Chapter VI: Living It Down

Nan did not come too near Cherry’s chair during the next day. Her attitude was like that Rag had once shown, on being cuffed for eating a chicken. In Nan’s case, however, it was fore-fear instead of aft-fear. That Cherry would “have it in for her,” she did not doubt for a moment.

It was as she swept the hearthstone that she noticed its unusual whiteness.

“There are angels hovering round,” hummed the man in the chair, and let out further hints, with odd smackings of the lips and winking of the eyes to say what a gem of beauty this feminine visitant of his had been.

Apparently, the ruse had not succeeded.

Everything was conjecture.

He was trying to get at Nan by jealousy. She must have a weak spot somewhere. He was trying to find it. But beyond a look of utter contempt, Nan gave no signs that she resented another woman’s invasion into her domestic circle.

Cherry felt despondent at the result of his art. He went wearily back to the bashful appeal of Paul to the Macedonians, asking them to give a good collection. Cherry discovered that he liked Paul, his reasoning, his pride in always following his trade of tent-making whilst he continued as an agitator--his magnificent endurance, and cool defiance of prison, lash and doom.

“If we’d had a son we’d have called him Paul,” he observed once to Nan.

She started at the confidence.

Their eyes met in a mutual memory of all those little sons, buried one after the other.

Then--hers hardened.

“Every man as is born should be strangled at birth,” avowed the Amazon.

For, to Nan, every man born was the inveterate invader into a woman’s liberty.

It was a cry worthy of those early Amazons of which the woman-hater is the masculine reflex.

Cherry grinned at the idea of a manless world. But the brief flash of his old humour faded on Nan answering a knock at the door, to return, followed by a parson--one of those men with feminine voices, and look of super-humility that comes from a sojourn in this wicked world.

Aunt Miriam had sent him.

Cherry anathematised Aunt Miriam as he endeavored to talk to Mr. Watts. Because he was “downed,” weakened, these vultures were after his soul, on the false pretence of giving him sympathy. He sat answering Mr. Watts in “Ayes” and “Noes,” and as the parson went out Cherry, felt that cut off as he was, the fibre of his manhood was yet of sterner stuff than that of Mr. Watts. There was the atmosphere of tea-party and mothers’ meetings about Mr. Watts.

Noon brought a bundle of literature from the Brand from the Burning Publishing House.

This also, Cherry set down as Aunt Miriam’s work. But it was the letter from the Company which engrossed him most. His hands shook as he tore open the envelope. It was brief and business-like, in very clear typewriting that left no doubt of the Company’s intention to award him ten shillings per week--reckoning his earnings at the porter’s pound they had paid him weekly for five-and-twenty years. According to the Workmen’s Compensation Act, they were giving him half of his earnings.

He looked down on the paper, with knitted brow.

Nan was standing, trying not to look concerned.

Cherry told her the contents of the letter.

“When our Polly’s gone,” she said, “we shall ha’ clean teeth.”

Cherry blushed.

His body tinged with shame at the idea that before Polly “went” they could feed on her. He had peculiar notions about parents feeding on their children.

“Tha’ll ha’ to give the dog up,” yapped Nan, triumphantly.

For a whole year and a half she had agitated for the removal of Rag. Persistence was one of her savage virtues. In this economic catastrophe that would press heavily on herself, too, she could yet triumph in the near accomplishment of a victory for the removal of the rickety dog.

Cherry stared at her.

He was realising the Titan she was.

He rendered her unwilling admiration.

What a soldier she would have made!

But--she was quite a misfit here.

That evening, as he sat smoking, the sticky Salvation labels bearing the words, “The Meek Shall Inherit the Land,” and “Prepare to Meet thy God,” which had been stuck upon the jamb-stones, in irony of spirits, by Cherry, he thought out his letter to the Company.

