Anna of the Five Towns · Chapter 10 (1/4)

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The Isle

About this time Anna was not seeing very much of Henry Mynors. At twenty a man is rash in love, and again, perhaps, at fifty; a man of middle-age enamoured of a young girl is capable of sublime follies. But the man of thirty who loves for the first time is usually the embodiment of cautious discretion. He does not fall in love with a violent descent, but rather lets himself gently down, continually testing the rope. His social value, especially if he have achieved worldly success, is at its highest, and, without conceit, he is aware of it. He has lost many illusions concerning women; he has seen more than one friend wrecked in the sea of foolish marriage; he knows the joys of a bachelor’s freedom, without having wearied of them; he perceives risks where the youth perceives only ecstasy, and the oldster only a blissful release from solitude. Instead of searching, he is sought for; accordingly he is selfish and exacting. All these things, combine to tranquillize passion at thirty. Mynors was in love with Anna, and his love had its ardent moments; but in the main it was a temperate affection, an affection that walked circumspectly, with its eyes open, careful of its dignity, too proud to seem in a hurry; if, by impulse, it chanced now and then to leap forward, the involuntary movement was mastered and checked. Mynors called at Manor Terrace once a week, never on the same day of the week, nor without discussing business with the miser. Occasionally he accompanied Anna from school or chapel. Such methods were precisely to Anna’s taste. Like him, she loved prudence and decorum, preferring to make haste slowly. Since the Revival, they had only once talked together intimately; on that sole occasion Henry had suggested to her that she might care to join Mrs. Sutton’s class, which met on Monday nights; she accepted the hint with pleasure, and found a well of spiritual inspiration in Mrs. Sutton’s modest and simple yet fervent homilies. Mynors was not guilty of blowing both hot and cold. She was sure of him. She waited calmly for events, existing, as her habit was, in the future.

The future, then, meant the Isle of Man. Anna dreamed of an enchanted isle and hours of unimaginable rapture. For a whole week after Mrs. Sutton had won Ephraim’s consent, her vision never stooped to practical details. Then Beatrice called to see her; it was the morning after the treat, and Anna was brushing her muddy frock; she wore a large white apron, and held a cloth-brush in her hand as she opened the door.

“You’re busy?” said Beatrice.

“Yes,” said Anna, “but come in. Come into the kitchen⁠—do you mind?”

Beatrice was covered from neck to heel with a long mackintosh, which she threw off when entering the kitchen.

“Anyone else in the house?” she asked.

“No,” said Anna, smiling, as Beatrice seated herself, with a sigh of content, on the table.

“Well, let’s talk, then.” Beatrice drew from her pocket the indispensable chocolates and offered them to Anna. “I say, wasn’t last night perfectly awful? Henry got wet through in the end, and mother made him stop at our house, as he was at the trouble to take me home. Did you see him go down this morning?”

“No; why?” said Anna, stiffly.

“Oh⁠—no reason. Only I thought perhaps you did. I simply can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re coming with us to the Isle of Man; we shall have rare fun. We go every year, you know⁠—to Port Erin, a lovely little fishing village. All the fishermen know us there. Last year Henry hired a yacht for the fortnight, and we all went mackerel-fishing, every day; except sometimes Pa. Now and then Pa had a tendency to go fiddling in caves and things. I do hope it will be fine weather again by then, don’t you?”

“I’m looking forward to it, I can tell you,” Anna said. “What day are we supposed to start?”

“Saturday week.”

“So soon?” Anna was surprised at the proximity of the event.

“Yes; and quite late enough, too. We should start earlier, only the Dad always makes out he can’t. Men always pretend to be so frightfully busy, and I believe it’s all put on.” Beatrice continued to chat about the holiday, and then of a sudden she asked: “What are you going to wear?”

“Wear!” Anna repeated; and added, with hesitation: “I suppose one will want some new clothes?”

“Well, just a few! Now let me advise you. Take a blue serge skirt. Seawater won’t harm it, and if it’s dark enough it will look well to any mortal blouse. Secondly, you can’t have too many blouses; they’re always useful at the seaside. Plain straw-hats are my tip. A coat for nights, and thick boots. There! Of course no one ever dresses at Port Erin. It isn’t like Llandudno, and all that sort of thing. You don’t have to meet your young man on the pier, because there isn’t a pier.”

There was a pause. Anna did not know what to say. At length she ventured: “I’m not much for clothes, as I dare say you’ve noticed.”

“I think you always look nice, my dear,” Beatrice responded. Nothing was said as to Anna’s wealth, no reference made as to the discrepancy between that and the style of her garments. By a fiction, there was supposed to be no discrepancy.

“Do you make your own frocks?” Beatrice asked, later.

“Yes.”

“Do you know I thought you did. But they do you great credit. There’s few people can make a plain frock look decent.”

