The Stars Look Down (64 page)

David took the meat contract from Rutter’s nervous fingers. David examined the meat contract: the amount was large, the total came to £300. Deliberately he protracted his examination of the blue-grey document, holding up the meeting, feeling their eyes upon him.

“Is this a competitive contract?” he inquired at length.

Unable to hold himself in any longer Ramage leaned forward across the table, his red face malignant with indignation and rage.

“I’ve had that contract for over fifteen years. Have ye any objections?”

David looked across at Ramage: it had come, the first moment, the first test. He felt composed, master of himself. He said coolly:

“I imagine there are a number of people who object.”

“The hell you do!” Ramage flared.

“Mr. Ramage, Mr. Ramage,” bleated the Rev. Low sympathetically.
In and out of the Council Low always toadied to Ramage, his pet parishioner, the man who had laid the foundation-stone of the Bethel Street Chapel, the golden calf amongst his thin-fleeced flock. And now he turned to David, peevishly reproving.

“You are new here, Mr.—er—Fenwick. You are a little over-zealous perhaps. You forget that these contracts are advertised for.”

David answered:

“One quarter of an inch stuffed away in the local paper. An advertisement that nobody ever sees.”

“Why should they see it?” Ramage bawled from the end of the table. “And why the hell should you go shovin’ in your neck? The contract’s been mine for fifteen year now. And nobody’s never said a blasted word.”

“Except the people who eat your rotten meat,” David said in a level voice.

There was a dead silence. Harry Ogle darted an alarmed glance at David. Rutter the clerk was pale with fright. Ramage, bloated with fury, thumped his big fist on the table.

“That’s slander,” he shouted. “There’s a law against that sort of thing. Bates, Rutter, you’re all witnesses—he’s slandered me!”

Rutter lifted his meek face protestingly. The Rev. Low prepared to bleat. But Ramage bawled again:

“He’s got to take it back, he’s got to bloody well take it back.”

Rutter said:

“I must ask you to withdraw, Mr. Fenwick.”

A strange ardour suffused David. Without removing his eyes from Ramage’s face he felt in his inside pocket and pulled out a packet of papers. He said:

“I need not withdraw if I can prove my statement. I have taken the trouble to collect my evidence. I have here signed statements from fifteen patients in the Cottage Hospital, from the three nurses and from the matron herself. These are the people who eat your meat, Mr. Ramage, and in the words of the matron it isn’t fit for a dog. Let me read them to you, gentlemen. Mr. Ramage may regard them in the light of testimonials.”

In a mortal stillness David read out the testimonials to Ramage’s meat. Tough, full of gristle and sometimes tainted: these were the recommendations of the meat. Jane Lowry, one of the ward maids in the hospital, testified that she had
suffered severe colic after eating a piece of rank mutton. Nurse Gibbings at the hospital had contracted an internal parasite which could only have come from polluted meat.

The air was petrified when David finished. As he folded his papers calmly, he could see Harry Ogle beside him, his face working with a grim delight, Ramage opposite, apoplectic with hate and fury.

“It’s a pack of lies,” Ramage stuttered at last. “The meat I supply is prime.”

Ogle spoke up for the first time.

“Then God help prime meat,” he growled.

The Rev. Low raised a pearly, propitiating hand. He bleated:

“Perhaps some bad pieces, once in a while; we can never be sure.”

Harry Ogle muttered:

“Fifteen years it’s been going on—that’s your blessed once in a while.”

Connolly thrust his hands in his pockets impatiently.

“What a song about nothing! Take a vote.” He knew the way to settle the thing for good and all. He repeated loudly: “Vote on it.”

“They’ll beat you, David,” said Harry Ogle in a feverish undertone. Bates, Connolly, Ramage and Low always hung together in their mutual self-interests.

David turned to the Rev. Low.

“I appeal to you as a minister of the gospel. Do you want these sick people in the hospital to go on eating inferior meat?”

The Rev. Low flushed weakly and a look of obstinacy came in his face.

“I am yet to be convinced.”

David relinquished the Rev. Low. He fastened his eye upon Ramage again. He said slowly;

“Let me make it quite clear. If this meeting refuses to sanction a new and adequate advertisement asking for tenders for meat I shall forward these statements to the County Medical Officer of Health and ask for a complete investigation of the entire question.”

A duel ensued between the eyes of Ramage and David. But Ramage’s eyes fell first. He was afraid. He had been swindling the Council for the past fifteen years, selling bad meat and selling underweight; he was afraid, horribly afraid of what an inquiry might reveal. Damn him, he thought, I’ll
have to climb down this time, damn the rotten interfering swine. I’ll get even with him one day if it kills me. Aloud, he said in a surly voice:

“There’s no need to vote. Advertise and be damned. My tender’ll be as good as the rest.”

A glorious wave of triumph swept over David. I’ve won, he thought, I’ve won. The first step on the long road had been taken. He could do it. And he would.

The business of the meeting proceeded.

But, alas, the results of David’s election to the Town Council proved sadly disappointing to Jenny. Jenny’s ardours were invariably so sprightly that the afterglow was always a little tarnished at the edges. And Jenny’s enthusiasm for the election went up like a rocket, burst with a beautiful display of stars and then fizzled out.

She had hoped for social advancement through the election, in particular she longed to “know” Mrs. Ramage. The afternoon tea parties which Mrs. Ramage gave were the
haut ton
of Sleescale: Mrs. Strother, the head master’s wife, was usually there, and Mrs. Armstrong, and Mrs. Dr. Proctor and Mrs. Bates the draper’s wife. Now if Mrs. Bates, why not Mrs. Fenwick?—that was the question which Jenny asked herself with quite a breathless eagerness. They often had music at these tea parties, and who could sing more nicely than Jenny?
Passing By
was such a beautiful song—quite
classical
in a manner of speaking: Jenny burned to sing that song before all the ladies of Sleescale in Mrs. Ramage’s elegant drawing-room in the big new red sandstone house on Sluice Dene. Oh dear, oh dear, chafed Jenny, if only I could get
in
with Mrs. Ramage.

But no recognition came from Mrs. Ramage, not even the faintest shadow of a cross-street bow. And then, at the beginning of December a dreadful incident occurred. One Tuesday afternoon Jenny went into Bates’s shop to buy a short length of muslin—Cousin Mayrianne writing in
Mab’s Journal
had just hinted that muslin would soon be the
dernier cri
for smart women’s undies—and there, at the counter of the drapery, examining some fine lace, stood Mrs. Ramage. Caught in this unguarded situation she looked quite amiable, did Mrs. Ramage. She was a big hard-boned bleakfaced woman who gave the queer impression of having been knocked about a bit and of having stood up to it with remarkable determination. But on this afternoon, fingering the pieces of lace, she had less determination and more pleasantness in her face. And as Jenny edged close to Mrs. Ramage and thought of both their husbands on the same council, so to speak, Jenny’s social aspirations went completely to her head. She came right forward beside the counter and, smiling in her best company manner to Mrs. Ramage and showing all her nice teeth, Jenny said prettily:

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Ramage. Isn’t it a beautiful afternoon for the time of year?”

Mrs. Ramage turned slowly. She looked at Jenny. The horrible thing was that she recognised Jenny, then ceased to recognise her. For, in one deadly second, her face closed up like an oyster. She said very patronisingly and formally:

“I don’t think we’ve met before.”

But poor Jenny, flustered and misguided, rushed on to her doom.

“I’m Mrs. Fenwick,” she murmured. “My husband is on the Town Council with your husband, Mrs. Ramage.”

Mrs. Ramage looked Jenny up and down cruelly:

“Oh,
that
,” she said, and raising the shoulder nearest Jenny she went back to the lace, saying in the sweetest manner to Bates’ young lady assistant:

“I think after all I’ll have the most expensive piece, my dear, and of course you’ll send it and charge it to my account.”

Jenny blushed scarlet. She could have died with shame. Such an affront, and before the nice young lady in the millinery! She spun round and fled from the shop.

That evening she whimpered out her story to David. He listened with a set face, his lips drawn into a fine line, then he said patiently:

“You can hardly expect the woman to fall on your bosom, Jenny, when Ramage and I are at each other’s throats. In these last three months I’ve blocked his rotten meat contract. I’m trying to hold up the grant of £500 he was calmly asking the town to whack out on the new road past his new house in Sluice Dene. A new road useless for
everybody but him! At the last meeting I suggested he was contravening six different regulations in his filthy private slaughter-house. You can imagine he doesn’t exactly love me!”

She gazed at him resentfully, with scalding tears in her eyes.

“Why must you go against people like that?” she sobbed. “You’re so queer. It would have been so useful for you to be on the right side of Mr. Ramage. I want you to get on.”

He answered compassionately:

“But Jenny dear, I’ve told you getting on in that particular sense doesn’t exist for me now. Perhaps I
am
queer. But I’ve been through some queer experiences in these last years. The pit disaster—and the war! Don’t you think, Jenny, that it’s high time some of us set ourselves to fight the abuses that produce disasters like the Neptune disaster and wars like the last war?”

“But, David,” she wailed with unanswerable logic, “you’re only getting thirty-five shillings a week!”

His breast heaved suddenly. He stopped arguing, gave her a quiet look, then rose and went into the other room.

This impressed her with the sense of his neglect, and the hot tears of self-pity trickled afresh. Then she brooded, became sulky and ill-tempered. David was different, completely different; her cajoling went for nothing, she seemed to have no grip upon him at all. She tried with a certain pique to make him passionate towards her, but in that way too he had turned curiously austere. She could feel that the physical side of love, unsupported by tenderness, was repugnant to him. She felt it as an insult. She could feel passionate in a minute, come right out of a violent quarrel to be violently passionate, to want a quick and urgent satisfaction—she called it modestly “making things up.” But not David. It was, she told herself,
unnatural
!

Jenny, of course, was not the one, in her own phrase, “to stand being slighted,” and she got her own back in many ways. She completely relaxed her efforts to please: David began to come home at nights to an out fire and no supper at all. The fact that he never complained now and never quarrelled exasperated her worst of all. On these nights she tried everything she knew to provoke him to a quarrel and when she failed she started to taunt him:

“Do you know that I was earning four pounds a week during
the war?—that’s more than twice what you’re earning now!”

“I’m not in this job for the money, Jenny.”

“I don’t care for money and you know it. I’m not mean. I’m generous. Remember the suit I gave you to go on our honeymoon. Oh, that was a scream that was!—me giving you your trousseau like. Even in those days you hadn’t no gumption. I wouldn’t call myself a man at all if I couldn’t bring home decent money at the end of the week.”

“We all have our standards, Jenny.”

“Of course,” with supreme spitefulness, “I could get a position any time I wanted. I went through the paper this morning and there was half a dozen posts I could have applied for easy. Why! I could get to be a buyer in the millinery any day.”

“Be patient, Jenny! Perhaps I’m not going to be such a dud as you imagine.”

If Jenny had grasped the situation she might, by construing it to her own standards, have been reconciled to patience. David was proving a success with Heddon—he accompanied him to all the Lodge meetings in the district and he was usually asked to speak. At Seghill he had addressed fifteen hundred men in the local Institute over the question of the Southport Resolutions. Heddon had been fogged by the findings of the January Conference and he had allowed David to handle the whole affair. The speech was a triumph for David: lucid, vital and alive with a passionate sincerity. At the end of the meeting, as he came off the platform, he was surrounded by a mass of men, who, to his amazement, wanted to shake him by the hand. Old Jack Briggs, seventy-six, beer- and case-hardened, the doyen of Seghill, pumped his arm till it ached.

“By Gor,” croaked old Jack in the dialect, “tha wor a bloddy gud speech, lad. Aw’ve heerd mony a one but aw diddent niver hear better nor tha. Ye’ll go fawr, hinny!”

And Heddon echoed that historic sentiment. The incredible fact stood established that Heddon, a bitter and unlettered man, was not jealous of David. Heddon had few friends, his violent nature repulsed all but the most persevering of his acquaintances, but from the first Heddon had taken to David. Heddon saw in David a rare and disinterested spirit and he knew so much of the dross of humanity that despite himself Heddon came to love David. He felt instinctively, here is a man who has found his natural bent, a born
speaker, unruffled, penetrating and sincere, a clever and passionately earnest man, a man who might do much for his fellow men. And it was as if Heddon had said fiercely to himself: for God’s sake don’t let me be bitter and mean and envious but let me do my damnedest to help him on!

It was Heddon who read with delight the reports of the Sleescale Town Council meetings which were finding their way into the Tynecastle papers. The Tynecastle papers had discovered David, and his attacks upon the excellent and well-established abuses of Sleescale were manna to them in a dull season. From time to time the Tynecastle papers gaily captioned David and his doings: “Rumpus in Sleescale Council Chamber,” and “Sleescale Trouble Maker at Work Again!”