The Stars Look Down (49 page)

“Haven’t you done no more nor that? We can’t have no scrim-shankin’ here.”

“I’m not used to it,” Arthur answered. Unconsciously he made his tone propitiating as if he realised the importance of being on the right side of Warder Collins. He raised his eyes, tired with close work, and it seemed as if Warder Collins had become enlarged. His head especially, his broad deformed head was fantastically enlarged and menacing. Arthur had to shade his eyes to look at Warder Collins.

“You better bloody well hurry up and get used to it.” Though he spoke ever so gently, Warder Collins brought his deformed head a little nearer. “Don’t think you’ve dodged out of the army to have a cushy job here. Get on with the bags till you hear the bell.”

Arthur got on with the bags until he heard the bell. He heard the bell at eight o’clock. The clanging of the bell filled the deep well of the prison with a great volume of sound, and Arthur knew that he had all night before him in which to be alone.

He sat on the edge of his board staring at the broad black arrows stamped on his khaki trousers and he started to trace the pattern of the arrows with his forefinger. Why did he have the arrows stamped upon him? He was covered with arrows; his entire body, enwrapped in a daze, in a blind stupor, was pierced by flights and flights of broad black arrows. He had a queer sense of having ceased to exist, a sense of spiritual annihilation. These arrows had killed him.

At nine o’clock the lights went out and after sitting stupidly for a minute in the darkness he fell back, dressed as he was, upon the board as though he had been stunned. He slept.

But he did not sleep long. Soon after midnight he was awakened by the howling which had disturbed him on the night before. But this time the howling went on and on, as if forgotten. It was wild and altogether lost. Arthur sprang up from the bed in the darkness. His sleep had recreated him. He was alive again, horribly and painfully alive, and he could not stand the howling nor the darkness nor the solitude. He lifted up his voice and shouted.

“Stop it, stop it, for God’s sake stop it,” and he began to pound the door of his cell with his closed fists. He shouted and pounded in a frenzy and in a minute he heard others
shouting and pounding too. From the dark catacombs of the gallery rose a great sound of shouting and pounding. But no one took any notice and the great sound of shouting and pounding fell away gradually into the darkness and the silence.

Arthur stood for a moment with his cheek pressed against the cold shut grating of the door, his chest heaving, his arms outstretched. Then he tore himself away and began to pace the floor of his cell. There was no space in which to move yet he had to keep moving, it was impossible for him to be still. His hands remained clenched and he seemed to have no power to unclench his body. From time to time he flung himself upon the board but it was no use, the torment of his nerves would not let him alone. Only the pacing relieved him. He had to go on pacing.

He was still pacing when the key sounded. The sound of the key opened another day. He jumped at the sound, then he stood in the centre of his cell facing Warder Collins. He panted:

“I couldn’t sleep for that howling. I couldn’t sleep for it.”

“What a shame,” sneered Warder Collins.

“I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep. What is that howling?”

“No talking!”

“What is that howling? What is it?”

“No talking I tell you. It’s a bloke gone mad if you want to know, he’s under observation for mental. Shut up. No talking!” And Warder Collins went out.

Arthur pressed his brow into his hands, striving with all his force to control himself. His head drooped, his legs seemed incapable of supporting his body. He felt mortally ill. He could not eat the skilly which Warder Collins had left for him in the usual earthenware bowl. The smell of the skilly sickened him to death. He sat down on the board bed. He could not eat the skilly.

Suddenly the key sounded. Warder Collins came in and looked at Arthur and drew back his lip. He said:

“Why don’t you eat your breakfast?”

Arthur looked at him dully.

“I can’t.”

“Stand up when I address you.”

Arthur stood up.

“Eat your breakfast!”

“I can’t.”

Collins’s lip came back, very thin and blue.

“Not good enough for you, eh? Not fancy enough for Cuthbert? Eat your breakfast, Cuthbert.”

Arthur repeated dully:

“I can’t.”

Warder Collins stroked his chin softly. It was beginning to get good.

“Do you know what’ll happen to you?” he said. “You’ll be fed forcible if you don’t look out. You’ll have a tube forced down your gullet and your soup run into your stomach, see. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.”

“I’m sorry,” Arthur said with his eyes on the ground. “If I eat it I know I’ll be sick.”

“Pick up the bowl,” Collins ordered.

