Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.
At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.
We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.
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Contents
A. J. Cronin
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
A. J. Cronin
Grand Canary
Born in Cardross, Scotland, A. J. Cronin studied at the University of Glasgow. In 1916 he served as a surgeon sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteers Reserve, and at the war’s end he completed his medical studies and practiced in South Wales. He was later appointed to the Ministry of Mines, studying the medical problems of the mining industry. He moved to London and built up a successful practice in the West End. In 1931 he published his first book, Hatter’s Castle, which was compared with the work of Dickens, Hardy and Balzac, winning him critical acclaim. Other books by A. J. Cronin include: The Stars Look Down, The Citadel, Three Loves, The Green Years, Beyond This Place, and The Keys of the Kingdom.
Chapter One
He was still a little drunk as he came out of the sleeping-car with Ismay and walked along the platform towards the baggage office. And he was still bitter – charged with that searing bitterness which, like an acid, had consumed him, drunk or sober, for the past three weeks. The platform swayed gently beneath his feet; the cold haze of morning that filled the high arches of the station pressed round him like a thick sea mist. He saw nothing. He walked rigidly like a man in a dream. He drew up.
‘A cabin trunk,’ he heard Ismay explain, ‘checked in from the London sleeper. The name is Leith.’ The clerk, pulling a pencil from his ear, ran down the list.
‘Consigned to the Aureola,’ he said. ‘Right. Slade’s agent is here.’ And without turning his head, he shouted:
‘Slade!’
A man with a mottled face hurried forward, an invoice book clutched to his reefer coat, a finger pointed to the peak of his gilt-badged cap.
‘Dr Leith, sir. Yes, sir. You’ll leave everything to me, sir. I’ll meet you with your luggage at the Princes Jetty. Ten o’clock sharp, sir. This here is your voucher.’
He scribbled on a blue sheet, tore it raggedly, and, looking indeterminately from one to the other, finally offered it to Ismay.
‘Sign here, sir. No – on my slip, if you please.’ His nicotined fingernail made a crease on the crinkling paper. ‘Nothing more to come, I suppose?’
Ismay shook his head, half turned to offer the book to Leith.
But he thought better of it. As he wrote neatly H. Leith he said to the porter:
‘Many people travelling?’
‘Eight passengers this trip, sir. A full cabin list. Nice business for Slade Brothers – oh, very nice, sir.’ From his subservient satisfaction he might have been principal shareholder in the company; and with an air even more proprietary he added – producing the title triumphantly: ‘ Lady Fielding and party are travelling, sir.’
Leith, listening with a set face, moved his hands restlessly in his raincoat pockets and shivered: after the steam heat of the train it was cold upon the draughty platform. He had not slept; his head was numb; the sudden shriek of a departing engine set a nerve twitching in his left cheek.
‘For Christ’s sake, Ismay,’ he broke in jerkily, ‘how long are we going to stand here?’
At once Ismay swung round.
‘All right, Harvey, all right,’ he exclaimed in his mild persuasive voice.
Harvey sneered.
‘If you must have your little society gossip, let’s get out of this blasted wind.’
‘We’re just moving,’ Ismay said quickly. ‘ This instant.’ He dismissed the porter with a shilling, and as they started off together he pulled out his watch. ‘Nine o’clock. We’ll breakfast at the Adelphi.’
‘What do I want with breakfast?’
Ismay slid his eyes towards his companion, gave him the shadow of a smile.
‘Then we’ll kill an hour in the lounge.’
‘What do I want with the lounge?’
Again Ismay smiled, a wry, acquiescent smile. They had emerged from the station into Lime Street, and, on the pavement, swept by a fine drizzle of rain, fronted by smoke-smeared buildings and sluggish clanging trams, environed by all the bleary life of a half-awakened provincial city, Ismay paused.
‘Well,’ he remarked in a tone kept carefully reasonable, ‘I don’t know the full resources of Liverpool at this hour. Not wholly exciting, I should imagine. In addition, it appears to be raining. You won’t eat and you won’t sit down. The ship doesn’t sail until ten-thirty. So perhaps you’ll say what you do want.’
For a moment Leith seemed to contemplate this distantly,with a sort of brooding derision.
‘Want,’ he echoed dully, as though scarcely conscious of what he said. ‘ I want to know why the devil I’m here at all.’ He paused, then his eye fell upon the other’s blunt, unconquerably good-natured face.
‘Sorry, Ismay,’ he said slowly, moistening his lips, ‘I’m not quite – you see –’ Then his nerves got the better of him and he cried out: ‘For God’s sake don’t stare at me like that. Let’s get to the blasted jetty if we’re going. Anywhere, so long as we keep moving.’
