CHAPTER II—THE VOICE FROM THE STREET
THE room held a grand piano, a great fire and two men of fifty who were playing chess. The stout, bullet-headed man with the mustache which did not conceal the firmness of his mouth was Tom Bradshaw; the lean man with the goatee beard, who wore spectacles, was Walter Pate. Both were autocrats in their way. Tom ran the Spinners’ Union and was M. P. in his spare time, Walter ran music in Staithley Bridge and had no spare time except, on rare occasions, for chess.
Tom made a move. “That’s done you, you beggar,” he said, gleefully rising and filling a pipe.
Walter’s fine hand flickered uncertainly over the board. He saw defeat ahead. “If I weren’t a poor man, I’d have the law on you,” he said.
“You can’t play chess, Walter. It’s a question of brain.”
Pate shied the matches at him, and Tom sat at the piano and picked out a tune with one hand.
“Stop it!” cried Walter.
“On terms,” said Tom.
“I hate you,” said Walter. “Come away.”
“The terms are the Meistersinger,” said Tom.
“On a piano! You’re a Goth.”
“No. I’m paying you a compliment you deserve. Get at it.”
Walter got.
Young Rupert in his Slough of Despond had been too busy with himself to wonder why Sir Philip had corrected him when he described Tom Bradshaw as a “beast.”
At his mother’s knee, Tom, like all the Bradshaws of the seed of John, had lisped, “’A ’ate th’ ’epplestalls,” and, when he was a little older, had learned that he hated them “Because they’re dirty thieves. Because yon mills o’ theirn are ourn by rights.” This was not socialism and had nothing to do with the doctrine that all property is theft; it was the family superstition of the Bradshaws, and they believed it as the first article of their faith.
They believed it blindly and perhaps none of them were eager to have their eyes opened because other people’s eyes might have been opened at the same time and, as things usefully were, it was romantic to be the wronged heirs to Hepplestall’s. It excused so much, it invited compassion for the victims of injustice, it extorted charity for these martyrs to foul play. Details were conspicuously lacking, but the legend had life and won sympathy for the view the Bradshaws took of themselves—that they couldn’t be expected to go to work in the mills of the usurping Hepplestalls. As a family, they were professional cadgers whose stock-in-trade was their legend, and Staithley held enough people who were credulous or who were “agin the government” on principle (whether they took the Bradshaw claim seriously or not) to make the legend a profitable asset. Repetition is infallible, as the advertiser knows, and these ragged Ortons of the Staithley slums had plenty of adherents.
There were several scores of ways of earning a livelihood in Staithley without working at Hepplestall’s, but the average Bradshaw pretended that as a natural pride prevented him from serving the despoiler, he was barred from work entirety, though he did not object to his children working for him, and Tom began as a half-timer in the mills. A bad time he had of it too at first. He did not say it for himself, but the other half-timers said it for him: he was the “lad as owned Hepplestall’s,” and if there was any dirty work going, the owner did it, nursing anger against his family and coming young to a judicious opinion of their pretensions.
He had his handicap in life, but soon gave proof that if he was a Bradshaw it was an accident which other people would be wise to forget, fighting his way from the status of a butt till he was cock of the walk amongst the half-timers. There is much to be said for a wiry physique as the basis of success, but Tom shed blood and bruised like any other boy and the incidents of his battling career amongst the half-timers at Hepplestall’s did nothing to disturb that first lesson of his life, “’A ’ate th’ ’epple-stalls.”
Hatred is a motive, like any other, and a strong one. It resulted in Tom’s conceiving the ambition, while he was a “little piecer,” that he would some day be secretary of the Spinners’ Union and in that office would lead labor against the Hepplestalls. He was his own man now, living not at home but in lodgings, hardily keeping himself on the wages of a “little piecer” of eighteen, reading the Clarion, and presently startling a Sunday School debating society with the assertion that he read Marx and Engels in the original. It was not long after that astonishing revelation of his secret studies that he became unofficial assistant to the local secretary of the spinners, and might regard himself as launched on a career which was to take him in 1906 to the House of Commons.
An election incident accounted chiefly for Sir Philip’s good opinion of Tom Bradshaw. Tom might forget the legend, but the legend could not forget a candidate, and it was thrown into the cockpit by some zealous supporter who imagined that Tom would ride that romantic horse and win in a canter. Tom thought otherwise; a story obscurely propagated amongst Staithley’s tender-hearted Samaritans was one thing, emerging into the fierce light which beats upon a candidate it was another. He was out to win on the merits of his case, not by means of a sentimental appeal which, anyhow, might be a boomerang if the other side took the matter up with the concurrence of the Hepplestalls.
