Love on the Dole (2 page)

Mrs Hardcastle went to the foot of the stairs again to call the boy and girl. Still no response. She frowned, sighed, lit a taper at the gas and went upstairs to the back room. A candle, secured in its own grease stood on a chair-seat by the bed; over the chair-back was flung, anyhow, feminine clothes. The rusting iron bed-end was similarly adorned except that the clothes there belonged to a boy. Except an old chest of drawers and a curtain suspended in front of an alcove by the fireplace, doubtless a makeshift wardrobe, there was nothing else in the room.

‘Come along, there. Come along,’ cried Mrs Hardcastle, petulantly, as she lit the candle: ‘Harry. Sal. … D’y’ hear?’ She shook one of the forms.

A smothered grumbling. Sally withdrew her head from the thin coverings and yawned. Eighteen, a gorgeous creature whose native beauty her shabbiness could not hide. Eyes dark, lustrous, haunting; abundant black hair tumbling in waves; a full, ripe, pouting mouth and a low, round bosom. A face and form such as any society dame would have given three-quarters of her fortune to possess. Sally wore it carelessly as though youth’s brief hour was eternal; as though there was no such thing as old age. She failed in her temper; but when roused, colour tinted her pallid cheeks such as the wind whipped up when it blew from the north or east.

Tea brewed, ma?’ she asked, rubbing her eyes.

‘Long since,’ her mother lied, adding, plaintively: ‘Come on wi’ y’. Get up. … Havin’ me trapesin’ about like this…. Why can’t y’ get up first cal… .When I was your age I was up wi’ t’ lark. … Harry.
Harry.
Y’ll be late for work. Oh,
willy’
get up. Sick an’ tired I am wastin’ breath.’

Sally prodded him with her elbow: ‘Hey, dopey… . D’y hear …? Gerrup.’

He stirred, grumbled, struggled half-heartedly to a sitting position, and, still keeping his eyes closed, groped over the bed for his clothes: ‘What day is it, ma?’ he mumbled.

‘Monday, lad, an’ pourin’ o’ rain. They’ll be wet through i’

Price’s yard,’ coaxingly: ‘Come on, son. … Hurry, lad, or y’ll ha’ no time for y’ breakfast.’ She went downstairs.

Sally groaned: ‘Rainin’…. Allus rainin’…. Ne’er does nowt else i’ this hole.’ She threw the bed clothes back, got out of bed and began to dress. Harry, fair hair all tousled, crawled on all fours to the edge of the bed and stepped on to the icy lino. He shivered, his skin pimpling with the cold: ‘Stockings gone agen,’ he mumbled, dithering and groping about the bed end: impatiently: ‘Aw, Ah’m sick of it all.’

‘Wrap ‘em round y’ neck of a night, then y’ll know where t’ find ‘em,’ snapped Sally. She pulled on her knickers and half-turned. ‘Open y’r eyes: there they are on floor.’ She stood in front of the candle slipping her clothes over her head, an enormous shadow of herself reflected on wall and ceiling.

Harry muttered something, dragged on his stockings and knickerbockers, stumbled past her and went below, his sullen expression mirroring the surly dissatisfaction he felt towards the day’s prospect. Rebellion stirred in his heart. Bleak visions both of the school classroom and of Price and Jones’s pawnshop where he worked as half-time clerk, rose to his mind. He would be writing tickets there from half past six this morning until school time; he would return after school and continue writing pawntickets until the place closed. Then it would be bed time again. He could smell the stale pungency of the place after it had been shut up over the week-end. His spirits retched. It was incredible, shameful, unbearable. No escape;
had
to go. And tedious lessons on top of it all. A lump rose to his throat as he pushed his hands under the cold water of the tap. The shock of the icy water roused him; the fair hairs on his thin arms stood upright. Then he remembered!

Why, how on earth had he overlooked - ! He’d done with schooling, had finished with it on Friday last! He now was free! His wondering spirits revived. Free! They contracted the instant he recalled Price and Jones’s pawnshop and his mother’s and father’s desire that he should accept Mr Price’s half-promise of full time employment there. Price and Jones’s though!
that
above all things. Couldn’t they understand that he’d had a surfeit of desks there? that the pawnshop was a worse prison than school? Imagine it, tied up there all day until eight o’clock of an evening and nine on Saturdays. He flamed with indignation. Three years now he’d been tied up there; three years before school hours and after; three years he’d sat in that dark corner of the pledge office writing out millions of pawntickets. Damned in a fair handwriting: ‘See our Harry’s handwriting. By gum, think o’ that, now, for one of his years.’ He had paid dearly for those flattering remarks. And now, if his parents were to have their way he was to be penalized even further; they wanted him to be a scrivener for the rest of his life. They
would
do. ‘Well, Ah’m not doin’ it,’ he muttered, aloud.

