The Stars Look Down (36 page)

As they stood at the corner of Quay Street Sammy said, with an effort at his old smile:

“Don’t take on, Annie, lass. The pit hasn’t done that much for me after all. Maybe the war’ll do a bit more.”

“Maybe,” Annie said: and with a sudden catch in her breath: “I’ll see you to-morrow, Sammy. I’ll see you for sure before you go.”

Sammy nodded his head, still holding his smile, then he exclaimed:

“Give us a kiss, lass, to show you’re not angry wi’ us.”

Annie kissed Sammy, then she turned away for fear Sammy should see the tears that were in her eyes. Holding her head down she walked rapidly towards her home.

Sammy climbed the Terraces slowly. He was a fool, he knew he was a fool to be leaving Annie and his good job for a war that did not interest him. And yet he couldn’t help himself. The disaster had done something to him—ay, just like it had to David. Where he was going didn’t matter; all that mattered was that he was getting out of the pit.

When he reached Inkerman his mother was sitting up for him as usual in her own hard, straight-backed chair by the window and the minute he came in she rose to get him some hot cocoa.

She gave him his cocoa, and, standing by the grate where she had just put the steaming kettle, she watched him, her hands folded beneath her breast, elbows rather gaunt, eyes sombre and loving.

“Will I cut you a piece of cake, son?”

He had sat down rather wearily at the table with his cap pushed back on his head and now he raised his eyes and looked at her.

She had altered. Though she did not fight within herself against the disaster but received it sombrely with the calm fatality of a woman who has always known and accepted the danger of the pit, the calamity at the Neptune had left its mark on Martha too. The lines on her face were deeper and her cheeks more fallen in, one grey strand made a curious streak on the black of her tight-drawn hair, there was a little pattern of furrows graven upon her brow. But she
still held herself erect without effort. Her vitality seemed inexhaustible.

Sammy hated to have to tell his mother; but there was no other way; and as he was without subtlety he spoke directly.

“Mother,” he said, “I’ve joined up.”

She went an ashen grey. Her face and her lips turned as grey as the grey strand of her hair; and her hand flew instinctively to her throat. A sudden wildness came into her eyes.

“You don’t mean”—she stopped, but at last she brought herself to say it—“the army?”

He nodded moodily:

“The Fifth Fusiliers. I fetched my tools outbye this afternoon. The draft leaves for camp on Monday.”

“On Monday,” she stammered, in that same tone of wild and incredulous dismay.

Still looking at him she sat down upon a chair. She sat down very carefully, her hand still pressed to her throat. She seemed shrunken, crushed into that chair by what he had told her; but still she refused to believe it. In a low voice she said:

“They’ll not take you. They want the miners back here at home. They can’t possibly take a good man like you.”

He avoided her beseeching eyes.

“They have taken me.”

The words extinguished her. There was a long silence, then almost in a whisper she asked:

“What way did you have to do a thing like that, Sammy? Oh, what way did you have to do it?”

He answered doggedly:

“I cannot help it, mother, I cannot go on any longer we the pit.”

It was about five o’clock on the following Tuesday evening and though still light the streets were quiet as David walked along Lamb Lane and entered his house. In the narrow hall he stopped, his first glance towards the little electro-plated tray upon which Jenny, with her deathless sense of etiquette,
always placed his mail. One letter lay upon the tray. He picked it up and his dark face brightened.

He went into the kitchen, where he sat down by the small fire and began to take off his boots, unlacing them with one hand and staring at the letter in the other.

Jenny brought him his slippers. That was unusual, but lately Jenny had been most unusual, worried and almost timid, looking after him in small ways, as though subdued by his sombre uncommunicativeness.

He thanked Jenny with a look. He could smell the sweet odour of port on her breath but he refrained from speaking, he had spoken so often and he was tired of words. She took very little, she explained, just a glass when she felt low. The disgrace—her own word—of his dismissal from New Bethel Street had naturally predisposed her to lowness.

He opened the letter and read it slowly and carefully, then he rested it on his knee and gazed into the fire. His face was fixed and unimpassioned and mature. In those six months since the disaster he seemed to have grown older by a good ten years.