So they set out to keep moving, steering a course through the wet streets, encompassed by a hurrying stream of elbowing clerks and typists, trudging past opening shops and cafés and offices and squat bounding taxis which invited them in vain. Beside Ismay’s short, well-groomed form, clothed with the dapper opulence of the successful man, Leith’s striding figure struck an arresting, almost painful contrast. He was tall, badly dressed, and spare, with an angular leanness which gave his movements a queer abruptness. His face was very pale, unshaven, the features set to a fine edge as though chiselled. In the fixed harshness of his expression openly displayed there was something burning. It was like a burning contempt of life – bitter, scornful, austere. And yet his wide, dark eyes betrayed him. They were wounded eyes with far-down glinting depths in which a sensitive comprehension lurked and quivered. His brow, too, was fine and high; feeling was there as well as mind. Yes, feeling, the dreadful feeling of despair! For now that mind, cleared by the keen wet air, lay focused to a dreary concentration. Why, he thought over and over again, why am I here? Only doing it because of Ismay; yes, because he stood by me. I don’t want to go. Don’t want to go. Don’t want –
To be left in peace, to be by myself, to forget – that’s what I want. And above everything to be alone – alone! But he was not alone; nor could he forget:
the most irrelevant and trivial distractions drew him back inevitably – painfully. Immediately in front of him two little typists travelling to work with brisk calves were exchanging confidences – loud and coquettish – of their conquests of the previous night; and giggling: tehee, tehee! Snatches of their chatter came drifting back like wafts of a bad air, nauseating him.
‘Mine was a nice one, mine was. In drapery, if you please. Least, he said he was. And the band played “ Believe it if you like”.’
‘Mine had pimples, rather. But you should have seen his style. Oh, my! Swish wasn’t the name.’
To him, sunk now in morbid introspection, their simpering, cheaply painted faces, their vapid minds, their weakly, rabbit bodies, endowed grotesquely with the means of propagation, became a sort of nightmare – a clownish symbol of humanity. These, and those like them, he would have benefited. Saved – that was the word; a beautiful, oh, a luscious word. But they wouldn’t be benefited, they wouldn’t be saved, not now. How funny, how damned funny! He wanted to laugh, to stand stock still in the middle of the wet pavement, to throw back his head and laugh and laugh.
Suddenly Ismay spoke.
‘Nearly there now’; and he indicated cheerfully a snatch of the Mersey river seen distantly between two house-roofs which lay below the cobbled street down which they tramped.
Leith, his head bent, his shoulders hunched, made no answer.
They went down the hill, past dirty plate-glass windows masking ropes and binnacles and ships’ gear; through a muddle of mean dockside alleys. In five minutes they had reached the Princes Jetty. There, the ubiquitous luggage man awaited and approached them as confidently as if he had known them from birth.
‘Tender’s here,’ he declared at once, and, ceasing to rub his hands together, he indicated almost with ownership a small steam tug which gently rose and fell, nosing its fenders against the quay. ‘And your baggage is aboard. All correct, sir. Absolutely all correct.’
‘Well,’ said Ismay, moving forward with a tentative air.
They went aboard, leaving the mottled-faced man obscurely grateful by the gang plank, and, passing forward beyond a massed disorder of trunks and leather bags, suitcases and wrapped-up travelling-rugs, beyond a small group of people staring with the nervous hostility of strangers, they stood silently in the bows.
The river, gliding without effort, was a cloudy yellow, windless and smooth, yet scored by thin curves where eddies ran; in midstream, anchored at ease, lay steel ships of burden; away to leeward some barges loitered, and always this river flowed towards the sea. Away and outwards towards the sea.
It was quiet, save for the slapping of the current, the far-off chink of hammers, the soothing rattle of a distant winch, till all at once a ferry, noisy and troubled, shot like a flustered duck towards the farther bank. Then, as in sympathy, the tug whistled and cast off its ropes. They began to sidle from the pier.
Again Leith shivered, struck by a sense of quitting the land. A rawness rising from the water enwrapped him, mingled with a presentiment so strangely agitating he felt shaken. His eyes, reaching ahead, drew magnetically to the lines of a ship of some three thousand tons, blue-flagged for departure, her dark brown funnel lightly smoking, her shut ports palely glittering in the cold grey light. Dimly he traced the name upon her stern – Aureola. She was small and built for cargo; but a lovely ship, her bow keen, her stern fine, her hull graceful, tense.
‘There’s your hooker, then,’ murmured Ismay, breaking his tactful silence at last. ‘Aureola – a lovely name. Aureola!’ He let the syllables slip over his tongue. ‘ Sounds fine. Good omen, too, I’ll be bound.’
Because he felt the name was lovely and somehow rhythmic, Harvey forced himself to sneer. He gave a hard satiric laugh.
‘More uplift, Ismay? A mystical light by the bow and haloes wreathed around the mast. You expect me to come back wearing one. Purified and ready to begin all over again.’ He broke off, sorry already that he had spoken. He was on edge, his nerves overstrung; he needed a drink; yes, that was it, he must have a drink to steady himself. With the cold insight of a scientific mind he admitted his agitation, and placed it to its just cause. But what did it all matter anyway? Finished – everything!