He was making a bid for the whole of his porter’s earnings, and justifying it on the grounds that his reading of the word “earnings” included also the tips by which he had doubled his meagre wage. Billy Breeze came in to play a game of draughts, and posted the letter on going out after supper. Billy had suggested that Cherry instead of rotting in the corner, by the wash-boiler, should have a machine made specially for him, similar to one used by a legless man he had seen at Cloughford. In this Cherry acquiesced, saying he would “see Bill right” if he’d order the machine.

Thus started the great battle in the heart of William Cherry--the battle against the sense that ever ridiculed his broken body.

Owing to Billy’s assiduous efforts, the machine came in the middle of the following week. For two days Cherry made no attempt to go out on the thing. The wash-boiler assumed havenish qualities he had never seen in it before. It was on a wet morning, two hours before noon, that Grandma Breeze saw him coming laboriously up the flagstones. He had a chalky hue of countenance that alarmed her, and his attempt to smile in the old way hurt her so much that her eyes were full of tears when he reached her.

“Do you think you’re fit to be out?” she queried.

Cherry smiled the twisted smile.

“In the pink,” said the dwindled voice.

After he had gone she sat down in the yellow-stoned kitchen, and had what Grandad Breeze defined as “a good bawl.”

Cherry proceeded on his way through the town. Heavy mist clogged the air of the streets as he passed through them. He had the strange, almost uncanny feeling that he was in a foreign land, so changed and painful was his journey through the old town. The market-clock was lit up, owing to the murk. It was like a great, leering face laughing at him. He met a few people he had known, and they shed more sympathy on him. He tried to believe that he did not hate them, as they gave their narratives on their personal feelings on hearing of his accident. They were people of Narrowfields, genuine, well-meaning, warm-hearted people. Yet--he hated them. He zig-zagged along on the flagstones, like a man in a bad dream. Women peeped at him, sometimes, through the misted windows. They were sorry for him. Some men would have enjoyed it. He hadn’t been built for a cripple. Now, if he had been made like that chap in the next bed to him when in hospital--the chap who didn’t want to go home because he was tucked up six times a day by a pretty nurse, and fed and washed like a big baby--how much easier it would have been!

He had all the hard temper of the man facing possible ridicule for the first time.

Every eye that rested on him seemed to prick him like red-hot needles.

He passed outside the police-station.

Some hazy idea of seeing the Inspector about the episode with Nan had been in his head all morning! But, this irritant new sense of self-consciousness unmanned his resolve. He trundled back to the haven by the wash-boiler.

The exhaustion of his journey, physical and mental, was upon him as he rapped at the door.

Nan came and opened it.

She helped him ungraciously up the step with a “Oh! back already” sort of face.

For a moment he wished she had been of the soft sort. Then--with a swift revulsion of feeling he began to think that he was becoming feminine, in his crippled state.

Mechanically he ate his dinner.

But he could not read afterwards, when Nan had pushed him into the corner.

He lay back with closed eyes.

On one occasion, opening them suddenly, from a brief sleep, he encountered the steady gaze of Nan. There was in that flash of a look he caught, triumph, mixed with something he could not fathom.

Whilst the old apathy of weakness--reaction from his first endeavors to grapple with life, that had become a giant all at once, was back upon him, rain set in. In the dead of the night it was always raining. In the morning the dull sound of rain gurgling by the street kerbs came to him. Mist hung on the walls of the stone-yard opposite, and the mallets of the workers in the sheds, stamp, stamp, became to the man sitting motionless in the corner, curiously like the sound of stone men, on stone feet, marching with stony boots forwards, on a great stone road that was--the world. It was a curious fancy. He recognised it as such himself, but he was not sufficiently analytical to trace in his fancy the stirrings of his mind, under the apathy of physical weakness, making a symbolic picture out of those common sounds made by the stone-workers, a picture wherein he was typifying the yet subconscious determination to march on, spite of all obstacles, to some new place in the world, to conquer all things, by sheer will, courage, and “sticking it.”

