Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
A. J. Cronin
Book One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Book Two
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 Ninteen
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
Book Three
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
A. J. Cronin
Three Loves
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.
Book One
Chapter One
When she had finished dressing, Lucy went to her bedroom window, but there was still no sign of Frank. And absently she stood behind the long lace curtain, letting her eyes mirror the white stretch of road which followed the estuary shore towards the town, nearly a mile away.
The road was empty except for old man Bowie and his mongrel dog: the one baking the rheumatism from his aged bones upon the low wall outside his little boatyard, the other asleep with head between licked paws, stretched flat on the sun-warmed pavement. For the sun was glorious that August afternoon: spangling across the firth in dancing sequins, touching Ardfillan with a shimmering glow, making of Port Doran’s roofs and tall chimneys, across the water, a city glittering and mysterious. Even this prim roadway before her drew in the splendour of the sunshine, and the neat houses which flanked it lost their ineffable precision in that glorious welter of golden light.
She knew it now so well, this view: the glistening water caught within the arms of the sweeping bay, the woods of the promontory of Ardmore shaded to coolness by a blue haze, the rifts of the western mountains tumbled in abundant majesty across the pale curtain of the sky: but today, transfigured, it bore an elusive quality of loveliness which somehow uplifted her. The season, too, holding for all its heat the first faint hint of autumn: one wayward leaf rustling on the path, the wrack more saline on the shore, a distant cawing of rooks inland: how she loved it! The Autumn! She sighed from sheer happiness.
Her gaze, shielded against the glare, travelling across the road to Bowie’s boatyard, picked up the figure of her son playing aboard the Eagle, helping or hindering Dave as he worked on the deck of the tiny launch moored to the grey-stone slip. More likely hindering, she thought, severely stifling all maternal fondness.
Half smiling to herself, she turned and paused before the oak wardrobe, now confronting her image in the glass with the natural instinctive seriousness of a woman before a mirror.
She was not tall – ‘a little bit of a thing’, her brother Richard had tolerantly named her – but beneath her muslin dress her neat form was outlined with a youthful grace. Ridiculously youthful and untried she seemed: looking, as Frank – escaping in an unexpected moment of appreciation his habitual reserve – had consciously suggested, more like sixteen than twenty-six. Her face was small, open, and alert: tending, indeed, towards a natural animation, a vivid quality of eagerness; her skin was fresh and, marked now by the warm print of the sunny summer, wore a delicate bloom. Her eyes, widely spaced, were blue: an opaque blue, reticulated by darker threads which meshed little sparkling points of light; singularly candid and unconcealed. Her mouth had an upward turn, the long line of her neck and chin a smooth round curve, her whole expression a frankness, something constant, vivid, warm in its sincerity.
She raised a hand to her dark brown hair, regarded herself only for a moment, then, folding the plain cotton dress she had worn during the day, she placed it in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe and, making a last swift inspection of the room to ensure its order, noting the shining linoleum, the exactitude of the antimacassar upon the fluted rocker, the smooth hang of the white bed-mat, she gave a neat movement of satisfaction with her head, swung round, and went downstairs.
Today she was later than usual – Friday was her baking day – but the clean smell of her polished, spotless house – a mingling odour of beeswax, soap, and turpentine, incense to the nostrils of a house-proud woman – rose up to justify her tardy dressing.
A due and modest pride was hers in the immaculate perfection of her house: the small, detached habitation – by courtesy a villa – situated so pleasantly on the outskirts of Ardfillan. She liked her house did Lucy, liked also to see it shine! And now, within her kitchen, she turned towards the open door of her scullery, said enquiringly:
‘Finished up yet, Netta?’
‘Just this minute, Mrs Moore,’ came the answer, muffled through lips which clasped a hairpin, from Netta, the maid, now achieving a belated toilet at the small square mirror above the copper.
‘Mr Moore will be home any minute now,’ continued Lucy reflectively. ‘I heard the train go down. If I were you, I’d slip in the eggs. Four.’
‘Yes, Mrs Moore’ – this rather indulgently!
‘And careful when you poach them, Netta. A little vinegar in the water – to firm them. Don’t forget now.’
‘Indeed no, Mrs Moore.’
The lips, no longer constrained, protested the impossibility of such omission, and in a moment Netta herself supported the declaration by an emphatic appearance through the scullery door.
She was a rangy girl of seventeen – willing, touchy, reticent, and amiable; yet through her amiability she betrayed already t
he self-determination of her race. Knowing by hereditary instinct her worth, and the worth of her sturdy stock, she would not, despite her willingness to work, admit to serve. No coercion would have drawn the words ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’ from her ruddy, independent cheeks, but, instead, she maintained a presupposed equity towards her employers by addressing them in civil yet unservile terms as Mr and Mrs Moore. Upon some occasions, indeed, a faint superiority tinged her immature manner, as though, conscious of the atrocious doctrinal peculiarity of the Moores, she balanced heavily against it the consideration of her own worth and orthodoxy.
Now, however, she smiled, and said consciously:
‘I’m longer dressing since I’ve started putting my hair up.’
‘You’re longer,’ thought Lucy, ‘since Dave Bowie started looking at you.’
Aloud she said:
‘It’s nice. Does Dave like it that way?’
Netta tossed her high-piled head in answer – what maidenly coquetry and tender yearnings did not this brusque sign express? – and tapped an egg sharply against the pot rim.
‘Him!’ said she; and that was all. But she blushed violently towards the vinegar bottle.
