LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

and then the only fault he found was seeing the boy lay his pen on the counter.

      “Put your pen in your ear, if you're going to be a clerk. Pen in your ear!” And one day he said to the lad: “Why don't you hold your shoulders straighter? Come down here,” when he took him into the glass office and fitted him with special braces for keeping the shoulders square.

      But Paul liked the girls best. The men seemed common and rather dull. He liked them all, but they were uninteresting. Polly, the little brisk overseer downstairs, finding Paul eating in the cellar, asked him if she could cook him anything on her little stove. Next day his mother gave him a dish that could be heated up. He took it into the pleasant, clean room to Polly. And very soon it grew to be an established custom that he should have dinner with her. When he came in at eight in the morning he took his basket to her, and when he came down at one o'clock she had his dinner ready.

      He was not very tall, and pale, with thick chestnut hair, irregular features, and a wide, full mouth. She was like a small bird. He often called her a “robinet”. Though naturally rather quiet, he would sit and chatter with her for hours telling her about his home. The girls all liked to hear him talk. They often gathered in a little circle while he sat on a bench, and held forth to them, laughing. Some of them regarded him as a curious little creature, so serious, yet so bright and jolly, and always so delicate in his way with them. They all liked him, and he adored them. Polly he felt he belonged to. Then Connie, with her mane of red hair, her face of apple-blossom, her murmuring voice, such a lady in her shabby black frock, appealed to his romantic side.

      “When you sit winding,” he said, “it looks as if you were spinning at a spinning-wheel—it looks ever so nice. You remind me of Elaine in the 'Idylls of the King'. I'd draw you if I could.”

      And she glanced at him blushing shyly. And later on he had a sketch he prized very much: Connie sitting on the stool before the wheel, her flowing mane of red hair on her rusty black frock, her red mouth shut and serious, running the scarlet thread off the hank on to the reel.

      With Louie, handsome and brazen, who always seemed to thrust her hip at him, he usually joked.

      Emma was rather plain, rather old, and condescending. But to condescend to him made her happy, and he did not mind.

      “How do you put needles in?” he asked.

      “Go away and don't bother.”

      “But I ought to know how to put needles in.”

      She ground at her machine all the while steadily.

      “There are many things you ought to know,” she replied.

      “Tell me, then, how to stick needles in the machine.”

      “Oh, the boy, what a nuisance he is! Why, THIS is how you do it.”

      He watched her attentively. Suddenly a whistle piped. Then Polly appeared, and said in a clear voice:

      “Mr. Pappleworth wants to know how much longer you're going to be down here playing with the girls, Paul.”

      Paul flew upstairs, calling “Good-bye!” and Emma drew herself up.

      “It wasn't ME who wanted him to play with the machine,” she said.

      As a rule, when all the girls came back at two o'clock, he ran upstairs to Fanny, the hunchback, in the finishing-off room. Mr. Pappleworth did not appear till twenty to three, and he often found his boy sitting beside Fanny, talking, or drawing, or singing with the girls.

      Often, after a minute's hesitation, Fanny would begin to sing. She had a fine contralto voice. Everybody joined in the chorus, and it went well. Paul was not at all embarrassed, after a while, sitting in the room with the half a dozen work-girls.

      At the end of the song Fanny would say:

      “I know you've been laughing at me.”

      “Don't be so soft, Fanny!” cried one of the girls.

      Once there was mention of Connie's red hair.

      “Fanny's is better, to my fancy,” said Emma.

      “You needn't try to make a fool of me,” said Fanny, flushing deeply.

      “No, but she has, Paul; she's got beautiful hair.”

      “It's a treat of a colour,” said he. “That coldish colour like earth, and yet shiny. It's like bog-water.”

      “Goodness me!” exclaimed one girl, laughing.

      “How I do but get criticised,” said Fanny.

      “But you should see it down, Paul,” cried Emma earnestly. “It's simply beautiful. Put it down for him, Fanny, if he wants something to paint.”

      Fanny would not, and yet she wanted to.

      “Then I'll take it down myself,” said the lad.

      “Well, you can if you like,” said Fanny.

      And he carefully took the pins out of the knot, and the rush of hair, of uniform dark brown, slid over the humped back.

      “What a lovely lot!” he exclaimed.

      The girls watched. There was silence. The youth shook the hair loose from the coil.

      “It's splendid!” he said, smelling its perfume. “I'll bet it's worth pounds.”

      “I'll leave it you when I die, Paul,” said Fanny, half joking.

      “You look just like anybody else, sitting drying their hair,” said one of the girls to the long-legged hunchback.

      Poor Fanny was morbidly sensitive, always imagining insults. Polly was curt and businesslike. The two departments were for ever at war, and Paul was always finding Fanny in tears. Then he was made the recipient of all her woes, and he had to plead her case with Polly.

      So the time went along happily enough. The factory had a homely feel. No one was rushed or driven. Paul always enjoyed it when the work got faster, towards post-time, and all the men united in labour. He liked to watch his fellow-clerks at work. The man was the work and the work was the man, one thing, for the time being. It was different with the girls. The real woman never seemed to be there at the task, but as if left out, waiting.

      From the train going home at night he used to watch the lights of the town, sprinkled thick on the hills, fusing together in a blaze in the valleys. He felt rich in life and happy. Drawing farther off, there was a patch of lights at Bulwell like myriad petals shaken to the ground from the shed stars; and beyond was the red glare of the furnaces, playing like hot breath on the clouds.

      He had to walk two and more miles from Keston home, up two long hills, down two short hills. He was often tired, and he counted the lamps climbing the hill above him, how many more to pass. And from the hilltop, on pitch-dark nights, he looked round on the villages five or six miles away, that shone like swarms of glittering living things, almost a heaven against his feet. Marlpool and Heanor scattered the far-off darkness with brilliance. And occasionally the black valley space between was traced, violated by a great train rushing south to London or north to Scotland. The trains roared by like projectiles level on the darkness, fuming and burning, making the valley clang with their passage. They were gone, and the lights of the towns and villages glittered in silence.

      And then he came to the corner at home, which faced the other side of the night. The ash-tree seemed a friend now. His mother rose with gladness as he entered. He put his eight shillings proudly on the table.

      “It'll help, mother?” he asked wistfully.

      “There's precious little left,” she answered, “after your ticket and dinners and such are taken off.”

      Then he told her the budget of the day. His life-story, like an Arabian Nights, was told night after night to his mother. It was almost as if it were her own life.

      Chapter VI

      

Скачать книгу