South Riding Read online

  No doubt of it, Isaiah made grand reading. Even the half-moon of choir girls behind him must feel some splendour from that resonant poetry. Sixteen of them, there were—all plain as cod-fish, and thirteen out of the sixteen wearing spectacles. Adenoids, curvature of the spine, anaemia and acne afflicted them—no, they were not afflicted; they simpered like beauty queens and patted soiled puffs against their pinched pink noses, quite complacent; it was Mr. Huggins whom their physical defects afflicted.

  “And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water; in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. . . . No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there.”

  Be damned to his supercilious high and mightiness in the pew below, with his Benevolent Society and his name upon foundation stones and his Daimler saloon and his invitations to supper. No lion nor any ravenous beast. . . . Councillor Huggins would not be intimidated.

  Opening his lungs, breathing deeply from his great diaphragm, stretching the silver watch chain across his stomach, with its seals and mascots and badges and orders tinkling, Mr. Huggins let his big voice triumph above the heads of clerks and coal merchants and shop assistants.

  “And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

  The congregation was not unduly impressed. It was accustomed to Mr. Huggins’ histrionics. He was a popular but not greatly respected preacher, and to-night Gladys Hubbard, the child vocalist who had won two gold medals though she was still only in form IV lower at the High School, was to sing a solo in the second anthem. Anticipation eagerly awaited her performance.

  But the reading had fortified the reader. His weak hands had been strengthened. His feeble knees had been confirmed. Why, after all, should Snaith not ask him out to supper? They were colleagues on the County Council, weren’t they? Snaith was a democrat on principle, wasn’t he? And even if he was a Power now, President of the Kingsport Housing, Self-Help and Mutual Improvement Association, on the Committee of the Kingsport Hospital, certain to be next Vice-Chairman of the Council, director of half a dozen companies with interests in trawling, cod liver oil, local railways, and artificial manures, reputed to be worth five hundred thousand, he had been nothing when he started, hadn’t he? And there was still something a little queer about him, wasn’t there?

  Mr. Huggins, who was rarely worth more than his two lorries and the clothes he stood in, took heart of grace.

  For it was surely odd that Snaith had never married, nor anything else either, so they said. A bachelor life—now Huggins could understand that. And there were some who happened to be queer and couldn’t help it, like that poor parson fellow who got himself into trouble up Norton Witral way with choir boys. Nothing like that about Snaith, or you’d have heard it. Just—odd. And in more ways than one, for, taking it by and large, it was not quite natural that he should keep himself so closely to the South Riding. Never stood for Parliament, for instance. Now there was scope for a man of initiative. Huggins who, as an ardent Liberal, had campaigned through many elections, never quite abandoned his dream that one day he himself would be the candidate, to stride up the room through the applauding audience, to fling hat and top coat on the chair behind him, to crush his hecklers by unanswerable retorts before dashing away by car to another meeting, and perhaps even to stand on the floodlit balcony of the Town Hall acknowledging the cheers that greeted him as elected member for the Kiplington and Cold Harbour Division of Yorkshire. . . . If only business had not gone so badly; if only he had not married; if only Nell were other than what she was. . . .

  Parliament was a life for a man. There was triumph worth winning. Queer that Snaith never tried for it—unless, poor chap, there was something a bit wrong with him.

  The choir shrilled through the Gloria and sank with relief to its seats.

  Mr. Huggins sprang forward, nimbly for one so large, and announced the second lesson:

  “The fifth chapter of the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Hebrews. First Verse. ‘For every high priest taken from among men is ordained for men in things pertaining to God.’” He never enjoyed reading the New Testament like the Old. Less body in it . . . “Who can have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way; for that he himself is also compassed with infirmity.”

  Ah, if that were the only qualification for priesthood, thought Mr. Huggins—being himself all too often compassed with infirmity.

  If he hadn’t messed up the insurance policy on that second lorry; if he hadn’t missed the Dollstall U.D.C. contracts; if Freda hadn’t quarrelled with her husband; if Bessy Warbuckle. . . . Now, a man like Snaith would never understand anything like that. Huggins considered himself to be a good-living man; but flesh and blood has limits. And his infirmities made him able to help other people. They were, you might almost call them, a gift from God. It was perhaps because Snaith couldn’t show natural human feelings that he went no further.