Arthur stooped and picked up the bowl. Warder Collins watched him do it. From the start Collins had taken a violent dislike to Arthur as being well-bred, educated and a gentleman. There was the other reason too. Collins explained the other reason slowly:

“I been lookin’ at you, Cuthbert. I don’t like Cuthberts. I sort of picked on you the minnet you came in. I got a son in the trenches, see. That explains a lot, see. It explains why you be goin’ to eat that breakfast. Eat your breakfast, Cuthbert.”

Arthur began to eat the skilly. He swallowed half of the watery mess, then in a laboured voice he said:

“I can’t.” And as he said it his inside revolted. He vomited over Warder Collins’s boots.

Warder Collins went livid. He thought Arthur had tried to vomit back the skilly over his boots. He forgot the technique of his sadism. Without any hesitation he hit Arthur a violent blow in the face.

Arthur turned bone white. He stared at Warder Collins with tormented eyes.

“You can’t do that,” he said, breathing painfully. “I’ll report you for striking me.”

“You will?” Warder Collins drew back his sneering lip as far as it would go. “Report that at the same time then.” He swung his fist hard and knocked Arthur down.

Arthur struck the concrete floor of the cell and lay still. He moaned weakly and at that sound Warder Collins, thinking of his son in the trenches, smiled grimly. He wiped his soiled boots on Arthur’s tunic, then, with his thin lip still drawn back, he walked out of the cell. The key sounded.

On the day that Arthur lay senseless in the puddle of skilly on the cement floor of his cell, Joe sat very sensibly before some oysters in the Central Hotel, Tynecastle. Amongst other things, Joe had recently discovered oysters. They were amazing, oysters were, amazing in every way, especially amazing in the number a man could eat. Joe could manage a dozen and a half quite easily when he was in the mood, and he was usually in the mood. And, by God, they were good—with a dash of Tabasco and a squeeze of lemon. The big fat ones were the best.

Even though certain food-stuffs, meat for instance and chicken, were rather more restricted, the people who knew their way about could always get oysters in season at the Central. For that matter Joe could get pretty well anything at the Central. He dropped in so often he was a known man there now, they all ran after him, and the head waiter, old Sue—his name was really Suchard but Joe had the hail-fellow-well-met habit of abbreviation—ran faster than any. “Why don’t you buy yourself some Crocker and Dicksons?” Joe had blandly suggested to old Sue some months before. “Ah, don’t look so frightened, I know you don’t speculate—a family man and all that, eh, Sue?—but this is
different
, you ought to buy yourself a hundred just for fun.” A week later Sue had been waiting for Joe at the entrance to the Grill Room, fawning with gratitude, almost genuflecting, showing him to the best table in the room. “Ah, that’s all right, Sue, don’t bother to say it. H’much d’you knock out of it? Sixty pounds. Keep you in cigars for a bit, eh, Sue? Ha, ha! That’s right, just you look after me, y’understand, and I’ll look after you.”

Money!—thought Joe, pronging the last oyster and letting it slide skilfully down his gullet—it certainly delivered the goods. While the waiter removed the pearly litter and brought his steak he surveyed the Grill Room genially. The Grill Room of the Central was a perfect health resort these days; even on Sundays it was bung full, the place where all the successful men gathered, the business men who were up to the elbow in the pie. Joe knew most of them, Bingham and Howard, both on the Munitions Council, Snagg the lawyer, Ingram, of Ingram Toogood the brewers, Wainwright the
big noise on the Tynecastle Exchange, and Pennington, whose specialty was synthetic jam. Joe had deliberately set out to make contacts; the people with money, anyone who might be useful to him. Personal liking meant nothing, he cultivated only those who could advance him; but he was so hearty in his manner, such an excellent mixer that he passed, everywhere, as the best of good fellows.

Two men at the window caught his eye. He nodded and they waved to him in recognition. Joe smiled with a secret gratification. A clever pair, Bostock and Stokes—yes, they’d both cut their eye teeth all right. Bostock was boots, just in a small way of business before the war began, with a little hand-me-down factory in East Town. But in these last eighteen months Bostock had reached himself a handful of army contracts. It wasn’t the contracts, of course, though they were good enough. It was the boots. There wasn’t an inch of leather in Bostock’s boots. Not one bleeding inch. Bostock had let it out to Joe the other night at the County when Bostock was just the littlest bit screwed. It was some kind of bark Bostock put in his boots and the bark was guaranteed not to last. But what was the odds, Bostock had tearfully confided, the boots lasted out most of the poor devils that wore them. Pity! “O Gord, Sho, washn’t it a pity?” Bostock had blubbered suddenly into his cham in a passion of patriotic grief.