This conversation brought Anna with a shock to the level of earth. She perceived⁠—only too well⁠—a point which she had not hitherto fairly faced in her idyllic meditations: that her father was still a factor in the case. Since Mrs. Sutton’s visit both Anna and the miser avoided the subject of the holiday. “You can’t have too many blouses.” Did Beatrice, then, have blouses by the dozen? A coat, a serge skirt, straw hats (how many?)⁠—the catalogue frightened her. She began to suspect that she would not be able to go to the Isle of Man.

“About me going with Suttons to the Isle of Man?” she accosted her father, in the afternoon, outwardly calm, but with secret trembling.

“Well?” he exclaimed savagely.

“I shall want some money⁠—a little.” She would have given much not to have added that “little,” but it came out of itself.

“It’s a waste o’ time and money⁠—that’s what I call it. I can’t think why Suttons asked ye. Ye aren’t ill, are ye?” His savagery changed to sullenness.

“No, father; but as it’s arranged, I suppose I shall have to go.”

“Well, I’m none so set up with the idea mysen.”

“Shan’t you be all right with Agnes?”

“Oh, yes. I shall be all right. I don’t want much. I’ve no fads and fal-lals. How long art going to be away?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t Mrs. Sutton tell you? You arranged it.”

“That I didna’. Her said nowt to me.”

“Well, anyhow I shall want some clothes.”

“What for? Art naked?”

“I must have some money.” Her voice shook. She was getting near tears.

“Well, thou’s gotten thy own money, hast na’?”

“All I want is that you shall let me have some of my own money. There’s forty odd pounds now in the bank.”

“Oh!” he repeated, sneering, “all ye want is as I shall let thee have some o’ thy own money. And there’s forty odd pound i’ the bank. Oh!”

“Will you give me my chequebook out of the bureau? And I’ll draw a cheque; I know how to.” She had conquered the instinct to cry, and unwillingly her tones became somewhat peremptory. Ephraim seized the chance.

“No, I won’t give ye the chequebook out o’ th’ bureau,” he said flatly. “And I’ll thank ye for less sauce.”

That finished the episode. Proudly she took an oath with herself not to reopen the question, and resolved to write a note to Mrs. Sutton saying that on consideration she found it impossible to go to the Isle of Man.

The next morning there came to Anna a letter from the secretary of a limited company enclosing a post-office order for ten pounds. Some weeks previously her father had discovered an error of that amount in the deduction of income-tax from the dividend paid by this company, and had instructed Anna to demand the sum. She had obeyed, and then forgotten the affair. Here was the answer. Desperate at the thought of missing the holiday, she cashed the order, bought and made her clothes in secret, and then, two days before the arranged date of departure told her father what she had done. He was enraged; but since his anger was too illogical to be rendered effectively coherent in words, he had the wit to keep silence. With bitterness Anna reflected that she owed her holiday to the merest accident⁠—for if the remittance had arrived a little earlier or a little later, or in the form of a cheque, she could not have utilised it.

It was an incredible day, the following Saturday, a warm and benign day of earliest autumn. The Suttons, in a hired cab, called for Anna at half-past eight, on the way to the main line station at Shawport. Anna’s tin box was flung on to the roof of the cab amid the trunks and portmanteaux already there.

“Why should not Agnes ride with us to the station?” Beatrice suggested.

“Nay, nay; there’s no room,” said Tellwright, who stood at the door, impelled by an unacknowledged awe of Mrs. Sutton thus to give official sanction to Anna’s departure.

“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Sutton exclaimed. “Let the little thing come, Mr. Tellwright.”

Agnes, far more excited than any of the rest, seized her straw hat, and slipping the elastic under her small chin, sprang into the cab, and found a haven between Mr. Sutton’s short, fat legs. The driver drew his whip smartly across the aged neck of the cream mare. They were off. What a rumbling, jolting, delicious journey, down the first hill, up Duck Bank, through the marketplace, and down the steep declivity of Oldcastle Street! Silent and shy, Agnes smiled ecstatically at the others. Anna answered remarks in a dream. She was conscious only of present happiness and happy expectation. All bitterness had disappeared. At least thirty thousand Bursley folk were not going to the Isle of Man that day⁠—their preoccupied and cheerless faces swam in a continuous stream past the cab window⁠—and Anna sympathised with every unit of them. Her spirit overflowed with universal compassion. What haste and exquisite confusion at the station! The train was signalled, and the porter, crossing the line with the luggage, ran his truck perilously under the very buffers of the incoming engine. Mynors was awaiting them, admirably attired as a tourist. He had got the tickets, and secured a private compartment in the through-coach for Liverpool; and he found time to arrange with the cabman to drive Agnes home on the box-seat. Certainly there was none like Mynors. From the footboard of the carriage Anna bent down to kiss Agnes. The child had been laughing and chattering. Suddenly, as Anna’s lips touched hers, she burst into tears, sobbed passionately as though overtaken by some terrible and unexpected misfortune. Tears stood also in Anna’s eyes. The sisters had never been parted before.