But it was not that afterthought, it was purely his resolution that the issues should not be confused, that took him straight to Sir Philip. Sir Philip looked a question at him.
“It might be Union business,” said Tom, “but it isn’t. It’s the election and I’m here, which is the other camp, to make you an appeal. There’s a thing being said in Staithley that touches you and me. I haven’t said it, but it was said by folk that thought they spoke on my behalf. You’ll have heard tell of it?”
“I’ve heard,” said Sir Philip.
“Well,” said Tom, “there’s always a lot of rubbish shot at elections, but the less the better. Will you help me to get rid of this particular load of rubbish? Will you help me to tell the truth?”
“Is there question of the truth?”
“Not in my mind. But in theirs, there is. They believed what they said of you and me.” And he went on to tell Sir Philip of the belief of the Bradshaws and of its acceptance by others. “You can put it that it’s never been an easy thing for me to be a Bradshaw in Staithley. We’re known as the Begging Bradshaws and it’s been a load I’ve had to carry that I’m one of them by birth. They’ve begged on the strength of this story. But it’s only hurt me up to now. It’s going to hurt others to-day, it’s going to hurt my cause and I’m here not to apologize for folks that have done no more than said what they believe: I’m here to ask if you will join with me in publishing the truth.”
“Shall I tell you the only fact known to me which may have bearing on your family’s belief, Mr. Bradshaw?”
“I wish you would. That there’s a fact of any sort behind it is news to me.”
“A man called Bradshaw was hanged for the murder of an ancestress of mine. It is possible you are descended from this man.”
“By gum!” said Tom. “That’s an ugly factor. I didn’t know I was in for one like that when I came here asking you to help me with the truth. Well, we’ll publish it. It’ll not help me, but I’m for the truth whether it’s for me or against me.”
Sir Philip crossed the room to him. “Shake hands, Mr. Bradshaw,” he said. “We’ll tell the truth in this together, but at the moment we’ve not gone very far. Your opinion of your family in general makes you rather too ready to believe that they are in fact the descendants of this murderer.”
“Thank you, Sir Philip,” said Tom. “But I’m not doubting it.”
“What we can do, at any rate, is to go together through the records of the firm. Or I will employ some one who is accustomed to research and we will issue his report. My cupboard may have a skeleton in it, but it is open to you to investigate.”
Tom Bradshaw sweated hard. “It’s making a mountain out of a mole hill,” he said. He had never, since the half-timers taught him commonsense, had anything but contempt for the legend of the Bradshaws; at every stage of his upward path it had embarrassed him, but never had he felt before to-day that it pursued him with such poisonous malignity. He had no hope that any point favoring the Bradshaws would emerge from an examination of the records; it would be a fair examination of dispassionate title deeds and its fairness would be the more damaging. And he had pleaded for the truth, he had put this rapier into his political opponents’ hands! The Labor candidate was the descendant of a murderer!
“Thank you again,” he said.
“Oh, as to that,” said Sir Philip, “the existence of this belief interests me. If our searcher finds any grounds for it here or in parish registers or elsewhere, I shall of course acknowledge them. But the odds are that the legend springs from a perverted view of the murder of which I have told you, and if that is so, I fear the disclosure will hardly profit you.”
“It won’t,” said Tom gloomily. “But it’ll shut their silly mouths.” If, he reflected, it did not open them in full cry on a new and odious scent.
“So we go on with it?”
“We go on.”
“May I say this, Mr. Bradshaw? That your attitude to this affair increases an admiration of you which was considerable before? If you beat us in this election we shall have the satisfaction of knowing that we are beaten by a man.” Which was handsome, seeing that there was the stuff of libel in the statements of Tom’s well-meaning supporter. Amenities, but Tom did not doubt their sincerity, and his sentiment of personal hatred, already weakened by contact with the Hepplestalls in his Union affairs, merged into his general and tolerantly professional opposition to capitalists.