‘Eh?’ answered his mother.

Harry did not hear her. He wouldn’t obey them; couldn’t; the thought was sickening; he would die. He began to cast about in efforts to devise a means of frustrating their plans. What could he do? Surely there was a way, a means. He wanted to …

Ah! Of course! But dare he? He paused, staring, unseeing into the gloom of the backyard transfixed by an idea. His heart swelled; a glow of eager anticipation suffused him; his eyes kindled. He would have to hurry, though. He’d to be at Price and Jones’s by six-thirty; and his father would be home from the night shift at the pits presently. Better be gone before he returned; might ask awkward questions as to the reason of the early departure. Hurriedly he finished washing himself to sit down to the table. And by the time Sally came downstairs he was bolting his breakfast, mechanically, while staring with absorption at the tablecloth. Yes, it was a fine notion, indeed. What luck! Dare he hope that it would materialize?

Sally said, after she had washed herself: ‘What’s up wi’
you
this morning? Why are y’ rushin’ wi’ y’ breakfast; y’ve plenty o’ time.’

She
would
say that. ‘You mind y’r own business,’ he muttered.

She smiled as she glanced at his rolled-up sleeves: ‘Old Samson,’ she said, with a provocative laugh: ‘All muscle.’

He flushed hotly: this was her favourite trick, deriding his miserable muscles when she couldn’t think of anything else to say; had been ever since once she had surprised him, stripped to the waist, standing in front of the small mirror over the slopstone endeavouring to emulate the posture of a notorious wrestler whose picture had lain propped against a jug on the table: it had been, for him, a most embarrassing moment. ‘You leave my arms alone,’ he snapped. He raised his brows accusingly: ‘You watch yourself. Ah saw y’ talkin’ t’ Ned Narkey, last night. What time did he let y’ come in, eh? That’s what Ah’d like t’ know. If pa hears about -‘

Her eyes blazed; the smile faded: ‘You mind your own business,’ contemptuously, and with a curl of the lip: ‘Choir boy! Ha!’

‘Now, children. Now children. Cant y’ ever agree? Like cat an’ dog, y’ are. Ne’er seen a pair like y’,’ said Mrs Hardcastle, wearily: ‘Get y’ breakfasts an’ let y’ food stop y’ mouths. Come on, Sal. Y’ll be quartered’ (fined a quarter hour’s wage for im-punctuality).

Harry mumbled something, resentful of Sal’s allusion to his being a chorister. She seemed to delight in provoking him. Oh, this kind of thing took all the pleasure out of the idea. He rose from the table sulkily, put on his jacket, celluloid Eton collar and stud bow, picked up his cap and sauntered to the door.

‘Where y’ goin’ now?’ asked Sally.

‘Aw. … Questions agen. … There’n back t’ see how far it is …’ With a gesture of impatience he stamped out of the house into the wet street

Doors were opening and slamming. Men, women, boys and girls were turning out to work.

The lamplighter was on his rounds extinguishing street lamps. The rain was ceasing.

DAYLIGHT waxed stronger.

Women wearing shawls so disposed as to conceal from sight and to shelter from the elements whatever it was they carried in their arms, passed him now and again. They looked, in profile, like fat cassocked monks with cowls drawn. He knew what it was they carried and whither they were bound. He paid no attention to them, proceeding, via by-streets, to fall in with a great procession of heavily booted men all wearing overalls and all marching in the same direction.

The drizzle had ceased by the time he reached the main thoroughfare.

Red and cream electric tramcars rattled by; alongside raced bicycles, municipal buses, privately owned charabancs crowded with men, the atmospheres within the vehicles opaque with tobacco smoke.

Tobacco smoke, blue and grey. It rose from the marching men like sweat vapour from distressed horses, hung in the still air or swirled, gracefully, in the draught of passers-by. Over all, the air resounded with the ringing rhythmic beat of hobnailed boots.