And yet it was strange, very strange, this sudden queer excitement piercing the dreary oppression of his mind. As the tug drew alongside the Aureola he felt it strike at him again. He stood apart, heedless of the other passengers, of whom vaguely there were four, now disembarking from the tender – a small, stout woman; an oldish, clumsy-looking man; another man, tall, very assiduous and talkative; and a young woman in the background – but he took no notice of them. Climbing the ladder to the deck, he looked round – like a man expectant of something he knows not what. Yet he saw nothing; no one but a steward whom Ismay at once appropriated. Thus the mood broke sharply and fell away from him. He followed Ismay and the steward along the alley-way to the brief row of cabins which constituted the passenger accommodation of the ship, bowed his head, entered his cabin dully. He sat down upon the settee, morosely contemplating the shining white-enamelled cell which must enclose him for the next four weeks.
Vaguely he heard Ismay talking to the steward; vaguely he saw them go out together. He didn’t care whether they went or stayed. No, no, that was wholly untrue; and above everything – yes, even now – there must be truth. Ismay’s kindness: coming from London like this, arranging the whole dismal business; it was a sign of something far beyond the mere friendship which had linked them at the hospital. Ismay was a good fellow, a little officious perhaps, but that surely was permissible, the prerogative of a successful surgeon.
Success! He winced from the word and stared at the bunk which he must occupy, a bunk white as a shroud and narrow as a coffin. There had been three coffins, long and black, the coffins of three men borne with all the ghastly panoply of death to the grave. He had never seen these coffins, yet, as he sat, a sound like that of chanting swelled over him in waves, hollow and sepulchral. Wearily he raised his hand to his brow. He had heard no chanting. Never. Was he mad or drunk? His jaw set rigidly. At a sudden sound abruptly he lifted his head. It was Ismay: returning alone, closing the cabin door, looking at him with sudden resolution.
‘I’m going now, Harvey. The tender’s just pushing off.’
‘You’ve been away a long time,’ said Harvey slowly. ‘Where have you been?’
There was a short silence.
‘Speaking to someone – the steward,’ said Ismay at length. ‘Explaining about your – your breakdown.’
Harvey stared at him fixedly.
‘You will try, Harvey,’ went on Ismay quickly. ‘You promise me you’ll try.’
‘Try what? I told you I’d stopped trying. Let someone else have a stab at the trying. I’m done with it.’
‘But listen; nobody believes – oh, I’m tired of telling you – every decent man knows –’
‘What do they know?’ Harvey cried bitterly. ‘Nothing. The whole blasted brigade.’ The nerve in his cheek began to work again painfully, excitedly; he went on with savage mimicry: ‘Take the coloured water three times a day. Come and see me next Tuesday. Yes, dear lady, two guineas, if you please. Swine – the lot of them ignorant, greedy, self-sufficient swine.’
‘But look –’
‘Stamping along their measly little ruts. Snouts in the muck of ignorance. Rooting the same patch. Year in, year out. Blind to truth. On and on. Blind.’
A supplicating note ran into Ismay’s voice:
‘But hang it all, man, be reasonable. There’s yourself – your future. You must think of it. You must.’
‘Future?’
‘A brilliant future.’
‘Who said so?’
‘I said so. And you know it. For God’s sake don’t smash up that, Harvey.’
‘It is smashed. Smashed to bits. And the bits belong to me. I’ll do what I damned well like with them.’
‘Can’t you think of humanity then?’ cried Ism
ay. ‘ Sneer if you like. I will put it like that. I know you’ll do great work. I feel it. You’ve got it in you just – oh, just as Pasteur had. I’m positive. Don’t let yourself go to pieces like this. It’s too horrible.’
Carried away by his feeling, he bent forward and said again entreatingly: ‘Can’t you think of humanity?’
‘Humanity!’ Harvey burst into a loud, derisive laugh. ‘ I hate every son of a bitch who ever had the belly-ache.’
There was a pause filled by a quiet sound of feet on the deck above; then all at once Ismay awkwardly discovered his own emotion. He let his attitude relax, forced the anxiety from his face.
‘I’ll say no more, then,’ he declared in his ordinary voice. ‘ I’m going now. But I know you too well to have any fear. All that you need is this breathing-space. Four weeks – it isn’t much. But it’s enough. I’ve got faith, you see. Perhaps I know you better than you know yourself.’
‘You know, do you?’ sneered Harvey. ‘My God!’
There was another pause: Ismay held out his hand.
‘Good-bye.’
‘Good-bye,’ said Harvey shortly; he hesitated, then added slowly, with averted head and a sort of laconic compunction, ‘And thanks.’
‘It’ll be good to have you back,’ said Ismay. ‘ Back and ready to begin again.’ He smiled his dry, reassuring smile; then the door closed behind him and he was gone.
Back – ready to begin again? Sitting there alone as Ismay had left him, he had the rushing conviction that he would never begin again. But what did it matter, anyway? That was all past, finished, done with; and in the meantime he wanted a drink, wanted it so badly he felt the moisture run into his mouth in reflex to the thought. Strange how alcohol had helped him. It was a drug, and as such he recognised it – a useful drug which he had applied deliberately to his own condition, blunting the edge of his suffering, dulling the quivering agony of his mind. Dispassionately he studied the question. He was no drunkard. He was a scientist, bound to no banal moral code, admitting no virtue but truth – that truth which he had always sought – impervious to the stupid, the obvious, and the orthodox, demanding the freedom to arrange his destiny according to his will. It was a lucid thought and not without a certain bitter comfort.