In the event, what was issued was a statement simply denying, on the authority of a historian, of Sir Philip and of Tom, that the claim made by the Bradshaw family, and repeated during the election, had any foundation whatsoever, and whether the denial had effect or not, it cannot have made much difference to Tom’s candidature. He had a clear two thousand majority over both Liberal and Unionist opponents, and had held the seat ever since, while the legend of the Bradshaws, like any lie that gets a long start of the truth, flourished as impudently as ever. In Bradshaw opinion, Tom Bradshaw had been bought, and they found fresh evidence for this view whenever Tom’s matured attitude toward the Masters’ Federation earned for him the disapproval of extremists. They did not cease to teach their children that if every one had their own, Hepplestall’s was Bradshaws’. “A gang of wastrels,” Sir Philip had called them to Rupert, and could have quoted chapter and verse for his opinion. As he read the history dredged by his searcher, the Bradshaws began with John, a murderer, and ended in a family of beggars; but he excepted Tom. When the Union spoke to him through Tom, there was no bitterness between them; there was a meeting on equal terms between two men who respected each other. Sir Philip recalled the Bradshaws as they figured in his historian’s report, and he recalled the Hepplestalls. “Dying fires,” he thought; Tom Bradshaw was eminently the reasonable negotiator.
Walter Pate crashed out the final chords.
“Aye,” said Tom, “aye. A grand lad, Wagner. And when I hear you play him, it’s a comfort to know I can wipe the floor with you at chess.” Which Mr. Pate accepted as a merited salute to a brilliant performance, and unscrewed the stopper from a bottle of beer. A moment later Tom stared at his friend in blank amazement; he was staggered to see Pate raise the glass to his lips and put it down again.
“Man, are you ill?” he cried. The beer foamed assuringly, but, to be on the safe side, Tom tasted it. “The beer’s fine, what’s to do?”
“Shut up, you slave to alcohol. Shut up and listen.”
Walter opened the window, the cold night air blew in and with it came from the street the strains of “Lead Kindly Light,” sung in a fresh girlish voice.
Fires are fires in Staithley, as Tom was in the habit of telling Londoners who put coal by the dainty shovelful into a doll’s house grate, and if he was commanded to shut up he could do it, but the open window was a persecution. There was a silent pantomime of two elderly gentlemen one of whom struggled to close a window, the other to keep it open, then Tom turned to the defeated Walter with a “What the hangment’s come over you?”
“Have you no soul at all, Tom? Couldn’t you hear her?”
“I heard a street-singer.”
“You heard a class voice, and you’re going to hear it again.” Mr. Pate was at the window.
“Then bring her in,” said Tom. “I’ll freeze for no fad of yours. A class voice in Staithley streets!”
“A capacity to play chess is a limiting thing,” was fired at him as Mr. Pate left the room. Tom took an amicable revenge by emptying both glasses of beer. “I’ve cubic capacity, choose how,” he said, indicating their emptiness as Walter returned with the girl who had been singing.
“Get warm,” said Walter to her. “Then we’ll have a look at you.”
She had, clearly, the habit of taking things as they came, and went to the fire with as little outward emotion as she had shown when Walter pounced upon her in the street. She accepted warmth, this strange, queerly luxurious room, these two men in it, as she would have accepted the blow which Walter’s upraised hand and voice had seemed to presage in the street—with a fatalism full of pitiable implications.
She was of any age, beyond first childhood, that went with flat-chested immaturity; she was dirty beyond reason, but she had beauty that shone through her gamin disorder like the moon through storm-tossed cloud. Her tangled hair was dark auburn, her eyes were hazel and as the fire’s heat soaked into her a warm flush spread over her pinched face like sunshine after rain on ripening corn.
“Can you sing anything besides ‘Lead Kindly Light?’” asked Walter.
“Of course she can’t,” said Tom. “It’s the whole of the beggar’s opera.” He was sore about that opened window and resented this girl who had disturbed a musical evening. He had appetite for more than the “Meister-singer,” and seemed likely, through the intruder, to go unsatisfied.
She looked pertly at Tom. “’A can, then,” she said. “Lots more, but,” her eyes strayed round the room, “’a dunno as you’d fancy ’em.”
“Go on,” said Walter. “There’ll be supper afterwards.”
“Crikey,” she said, and sang till he stopped her, which was very soon. They had a taste in the meaner public-houses of Staithley for the sort of song which it is libelous to term Rabelaisian. Her song, if she did not know the meaning of its words, was a violent assault upon decency; if she did know—and her hesitation had suggested that she did—it was precocious outrage.
“Stop it,” cried Walter, horrified.
Tom spat into the fire. “My constituents!” he groaned. “Walter, it’s a queasy thought.”
“I thought you favored education,” said Walter.
“I do, but—”
“Go on favoring it. It’s a growing child.”
“Thanks,” said Tom gratefully. “You’re right. This is foul-tasting tonic, but it’s good to be reminded how far we haven’t traveled yet.”
Walter’s hand strayed gently to his friend’s shoulder.