Jenny moved about the kitchen pretending to be busy but glancing at him furtively from time to time, as if curious to know what was in the letter. She felt that deep currents were working secretly within David’s mind; she did not fully understand; a look, almost of fear, was in her eyes.

“Is it anything important?” she asked at length. She could not help asking, the words slipped out.

“It’s from Nugent,” he answered.

She stared at him blankly, then her features sharpened with temper. She distrusted this sudden and spontaneous friendship with Harry Nugent which had sprung from the disaster at the Neptune; it struck her almost as an alliance; she felt excluded and was jealous.

“I thought it was about a job, I’m about sick of you going idle.”

He roused himself and looked at her.

“In a way it is about a job, Jenny. It’s the answer to a letter I wrote Harry Nugent last week. He’s joining the ambulance corps, going out to France as a stretcher-bearer, and I’ve decided that the only thing to do is to go with him.”

Jenny gasped—her reaction was unbelievably intense. She turned quite green, a ghastly colour, her whole body wilted. She looked cowed. He thought for a moment she was going
to be sick, she had lately had some queer bouts of sickness, and he jumped up and went over to her.

“Don’t worry, Jenny,” he said. “There isn’t the slightest reason to worry.”

“But why must you go?” she quavered in that odd frightened voice. “Why have you got to let this Nugent drag you in? You don’t believe in it, there isn’t any need for you to go.”

He was moved by her concern; lately he had resigned himself to the conviction that Jenny’s love for him was not what it had been. And he hardly knew how to answer her. It was true that he had no patriotism. The political machinery which had produced the war was linked in his mind with the economic machinery which had produced the disaster in the Neptune. Behind each he saw that insatiable lust for power, for possessions; the quenchless self-interest of man. But although he had no patriotism he felt he could not keep out of the war. This was exactly Nugent’s feeling too. It was awful to be in the war but it was more awful not to be in the war. He need not go to the war to kill. He could go to the war to save. To stand aside palely while humanity lay locked in the anguished struggle was to proclaim himself a fraud for ever. It was like standing upon the pit-bank of the Neptune watching the cage descend filled with men upon whose foreheads was the predestined seal of the disaster, standing aside and saying, you are in the cage, my brothers, but I will not enter with you because the terror and the danger which await you should never have arisen.

He put out his hand and stroked her cheek.

“It’s difficult to explain, Jenny. You know what I’ve told you… since the disaster… since I got the sack from the school… I’m chucking the B.A., teaching, everything. I’m going to make a complete break and join the Federation. Well, while this war is on there’s not much chance to do what I want to do at home. It’s a case of marking time. Besides, Sammy has gone and Harry Nugent is going. It’s the only thing.”

“Oh no, David,” she whimpered. “You can’t go.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said soothingly. “There’s no need to worry about that.”

“No, you can’t, you can’t leave me now, you can’t desert me at a time like this.” She created the picture of herself forsaken, not only by him, but by everyone she had trusted.

“But, Jenny—”

“You can’t leave me now.” She was quite beside herself, her words came all in a rush. “You’re my husband, you can’t desert me. Don’t you see I’m going… that we’re going to have a baby.”

There was a complete silence. Her news staggered him, not for an instant had he suspected it. Then she began to cry, letting her head droop while the tears simply ran out of her eyes, to cry as she always cried when she had offended him. He could not bear to see her cry like this; he flung his arm round her.

“Don’t cry, Jenny, for God’s sake don’t cry. I’m glad, I’m terribly glad; you know I’ve always wanted this to happen. You took me by surprise there for a minute. That was all. Don’t cry. Jenny, please, don’t cry like that, as if it was your fault.”

She sniffed and sobbed on his chest, snuggling up to him. The colour came back into her face, she looked relieved now that she had told him. She said:

“You won’t leave me now, will you, David, not until our baby’s born at any rate?”

There was something almost pitiful in Jenny’s eagerness to share the baby with him; but he did not see it.

“Of course not, Jenny.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

He sat down and took her on his knee. She still kept her head against his chest as though afraid to let him read her eyes.

“The idea,” he said gently, “crying like that. Surely you knew I’d be pleased. Why on earth didn’t you tell me before?”

“I thought you might be angry. You had that much to worry you and you’re different lately. I don’t mind telling you you’ve frightened me.”

