Mrs. Engels (6 page)

Though it makes me bitter to do it, I give in and learn, and what I do well I try to do better and faster, for that's the way to beat the weariness and to sleep at night. I come early and leave late. I join in the talk in the yard. I spend my Sundays with the girls in the halls and the fairs. And when the time comes, in spite of myself, I have to own that he's handsome.

He holds himself slim and erect, and has a good forehead, and—still so young—all the color is yet in his hair. At assembly he talks quick and short, ashamed, it seems, about the foreign in his patter. He's going to make a tour, he says, and he promises to get to know each and every one of us, which makes everybody giddy. Except Mary. It makes her regular cross. “When he comes,” she says, “keep at it and put on you don't even see him. The last thing he wants is a mill full of girls losing the run of themselves.”

Of course, it's herself, then, who goes and loses herself entire.

His laughter comes into the room before he does, and it's catching. “Lethal as the consumption,” Mary will say later.

“My lucky day!” he belts from the doorway, stretching out his arms to get the full lung into it. He looks around. Even from a distance I can see his eyes take in the world and see to the bottom of things, and though he keeps his face, I know he's disappointed by us. Fine lookers between us, there aren't many. There's only Adele in the carding room, but she's got very thin and looks to be down with something serious. And Maggie two rows up, I suppose, if that's your dish of tea.

As he moves around, he waves his hand in front of his face to keep off the dust, and I'd like to tell him it's a useless exercise, all that waving, for it only wafts the flyings in, but of course I keep my trap shut. He's nowhere near me yet anyhows, and I don't know if he'll even get close, for time's ticking on and work hasn't been takenup proper, and he's stopping at every girl and asking them questions—about themselves and where they're from and their work and how they're finding it—and he doesn't seem to be putting on, he appears sincere enough and waits for their answers, though the bulk of them can only stretch to a blush and a curtsy.

Soon Mr. Ermen loses patience and hurries him on—something about having to finish the tour before Christmas—and then all he can spare is a flash of his whites as he passes. He doesn't even stretch that far with me, but strolls by without so much as a glance. I see his cheek out of the side of my eye: skin like the back of a babby. He goes past Lydia, too, without a look, I'm glad to see. And Mary. And soon all there's left of him is his little arse, swaggering away out of our lives.

Only what happens then is, he nigh on catches his side against a wheel. Mary rushes over to steady him, for she's the closest. She takes tight of his arm and pulls him away from the danger, and while he's still reeling in his boots, heedless to what's happening to him, she says to his face a curse in the Irish, something our mother used to say when we were being hazards to ourselves.

The room catches its breath. Speaking out of turn costs you sixpence of your wage, and that's on an ordinary day. Mr. Ermen makes for Mary and looks ready to handle her, but Frederick, now recovered, waves him away and tells him not to be so jumpy. Can't he see this woman has saved him from an injury? Then, God bless him, he asks her to repeat what she said, for he loves a joke.

“Let us hear it,” he says.

She wipes her brow and looks about at all the faces, and in that moment I wish her looks were doing her better justice, for she's recent taken on a touch of jaundice and isn't as flush as God wants her.

“Come on, do share,” he says, and folds his arms across like someone biding to be impressed.

Mary coughs. “It's only something Mammy used to say when we were little.”

There's a shuffle of feet as we prepare for the worst.

“Go on,” he says, not annoyed but eager-like, fain to be on the inside of things.

“She used to say it when she'd see us knocking over things,” she says, and bites her lip and looks down.

He waits for her to look up again before addressing her. “Your accent, young lady,” he says, “is most unusual,” and he asks her where it's from. She says it's from Manchester, like herself, but the Irish part. Then he asks was it the Irish-Celtic her mother spoke when she scolded her.

She says, “Is that the old language you'd be referring to, sir?”

And he says he supposes it is.

And she says, “Well then, aye, it was.”

Then he asks does she speak the Irish-Celtic herself, and she says she does, but only the few phrases she has. And then he asks has she ever been to Ireland, and she says, “Nay, though I hope to go before it pleases God to call for me.”

There's a tense air about the room. He's spent more time with Mary than anybody else, and in a manner more intimate than most would judge her worth. But it's to get worse, for instead of calling it a day and leaving it at that; instead of being happy with saving her a fine and taking his leave, he puts a hand on her back and draws her out of her place, as if to make something special out of her, a fine example. The two of them are standing apart now, Mr. Ermen several paces back, and he begins to ask her about the firesome spirit of the Irish he's heard so much talk of, and he wonders if it's true that we're more related in character to the Latins—to the French and the Italians and the like—and if, like them, we're more interested in the body—
the body!
—than in the mind.

There isn't a sound in the room, and the heat makes it all seem like a feversome dream, and Mary, I can see, is struggling to understand whether she's being mocked, whether this foreigner is using her for his fun, and it's all a trap, and these are the last agonies of her situation. So what she does is, she hardens against the doubt and says the only Italians she knows are the organ boys that come into the pub, and they're only good for making a racket and slipping their dirties up your skirts, and she wouldn't like to be put in a basket with them.

At this, he roars. So shocked are we by its quickness and its power that at first we don't understand it's laughing he's doing, and we're relieved when we see that it is, and that it's the good kind, not the sneering kind, and then we let ourselves do it too. For we can see he's no longer behaving like one of them—listening from across a fast river—but has dropped his distance and waded in, like a hunter that's lost his fear. His arm reaches farther around Mary's waist.

“Where would a man have to go in this town to meet a girl like you?”