“Short fights aren’t interesting,” he said, and turned to the girl, whose patient aloofness through this little conversation, so unintelligible to her, was, again, revealing.
“Go back to the hymn,” he said.
“A hymn?” The word had no meaning for her.
“‘Lead Kindly Light,’” he explained.
“Oh, that,” she said, and sang it through without interruption. It was street singing, adapted to penetrate through the closed windows of Staithley and by sheer shrillness to wring the withers of the charitable. Tom Bradshaw, amateur of music, found nothing in this insistent volume of song to account for Walter Pate’s interest; she made, tunefully, a great noise in a little room, and he wished that Walter would stop her, though not for the same reason as before. But Walter did not stop her, he listened and he watched with acute absorption and when she had finished, “again,” he said, gesturing Tom back into his chair with a menacing fist.
“It goes through me like a dentist’s file in a hollow tooth,” Tom protested.
“You fool,” said Mr. Pate pityingly, and, to the girl, “Sing.”
“Now,” he said when she had ended, “I don’t say art. Art’s the unguessable. I say voice and I say lungs. I say my name’s Walter Pate and I know. Give me two years on her and you’ll know too. If you’d like me to tell you who’ll sing soprano when the Choral Society do the ‘Messiah’ at Christmas of next year, it’s that girl.”
“’Oo are you gettin’ at?” she asked.
“I’m getting at you, getting at you with the best voice-producing system in the North of England—Walter Pate’s. And when I’ve finished with you, you’ll be—well, you won’t be singing in the street.”
“Well, I can’t see it, Walter,” said Tom.
“You’ve the wrong letters after your name to see it,” said Walter, “but I’ve made a find to-night, and I’m gambling two years’ hard work on the find’s being something that will make the musical world sit up. Buy a cheap brooch and it’s tin washed with gold. That voice is the other way round. It’s tin on top and gold beneath and I’m going digging for the gold.” Not, he might have added, because gold has value in the market. If Walter Pate had discovered a voice which, under training, was to become the pride of Staithley, that was all he wanted; he wouldn’t hide under a bushel his light as the discoverer and the instructor, but all he wanted else was proof in support of his often expressed opinion that musically Staithley led Lancashire (the rest of the world didn’t matter) and he thought he had found his proof in—he turned to the girl. “You haven’t told us your name,” he said.
“Mary Ellen Bradshaw,” she told him, and “Lord!” said Tom. “You’ll waste your time.”
“I shan’t,” said Walter. “There’s grit amongst that tribe. You’re here to prove it.”
“Where do you live?” Tom asked her.
“Brick-yards, mostly,” she said. “I’m good at dodging bobbies.” There is warm sleeping by the kilns, and the police know it.
“Got any parents, Mary Ellen?”
“’A dunno. They was there last time ’A went to Jackman’s Buildings. There weren’t no baggin’ there, so ’a ’opped it. That’s a long time sin’.”
“This gentleman is called Bradshaw,” said Walter, to Tom’s annoyance.
“Is ’e?” she said. “’A ’ate th’ ’epplestalls.” It might have been a password, and Tom thought she had the intention, in speaking it, to curry favor with a rich relation, but as it happened Mary Ellen was sincere. She did not say she hated the Hepplestalls to please Tom Bradshaw. She said it because it was true.
Tom certainly wasn’t pleased. He reached for his hat. “I’m off out of this,” he said, and when Walter looked at him with surprise, “Man,” he said, “it’s beyond all to find that old ghost jibbering at me when I’ve sweated blood to lay it. You do not hate the Hepplestalls,” he roared at Mary Ellen. “They’re decent folk and you’re mud.”
“Aye,” she said submissively. That she was mud, at any rate, was not news to her.
“Aye, what?”
“What yo’ said.”
“Come,” said Walter. “There’s tractability.”
“I call it cunning. Beggar’s cunning. She’s a Bradshaw.”
“Not to me. She’s a Voice, and, by the Lord, I’ll train her how to use it.”
“What are you going to do, Walter?” Tom put his hat down, feeling that it was ungenerous to leave his friend in the grip of a mistaken impulse.
“Steal her. Well, no. That’s not to do; it’s done. She’s here. Mary Ellen, you’re going to sleep in a bed to-night, with sheets and a striped quilt on it like you see in the windows of the Co-op.”
“Oo—er,” said Mary Ellen.
“But,” said Walter, “you’re going to be washed first. The water won’t be cold. It’ll be warm, and it’ll be in a bath. You’ve heard of baths?”
She nodded. “Aye,” she said, “you ’ave ’em when you go to quod.”
