Noble in Reason (12 page)

It was not without a certain youthful resolution, a determination to make my life go well from this fresh start, that I returned to Hudley. My sojourn in London, I reflected, had after all been rather in the nature of a holiday until its tragic termination; it was only in the West Riding that my real life was to be found. When John and I, after passing together through the ordeal of the inquest and the funeral, returned to the north, I own I felt a romantic excitement as the train entered Yorkshire and mill chimneys and pit-head-stocks became features of the scene. I was returning home, and I experienced a youthful gush of affection for my native landscape. My father met us at the station and greeted me with loving warmth; he looked old and haggard and I felt sorry for him about Henry, so that my heart was tender towards him. It was something of a shock to find that he was not living in Ashroyd but in humdrum lodgings—I knew this of course but had never clearly visualized it—and that neither my mother nor Netta was with him. Still, my spirits remained fairly high until after tea. When we had settled ourselves round the fire my father turned to me eagerly and said:

“Now, Chris, tell me all about Henry.”

“But, father, there's nothing to tell. I don't know
why
he did it—I just found him,” I began miserably, the sweat starting to my forehead.

“Don't think I blame you about Henry, Chris,” said my father, fixing me with his piercing blue eyes.

My heart sank. It had not occurred to me before that I could be blamed. My father did not even know about Florrie, I reflected, yet considered me the obvious target for blame!

“Father, have you thought over that matter I mentioned in my letter?” put in John,

My father frowned. “I have had a letter from Josiah Hodgson myself,” he answered stiffly.

It appeared that Mr. Hodgson had offered to lend my father five hundred pounds with which to begin business for himself again. It was plain that he made this offer because he felt himself guilty with regard to Henry's death—his friend's son had been entrusted to his care and he had failed in his trust. I respected him very much for this offer, but understood why my father hated to accept it. John wished my father to accept the loan, and thought his reluctance characteristically “la-di-da” and silly. He sat with his arms folded and his face grim, his heavy lower lip protruding in silent contempt, while my father raged on, winding himself up to ever greater heights of anger.

“Why didn't Josiah offer the loan before, when it would have been some good? If he'd had any true friendship, he would have offered it before, and none of all this need have happened. Henry would have been alive!” cried my father, glaring round at us.

At this John moved impatiently.

“What's the good of all this?” he muttered. “We can't bring Henry back again. It's cutting off our nose to spite our face, to refuse good money when it's offered.”

“Blood-money!” exclaimed my father. “You are heartless, John—you are ready to profit by your brother's death.”

John coloured. “That's not true. It'd be a lot easier for me to stay with Uncle Alfred than to come back to Hudley and bother with you.”

“Stay with your Uncle Alfred then!” shouted my father.

“There's Chris to think of,” said John.

My father and brother both turned their eyes on me. That anyone should change his plans on my account was painful to me, and I made hurried disclaimers: “Don't trouble about me. Don't do anything for my sake.”

“That's silly, Chris,” said John in his most sensible, down-to-earth tone. “Of course we have to trouble about you.”

“Don't think we blame you about Henry, Chris,” repeated my father.

“What's the point of keeping on dragging in Henry?” said John. “Poor old Henry's dead and gone. There's no need to make ourselves more miserable than we need be about it.”

“You are heartless, John!” exclaimed my father again.

I hardly knew whether my acute discomfort in listening to this argument was outweighed by my relief in the cessation of my father's questions about Henry, or no; whether to be glad when John presently left to catch a train to Ashworth, or oppressed by being left alone with my father.

In the next few days oppression won, however, and I longed for some relief from his company. So one sunny afternoon, my father being at his employment, I conceived the idea of bicycling over to Ashworth to see Netta. Giving our landlady a message to this effect for my father, I set off cheerfully enough, and my spirits rose with the fresh air and exercise and my own cleverness in finding the way; after three years in London the gradients of the West Riding hills surprised me but I enjoyed conquering them, and was excited by the prospects they afforded. But as I approached Ashworth my confidence (as usual on any enterprise I undertook outside the world of books) sank low; I felt that I had done wrong in acting on my own initiative, I should not have come without receiving an invitation,
or at any rate warning John. I therefore changed my destination and sought out my uncle's mill. It was large, so that many questions were necessary to track down my brother, and by the time I had penetrated to his small office, I felt quite daunted and entered with a hangdog and sheepish air, which deepened as I perceived that my brother was not at all pleased to see me.