  Reading mechanically, Huggins ended the second lesson, sat through Gladys Hubbard’s solo and knelt to pray.

  For he had reached a solution to his problem. Snaith was not quite all that he ought to be. A good enough chap, but not a proper man. Therefore he could go no further. Some timidity, some limitation of spirit held him. While Huggins, why—if only he could escape from his entanglement of debts and children and responsibility—from Nelly and her querulous hypochondria, from Freda and her matrimonial troubles—there was no knowing what he might not do, where he might not end, a man with his talents . . .”

  He rose from prayer feeling strengthened and encouraged. His was a devout nature, and the god whom he worshipped rarely left him comfortless.

  He found himself able to look Snaith straight in the eye, and, bending over the desk, preached him a sermon as eloquent, rich and full of “body” as even he, with his high standard, could desire.

  He took as his text the words: “In the place of dragons . . .” romantic and suggestive.

  “Isaiah’s call,” he boomed, “comes to us to rebuild the wilderness. We can fight the dragons, misery, squalor, overcrowding. Do you know these little alleys of East Kingsport? Filthy, verminous, crawling with sin—sin! The prophet talked about the solitary place, but it’s the overcrowded place we think of to-day. Five or six adults in a bedroom. What purity can you expect there? Boys and girls, yes, and men and women together . . .”

  Huggins knew a thing or two about the Kingsport slums. He had been born in one. He was on the Public Health Committee of the South Riding County Council. He was a compassionate man. He really hated misery. Had he created the world not a woman should ever be overburdened, not a child forlorn, not a man discouraged. Youth should endure for ever; strength should never fail; and love and gaiety, song and feasting, should reign on earth as they surely did in Heaven.

  For Huggins wholeheartedly believed in Heaven and entirely hoped that he would go there one day.

  The dissimilarity of East Kingsport from Heaven was a cause of real distress to him, and he cursed the proud and cruel men who made money by grinding the faces of the poor and by driving girls into vice and men into drunken squalor. He praised the public-spirited and noble who made the wilderness break forth into joy and singing. He drew vivid pictures of the touts and procurers who, like ravenous beasts, walked through the evil dripping yards and stinking alleys, and he prophesied their flight when the ransomed of the Lord should return to the Zion of Christian decency, with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads.

  He did it all the better because he had only now fought his fight against depression and lack of confidence. The reaction drove him high into exaltation. The glow of his triumph endured through the singing of the final hymn, the last verse repeated softly, the congregation kneeling, the caretaker waiting in his seat to pounce upon the lights; it endured as the people rose
to their feet, and Madame Hubbard at the organ swayed into the valedictory sweetness of Gounod’s Ave Maria, and Mr. Huggins plunged across the chapel to shake hands with the retreating worshippers.

  “Good-evening, Mr. Hubbard. How well your little girl sang. A real gift from God. Good-evening, Mrs. Ransom. Good-evening. I hope you enjoyed the service?” “I’ve known worse.” “Good-evening.”

  He did it well—much better than the minister, he thought, a little bitterly, aware that he lacked the prestige of a “Reverend.”

  “Good-evening. Good-evening.”

  A small sedate youngish woman in brown slipped unobtrusively past him.

  He caught her hand. “Why now, I’m welcoming a stranger, surely? I hoped you enjoyed our service?”

  Now where had he seen before those pale greenish eyes that glanced so coolly over his puzzled face.

  “Very much, thank you,” replied the woman, and made for the door.

  “Ah, I see you’ve already met our new head mistress,” said Alderman Snaith’s precise quiet voice.

  “Head mistress?”

  “Of the High School. Miss Sarah Burton. I understand that she’s Church of England, but your fame has obviously seduced her.”

  “I hope not—I hope not,” began Huggins, realised that this was not quite what he meant to say, and coloured. Snaith stood examining his polished finger-nails, an irritating trick, but characteristic. The chapel was almost empty. Huggins felt his courage dwindling with the congregation. It was as though they carried away with them something that was his— that was—in its way—himself, and left him, with Snaith there beside him, helpless and empty, a big, brown-bearded, coarse-featured, powerful yokel dominated by the little neat grey dapper alderman.

