A Modern Tragedy (33 page)

The inconsistency between this remark, so bitter to Harry and Jessie, and her usual lament about the inadequacy of her nine children in supporting her one day provoked Milner into comment, but he might as well have spared his breath.

“I want no back-answers from you, Milner Schofield,” said his mother on a loud, hostile note—her grating tones were indeed becoming an irritation almost beyond bearing to her sons. “If you're non married, it's because no lass'd look at you, you great sheep's head, messing about wi' all those books and fuddling yourself wi' their silly nonsense. From all I hear, this business is mostly your doing.”

“It is, and I'm proud on it,” said Milner fiercely, very pale about the mouth.

The old woman was so taken aback that for the nonce she desisted. But not for long. Few were the opportunities she let slip of reminding her sons of their workless condition.

If a hawker came to the door, she told him: “We can't do owt for thee here, lad, our men's out o' work.” If a neighbour had an errand to be done, Mrs. Schofield offered to send one of her sons. “I'll ask our Harry to run up for you,” she would say sardonically, “He's nowt else to do.”

All this the old woman did with the deliberate intention of wounding her sons, meaning to be cruel in order to be kind; for, like Harry, she lay awake for long hours in the night in an agony of fear, wondering what would happen to them all—and especially to little Dorothy, who was her favourite grandchild—if one of the men did not soon get work. “And another babby coming,” she mused, staring up through the darkness, recalling the bad times she had had in her youth and deciding, in spite of her scornfulness to Milner about his “world forces,” that these bad times to-day seemed almost worse than any she had known: “Another babby coming. It's a poor look out for them; it is that.”

Next morning she attacked Harry more furiously than ever, humiliating his pride so that he winced, and felt what a poor thing he had become to cower beneath a woman's tongue. Thus day by day the interplay of Mrs. Schofield's fears and Harry's slowly broke her son's nerve.

Harry had at first after the Valley Mill disaster visited the Employment Exchange every day to see if there was any chance of work for him, but now he began to pay only the single weekly visit necessary to keep his registration “live,” and sometimes he omitted even that—lying about it to his wife and mother, if the subject came up. It was too humiliating, it required a strength of will, a courage, which he hadn't
now got, to enter that room, approach the counter, with the sure knowledge that there would be nothing for him, that he would not be wanted. Sweat broke out on his forehead now as soon as he pushed back the door—the room was always rather empty, and the space to be crossed between door and counter prolonged the agony beyond bearing point. Instead he spent his days at street corners with groups of unemployed; and presently a fearful lassitude began to fill his veins.

As he lounged, silent and motionless, in the signing-on queue at the Exchange, or at the street corner, gazing ahead with vague eyes at the grey abyss which was his future, he seemed to himself to think of nothing; but after each day spent thus, when he returned home to Thwaite Street, he felt less like the Harry—the sturdy, honest, jolly Harry—whom Jessie and Dorothy and Hal used to know. He grew thin, nervous, irritable, moody. At last one day he spoke so roughly to Dorothy for some childish importunity that her solid little face puckered in horrified astonishment, and she wept; whereupon Jessie too—the placid Jessie who never cried—burst into tears, and cried roundly: “Nay, Harry, don't
you
start!”

This reference to her own nagging might have been expected to bring down Mrs. Schofield's thunders upon her daughter-in-law, but the old woman was nothing if not unexpected—it was part of her strength—and instead, she shouted at her son that he ought to be ashamed of himself for talking so to a woman in Jessie's condition; and she continued on this theme so long that Harry, who was already ashamed enough of having made Jessie cry, felt that the house was simply intolerable. He snatched up his cap, called Nance, and went out—to stand again in silent misery at the street corner.

Nance was both a boon and a bane to Harry just now.
One of Mrs. Schofield's favourite methods of wounding her son was to refer indirectly to his extravagance in keeping a dog. When Jessie put its meagre plate of scraps down on the rug, for example, Mrs. Schofield would address Nance in ironical approval: “You won't clem, lass, whatever onybody else does.” And she would sometimes deny Dorothy a second piece of bread unnecessarily, in order to remark brutally when the child whimpered: “Don't cry, love; dog mun be fed, you know. If one on you's to lack, it mun be you; dog mun have its meat, choose how.”