I know now that a bold manner goes well with women and impresses men. I've seen it work a hundred times since. But back then I think he's gone too far, crossed over too quick. It isn't the species of thing a mill man ought say—though it is, I know, the truth of what they do without saying—and I'm not prepared for everybody laughing, and Mr. Ermen clapping his back and calling him a sly trickster, and the girls turning to measure their disbelief against each other, and Mary giving him a soft elbow and asking him, scut-like, what type of man he is at all. Nay, I'm not prepared for any of it—the fainting and the adoration that no mortal body deserves—so when I see it, it sickens me.

He takes to walking out with her, I believe, because she talks well and he enjoys hearkening to her. And he keeps walking out with her, he doesn't bore of it, I believe, because he doesn't understand her and wants desperate
to
understand her, for it promises so much.

She likes to say it's because of her ankles. They have a peculiar allure, she thinks, that he can't get full of. She takes to flashing them at him in the yard. He'll be up in the office looking down, and she'll be walking with us and putting on not to notice anything but the ground in front, but then, easy as you please, not a whiff of warning, she'll lift up and step one out from under the hem. They aren't bad as ankles go—of the two of us she has the better—and I'm sure they don't put a damper on proceedings, I'm sure he likes them regular enough, but what really keeps him interested, I'm also sure, is her blather.

He's like a young scholar trying to pull truth out of a foreign gospel. If he learns to understand her, and to speak like her, he'll know what it's like to be her, and by there to be poor. Of course, what he's chasing is a shadow down a passage, for you can't learn that species of thing. To have your vittles today and to know it doesn't depend on you whether you'll have them tomorrow, that's something you've either lived or you haven't.

“What do you talk to him about?” I says to her, for I want her to be ashamed, going around at night with the owner's son.

“Oh, everything,” she says.

“Everything?”

“My life. His life.”

“You're telling him our affairs.”

“Arrah, don't be at me, Lizzie. He's not like the others. He wants to learn about how things are for us. To help us.”

“Help? Well, we know what
that
means.”

“It's different.”

“Why is it different? Why would he want to help you? Hasn't he enough to be getting on with? A mill to run.”

“He doesn't like what he sees here, Lizzie. In Manchester and thereabouts. He wants to understand it so he can change it.”

“He has ideas, all right, and for that he's no different than any other man. You'll be ruined.”

Listening to me, you'd think I'd become the eldest and she the youngest. The truth is, I'm scared for her. She's gone deaf to her own advice. Isn't it herself who says that the higher-ups only marry their own, and if they want your time it's only to lie down with you, and then only for the thrill: it's
you
who pays the final price? Hasn't she gone back on her own words? It's a part of Mary I'm not patient with, this habit of not heeding herself, but I don't punish her with it either, for she punishes herself enough on the days he doesn't call.

No doubt he goes with other women—he's been seen wandering alone down the District—and the thought of it makes her suffer, deep and miserable. He stays away for weeks on end. She sees him in the mill and pours all her hurt into her eyes, but he resists her willing and stays upstairs where he is. Then when it suits him, he appears again, raps his ashplant on the door, and goes to the end of the passage to wait. So strong is her wanting, she throws a shawl around her pain, and runs out.

“What do you do when you go out with him?”

“I show him around.”

“Around where? What's there to be shown?”

“He wants to see where we live.”

“We? We who?”

“We the Irish. We the workers.”

“Jesus.”

“The Holy Name, Lizzie.”

“Well, he's not coming in here, he's not welcome.”

“He'll want to come inside eventual. And I'll not stop him. And you'll not stop him neither.”

She enjoys her new position, anybody can see that. It's easy to picture her leading him down the passages and into the courts, choosing the meanest of the doors to knock on, pointing out all the things that are filthy and wrong, speaking to the bodies for him and getting them to show him their children, and their hips and their sores. Oh aye, all that would come to her like breathing. But what it takes a sister to see—and what I can't keep my eyes off once I've seen it—is what she's doing her best to hide: her love illness.

For it's ill she is. Ill and pure struck-blind. The moments when he needs her and wants her—“Precious moments,” she calls them—these moments are when she's fullest and happy, and she wishes them to go on and on into forever, for she doesn't want to go back to being empty of him. She wants him to be unable to do without her. And he leads her to believe this is so. Just by looking at her a certain way he leads her down that lane—she herself tells me it's all in his eyes—and she forgets her own person there, gets lost in the maze of his possibilities.

She falls, just as he does, for a promise.

Then comes the night he comes inside and stays for tea. He brings pies and ale, too much for the three of us, so he orders the neighbors out from behind the curtain and divides it all up. I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking, Who in God's name does he think he is?

He gets the good chair, and the best cup and plate, and a knife and a fork, and everybody watches how he uses them, on a pie. No one dares talk, so he has to do the talking himself, though he leans on Mary for help, there being so much in what he says that's hard to get. He tells us many things, gossip most of it, about the foremen in the mill and their romances, and the practical jokes he likes to play on Mr. Ermen. And a whole other heap, too, about growing up in Germany among the Calvins, and hating it because the Calvins credit that all time is God's time and wasting a minute is a sin, and life isn't meant for enjoying but for working only.

As for working, he hates his situation at the mill. He hates the position it puts him in, up there on a pillar, for he's happier down here with us lot. But he judges it good for himself also. “Because Germans of my particular caste know too little of the real world. It's an education of sorts, and will do me good.”

What he's learnt so far—and he swears to learn more before he leaves for Germany again in a year's time—is that the workers are more human in daily life, less grasping, than the philistines who employ them, and that the philistines are interested only in money and how much it can buy them. The least grasping of all, he thinks, are the Irish. And, as far as he can see, they work just as good as the English.

Says he: “It's true that to become something skilled like a mechanic, the Irishman would have to take on English customs, and become more English, which would be a formidable task, for he's grown up without civilization, and is close to the Negro in this regard. But for simpler work which asks for more strength than skill, the Irishman is just as good.”