Stokes’s line was tailoring. In the last few months he had bought all the property over his shop and could now refer casually to “his factory.” He was the biggest patriot in the whole Crockerstown district; he was always talking of “the national necessity,” he made all his women work unpaid overtime, cribbed down their dinner hour, drove them often till 8 p.m. on Sundays. Even so, most of his work was “given out” to the surrounding tenements. He paid 7
d
. per pair of breeches, and 1
s
. 6
d
. the complete uniform. Khaki shirts he gave out at 2
s
. a dozen less 2¾
d
. a reel for the cotton. Soldiers’ trousers he farmed out to be finished at 1
d
. a pair, body belts at 8
d
. a dozen, needles and cotton provided by the women. And the
profit
?—Joe moistened his lips, hungrily. Take these body belts for instance: Joe knew for a fact that they were being bought from Stokes by somebody “higher up” at 18
s
. a dozen. And the total cost to Stokes was 2
s
. 10
d
.! God, it was marvellous. True enough, some socialist swine had worked it out that Stokes paid on an average 1
d
. an hour to his tenement out-workers and
had raised the question of sweated labour in the Council. Bah! thought Joe. Sweated labour be damned! These women fought to get the work, didn’t they? There were plenty of them too—just take a look at the draggled mob that made up the margarine queues, for instance! And besides, wasn’t there a war on?

Joe’s experience was that there was nothing like a war for helping a man to throw his weight about. At least Joe put it down to the war. At Millington’s he had thrown his weight about to some tune, they were all scared of him now, Morgan, Irvine, even that old stickler Dobbie. Joe smiled. He lay back in his chair and carefully peeled the band off a light Havana cigar. Stokes and Bostock might smoke their cigars with the band on, the blinking profiteers, but he knew one better than that. Joe’s smile became dreamy. But suddenly he sat up, alert and welcoming, at the sight of Jim Mawson approaching. He had been expecting Mawson, who always took his Sunday dinner at home, to drop in about two.

Jim edged along quietly through the crowded room and sat down at Joe’s table. His heavy, hooded eyes lifted towards Joe who nodded silently in return: the greeting of two men who knew their way about. A pause while Mawson surveyed the restaurant with boredom.

“Whisky, Jim?” asked Joe at length.

Jim shook his head and yawned. Another pause. “How’s things upbye?”

“Not so dusty.” Joe pulled a slip from his waistcoat pocket in leisurely fashion. “Output last week was 200 tons shrapnel, 10,000 Mills grenades, 1,000 whizz bangs, you know, stick bombs, and 1,500 eighteen-pounders.”

“Christ,” said Jim, reaching without emotion for a toothpick out of the little glass dish, “you’ll finish the bloody war all by your bloody little self, Joe, if you’re not careful.”

Joe grinned cautiously. “Don’t you fret, Jim. Some of these shells wouldn’t finish a coco-nut. God, I never saw so many blow-hole castings as we got last week. It’s that last pig you delivered, Jim. Shocking. Half of them come out like Gruyère cheeses. Duds. We had to clay up the holes and slash on two coats of paint.”

“Ah,” Jim sighed. “Won’t carry true, eh?”

“Not on your bloody life, Jim, they’ll about go round corners if they clear the muzzle.”

“Pity,” agreed Jim, working overtime with the toothpick. Then, “How much can you take this week?” he asked.

Cocking his head Joe affected to consider: “You better send me 150 tons.”

Mawson nodded.

“And look here, Jim,” went on Joe, “invoice it as 350 this week. I’m sick of piking at an extra hundred.”

Jim’s enigmatic eye inquired, is it safe?

“We don’t want to go too quick,” he said at last, thoughtfully. “There’s Dobbie.”

“Ah, what about him? If the invoice comes in he doesn’t know what the hell we’re using in the foundry. So long as his bloody figures add up right he thinks he’s got the whole issue taped.” Perhaps Joe spoke a little violently: his early tentative efforts to corrupt Dobbie, the angular, pince-nezed, finicking cashier, had proved singularly unsuccessful. Fortunately Dobbie, if interfering, was easy to hoodwink. His whole being was bound up in the scrupulosity of his returns. But he knew nothing of the practical side. For months past Joe had been conducting these amusing little deals with Mawson. To-day, for instance, he had ordered 150 tons of scrap iron, but the invoice which he would initial as correct would be for 350 tons. Dobbie would pay for 350 tons and Mawson and Joe would split even on 200 tons at £7 a ton. A trifling matter of £1,400 profit. Only a side, issue perhaps, in the combined activities of Jim and Joe. But for all that enough to make them mildly grateful for the boon of war.