Harry foresaw that when the time came to renew Nance's license, he would have to part with her; even if he could find the money—which he certainly couldn't—his mother's opposition would be too overwhelming to resist. He grieved at the thought, for he loved Nance; she was a great solace to him now, accompanied him wherever he went and seemed glad of his society, sat beside him in the group at the street corner, and provided a theme for long hours of slow talk by her unusual breed. Indeed, as the days went on and the situation did not change and his mother continued to nag and Jessie's good-humour, under the strain of the family dissensions and her condition, grew increasingly uncertain, Harry felt so sunk, so disheartened, that he was thankful even for the affection of a little black bitch; her dark eyes always gazed up at him lovingly; they never reproached, they did not weep.

And at last it seemed that the climax came to his wretchedness.

One autumn day at their scanty midday meal, Mrs. Schofield was nagging Milner. She attacked him less often than she did Harry, for Milner, being still firmly convinced that he was in the right on the Lumb dispute, and a practised debater, sometimes gave her as good as he got.

“I don't know how you can sleep at night with all them
Lumbs' men on your mind—and their wives and childer too!” said Mrs. Schofield with an air of virtuous indignation.

“We must expect to suffer to bring a new era to birth,” intoned Milner with passion, in his “platform” voice, his eyes gleaming, quite forgetting to eat. “We're victims of the class war, and we should be proud of it.”

“Well,” began Mrs. Schofield. The gleam in her eye revealed that she was about to say something particularly telling, when Jessie suddenly exclaimed:

“Oh, let Milner be!”

Harry started in his chair, and shot her a glance of furious jealousy. Turbulent feelings warred madly in his heart. His months of unemployment had so lowered him, he felt so inferior, so unwanted and unwantable, that he actually resented his wife's interference on his brother's behalf, was actually jealous of it. All the times he had noticed, in the past, that Milner thought him lucky to win Jessie, now flashed through his mind; he was ready to believe that Jessie despised him, preferred Milner, that the coming child even was not his. When had Jessie interfered with his mother on his behalf, when, when? A faint glimmering in the darkness of his heart assured him of the truth, namely that Jessie had defended Milner simply because her patience had given out, and she was tired of Mrs. Schofield's everlasting scolding, tired of Milner's political replies: he struggled to believe this, to reassure himself that Jessie was still his and still loved him. At length, after a long moment of utter wretchedness, he found he did believe it, and the world settled down about him once more; but his heart was still sore and bleeding when Jessie stabbed him again.

“I'd go back to t'loom mysen,” said Jessie thoughtfully, “if only I weren't carrying.”

“Well, by gow!” thought Harry in a fury. “That caps all, that does!” He crimsoned with rage. That Jessie should
wish she wasn't bearing his child, so that she might return to the mill and work to keep him—well! Of course it was said that there were plenty of houses in Yorkshire and Lancashire to-day where the wife went out to work and left the husband at home to look after the children; there were even one or two in Thwaite Street where that was the case. Nor was it unknown, or even unusual, that a pregnant woman should tend a loom. But that Harry Schofield's wife should ever be in that position! No! It was more than he could stand!

“I reckon you wouldn't find a loom waiting for you, my lass,” he said aloud grimly. “There's a good few looms standing i' Hudley just now.” And to himself he thought: “Summat's got to be
done.”

As soon as the meal was over, he took his cap silently and went out without Nance, sternly refusing the request in her pleading eyes. He went straight up through the park to the free library, walking purposefully, not with the slouch which was becoming habitual to him because he had nowhere to go and was always just passing the time.

Milner had often told him about the reading-room at the library, but he had never been there before, and he now entered it rather distrustfully. The large windows admitted so much light that the room was quite disagreeably dazzling, he thought, and the huge glossy stands of light wood, bearing unfamiliar newspapers, intimidated him. But he was determined not to be beaten, and after a minute, when his nerves had settled down, he saw that most of the people standing in front of the newspapers were of the same type as himself—unemployed men, with cloth caps, white scarves folded across their throats, patched trousers, broken boots, and a general look of fading hope and growing anxiety.