Tom turned suddenly away and when he looked round there were marks of suffering on his face. “I’ve been living too soft, Walter,” he said. “I’ve been forgetting.”
“No,” said Walter, “your whole life is remembering. Education, Tom. Isn’t that the sovereign remedy?”
“I’m believing in nothing just now,” said Tom Bradshaw.
“Then I am. I’m believing in the voice of Mary Ellen and I’m going to educate it.”
“Will it ’urt?” asked Mary Ellen.
“No,” said Tom, “but I will if you’re not grateful to Mr. Pate. I’ll break your neck.”
“Tom, Tom!” protested Walter.
“Eh, lad,” said Tom, “I’ve got the heartache for the waif, but you’re aiming to sink two years’ good work in her, and she a Bradshaw. Man, they’re the Devil’s Own. They’ll take and take and—do you fancy this is like me, Walter? Me arguing against one of the downs being given a chance to get up! But when it’s you that’s giving the chance and a Bradshaw that’s to take it I’ve a sinking feeling that the risk’s too big. They’ll bite the hand that feeds them, they’ll—”
“Well, I’ll be bitten then. There are times when I doubt if you’ve a proper sense of the place of music in the world and I tell you, this is one of them. If I’m vouchsafed the chance of giving that voice to mankind, I can do without having her gratitude thrown in. I’m doing this to please myself, my lad, and for the honor and the glory of Staithley Bridge. If she goes on to where I’m seeing her, she’ll wipe her boots on me in any case, but she’ll not wipe out the fame of Staithley that bred her.”
“She was bred in Jackman’s Buildings. The beastliest slum in the town.”
“They’ll go pilgrimages to her birthplace.”
“You don’t believe that. Music’s as bad as drink for damaging a man’s sense of proportion.”
Mary Ellen fidgeted, not with, the distress which may be supposed to assail a sensitive child who is discussed before her face, but because the conversation missed her main point. “When’s supper?” she asked.
“After your bath,” said Walter, defying Tom with his eyes. Tom took up his hat again. “I’m off,” he said. “I’ve never found the cure for fools.”
“All right,” said Walter. “In two years’ time, you’ll be the fool. I’m going bail for that Voice, and it’s neither here nor there that the Voice goes with a Bradshaw.”
“Good night,” said Tom, and went.
Mary Ellen “pulled bacon” at the door he closed behind him. “’A ’ate th’ ’epplestalls,” she said cheekily, but her impudence fell from her as he returned. She thought he had heard her and had come to inflict punishment.
But Tom had not heard. “Walter,” he said, “if you value my friendship, there’s a thing you’ll not deny me.”
“Well?”
“I pay half. Let’s be fools together.”
Walter sucked meditatively at an empty pipe. “Aye,” he said, “we’re both bachelors and,” holding out the hand of partnership, “I’m generous by nature, Tom. Tell Mrs. Butterworth I want her as you go downstairs.”
CHAPTER III—MARY ELLEN
MARY ELLEN heard with trepidation that there was a Mrs. Butterworth on the premises; she was old enough to know that it was one thing to “get round” two men, and another to cozen a woman.
Her cozening had not been much more culpable than that of any one who sees a chance and determines not to fritter it away by understatement. It was not quite true, it was a propagandist gloss upon the truth, to say that she slept out on the brickfields, implying that she was homeless when she had sleeping rights in the fourth part of a bed in Jackman’s Buildings. But there had been no dissembling, no thought to please Tom Bradshaw, when she said she hated the Hepplestalls. She hated them because she hated the misery in which she lived and because they were the cause of her living in misery. That was her implicit belief and the guile had not been in stating it but in denying it when Tom commanded her denial.
The guile had succeeded, too. Tom Bradshaw was not a strong man of his faction without knowing that there is a cant of the underdog as of the upper, and he had suspected her of “beggar’s cunning.” Then she had won him round; he had remembered that she was of his clan, he had felt that there, but for the grace of God and the difference of age and sex, went Tom Bradshaw, and he had gone partners with Walter in her future.
She had conquered males, but she feared Mrs. Butterworth and drew closer to the fire lest the woman should detect her as not so unsophisticated as she seemed nor so young as she looked.