He said mildly:

“I don’t want to frighten you, Jenny.”

“You won’t go then, will you, David? You won’t leave me till it’s all over?”

He took her chin gently in his fingers and raised her tear-stained face to his. Looking into her eyes he said:

“I’ll not think about the army until you’re all right, Jenny.” He paused, holding her glance firmly in his. She looked vaguely frightened again, ready to shrink, to start,
to weep. Then he said: “But will you promise to give over drinking that confounded port, Jenny?”

There was no quarrel. A sudden final relief swept over her and she burst into tears.

“Oh yes, David, I promise,” she wailed. “I really do promise, I swear to you I’ll be good. You’re the best husband in the world, David, and I’m a silly, stupid, wicked thing. But oh, David…”

He held her closely, soothing her, his tenderness strengthened and renewed. Amongst all the troubled darkness of his mind he felt a shaft of light strike hopefully. He had a vision of new life rising out of death. Jenny’s son and his; and in his blindness he was happy.

Suddenly there came a ring at the bell. Jenny raised her head, flushed now and relieved, her mood altered with almost childish facility.

“Who can it be?” she queried interestedly. They were not used to front-door callers at such an hour. But before she could surmise the bell rang again. She rose smartly and hurried to answer it.

She was back in a minute, quite excited and impressed.

“It’s Mr. Arthur Barras,” she announced. “I showed him in the parlour. Can you think of it, David, young Mr. Barras himself? He’s asked to see you.”

The fixed look returned to David’s face, his eyes hardened.

“What does he want?”

“He didn’t say. I didn’t think to ask him, naturally. But imagine him calling at our house. Oh, goodness, if I’d only known I’d have had a fire going in the front room.”

There was a silence. The social occasion did not seem to strike David as important. He rose from his chair and went slowly to the door.

Arthur was walking up and down in the parlour in a state of acute nervous tension and as David entered he started quite visibly. He looked at David for an instant with wide, rather staring eyes and then came hurriedly forward.

“I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you,” he said, “but I simply had to come.” With a sudden gesture, he sank into a chair and covered his eyes with his hand. “I know how you feel. I don’t blame you a bit. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had refused to see me. But I had to come, I’m in such a state I had to see you. I’ve always liked you and looked up to you, David. I feel that you’re the only one who can help me.”

David sat down quietly at the table opposite Arthur. The contrast between them was singularly pathetic: the one rent by a painful agitation, the other firmly controlled with strength and forbearance in his face.

“What do you want?” David asked.

Arthur uncovered his eyes abruptly and fixed them on David with a desperate intentness.

“The truth, that’s what I want. I can’t rest, I can’t sleep, I can’t be still until I get it. I want to know if my father is to blame for the disaster. I must know, I must. You’ve got to help me.”

David averted his gaze, struck by that strange recurrent pity which Arthur seemed always destined to evoke in him.

“What can I do?” he asked in a low voice. “I said all I had to say at the Inquiry. They wouldn’t listen to me.”

“They can reopen the Inquiry.”

“What would be the use?”

An exclamation broke from Arthur, a sound lost in bitterness, between a laugh and a sob.

“Justice,” Arthur exclaimed wildly. “Ordinary decency and justice. Think of these men killed, cut off suddenly, dying horribly. Think of the suffering among their wives and children. O God! it won’t bear thinking of. If my father is to blame it’s too brutal and horrible to think it should all be glossed over and forgotten.”

David got up and went to the window. He wanted to give Arthur the chance to collect himself. Presently he said:

“I felt exactly that way too at first. Worse, perhaps… hatred… a terrible hatred. But I’ve tried to get over it. It’s not easy. It’s human nature to have these violent reactions. When a man throws a bomb at you, your first reaction is to pick it up and throw it back. I talked all this out with Nugent when he was here. I wish you’d met Nugent, Arthur, he’s the sanest man I know. But throwing back the bomb isn’t a bit of good. It’s far better to ignore the man who threw the bomb and concentrate on the organisation which made it. It’s no good looking for individual punishment over this Neptune disaster when the whole economic system behind the disaster is to blame. Do you see what I mean, Arthur? It’s no good lopping off a branch when the disease is at the very roots of the tree.”