  “You are coming round to supper with me, aren’t you? I’ve got Astell too. Just the three of us.”

  “Thanks very much. Yes. I’m looking forward to it.”

  But he wasn’t. Uneasiness shook him. He was aware of fatigue. He wanted to go with the Tadmans or Hubbards to a homely meal of bacon pie and cocoa, or beef and pickles, strong rich foods that satisfied his big body, pious gossiping easy talk that relaxed his mind.

  But he had to follow the alderman into his waiting car and summon his resources for ordeal at the Red House.

  Huggins had visited the Red House for purely business interviews already. He had never been there for supper. He was prepared for discomfort, formality and the stiff finicking queerness of a bachelor establishment.

  He found himself, to his disarmed surprise, seated before a small but well-spread table, eating enormously of cold sirloin cut in paper-thin slices, cooked to a turn, potatoes baked in their jackets swimming with butter, a perfect apple pie, its fruit sweet, tart, invigorating, under the sliding yellow cream, its pastry short enough to melt in his mouth, and Stilton cheese that was ripe and mellow as wine. A teetotaller on principle, Huggins could find in food some quality of elation for which others, less temperate, required alcohol. Well-being like the Grace of God crept warmly through his body. Perhaps, thought Huggins, they are not so far different. Food is one of God’s gifts. So is well-being. The peace of the body which is beyond all understanding filled his heart with love for God and man.

  He could listen, without irritation, to Astell’s harsh solemn voice, criticising an article by Mr. J. L. Garvin in the Observer.

  By the time supper was over and the men withdrew with coffee, liqueurs and cigars to the library upstairs, Huggins knew that life was good and that God was on his side. Except that envy now lay dead in his heart, Huggins could have envied Snaith his library. The alderman had built the Red House for himself just after the War, on the only eminence that could be called a hill between Kingsport and Kiplington. At night from the big uncurtained window of the first floor library, Snaith could watch as he worked the formless glow in the sky westward over Kingsport, the shivering spangling lights from the docks across the Leame in Lincolnshire, and eastward the long rotating beam of the Leame Hook lighthouse. Huggins, an imaginative man, found that view superb, and wondered whether Snaith realised entirely what he had done when he designed this window. But to-night he was content to lie back in a large arm-chair, inhaling deeply the smoke from a half-crown cigar, and watching without contempt the dry small figure of his host outlined against that gold-splashed panorama.

  “You missed something to-night, Astell,” Snaith was telling his other guest. “Pity you don’t come to Chapel. Huggins surpassed himself.”

  Astell read Kant in translation, spoke at meetings of the Rationalist Press and was an agnostic. Snaith upheld the proud intellectual traditions of nonconformity with a theological precision far above Huggins’ head. But it was Huggins whom he praised.

  “He took as his text ‘The habitation of dragons . . .’ and turned it against East Kingsport housing conditions. D’you know Gladstone Passage? Ah—I thought you had it in mind— — You too, Astell. As magistrate in the Junior Court I had a case up from there last Wednesday. Girl. Thirteen. Soliciting. Eight people at home sleeping in one room. Elder sister pregnant by the father, procured an abortion. This child told us. Mother in mental hospital. Pretty, eh?” Snaith delicately clipped the end of his cigar. “Eh, Astell?”

  “You know what I think. You know too that Gladstone Passage is Kingsport’s responsibility. But we’ve got some pretty warrens ourselves in Dollstall and Spunlington and Flintonbridge.”

  “I know. I know. I’m quite ready to pluck the beam out of our own eye—and if I wasn’t, you’d soon prompt me to it, Astell. As a matter of fact . . . it was queer you preaching that sermon to-night, Huggins. Because I’d asked you two up here with a special purpose. You’re both men who have specialised in housing one way or another. You know, I think, that Kingsport feels it can’t go much further by itself. It’s got to that point when it needs our co-operation.”

  “More land for housing estates, you mean?”

  “Precisely. Ever thought about Leame Ferry Wastes, Astell?”

  “No drainage, is there?”

  “But supposing the Ministry sanctions the new road from Skerrow to Kiplington. It would pass right across the wastes. We should have to drain to some extent any way. And it would make the place exceedingly accessible.”

  On the table in the great bow of the window lay piles of papers. Snaith switched on a lamp. Light flooded them. “I should like you, if you will, to come here for a moment and look at these. I’ve been having some plans made out—partly for my own amusement. But I want you to help me to decide if there might not be something more than amusement in it. Now here’s the Waste—two and a half square miles of absolutely useless property—at present. Belongs to the Rammington Panel Company. Going for a song. But it’s no further from Kingsport than Clixton Garden Village—in fact it’s much nearer for men working in Skerrow and Fleetmire. And, if the Ministry of Health would let us drain it as part of a big town planning scheme—and co-operate with Kingsport to move out the families from Skerrow yards and Gladstone Passage way—It’s a dream, of course, and Westminster may turn us down, but . . .”

  His two guests, bending over the papers, were aware that Snaith’s dreams had a habit of coming true. That house itself, that library, that admirable supper which they had just eaten, must have seemed an impossible dream to the undersized raw out-of-elbows boy once running errands in a back street insurance office.

  Snaith talked well and he talked eagerly. When he became enthusiastic he became likeable. It appeared that he had gone further into facts and figures than he had at first suggested. He had foreseen possibilities and met difficulties.

  A new market would be opened up for that part of the South Riding. The figures for tuberculosis, rickets and other infantile scourges in East Kingsport would be reduced. The children could have an elementary school of their own; but secondary school pupils could be divided between Dollstall, Kiplington and Kingsport. Fresh air, space and freedom could work wonders for them. Perhaps far-sighted industrialists could
be persuaded to move their factories out of the grime and congestion of the city.

  “We’ve got to plan. We’ve got to build for the future,” said Snaith. “We’ve got to justify our power.”

  Huggins could feel a slight nervous hand gripping his arm. “Here’s your desert all right, Huggins. The question is—can we make it blossom?”

  Not a word was said of how the opening out of this estate might affect local incomes, increase Huggins’ opportunities for haulage contracts or rescue a moribund railway line in which Snaith was interested from ruin. It was Astell, the Socialist, who had no possible financial stake in the matter, who was first converted. Afterwards Huggins could have sworn that though it was Snaith who conceived the Leame Ferry Waste idea, it was Astell’s dogged persistence that carried it forward.

  Snaith’s oar drove Huggins and Astell home.

  Before he got out at Pidsea Buttock, Huggins remarked, “Clever chap, Snaith. Knows what he’s talking about.”

  “Does he?” asked Astell.

  “Eh, eh? Don’t you think so?”

  “I hope it may be so.”

  A trifle deflated, Huggins fell back upon consoling platitudes. “Well, well,” he yawned, agreeably fatigued, “God moves in a mysterious way.”

  “God?” Huggins was too sleepy to catch the precise meaning of that inflection. “We have to . . . very mysteriously sometimes. But we move all right. We move . . .”

  “Well, I get out here, I’m afraid. Good-night,” said Huggins.

  7

  Madame Hubbard Has Highly Talented Pupils

  MISS DOLORES JAMESON looked at Sarah Burton’s red hair bent over her time-tables, and smiled indulgently.

  “These spinster school-marms,” she thought. “No wonder they stick to their job.”

  As for Dolores, she had something better to do than to conjugate Latin verbs for ever. Amo, amas, amat. To hell with it. Ten more minutes and she’d be due to meet Pip.

  If it had not been for Pip, of course, she’d be in Miss Burton’s place this very moment. Pip was Philip Pankhurst, a bank clerk who lived as paying guest with the Jameson family at Hardrascliffe. He was going to marry Dolores the moment he got his promotion, so she had not even put in for the headmistress-ship. Miss Burton was welcome to it. Plain, redheaded, managing. A typical school-marm. It made Dolores smile to think what Pip would say of her. Dear Pip. He thought Dolores wonderful with her temperament and her flashing eyes and her Spanish ancestry.