She did not know Mrs. Butterworth nor the strength of Mrs. Butterworth’s affection for Walter. Mrs. Butterworth was, in nominal office, his housekeeper; actually she was slave, without knowing she was slave, to a man who did not know he had enslaved her. Stoically she took whatever came from Walter, and things like lost kittens and broken-legged puppies came habitually. This time, making unprecedently a call upon her tolerance, a girl came and Mrs. Butterworth might have been provoked into defining the duties of a housekeeper to a bachelor. Instead, she listened to instructions, put on an overall, got out her disinfectants and prepared to clean Mary Ellen and to burn her clothes with a placid competence which asserted that she was not to be overcome by any freak of Walter’s, no matter how eccentric.
“If she’s to go into the spare bed,” she said, “she’ll go clean.”
No need to dwell on happenings in the bathroom; they were there for a long time, and when Mary Ellen came out, wrapped in a night-dress of Mrs. Butterworth’s, she felt raw from head to foot. But she had two satisfactions which sent her very happily to sleep in spite of her rawness. One was bread and milk in quantity, the other was the assurance she derived from the looking-glass that if her parents saw her, they would not recognize her. Her voice had been an asset to her parents who had been therefore not so indifferent to the existence of their Mary Ellen as her story had suggested.
Mrs. Butterworth returned to the sitting room. “She’s in bed,” she reported.
“Thank you,” said Walter and then, by way of explanation, added, “She can sing.”
“I thought it would be that,” she said.
“Yes, yes, it is quite extraordinarily that. Did I make it clear to you that she will live here?”
“I’ll keep her clean,” said Mrs. Butterworth, shouldering the burden.
“And she had better be described as my niece, from, let us say, Oldham. You will buy her clothes to-morrow. Her name is Mary. We will call her Mary Pate.”
“It’s a good name to take risks with,” she warned him.
“Wait till I’ve taught her how to sing.”
“Oh, aye,” she said, with seeming skepticism; but she was not skeptical. She accepted Mary, she believed in her because Walter believed in her and because his belief was so strong that he bestowed on her the name of Pate. That settled, for Mrs. Butterworth, that Mary was remarkable.
Walter himself was doubtful if he was justified in sharing his name with her. It was an honored name in Staith-ley, but when Mary Ellen soared she would cast luster on the name she bore, and he questioned if he were not highhandedly appropriating that luster to his name. But on other grounds, of convenience, of propriety (a singing master had to be circumspect), of cover from the possible quest of bereft parents, he decided she had better be Pate.
Why, it Italianized into Patti! He hadn’t thought of that before, but it seemed a good omen and before he went to bed that night he had planned in full his scheme for the education of a pupil who did not merely come to him for lessons while spending the rest of her time out of his control, but of one who from her uprising to her retiring should be ordered by him to the single end that she should be a great singer.
No one but a bachelor, and a Mrs. Butterworth-spoiled bachelor at that, would have imagined that a system so drastic, and so monastic, would prove workable, but at first Mary Ellen was docile. She had gone without creature comforts for too long not to appreciate them when she had them, and she was docile through her fear of losing them, of being sent back to Jackman’s Buildings or of being dragged back by her parents. Their beat, certainly, was not her beat now, and the almost suburban street in which she had been singing when Walter heard her was well away from the Staithley Beggar’s Mile. But there were always off-chances (such as her own coming there), and perhaps she knew or perhaps she did not know that she was one of those people who can be seen across a wide road by the short-sighted: a quality she had of which there is no particular explanation except that it is one of the Almighty’s conjuring tricks, performed for the ugly as compensation for their ugliness and for the beautiful because to them that hath shall be given.
At any rate, so long as she feared the clutch of her past she subdued her rebelliousness to the discipline of study, and all too soon he was treating her companionably, he was letting her into the secret of the ambition he had for her, he was assuming that because he knew the necessity of a long, arduous training, she would reasonably submit to it.
But her submissiveness to his regimen passed with the passing of her fears. She trusted the disguise of clothes, of the manner she acquired and of speech, which was no longer that of Jackman’s Buildings, to confound the Bradshaws even if she met them face to face and as confidence grew her motive for acquiescence in much that his system implied was weakened. It implied, especially, the secreting of her talent until he deemed it ripe for exhibition, and Mary Ellen grew impatient.
Perhaps he had not clearly stated his ambition or perhaps she had not clearly understood, but while he expected her to be a pupil long after her Staithley days were past, she was not looking beyond Staithley, she was not seeing why work should be continuous now that it had ceased to be a new sensation. She was avid of results and grew sullen at her labor which seemed to lead nowhere but to more labor.
He consulted Mrs. Butterworth: was Mary Ellen ill? “I’ll? She’s got horse-strength, but you can overdrive a horse. All work and no play is good for nobody.”
“She goes to concerts,” he protested.