“Chris!” he exclaimed, frowning. “What are you doing here? Is there anything wrong at home?” he added quickly.

“I just came to see Netta,” I explained, hanging my head lower than before.

“Well!” exclaimed John. “You do have the daftest ideas, I must say, Chris. However, now you're here I suppose I'd better take you in to see Uncle Alfred.”

“Will he be vexed I've come?” I enquired.

“Now see here, Chris,” said John sternly, rising and standing rather menacingly close beside me: “Uncle Alfred isn't your sort—and he isn't Henry's sort. But that doesn't mean you have to be rude to him. As a personal favour I ask you to behave as nicely to him as you can.”

The implication of this speech—that I was a wildly eccentric person who only liked certain “sorts” of people and was ill-mannered to all others—astonished me and wounded me so deeply that I could not find a word to say in my defence. With an exasperated snort, John pushed me in front of him out of his little cubby-hole, then led the way to my uncle's much more handsome office. He was not there, however, but “in the mill,” as the West Riding phrase goes, and this perhaps mitigated my first impression of him, for standing at the end of a row of looms and haranguing a foreman in the quiet tone proper to the din and clatter of the shuttles, he appeared at his best, knowledgeable, capable, in his element. Still I saw at once that John was right and Uncle Alfred was “not my sort”; short and broad and bald, with a red face, coarse features,
small shrewd grey eyes, a look of invincible complacency and a great deal of gold watch-chain, he would have, I felt convinced, not a single copy of Shakespeare in his house. (This was then my criterion of culture.)

John introduced me. My uncle nodded, eyed me shrewdly, and said some words, but I had forgotten the knack of hearing the human voice through the sound of looms, and bent forward (I was taller than he) perplexed. My uncle with the slight look of contempt which the professional gives the amateur put his hand on my arm and pushed me out of the long shed through the swinging wooden doors. The noise dropped to a mild hum as soon as the doors swung to behind us.

“So you're Chris, eh?” said my uncle.

His speech was very Yorkshire and altogether inferior to my father's.

“I just came to see Netta,” said I hesitantly.

“Aye. Well—you'd best take him up to Ashville to tea,” said my uncle to John, with a backward jerk of his head presumably in the direction of his house.

This proved to be a large solid Victorian mansion standing in its own grounds, with a huge (and to me horrifying) cactus plant, several feet from prickled tip to tip, occupying a circle inside a low wall, before the front porch. Red geraniums abounded and a gardener in an apron was tying up plants. The interior of the house was furnished with what 1 even then felt to be stuffy and overpowering luxury; carpets, upholstery, curtains, were all of thick plush material on which sprawled enormous bright-coloured patterns. My aunt Minna proved to be a thin, worried-looking woman with traces of former blonde prettiness; she was handsomely dressed but apt to “natter” about unimportant details, and pretended to be afraid of her husband, whom she really controlled. My cousin Edie, a short, plump, bouncing young woman in her twenties
with a great deal of yellow hair and a loud cheerful laugh, was not afraid of anyone, not even of John, with whom she was obviously in love—nor did she care who knew this last fact; she allowed it to appear in all its bluff honesty. These two women had evidently been kind to Netta, for she showed no fear or even diffidence in their presence. Summoned from upstairs by a loud shout from Edie—“your brother's come to see you, love,”—Netta came trotting obediently down the upper flight of the massive staircase with a pleasant smile, expecting to see John, but suddenly perceiving me, her smile yielded to a joyous peal of laughter, and crying: “Chris! Chris!” she hurled herself down the stairs into my arms.

“Fond of your little sister, eh?” boomed Uncle Alfred in my ear.

