling a large public convenience.

David’s dark figure moved rapidly under the lowering and wind-swept sky and seemed to indicate that he was eager to leave the school. It was a cold night and as he had no coat he turned up the collar of his jacket and fairly spurted down the windy street. Suddenly he recognised and was inclined to smile at his own eagerness. He was still unused to the idea of himself as a married man and a master at New Bethel Street. He must, as Strother said, begin to cultivate decorum.

He had been married six months and was settled with Jenny in a small house behind the Dunes. A most tremendous business it had been finding the house—the
right
house,
as Jenny put it. Naturally the Terraces were impossible: Jenny wouldn’t have looked at a miners’ row “for love nor money”; and David felt it wise in the meantime to be at the other end of the town from his parents. Their reaction to his marriage had made things difficult.

High and low they had searched. Rooms furnished or unfurnished Jenny would not have. But at last they had pitched on a small plaster-fronted detached house in Lamb Lane, the straggling continuation of Lamb Street. The house belonged to Wept’s wife, who had one or two “bits” of property in her own name in Sleescale, and who let them have the house for ten shillings a week because it had stood unlet for the previous two quarters and now showed signs of damp. Even so, the rent was more than David could afford on a salary of £70 a year. Still he had not wished to disappoint Jenny, who had from the first taken quite a fancy to the house, since it did not stand vulgarly in a row and had actually a patch of front garden. Jenny insisted that the garden would afford them a most refined seclusion and hinted romantically at the wonders she would work in the way of cultivating it.

Nor had he cared to stint her over the house’s furnishing: Jenny was so bright and intrepid, so set on having “the exact thing” that she would tirelessly ransack a dozen shops rather than confess defeat—how, in the face of such enthusiasm, could he freeze her warm housewifely spirit! Yet he had eventually been obliged to take a stand and in the end they had compromised. Three rooms of the house were furnished on credit: kitchen, parlour, bedroom—the last with a noble suite of stained walnut, the pride of Jenny’s heart. For the rest she had taken it out in chintzes, muslin curtains and a superb selection of lace doyleys.

David was happy… very happy in this house behind the Dunes—these last six months had been far and away the happiest of his life. And before that there had been the honeymoon. Never, never would David forget the joy of that week… those seven blessed days at Cullercoats. Naturally he had thought a honeymoon out of the question. But Jenny, tenacious as ever where romantic tradition was involved, had fiercely insisted; and Jenny, revealing unsuspected treasure, had produced fifteen pounds, her six years’ money from the Slattery savings fund, and handed it firmly to him. She had, moreover, in the face of all his protests, argued him into buying himself a new ready-made suit out of the money to replace the shabby grey he wore. Her way
of putting it involved no humiliation. Jenny, at least, was never mean; where money was concerned Jenny never thought twice. He had bought the suit; they had spent the honeymoon on Jenny’s money. He would never in all his life forget Jenny for that.

The wedding ceremony had been a failure—though he had been prepared for worse—a chilly affair in the Plummer Street church with Jenny unnatural and stiff, a pretentious breakfast at Scottswood Road, a horrible rigidity between the opposing factions of Sunleys and Fenwicks. But the week at Cullercoats had blown it all away. Jenny had been wonderful to him, revealing an ardour—startling yet beautiful. He had expected her to be timid; the depth of her passion had overwhelmed him. She loved him… she loved him… she really loved him.

He had discovered, of course, that she had been unfortunate, there was no escape from the stark physiology of this fact. Sobbing in his arms that first bitter-sweet night she had told him the whole story; though he had not wished to hear and had begged her, unhappily, to stop. But she would, she must
explain
, it had happened, she wept, when she was just, oh, just a girl, a well-to-do commercial traveller, in the millinery line, of course, a perfect brute, a
beast
of a man, had taken advantage of her. He was drunk and forty, she not yet sixteen. He was bald, too, she remembered, with a little mole on his chin, and his name, oh, his name was Harris. She had not been untrue to herself; she had struggled, fought, but her resistance had been useless; terrified, she had been afraid to tell her mother. It had happened only once and never, never,
never
again with any one in all the world.

Tears filled David’s eyes as he held her in his arms, compassion added to his love, his ardour leavened by a sublime pity. Poor Jenny, poor, darling little Jenny!

After the honeymoon they had come direct to Sleescale where his work at New Bethel Street had immediately begun. Here, alas, the run of his good luck was checked.