It fired Harry’s imagination. A tremulous elation fluttered his heart; then a despondence stole across his spirits when he remembered that he was but a trespasser. He had no real right to be here with these men. A spiteful voice in his brain whispered that he was doomed to clerking, reminded him that, even now, he wore the uniform of offices, Eton collar, stud bow and those abominable knickerbockers. He felt ashamed of himself, slunk along by the walls trying to make himself inconspicuous. All these men and boys wore overalls;
they
weren’t clerks, they were Men, engaged in men’s work. Sullen obstinacy mingled with rebellious desperation stirred in his heart. They ain’t getting me clerking,’ he muttered.

He found himself listening to the beat of the men’s feet again; an entrancing tune, inspiring, eloquent of the great engineering works where this army of men were employed. Reverently he murmured its name: ‘Marlowe’s.’ Marlowe’s, a household word throughout the universe of commerce; textiles, coal, engineering, shipping and home trade; a finger in the pie of them all.

And there, majestic, impressive, was the enormous engineering plant itself; there, in those vast works, the thousands of human pygmies moved in the close confines of their allotted sphere, each performing his particular task, an infinitesimal part of a pre-ordained whole, a necessary cog in the great organization.

He stared at it, unblinkingly. He had seen it before, often enough, but not in the light of the present as something in which he wished to be absorbed. Awe glowed in his intent eyes.

Three huge chimneys challenged the lowering sky; three banners of thick black smoke gushed forth from their parapets, swirling, billowing, expanding as they drifted, with ‘unperturbed pace’ to merge, imperceptibly into the dirty sky. A double row of six smaller chimneys thrust up their steel muzzles like cannon trained on air raiders. Tongues of flame shot up, fiery sprites, kicking their flaming skirts about for a second then diving again as instantly as they had appeared. An orange glare reflected dully on the wet slates of the foundry.

The colossal building itself sprawled sooty and grimy over a tremendous acreage enclosed within a high brick wall. Within was laid out in streets numbered in the American manner, ‘First Street’, and so on to ‘Forty-First Street’.

Railway lines, like shiny snail tracks, trailed all over the place. Presently, men would come out of their small cabins to stand at junctions with red flags in their hands, waving on or holding up the light locomotives which pulled the railway traffic about the company’s premises. At present, though, all within was quiet. The industrial city’s streets lay as in a midnight silence. Deserted save for the solitary figure of a night watchman slowly traversing Tenth Street; a slow-moving speck hemmed in on both sides by the towering steel and glass facades of the riveting and machine shops. In a moment this silence would be shattered.

Shattered by the influx of the vast concourse of men congregated outside the walls. Before six o’clock the twelve thousand of them would pass through the gates. They crammed the wide thoroughfare, a black mass of restlessness; crammed, saving a strip of roadway kept clear for the frequently arriving, bell-clanging tramcars full of more overalled men. The air stank of oily clothes, reeked with it and tobacco smoke, and buzzed with conversation to do, mostly, with week-end sport.

How easily, negligently, these men wore their supreme importance; how infinitely, ineffably superior these gods of the machine and forge were to mere pushers of pens! Occasionally, as he pushed through the crush gazing at the faces of the men, he was filled with misgiving to remember his great temerity in presuming to aspire to their status. Could it be possible that those in authority would give Harry Hardcastle a job? No, no, it was too much to expect; those expectations, desires, which would give one great happiness rarely materialized. His courage ebbed; the thought of the likelihood of returning home disappointed, of going back to Price and Jones’s, was maddening. He wouldn’t do it; he’d run away first; he’d - Oh, they must take him on here; must, must, must.

Of course they’d take him on. They’d engaged the other boys, Tom Hare, Sam Hardie, Bill Simmons and Jack Lindsay. He pushed onwards towards the gates, an expression of desperate resolve and intense determination on his face. He kept a wary eye open for a chance meeting with the four boys with whom he associated of an evening at the street corner. He almost bumped into them but managed to withdraw and disappear into the crush; they were too preoccupied in consuming a cigarette which they were taking turns in puffing. He didn’t want them to see him; they were too discouraging; chaffed him, with unmerciful derision, concerning his occupation at the pawnshop. Nor was there anything remained for Harry but to grin in a sickly, apologetic manner. Wasn’t their contempt justifiable when their romantic work was compared with his own? Look what Marlowe’s had done for them in three months’ time! Three months ago they had been at school, marbles in their pocket. They and he now were poles removed. They talked, intimately and authoritatively in terms of magic; entrancing names such as ‘machine shop’, ‘foundry’, ‘riveting shop’ slipped from their tongues with spellbinding ease. They were men already; their speech and swagger made him outcast, filled him with gnawing envy. But think on it in a few moments, perhaps, he would be as they, an engineer in embryo!