“Poor little thing!” Mrs. Sutton murmured; and Beatrice told her father to give Agnes a shilling to buy chocolates at Stevenson’s in St. Luke’s Square, that being the best shop. The shilling fell between the footboard and the platform. A scream from Beatrice! The attendant porter promised to rescue the shilling in due course. The engine whistled, the silver-mounted guard asserted his authority, Mynors leaped in, and amid laughter and tears the brief and unique joy of Anna’s life began.

In a moment, so it seemed, the train was thundering through the mile of solid rock which ends at Lime Street Station, Liverpool. Thenceforward, till she fell asleep that night, Anna existed in a state of blissful bewilderment, stupefied by an overdose of novel and wondrous sensations. They lunched in amazing magnificence at the Bear’s Paw, and then walked through the crowded and prodigious streets to Prince’s landing-stage. The luggage had disappeared by some mysterious agency⁠—Mynors said that they would find it safe at Douglas; but Anna could not banish the fear that her tin box had gone forever.

The great, wavy river, churned by thousands of keels; the monstrous steamer⁠—the Mona’s Isle⁠—whose side rose like solid wall out of the water; the vistas of its decks; its vast saloons, story under story, solid and palatial (could all this float?); its high bridge; its hawsers as thick as trees; its funnels like sloping towers; the multitudes of passengers; the whistles, hoots, cries; the far-stretching panorama of wharves and docks; the squat ferry-craft carrying horses and carts, and no one looking twice at the feat⁠—it was all too much, too astonishing, too lovely. She had not guessed at this.

“They call Liverpool the slum of Europe,” said Mynors.

“How can you!” she exclaimed, shocked.

Beatrice, seeing her radiant and rapt face, walked to and fro with Anna, proud of the effect produced on her friend’s inexperience by these sights. One might have thought that Beatrice had built Liverpool and created its trade by her own efforts.

Suddenly the landing-stage and all the people on it moved away bodily from the ship; there was green water between; a tremor like that of an earthquake ran along the deck; handkerchiefs were waved. The voyage had commenced. Mynors found chairs for all the Suttons, and tucked them up on the lee-side of a deck-house; but Anna did not stir. They passed New Brighton, Seaforth, and the Crosby and Formby lightships.

“Come and view the ship,” said Mynors, at her side. “Suppose we go round and inspect things a bit?”

“It’s a very big one, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Pretty big,” he said; “of course not as big as the Atlantic liners⁠—I wonder we didn’t meet one in the river⁠—but still pretty big. Three hundred and twenty feet over all. I sailed on her last year on her maiden voyage. She was packed, and the weather very bad.”

“Will it be rough today?” Anna inquired timidly.

“Not if it keeps like this,” he laughed. “You don’t feel queer, do you?”

“Oh, no. It’s as firm as a house. No one could be ill with this?”

“Couldn’t they?” he exclaimed. “Beatrice could be.”

They descended into the ship, and he explained all its internal economy, with a knowledge that seemed to her encyclopædic. They stayed a long time watching the engines, so Titanic, ruthless, and deliberate; even the smell of the oil was pleasant to Anna. When they came on deck again the ship was at sea. For the first time Anna beheld the ocean. A strong breeze blew from prow to stern, yet the sea was absolutely calm, the unruffled mirror of effulgent sunlight. The steamer moved alone on the waters, exultantly, leaving behind it an endless track of white froth in the green, and the shadow of its smoke. The sun, the salt breeze, the living water, the proud gaiety of the ship, produced a feeling of intense, inexplicable joy, a profound satisfaction with the present, and a negligence of past and future. To exist was enough, then. As Anna and Henry leaned over the starboard quarter and watched the torrent of foam rush madly and ceaselessly from under the paddle-box to be swallowed up in the white wake, the spectacle of the wild torrent almost hypnotised them, destroying thought and reason, and all sense of their relation to other things. With difficulty Anna raised her eyes, and perceived the dim receding line of the Lancashire coast.

“Shall we get quite out of sight of land?” she asked.

“Yes, for a little while, about half an hour or so. Just as much out of sight of land as if we were in the middle of the Atlantic.”

“I can scarcely believe it.”

“Believe what?”

“Oh! The idea of that⁠—of being out of sight of land⁠—nothing but sea.”

When at last it occurred to them to reconnoitre the Suttons, they found all three still in their deck-chairs, enwrapped and languid. Mr. Sutton and Beatrice were apparently dozing. This part of the deck was occupied by somnolent, basking figures.

“Don’t wake them,” Mrs. Sutton enjoined, whispering out of her hood. Anna glanced curiously at Beatrice’s yellow face.