“Er—yes,” said I.

My visit might, I thought, be counted a fair success and I was disappointed by John's look of gloom as, walking beside me while I wheeled my bicycle, he guided me after tea (a very sumptuous Yorkshire high tea) to the road I must take for Hudley. I despised Alfred Jarmayne and his family as ignorant and ill-mannered provincials, of course, but I thought (mistakenly) I had kept this sentiment fairly well concealed.

When John next came to see my father and myself, he renewed his persuasions to accept Mr. Hodgson's loan, even more strongly. It seemed to me that my father, though he raged against John's heartlessness as he had done before, was in reality weakening in his opposition and would be glad of an excuse to yield. This was provided for him on the following Saturday afternoon by Mr. Hodgson who, coming to the West Riding to visit his employers—or perhaps arranging such a visit to suit his real purpose—called upon us, and, planted solemnly in a rather gimcrack armchair out of which he bulged, a hand on each solid knee, scolded my
father for, as he put it, trying to kick against the pricks.

“You've two other sons and a daughter to provide for, Edward,” he said solemnly, “besides your good wife, you know. We have our duty to do even if our hearts are broke.”

“It's easy for you to say that, Josiah,” exclaimed my father irritably.

“Happen it's not as easy as you think,” returned Mr. Hodgson, unperturbed. “Anyway, I shall take it as a personal favour if you will accept the loan, Edward.”

“Oh, have it your own way!” shouted my father suddenly.

He rushed out of the room, banging the door, and could be heard pacing rapidly about the room above.

“You won't regret the loan, I promise you, Mr. Hodgson,” said John.

“That's as may be,” returned Mr. Hodgson with a sceptical sniff.

So the new business came into being, in a small building at the bottom of the town called from the name of its street Hilbert Mills. (Eventually all the buildings on the top side of the street came to share this name.)

I accepted it as my duty, of course, in spite of the disillusionments I had experienced since my return to Yorkshire, to help my family in this new venture in any way I could; keenly anxious for the Jarmayne welfare and most earnest in my efforts to promote it, I ran about under John's command with immense zeal if little skill. This latter defect, however, John was determined to remedy, and I found myself launched upon a three-year course in textiles in the Hudley Technical College, which was then just rising to fame. The early stages of this course, with its simple textbooks, were easy to me and I had a pleasant feeling of progress and achievement, of proving equal to the change in the family fortunes and assisting the rise of the Jarmaynes.

For from the first the new venture prospered. Quite soon, as it seemed to me, the short Ashroyd sub-lease falling in, we were financially strong enough to take our furniture out of store, re-occupy the house and resume family life there.

The preparations for this return were highly enjoyable. To save expense, we decided—or rather, John had decided, John decided everything Jarmayne nowadays—to do everything except the actual cartage ourselves; we put up beds and laid carpets, we hung curtains and scrubbed floors. In these tasks we were assisted on the first day by Beatrice Darrell. I had not previously seen her since my return to Hudley, for Mrs. Darrell had been struggling with the illness which was beginning to make her a permanent invalid, and Beatrice had been busy nursing her. I was delighted when, on answering a quick knock at the back door, I found Beatrice there in a green frock and a highly becoming apron, sparkling and lively and sophisticated as always. I greeted her warmly and gladly accepted her offers of help; we made merry together over the unpacking of a crate, kneeling side by side and plunging our arms into the straw. Suddenly she turned to me and whispered:

“Was it my fault, Chris?”

I did not know to what she referred, and gaped at her.

“About Henry, I mean,” said Beatrice.

Ashamed to have forgotten my brother's tragedy so soon, I coloured and began to stammer my usual answer: “I don't
know
why he did it.” But I was interrupted by John, who had come downstairs unheard and was standing in the kitchen doorway.

“Don't worry the boy,” he said. “Why should you ask him that, anyway?”

His tone was harsh and inimical, and he fixed his eyes on Beatrice in a strange scornful glare. Beatrice without a word
stood up, dusted her fine long hands together and slipped out of the house.