“That’s part of her work, and part of her trouble, too. Going and hearing others sing and you telling her to watch them and to learn what to avoid, and she fancying she’s better than they are, an’ all.”
“She is better.”
“Then it doesn’t help her to know it and to know they sing in public and she doesn’t.”
“She shan’t sing yet. What am I to do?”
“Take her mind off it. It’s always concerts. There are theaters.”
There were. There was one in Staithley (there was even, depth below the deep, a music-hall), but the feeling existed that if playgoing was done at all it should be done furtively and though Walter would not have dreamed of putting music and drama in two categories the one labeled respectable and the other disreputable, he had to defer to the prejudices of those who did. He lived by teaching music and singing to the offspring of Staithley’s upper ten, and there might be tolerance amongst them, but he had to be on the safe side and to take the view that the theater was a detrimental place. This was self-protective habit which recently had crystallized into something approaching conviction through the action of one Chown. The crime of Mr. Chown, and to Walter it was no less than crime, was to translate the Staithley Hand Bell Ringers to the music-halls, where they had made much money by (Walter held) debasing their musical standards. But the music-hall was not the theater and he had to admit, on reflection, that there was really no connection between Mr. Chown’s vulgarization of the musical taste of the Staithley Hand Bell Ringers and Mary Ellen’s going to the play. There was Shakespeare and if it was prudent for him not to go with her himself, there was Mrs. Butterworth, who stood awaiting his decision with a notable and not disinterested anxiety.
It was not disinterested because the slave had her relaxation, her weekly “night out” when she threw the shackles off and forgot in the pit of the Theater Royal that she was housekeeper, valet, nurse and mother to Walter Pate. Not his to ask nor his to tell what delicious freedom she found in those emancipated hours, but hers the hope to add to them when she cunningly prescribed the theater as a cure for Mary Ellen’s restiveness.
“Would you go with her?” he asked shyly, his tone implying that now, if never before, he was her petitioner.
“If you wish it,” she said, exulting secretly. “I’m sure she needs a change.”
So, Shakespeare conveniently arriving at Staithley in the hands of a troupe of actors of heroic good intentions, Mary Ellen went to fairyland with Mrs. Butterworth who proved, however, when she had grown used to sitting on a plush chair in the circle instead of on a hard bench in the pit, an unromantic guide. Mary was lost with Rosalind in Arden and Mrs. Butterworth took advantage of the interval to parade her knowledge of the private concerns of the actors. It was, for the most part, a recital of the sycophantic slush handed by the advance agent to the office of the Staithley Evening Reporter, and printed each Friday unedited. She knew how Jacques and Phoebe, though they only met when this tour began, had been married last week at. Huddersfield, and what difficulties had been overcome to secure legal marriage for a pair of strolling players who only stayed in a town for a week. And she knew where Rosalind lodged in Staithley. Mary did not find this disenchanting: for her it linked fairyland with Staithley. Rosalind was not a dream, mysterious, impalpably detached from life, but a real woman lodging in a street which Mary Ellen knew: she walked the pavements in skirts when she wasn’t ruffling it in doublet and hose, bewitching young Orlando in a glamorous wood, and if Rosalind why not, some magical day, Mary Ellen? She gasped at her audacity, at the egregious fantasy of leaping thought. She was earth-bound by Staithley, and these were the fetterless imaginings of a freer world.
She couldn’t and she didn’t look beyond Staithley, and the stage seemed something so remotely beyond her reach that she bid her thought, even from herself. She had the trick, when chocolate came her way, of getting on a chair and of putting the packet on the top of her wardrobe, hoarding it not too long but long enough to make her feel nobly conscious of severe self-restraint. So with this thought of the stage: she put it, wrapped in silver paper, at the top of her mental wardrobe, not wholly inaccessible, but difficult of access, not forgotten but put where it was not easy to remember it. But it had all the same its reactions and the chief of these operated in a manner precisely contrary to Walter’s intentions when he allowed her to go to the play. “She shan’t sing yet,” (in public, that is) he had said decidedly to Mrs. Butter-worth, and Mary Ellen, if she admitted doublet and hose to be, for her, the fabric of a dream, was spurred by that impossible to demand her possible, to demand her right to wear an evening dress and in it to appear upon a platform and to sing in public.
“Not yet,” he said. “Not for a long while yet.”
“Oh, Daddy Pate, I can’t wait for ever.”
“Nobody’s asking you to. But you’ll wait till you’re ready.”
“How long?”
“Some time. Years.”