He was not happy at the school. He had always recognised that teaching would never be his trade, he was too impulsive, too eager for results. He wanted to reform the world. And now, in charge of Standard III
A
, a class full of little boys and girls of nine, inky, untidy, apathetic, he was conscious of the irony of this beginning. He chafed at the creaking system, controlled by bell and whistle and cane, loathed equally the
Grand March
as thumped on the piano by Miss Mimms, his
opposite number in III?, and her acidulous “now children” heard through the thin partition fifty times a day. As in his period of pupil-teaching, he wanted to change the whole curriculum, cut the idiotic non-essentials on which visiting inspectors set such store, ignore the Battle of Hastings, the latitude of Cape Town, the sing-song recitation of capitals and dates, substitute Hans Andersen for the prim Crown Reader, awaken the children, fan their flickering interest, stimulate the mind rather than the memory. Of course all his attempts, his suggestions towards this end had met with the chilliest reception. Every hour of every day he felt that he did not belong to this environment. In the Staff Room it was the same, he felt himself alien, treated distantly by his colleagues, frozen by the virgin Mimms. Nor could he disguise from himself the fact that Strother, the head master, disliked him. Strother was a square, official man, an M.A. of Durham with a ponderous manner and a fussy, pedantic mind. He wore black suits, had a heavy black moustache, was something of a martinet. He had been second master at the old school, knew all about David, his family and origin; despised him for having worked in the pit; for not having taken the B.A.; felt that he had been foisted upon him; went out of his way to be difficult, contemptuous and severe. If only Mr. Carmichael had been head, everything would have been different; but Carmichael, though applying for the post, had not even reached the short leet. He had no influence. In disgust he had accepted a village school at Wallington. He had written a long letter to David asking David to visit him soon, to come for a week-end occasionally. The letter was full of the pessimism of a discouraged man.

But David was not discouraged: he was young, enthusiastic, determined to make his way. And as he swung round the corner of Lamb Street, braced by the keen wind, he swore to himself that he would get on, out of New Bethel Street, away from Strother’s paltriness, into something finer. The chance would come. And, by heaven, he would take it.

Half-way down Lamb Street he saw a figure advancing on the same side of the road: it was Ramage, James Ramage, the butcher, vice-chairman of the school board, mayor in prospect for the town. David prepared to nod civilly. He did nod. But Ramage passed without the slightest recognition; his lowering gaze dwelt blankly upon David as though he looked through him.

David coloured, set his jaw hard. There, he thought, is an
enemy of mine. Coming at the end of a trying day this last snub cut him pretty deeply. But as he let himself into his house he tried to banish it, calling out cheerily to Jenny as soon as he came inside the door.

She appeared in a fetching pink blouse which he had never seen before, her hair newly shampooed and smartly arranged.

“Why, Jenny, you like like the queen.”

She held him off, posing nicely, coquettishly:

“Now, don’t crush my new blouse, Mister Man.” Lately she had taken to calling him Mister Man: it jarred abominably, he must tell her to stop. Not now, of course… she might stop of her own accord. With his arm round her trim hips he steered her to the kitchen where, through the open door, he saw a comforting fire. But she protested:

“No, not there, David. I won’t have us in the kitchen.”

“But, Jenny… I’m used to kitchens… and it’s so lovely and warm there.”

“No, I won’t have it, bad Mister Man. You know what we said. No falling off. We got to use the front room. It’s terribly common to sit in the kitchen.”

She led the way to the parlour where a green fire smoked unpromisingly.

“Now you sit there till I fetch the tea.”

“But hang it all, Jenny…”

She settled him with a pretty little gesture, bustled out. In five minutes she brought in tea: a tray first, then a tall nickel-plated cake stand—a recent purchase, such a bargain, bought on the near prospect of people calling—and finally two little Japanese paper serviettes.

“Now you be quiet, Mister Man.” Again she stilled his bewildered protest almost before he uttered it. She poured him a cup of not very hot tea, politely handed him a serviette, placed the cake stand at his elbow. She was like a small girl playing with a doll’s tea-set. He could stand it no longer.

“My heavens, Jenny,” in humourous exasperation, “what in the name of thunder does this mean? I’m hungry. I want a good high tea, a kipper or eggs, or a couple of Wept’s prepare to meet thy Gods.”

“Now, David, don’t swear. You know I wasn’t brought up to it. And don’t be impatient. Just wait and see. A cup in your hand is very nice once in a while. And I’ll be having visitors soon enough. I want to try things out. Have some of that seed-cake. I bought it in Murchison’s.”