Presently he recovered himself sufficiently to notice a list, framed and hanging on the wall. He consulted it, discovered
the numbers of the stands where the copies of last night's
Hudley News
were displayed, and slowly made his way through the gangways towards them. Both were engaged; both had a little group of men near by, pretending to be unconcerned, but really waiting to consult them. Harry joined the smaller group, and after a rather long wait, got his turn. He studied every advertisement with meticulous care, but nobody in Hudley seemed to want a cloth finisher of any description. Disappointed, yet hardly surprised, he passed on to read the county newspapers, which covered a wider area; for he would go anywhere, he decided fiercely—he had already seen that phrase in the advertisement of someone wanting a situation. Well! There was nothing for him to-day, but he'd come there till there was something. There must be some jobs vacant sometimes, surely. Look at Arnold Lumb's advertisement, for instance. Here Harry remembered the crowd of men who had streamed into the Valley Mill office, and winced. But no matter. Somebody had got those jobs, and that somebody might one day be Harry Schofield. Why not go to Valley Mill, now, by the way, and see if Mester Arnold would take him back? He was Isaiah's son, after all; and, in spite of Milner, union men were working there.

“Be hanged to Milner!” said Harry; and he went to Valley Mill.

Arnold received him kindly, and withholding from him the fact that he was by no means the first to come on the same errand, promised to put his name down for a vacancy if one should occur.

“But I reckon I know your work better than them you've got on the job now,” protested Harry.

“I daresay,” agreed Arnold. But he went on to explain that he had promised his new workers, when they took the risk of flouting their union by working for him, not to turn them out to reinstate his former men. “So I can do nothing
unless one happens to leave or die,” said Arnold grimly.

“There's not likely to be a place for me yet awhile, then?” said Harry in an artificially cheerful tone.

“I'm afraid not,” said Arnold.

Harry gave him a good-afternoon, and left. But oddly enough this interview, so far from depressing him, only stimulated him to further effort. It was long since he had been inside a mill, or seen men at work; now the mere sound of the machinery, the cheerful manner of the foreman as he put his head in at Mr. Arnold's door and shouted a request to him to come and look at a piece, made Harry's heart beat fast with hope and excitement. Work still went on, then; the West Riding wasn't all quite silent; some men had work and went home happily to their families. He would do the same yet; he'd show them all!

He decided to say nothing of his new hopes, his recovered manhood, until he had actually found a job, and he was cold and reserved when Jessie mildly tried to find out where he had been. He was still angry with Jessie. At the bottom of his heart he knew that she loved him, but he could not yet forgive her for seeming to disparage him and his unborn child.

He now called at the Employment Exchange registration department, not only on the mornings when the business of signing on and drawing benefit took him to the other side of the building, but every day. Every day he went to the reading room, picking his times carefully so that he should not meet Milner by the way; every day he returned silent, musing, preoccupied—there was nothing in the papers, or at the Exchange, suitable for him to apply for. He gradually began to feel that he
must
maintain this reserve until he found something to do; it was his last support, his last shred of courage; if it went, he would go too, collapse into a mere wreck of a man.

Jessie was frightened, then saddened, by the withdrawal of his confidence; her kind eyes followed him about the house wistfully. She tried, indeed, once or twice to bring him back to her by a timid caress, but he looked at her so scornfully, and laughed so harshly, that she removed the hand she had placed on his arm, without saying anything. At night he never spoke to her; no longer did they sleep with arms entwined.

It was about a fortnight after Harry's first visit to the library, and he had still found no advertisement which could concern him, when one wild windy afternoon he saw in the previous day's
Hudley News
a photograph of Walter Haigh. It was a photograph taken some years ago, and Walter looked just as Harry remembered him at Valley Mill. Beside this photograph was another, a lovely portrait of a lovely girl. Harry slowly read the caption beneath the pair: