Helen with the High Hand, Arnold Bennett [summer reading list .txt] 📗

was knocked out of him.

"Yes. And gone to Canada!" Helen added.

You pick up your paper in the morning, and idly and slowly peruse the advertisements on the first page, forget it, eat some bacon, grumble at the youngest boy, open the paper, read the breach of promise case on page three, drop it, and ask your wife for more coffee--hot--glance at your letters again, then reopen the paper at the news page, and find that the Tsar of Russia has been murdered, and a few American cities tumbled to fragments by an earthquake--you know how you feel then. James Ollerenshaw felt like that. The captain of the bowling-club, however, poising a bowl in his right hand, and waiting for James Ollerenshaw to leave his silken dalliance, saw nothing but an old man and a young woman sitting on a Corporation seat.


CHAPTER III


MARRYING OFF A MOTHER

"Yes," said Helen Rathbone, "mother fell in love. Don't you think it was funny?"

"That's as may be," James Ollerenshaw replied, in his quality of the wiseacre who is accustomed to be sagacious on the least possible expenditure of words.

"We both thought it was awfully funny," Helen said.

"Both? Who else is there?"

"Why, mother and I, of course! We used to laugh over it. You see, mother is a very simple creature. And she's only forty-four."

"She's above forty-four," James corrected.

"She _told_ me she was thirty-nine five years ago," Helen protested.

"Did she tell ye she was forty, four years ago?"

"No. At least, I don't remember."

"Did she ever tell ye she was forty?"

"No."

"Happen she's not such a simple creature as ye thought for, my lass," observed James Ollerenshaw.

"You don't mean to infer," said Helen, with cold dignity, "that my _mother_ would tell me a lie?"

"All as I mean is that Susan was above thirty-nine five years ago, and I can prove it. I had to get her birth certificate when her father died, and I fancy I've got it by me yet." And his eyes added: "So much for that point. One to me."

Helen blushed and frowned, and looked up into the darkling heaven of her parasol; and then it occurred to her that her wisest plan would be to laugh. So she laughed. She laughed in almost precisely the same manner as James had heard Susan laugh thirty years previously, before love had come into Susan's life like a shell into a fortress, and finally blown their fragile relations all to pieces. A few minutes earlier the sight of great-stepuncle James had filled Helen with sadness, and he had not suspected it. Now her laugh filled James with sadness, and she did not suspect it. In his sadness, however, he was glad that she laughed so naturally, and that the sombre magnificence of her dress and her gloves and parasol did not prevent her from opening her rather large mouth and showing her teeth.

"It was just like mother to tell me fibs about her age," said Helen, generously (it is always interesting to observe the transformation of a lie into a fib). "And I shall write and tell her she's a horrid mean thing. I shall write to her this very night."

"So Susan's gone and married again!" James murmured, reflectively.

Helen now definitely turned the whole of her mortal part towards James, so that she fronted him, and her feet were near his. He also turned, in response to this diplomatic advance, and leant his right elbow on the back of the seat, and his chin on his right palm. He put his left leg over his right leg, and thus his left foot swayed like a bird on a twig within an inch of Helen's flounce. The parasol covered the faces of the just and the unjust impartially.

"I suppose you don't know a farmer named Bratt that used to have a farm near Sneyd?" said Helen.

"I can't say as I do," said James.

"Well, that's the man!" said Helen. "He used to come to Longshaw cattle-market with sheep and things."

"Sheep and things!" echoed James. "What things?"

"Oh! I don't know," said Helen, sharply. "Sheep and things."

"And what did your mother take to Longshaw cattle-market?" James inquired. "I understood as she let lodgings."

"Not since I've been a teacher," said Helen, rather more sharply. "Mother didn't take anything to the cattle-market. But you know our house was just close to the cattle-market."

"No, I didn't," said James, stoutly. "I thought as it was in Aynsley-street."

"Oh! that's years ago!" said Helen, shocked by his ignorance. "We've lived in Sneyd-road for years--years."

"I'll not deny it," said James.

"The great fault of our house," Helen proceeded, "was that mother daren't stir out of it on cattle-market days."

"Why not?"

"Cows!" said Helen. "Mother simply can't look at a cow, and they were passing all the time."

"She should ha' been thankful as it wasn't bulls," James put in.

"But I mean bulls too!" exclaimed Helen. "In fact, it was a bull that led to it."

"What! Th' farmer saved her from a mad bull, and she fell in love with him? He's younger than her, I lay!"

"How did you know that?" Helen questioned. "Besides, he isn't. They're just the same age."

"Forty-four?" Perceiving delicious danger in the virgin's face, James continued before she could retort, "I hope Susan wasn't gored?"