“Years? But you told Mr. Bradshaw I was to sing in the ‘Messiah.’ I’ve been learning it.”
“You heard that? That night you came? Well, it was a foolish boast of mine. You practiced it as you have practiced other things, for the groundwork on which you’ll build.”
“You mean I’m not good enough. Then why have you told me I’m good?”
“You’re too good to spoil.”
“But I’m spoiling now.”
“No: you’re learning.”
She cried piteously and when, surprisingly, that did not move him, she sulked and refused to eat and managed to make herself so unwell that work was out of the question and Mrs. Butterworth was guilty of disloyalty to Walter.
“She’ll fret herself into a decline,” she said. “You’d best give way to her.”
“She’ll damage her voice if this goes on,” he had to admit. “Can’t you talk sense to her?” and Mrs. Butter-worth, swinging back to her allegiance, promised she would try, but her talking was to ears that were deaf. Mary Ellen, appealed to in the name of gratitude she owed Walter, was stubbornly unmoved. “I was better off in the streets,” she said. “I sang. People heard me.”
Mrs. Butterworth held up her hands in scandalized protest. “Oh, dearie!” she said, incapable of more.
“Why am I kept down like this?” demanded Mary Ellen. “Mr. Pate knows best.”
“He knows he’s got me in prison. He thinks he can amuse himself by trying his experiments on me. His perfect system that has never been tried before! No, because nobody would stand it, so he picked me off the street to have me to try it on because he thought I was helpless. He doesn’t care about me. I’m not a girl. I’m not human flesh and blood. I’m a thing with a voice that he’s testing a system on, and he thinks I’ll let him go on testing till he’s tired of it. Years, he said. Years in a prison! Years, while he bribes me to stand it by making lying promises—”
“Oh! he never!” said Mrs. Butterworth, stung to defend Walter, though secretly in sympathy with much of her passionate distortion of his motives.
“He did! He said I was to sing solo in the ‘Messiah’ and now he says I shan’t. He isn’t tired of his experiments yet.”
“I’m sure he means it for your good.”
“Yes. Father’s licked me saying that and loving me I’m being kept down for his pleasure and I’m tired if he isn’t. I’m going back to the streets.”
“That’s foolish talk, Mary.”
“I’m going to sing somewhere. That may be foolish, but it’s fact.”
“Well, I’ll tell him. Now eat your breakfast.”
“No,” said Mary Ellen, hunger-striker, and Mrs. Butterworth reported a total failure in guarded misquotation of the rebel. “I can put bacon before her, but I cannot make her eat. And she’ll run away. She will, as sure as eggs are eggs, and you’ll lose her then. We can’t lock her up.”
“No.” Walter mused upon the authority of a foster-father, clamping his anger down, recognizing the weakness of his position. He was not her guardian; he had no reason to suppose that her parents were alive or that any one had better right than he had to command her, but he had assumed possession of Mary Ellen as if she were a kitten and a girl was not a kitten. He could only rule by the consent of the ruled, and he thought he had earned her consent. He had given her so much—even, treating her as of discreet age, his confidence—and he had thought she had responded, he had thought she had reasonably understood what he was doing and why. But if she put it that he was simply a tyrant, there was nothing to do but to humor her till, in time, she saw indisputably that he was right. To let her go, to lose what had been so well begun, was unthinkable.
Mrs. Butterworth, sensitive to Walter’s suffering, broke in upon his thoughts. “I’d like to whip the thankless brat,” she said viciously, and if she was hinting at a policy it might have been a sound one. But Walter was not thinking whether Mary Ellen was or was not still of whipable age, he was going back, whimsically, to his beginnings with her, he was thinking how he had said to Tom, “If she goes on to where I’m seeing her, she’ll wipe her boots on me.” The boot-wiping had begun before he looked for it; that was all except that it was his system on which she wiped her boots, his system off which she rubbed the bloom.
He went to Mary, still staring at her uneaten meal, with a compromise. “I think you might sing this season with the Choral Society, Mary,” he said, “attending their practices and appearing in public when they appear.”
“Daddy Pate,” she said, “I didn’t mean to be a nuisance, but I had to make you see it. The Choral Society? That means just in the chorus.”
“Well, for this season, Mary.”
“But the ‘Messiah’? You promised me.”
“Oh, hardly. But we shall see, Mary. We shall see.” And knowing that she had got him, so to speak, with his foot on the butter-side, she kissed him very sweetly and then, to show him what a practical, commonsensical person she really was, she sat down to breakfast. “And I don’t mind,” she said, “if the bacon is cold,” and ate, magnanimously.