Nan went to Tanner Fold some little time afterwards. Cherry had sent a postcard to the little charwoman, asking her to come in if she saw a chalk mark on the window-sill. As soon as Nan had gone, Cherry got Polly to chalk the window-sill, before she went out to the practice. But she had to be let into the secret. How she giggled. Polly was very busy these days. She was making herself a new dress out of pink zephyr, and a new hat for the Charity, whilst singing-lessons and lads alternately took up most of her nights. The reluctant spell Adam Wild had put upon her was almost vanished, though she looked forwards very much to the Cherrydale Tide that was approaching. She would sit down in the drab, dirty kitchen, sewing away at the pink dress on the old box of a sewing-machine that Cherry called a “crushing-engine” from its din, singing bits of Grand Opera and dreaming flapperish dreams. For her life in the hap-hazard house had never yet been an integral part. On this night, before she went to the practice, she made Cherry a cup of Oxo.

“A1, Polly,” Cherry commented, as she took the cup from him.

“Dad!” she said, as she stood quite ready for the practice.

“Humph!” said Cherry.

Polly blushed.

“Do you think I don’t care?” she asked, looking at him very straight.

In the sheen of the lamplight her eye took a resemblance to Aunt Dinah’s when Aunt Dinah was young.

Cherry looked up, smiling--almost his old smile.

“Well, I do,” she avowed, suddenly, passionately.

She had come up to his chair, put her arms round his neck, and was kissing him, whilst something wet touched his cheek.

She was gone, leaving him with an impression of still waters under the froth of this flapper exterior, and with a feeling of surprise, not altogether unmixed with fear. She was the child of that line of Harkers who at times cared too little, at times too much. She had the warmth of heart that belonged to the Cherries. What a combination!

Whilst he pondered it, Jane arrived, with the brown bag--and--a black eye, which she apologetically half-blamed herself for. Tim had done it. But she had been to blame for not covering it up from the air.

Cherry watched her in the same old cloud of dust, a ministering angel of the queerest order. The black eye gave him an odd feeling of revulsion--became an offence, crying out against the light of the twentieth century that could yoke iron to steam. Whilst as she poured out the story of her struggling life, its persistence of endurance, of passive courage that would make all fiction fall before its fact, his indignation made him feel quite sick, until he remembered--that the way of brute force had been his way of dealing with Nan. He stared at the black eye until it made him feel quite sick. He sat in thought after Jane had gone.

Polly came in before her mother.

Nan had not got drunk this time.

If she noticed the change in the kitchen she did not show it--or get wild. Cherry’s heart sank. She was not jealous. It was like being against a stone wall, to which one could find no entry, a door to which there was no key.

Every morning for another week she got him up with the same attitude of resenting the job, and every night she lifted him into bed, whilst he gritted his teeth at being lifted by any one--most of all, Nan. There was no danger of the cyclone for another week. Nan was studying election literature. Nan took after Pa Harker in her political views. Nan would vote Blue. She was a great upholder of the Royal Family.

To Cherry it seemed that the grey days were all alike--excepting that washing-day was a little worse than the others. He would say to Nan, sometimes, looking at the clock, “It’s like to be after that time.”

But it was not.

He discovered that Greenwich time is not the way to reckon time at all, in the matter of living. He struggled painfully to read a little, but his attention wandered. There were so many things to conquer. Nan--and the Company--and, last but not least, himself, the dejected, hating, sensitive, morbid, inward-driven self that was as much of a stranger to him as though some other man’s soul had crept into his broken body--with only this exception--that there was the load of bitter memories brought from that past life of his, six-foot-one-life, manly and glorious, to this--wherein he wandered round and round, in a maze of thought, wondering how to get over difficulties that were so simple, when one had--feet.

The days went by without his being the least bit aware that in an infinitesimal degree, he was adapting himself slowly and painfully to his changed conditions--that this agony was killing itself, as do all agonies.

Least of all did he realise that the sight of Jane’s blackened flesh was changing his whole philosophy of life. It took another week before that revulsion of feeling he had felt took definite shape in a weak resolve not to hit Nan again.