"You're quite wrong. You're jumping to conclusions," said Helen, with an air of indulgence that would have been exasperating had it not been enchanting. "Things don't happen like that except in novels."

"I've never read a novel in my life," James defended himself.

"Haven't you? How interesting!"

"But I've known a woman knocked down by a bull."

"Well, anyhow, mother wasn't knocked down by a bull. But there was a mad bull running down the street; it had escaped from the market. And Mr. Bratt was walking home, and the bull was after him like a shot. Mother was looking out of the window, and she saw what was going on. So she rushed to the front door and opened it, and called to Mr. Bratt to run in and take shelter. And they only just got the door shut in time."

"Bless us!" muttered James. "And what next?"

"Why, I came home from school and found them having tea together."

"And ninety year between them!" James reflected.

"Then Mr. Bratt called every week. He was a widower, with no children."

"It couldn't ha' been better," said James.

"Oh yes, it could," said Helen. "Because I had the greatest difficulty in marrying them; in fact, at one time I thought I should never do it. I'm always in the right, and mother's always in the wrong. She's admitted that for years. She's had to admit it. Yet she _would_ go her own way. Nothing would ever cure mother."

"She used to talk just like that of your grandfather," said James. "Susan always reckoned as she'd got more than her fair share of sense."

"I don't think she thinks that now," said Helen, calmly, as if to say: "At any rate I've cured her of _that_." Then she went on: "You see, Mr. Bratt had sold his farm--couldn't make it pay--and he was going out to Manitoba. He said he would stop in England. Mother said she wouldn't let him stop in England where he couldn't make a farm pay. She was quite right there," Helen admitted, with careful justice. "But then she said she wouldn't marry him and go out to Manitoba, because of leaving me alone here to look after myself! Can you imagine such a reason?"

James merely raised his head quickly several times. The gesture meant whatever Helen preferred that it should mean.

"The idea!" she continued. "As if I hadn't looked after mother and kept her in order, and myself, too, for several years! No. She wouldn't marry him and go out there! And she wouldn't marry him and stay here! She actually began to talk all the usual conventional sort of stuff, you know--about how she had no right to marry again, and she didn't believe in second marriages, and about her duty to me. And so on. You know. I reasoned with her--I explained to her that probably she had another thirty years to live. I told her she was quite young. She _is_. And why should she make herself permanently miserable, _and_ Mr. Bratt, _and_ me, merely out of a quite mistaken sense of duty? No use! I tried everything I could. No use!"

"She was too much for ye?"

"Oh, _no_!" said Helen, condescendingly. "I'd made up my _mind_. I arranged things with Mr. Bratt. He quite agreed with me. He took out a licence at the registrar's, and one Saturday morning--it had to be a Saturday, because I'm busy all the other days--I went out with mother to buy the meat and things for Sunday's dinner, and I got her into the registrar's office--and, well, there she was! Now, what do you think?"

"What?"

"Her last excuse was that she couldn't be married because she was wearing her third-best hat. Don't you think it's awfully funny?"

"That's as may be," said James. "When was all this?"

"Just recently," Helen answered. "They sailed from Glasgow last Thursday but two. And I'm expecting a letter by every post to say that they've arrived safely."

"And Susan's left you to take care of yourself!"

"Now, please don't begin talking like mother," Helen said, frigidly. "I've certainly got less to take care of now than I had. Mother quite saw that. But what difficulty I had in getting her off, even after I'd safely married her! I had to promise that if I felt lonely I'd go and join them. But I shan't."

"You won't?"

"No. I don't see myself on a farm in Manitoba. Do you?"

"I don't know as I do," said James, examining her appearance, with a constant increase of his pride in it. "So ye saw 'em off at Glasgow. I reckon she made a great fuss?"

"Fuss?"

"Cried."

"Oh yes, of course."

"Did you cry, miss?"

"Of course I cried," said Helen, passionately, sitting up straight. "Why do you ask such questions?"

"And us'll never see Susan again?"

"Of course I shall go over and _see_ them," said Helen. "I only meant that I shouldn't go to stop. I daresay I shall go next year, in the holidays."


CHAPTER IV


INVITATION TO TEA

They were most foolishly happy as they sat there on the bench, this man whose dim eyes ought to have been waiting placidly for the ship of death to appear above the horizon, and this young girl who imagined that she knew all about life and the world. When I say that they were foolishly happy, I of course mean that they were most wisely happy. Each of them, being gifted with common sense, and with a certain imperviousness to sentimentality which invariably accompanies common sense, they did not mar the present by regretting the tragic stupidity of a long estrangement; they did not mourn over wasted years that could not be recalled. It must be admitted, in favour of the Five Towns, that when its inhabitants spill milk they do not usually sit down on the pavement and adulterate the milk with their tears. They pass on. Such passing on is termed callous and cold-hearted in the rest