“Oh,” she said now. “I thought it was the club-man.” Pause. “So you’re looking for a room?”
“Yes, mam.”
“We only take one young man.” When she met people for the first time, Ada always tried to put on a faint air, but it soon slipped off. “Our last gentleman left a week ago. Should you require part board as well?”
“Yes, mam, if it wouldn’t trouble you.”
“You should have to sit down with the family. We’re six in family here. Me, my husband, Jenny there, who’s out all day at Slattery’s, Phyllis, Clarice and Sally, my youngest.” She paused, considered him more shrewdly: “Who are you, by the bye? And where are you from?”
Joe’s eyes fell humbly, but a wave of panic swept him. He had come in for a bit of a lark really, a kind of try-on just for fun, but now he knew he must get in, he simply must. She was a plum, that Jenny, she really was a plum, she had him simply gasping. But what the hell was he going to say? Strings of sympathetic lies flashed through his head and were instantly rejected. Where was his luggage, his money to pay in advance? Hell! He sweated. He despaired. Suddenly the inspiration came, nothing better surely than the truth, ah, that was it — he glowed inside — the truth, not the whole truth, of course, but something like the truth. He flung up his head and faced her. He said with conscious honesty:
“I could tell a pack of lies to you, mam, but I’d rather tell you the truth. I’ve run away from home.”
“Well I never!”
The magazine was lowered, and this time the rocking did stop: Mrs. Sunley and Jenny both stared at him with a new interest. Romance in the best tradition had flown into the frowsy room.
Joe said:
“I had a terrible time, I couldn’t bear it no longer. My mother died, my father used to leather me till I could hardly stand. We had a strike an’ all at wor pit. I diddent… I diddent have enough to eat.” Manly emotion glistened in Joe’s eyes as he went on… oh, it was glorious… glorious… he had them eating out of his hand!
“So your mother died?” Ada breathed.
Joe nodded dumbly — the last convention was fulfilled.
Ada let her big balmy eyes travel over his brushed and combed handsomeness with a rising sympathy. He’s had a hard enough time, poor young man, she reflected, and that good-looking too, with his bright brown eyes and curly hair. But curly hair don’t pay the rent, no indeed it don’t, with Sally’s music to think of…. Ada started to rock again. For all her sluttish indolence Ada Sunley was no fool. She took herself in hand.
“Look here,” she declared in a matter-of-fact tone, “you can’t come to us on pity. You’ve got to have a shop, a regular shop. Now, my Alf said to-day they was taking on at Millington-Yarrow’s, the foundry in Yarrow, you understand, Platt Lane way. Try there! If you’re lucky, come back. If you’re unlucky, do the other thing.”
“Yes, mam.”
Joe held his chastened probity till he was out of the house, then in his exultation he bounded across the street.
“Here, you with the face!” He grabbed a passing message boy by the collar. “Tell us the road to Millington’s Foundry or I’ll break your blasted neck!”
He almost ran to Yarrow, and it was a long, long way. He presented himself at the Foundry. He lied nobly, obscenely, and showed his sweating muscle to the foreman. His luck held, they were in urgent need of hands, he was taken on, as puddler’s assistant, at twenty-five shillings a week. After the pit it was riches. And there was Jenny, Jenny, Jenny…
He came back to Scottswood Road in easy stages, holding himself in, telling himself he must be careful, do nothing in a hurry, work it up slow. But triumph rose gloating through the thin veneer of caution as he came into the back room once more.
The whole family sat there, had just finished tea. Ada lounged at the top of the table and next to her sat Jenny. Then came the three younger girls: Phyllis, cast in the image of her mother, blonde, languid, and thirteen years of age, Clarice, dark, leggy and eleven and a half, with a beautiful scarlet ribbon, removed from a chocolate box of Jenny’s, in her hair, and finally Sally, a queer thing of ten, with Jenny’s big mouth, hostile black eyes and a self-possessed stare. At the end of the table was Alfred, husband of Ada, father of the four girls and head of the house, an insignificant pasty-faced man with drooping shoulders and a sparse ginger moustache. He had also a crick in his neck, no collar and watery eyes. Alf was a house-painter, a house-painter who swallowed a fair amount of white lead in the process of slabbing it upon Tynecastle house fronts. The lead gave him his pallid face, sundry pains in his “stummick” and that faint blue line which could be made out along the edge of Alf’s gums. The crick in his neck, however, came not from painting but from pigeons. Alf was a fancier, his passion was pigeons, blue and red chequers, homers, lovely prize homers. And flighting his homers, watching them fly the empyrean blue, had gradually brought Alf’s neck to this singular obliquity.
Joe surveyed the company, exclaimed joyously:
“They’ve taken me on. I start to-morrow. Twenty-five bob a week.”
Jenny had obviously forgotten him; but Ada looked pleased in her indolent way.
“Didn’t I tell you, now? You’ll pay me fifteen a week, that’ll leave you ten clear, in the meantime that’s to say. You’ll soon have a rise. Puddlers earn good money.” She yawned delicately behind her hand, then sketchily cleared a space upon the littered table. “Sit in and have a pick. Clarry, fetch a cup and saucer from the scull’ry and run round to Mrs. Gresley’s, there’s a dear, for three penn’orth corned ham, see you watch her weight too. Might as well have something tasty for a start. Alf, this is Mr. Joe Gowlan, our new gentleman.”
Alf stopped his slow mastication of a final tea-soaked crust to give Joe a laconic yet impressive nod. Clarry slammed in with a newly washed cup and saucer, inky tea was poured, the corned ham appeared with half a loaf and Alf solemnly pushed across the mustard.
Joe sat next to Jenny on the horse-hair sofa. It intoxicated him to be beside her, to think how marvellously he had managed it. She was wonderful, never before had desire stricken him so deeply, so suddenly. He set himself to please, to captivate them — not Jenny, of course, oh, dear no, Joe knew a thing or two better than that! He smiled, his open good-hearted smile; he talked, made easy converse, invented little anecdotes connected with his past; he flattered Ada, joked with the children; he even told a story, a splendidly proper funny story he had once heard at a minstrel entertainment given by the Band of Hope — not that he had really belonged to the Band of Hope — he had joined the night before the concert, dissevered himself abruptly from the pious movement on the following morning. The story went welclass="underline" for all except Sally who received it scornfully and Jenny whose haughtiness remained unmoved. Ada shook with laughter, her hands on her fat sides, shedding hairpins all over the place: