The Stars Look Down (8 page)

With clouded eyes, she made to take up the singlet when all at once the pain in her back came on again. The pain was bad this time, transfixing her, and in the instant she knew it for what it was. Dismayed, she waited. The pain went, returned. Without a word she got up and went out of the back door of the kitchen. She walked with difficulty up the back. She went into the closet. Yes, it was that.

She came out, stood for a moment surrounded by the quiet darkness of the night, supporting herself against the low dividing fence with one hand, holding her swollen body with the other. It had come upon her then, while her husband was in prison, the last indignity. And before her grown sons. Inscrutable as the darkness which lay about her, she thought rapidly. She would not have Dr. Scott, nor Mrs. Reedy, the midwife, either. Robert had flung away their savings madly in the strike. She was in debt, she could not, she would not tolerate further expense. Within a minute her mind was made up.

She returned to the house.

“David! Run round to Mrs. Brace. Tell her to look in to me now.”

Startled, he looked at her questioningly. She was never a great one for David, who had always been his father’s boy, but now the expression in his eyes moved her. She said kindly:

“Never worry, Davey. I’m just not well.” As he scurried out she went over to the kist where she kept such linen as she had, unlocked it. Then, awkwardly, lifting one foot up to the other, she climbed the ladder to the lads’ room above.

Mrs. Brace, the neighbour, came in presently from next door. She was a kindly woman, short of breath and very stout: indeed, she looked, poor soul, as though she were going to have a baby herself. But it was not so. Hannah Brace was
ruptured
, as she phrased it, she had a big umbilical hernia, the result of repeated pregnancies, and, though her husband Harry faithfully promised her the article every Christmas, as yet no truss to restrain it: every night when she went to bed she solemnly pushed back the bulging mass, every morning when she got up the thing bulged out again. She had become almost attached to her rupture, it formed a topic of conversation, she spoke about it to her intimates as people do about the weather. She went up the ladder very cautiously too, and disappeared into the room above.

David and Hughie sat in the kitchen. Hughie had given over his cobbling, and now pretended to interest himself with a paper. David also pretended to read. But from time to time the two looked at each other, confronted by the mystery secretly unfolding in the room above, and in the eyes of each there was a strange shame. To think of it; and their own mother!

No sound came from the bedroom but the heavy thump of feet as Mrs. Brace moved about. Once she called down for a kettle of hot water. Davey handed it to her.

At ten o’clock Sam came back rather pale about the gills, his jaw set to meet a most tremendous row. They told him. He flushed, as he did so easily, and remorse flooded him. Sam never could bear ill will. He lifted his eyes to the ceiling.

“My poor mother,” he said. It was the most any of them dared to say.

At twenty minutes to eleven Mrs. Brace came down carrying a small newspaper package. She looked saddened and put out; she washed her red hands at the sink, took a drink of cold water; then she addressed herself to Sammy—the eldest:

“A little lass,” she said, “a bonny thing, but dead. Ay, still-born.
I’d have done as well as Mrs. Reedy, don’t yon fret. But I niver had no chance. I’ll come in te-morrow an’ lay the littlin out. Take yer mother up a cup of cocoa now. She’s fair to middling; an’ I’ve my man’s bait to see to for the fore shift.” She lifted the package carefully, smiled gently at David who saw that red was coming through the newspaper, then she waddled out.

Sam made the cocoa and took it up. He remained about ten minutes. When he came down, his face was pale as clay, and the sweat had broken on his brow. He had come from his courting to look on death. David hoped that Sam might speak, say that their mother was comfortable. But all Sam said was:

“Get into bed, here, lads. We’ll sleep three thegither in the kitchen for a bit.”

Next morning, which was Tuesday, Mrs. Brace came in to see to Martha and, as she had promised, she laid out the still-born child. David returned from the pit earlier than the others; that night he had been lucky and ridden to bank two cage-loads ahead of the main shift. He entered the kitchen in the half-darkness. And there, upon the dresser, lay the body of the child.

He went over and looked at it with a queer catch of fear and awe. It was very small, its hands no bigger than the petals of a water lily. The tiny fingers had no nails. The palm of his own hand would have covered its face; the pinched, marble-white features, were perfect; the tiny blue lips parted as in wonderment that life was not. Mrs. Brace, with the real professional touch, had stuffed the mouth and nostrils with cotton-wool. Looking over his shoulder now, not without pride, she explained:

“It looks mortal pretty. But she couldna bear it upstairs wi’ her, your mother, Davey.”

David hardly heard her. A stubborn resentment surged within him as he gazed at the dead-born infant. Why should it be so? Why shouldn’t his mother have had food, care, attention, all that her condition demanded? Why was his child not living, smiling, sucking at the breast? It hurt him, stirred him to a fierce indignation. As on that occasion when the Wepts had given him food, a chord vibrated deeply, painfully within his being; and again he swore with all the inarticulate passion of his young soul to do something… something… he didn’t know what or how… but he
would do it… strike some destroying stroke against the pitiful inhumanities of life.

Sam and Hughie came in together. They looked at the baby. Still in their pit clothes they ate the fried bacon Mrs. Brace had prepared. It was not the usual good meal, the potatoes were lumpy, there was insufficient water for the bath, the kitchen was upset, everything untidy, they missed their mother’s hand.

Later, when Sammy came down from upstairs he looked at his brothers furtively. He said awkwardly:

“She won’t have no funeral. I’ve talked an’ talked, but she won’t have it. She says since the lock-out we can’t face the expense.”

“But, Sammy, we must,” David cried. “Ask Mrs. Brace…”

Mrs. Brace was called to reason with Martha. It was useless, Martha was inexorable, an iron bitterness had seized her over this child she had not wanted and which now had no want of her. No funeral was exacted by law. She would not have it, none of the trappings or panoply of death.

Hughie, always clever with his hands, made a neat enough coffin from plain pit boards. They put clean white paper inside and laid the body in the rude shell. Then Hughie nailed on the lid.

Late on Thursday night Sam took the box under his arm and set out alone. He forbade Hughie and David to accompany him. It was dark and windy. They did not know where he had gone until he came back. Then he told them. He had borrowed five shillings from Pug Macer, Annie’s eldest brother, and given it to Geddes, the cemetery keeper. Geddes had let him bury the child privately in a corner of the graveyard. David often thought of that shallow grave; he never knew where it was; but he did know it was not near the pauper graves; this much Sammy told him.

Friday passed and Saturday came: the day of Robert’s release. Martha had been confined on Monday night. By Saturday afternoon she was up, waiting… waiting for him, for Robert.

He arrived at eight o’clock, to find her in the kitchen alone. He entered so quietly she did not know he was there until the sound of his cough made her spin round as she stood, still bent over the fire. They stared at each other, he quietly, without rancour, she with that terrible bitterness burning like dark fire in her eyes. Neither spoke. He flung
his cap on the sofa, sat down at the table like a weary man. Immediately she went to the oven, drew out his plate of cooked dinner kept hot for him there. She placed it before him in that same terrible silence.

He began to eat, casting quick glances at her figure from time to time, glances that became charged with a strange apology. At length he said:

“What’s like the matter, my lass?”

She quivered with anger.

“Don’t call me your lass.”

He understood then what had happened; a kind of wonder stirred in him.

“What was it?” he asked.

She knew he had always wanted a daughter. And to cut him more she told him that his daughter was dead.

“So that was the way of it,” he sighed; and then: “Did ye have a bad time, lass?”

It was too much. She did not deign to answer at once; but with embittered servitude she removed his empty plate and placed his tea before him; then she said:

“I’m used to bad times like, since ever I knew you.”

Though he had come home for peace, her savage attitude provoked his tired blood.

“I canna help the way things hev gone,” he said with a sudden bitterness to match her own. “I hope ye understand they gaoled me for nowt.”

“I do not understand,” she answered, hand on her hip, facing him.

“They had their knife in me ower the strike, don’t ye see!”

“I’m not surprised,” she retorted, panting with anger.

It was then that his nerves broke. What, under heaven, had he done? He had brought the men out, because in his very marrow he feared for them in Scupper Flats, and in the end they had scoffed at him and spat upon him and let him go to gaol for nothing. Fury seethed in him, against her and against his fate. He lifted his hand and struck her on the face.

She did not flinch, she received the blow gratefully. Her nostrils dilated.

“Thanks,” she said. “That was good of ye. ’Twas all I needed.”

He sank back into his chair, paler than she. Then he began to cough, his deep booming cough. He was torn by this paroxysm. When it had passed he sat bowed, defeated; then he rose, threw off his clothes, got into the kitchen bed.

Next day, Sunday, though he awakened at seven, he stopped in bed all forenoon. She was up early and went to chapel. She forced herself to go, enduring the looks, slights and sympathy of the Bethel Street congregation, partly to show him up, partly to establish her own respectability. Dinner was a misery, especially for the lads. They hated it when open anger came between their father and mother. It paralysed the house, lay upon them like a degradation.

After dinner Robert walked down to the pit. He expected to find himself sacked. But he was not sacked. Dimly he realised that his friendship with Heddon, the miners’ agent, and with Harry Nugent of the Federation had helped him here. Fear of real trouble with the Union had saved his job for him at the Neptune.

He came straight home, sat reading by the fire, went silently to bed. Next morning the caller woke him, at two o’clock he was in the pit working the early fore shift.

All day long she prepared for his return in that same storm of unappeased bitterness. She would show him, make him pay… she kept looking at the clock, waiting for the hours to pass.

At the end of the shift he returned, dead beat and soaked to the skin. She prepared to wound him with her silent anger, but somehow the sight of him killed all the rankling in her heart.

“What’s like the matter?” she asked instinctively.

He leaned against the table, stifling his cough, gasping for breath.

“They’ve couped the cavils,” he said, meaning that the draw for positions in the Paradise had been overruled. “They’ve black-listed me, gi’en me the worst place in the whole district. A scabby three-foot roof. I’ve lay on my stomach in water, hewin’, all the shift.”

A throb of compassion beat within her. And with that beat of anguish something she had thought dead came painfully alive. She reached out her hands.

“Let me help ye, my lad. Let me help ye with your claes.”

She helped him strip the filthy sodden clothes. She helped him to the bath. She knew she still loved him.

David, five hundred feet underground and two miles from the main shaft, reckoned it was nearly bait time. He was in the Paradise, the Mixen-section of Paradise, the lowest level of the Neptune pit with Globe Coal two hundred feet above, and Five Quarter a hundred higher still. He had no watch, but the number of journeys he had made with his tubs from the flat to the landing gave him the clue. He stood beside Dick, his galloway, in the landing—where the full tubs which he, the horse putter, drove up, were hitched to the mechanical haulage and pulled outbye on the Paradise haulage road. He was waiting for Tally Brown to switch the empties. Though he hated the Paradise, David always liked the landing. It was cool, after a hot sweaty run, and he could stand upright without fear of banging his head.

While David waited he reflected on his own good fortune. He could barely believe it, that this should be his last Saturday in the Neptune. Not only his last Saturday; but his last day! No, he could not fully realise his luck.

He had always hated the pit. Some of the lads liked it, took to the work like a duck to water. But not he. Never! Perhaps his imagination was too vivid, he couldn’t lose the sense of being shut up, buried in these dark little warrens, deep down underground. He always remembered, too, in the Five Quarter Seam, that he was under the sea. Mr. Carmichael, the junior master at Bethel Street Council School, who had helped him over the scholarship, had told him the name of that queer sensation of feeling shut down. Deep underground; deep under the sea. While above the sun shone, the wind blew fresh, the waves broke white and lovely.

He always set himself stubbornly against that feeling. He’d be hanged if he’d give way to a thing like that. Yet, he was glad, glad to be leaving the Neptune, the more so as he had always had the odd notion that once a boy went down the pit, the pit claimed him, refused to let him go. Old pit-men said that, joking. In the darkness David laughed to himself, it was a joke, that, right enough.

Here Tally switched the empty tubs. David coupled them in a train of four, sprang on to the bar, clicked his tongue to Dick and set off down the pitch-black incline. Bang, bang went the tubs, jerking and crashing behind him on the badly
laid track as he gathered speed. David prided himself on driving fast, of all the horse putters in the Paradise he could drive the fastest; and he was used to the banging of the tubs, he did not mind the din. What he did mind was the bother when a tub ran off; it nearly killed him, the raxing and straining to lift it back upon the line.