Standing a moment watching the girl’s movements, Lucy concealed a smile. She had, suddenly, a realisation of her own happiness, a ridiculous contentment mingling with a pleasant feeling of achievement, that personal coolness and tidiness following her dressing, a sense of having earned this present leisure. She loved always this moment, which usage had not staled, of Frank’s return from the city: she, dressed and ready, her work done, her house immaculate, awaiting him; it gave her unfailingly a little thrill of warm expectancy. Turning, she went through the narrow lobby, opened the front door, sauntered along the pebbled pathway. The small square green, with its plot of calceolarias, lobelias, and geraniums – a combination in that year of the Diamond Jubilee admittedly the last word of horticultural artistry – bloomed effulgently under her appraising eye. Delicately she plucked an impudent weed which harassed the more voluptuous of the geraniums; delicately she cast it from her. Then, walking to the front gate, she swung it open.
Now there was movement in the road, a quick scatter of sounding movement, and, looking up, Lucy saw her son coming towards her, his shadow trotting gaily beside him as he raced along.
‘Mother!’ he exclaimed immediately, with an air of great tidings. ‘I’ve been working on the Eagle with Dave.’
‘No!’ she exclaimed, displaying an adequate amount of incredulity.
‘Yes,’ he affirmed, with all the enthusiasm of eight years for the momentous, ‘and he let me splice a rope.’
‘Gracious! What next!’ she murmured, thinking about the freckles upon his nose. The nose was frankly snub, and the freckles merely points of pigment. There were also, she freely admitted to herself, other noses and other freckles; but for her the combination of this nose and these freckles was irresistible!
A well-set-up boy for his age, she often thought – ‘refined’ was perhaps the word – brown-haired, and with his father’s light brown eyes. Other boys? Most assuredly they had their virtues, but not – not quite like Peter!
‘Can I go and play marbles?’ he was asking ingenuously.
‘Marbles?’ she repeated, with real incredulity. ‘Where did you get marbles?’
He grinned at her, showing the gaps between his growing teeth, and his grin ravished her; then he lowered his eyelashes, which had, it seemed to her, an exquisite darkness against the fruit-like freshness of his cheek.
‘Well,’ he said meditatively, kicking the toe of his boot against the wall, ‘they just began playing today, so I borrowed two from a boy. Then I played him, you see, and I won – then I paid him back, you see. You see how it happened, mother?’
‘Oh, I see,’ she returned, controlling her lips. He put his hands behind his back, threw out his stomach, and straddled slightly to look at her the better.
‘It was quite fair, wasn’t it?’ he suggested, with his eyes at different levels. ‘ That’s how it’s done – at least, how I did it. I’ve got fifteen for my jug.’ He had lately begged from her a metal-lidded jug wherein, with miserly intensity, he hoarded all his minor treasures. ‘And if you let me play, I might win more.’
‘Well,’ she considered, with a judicial air which took all sting from her refusal. ‘I think we’ll have tea first, anyway. Your father’ll be home any minute.’
‘Ah!’ he said profoundly, with the air of having received her confidence; then he reflected openly: ‘I wonder if he’ll bring me anything. Might, you know!’
‘Run in, anyway, and wash your hands.’ To prove that she could be severe with him for his good, she added: ‘They’re a perfect disgrace.’
‘Well, you see,’ he explained, examining his dark knuckles and the lines on his sweat-stained palms, ‘if you work on the Eagle. And that splice – whew!’ He paused, and, beginning suddenly to whistle, turned and made off along the path.
As the boy entered the house, her gaze detached itself and fell again upon the road to the town, expectant of the appearance of her husband. A moment later, indeed, he swung into sight, slouching carelessly along towards her. It was so like him, this leisured gait, that, involuntarily, she made a slight sound, half affection, half impatience, with her tongue; and suddenly, with instinctive association, there came to her a realisation of the fitness of her marriage.
‘Yes, indeed,’ she meditated, tacitly affirming their suitability towards each other. ‘It’s as well I took Frank in hand.’ And, dwelling upon the happiness, the rare success of their present state, her thoughts leaped back through the years to the preordained occasion of their meeting. What was that name again? Yes, ‘The Kyle’ – owned by the Misses Roy. Never would she forget that name, nor Miss Sarah Roy, the managing sister who didn’t cook, presiding, all jet front and trained eye, at the head of the ‘liberal table’ – the phrase was Miss Sarah’s from her advertisement in the Catholic Trumpeter; ‘patronised by the clergy and the cream of the laity’, ran the rest.
Yes, ‘ The Kyle’ was irreproachably genteel, or Richard and Eva would never have gone. Richard had always been a stickler, punctilious, even in those early days of his married life before he had made his way in the law; besides, he would have things right for his Eva. Hadn’t mattered about her, of course; she had been simply taken – an extraordinary mark of brotherly patronage. Or had it been to look after Charlie, the baby? Eva, following her confinement, was languishing – not strong!
Richard and she had never got on really well – some curious incompatibility, or was it similarity, of temper – though, left together as they had been, they ought to have agreed. And when young Moore had started to pay her attention —!
At the recollection she almost smiled: Frank, on his fortnight’s holiday, ill at ease, careless or ignorant of the precise gentilities of the table, altogether in the wrong galley; ‘a butter and egg man’ – Richard’s phrase – ‘ making up to her!’
Ridiculous to have met your husband at a boarding-house – and at Ardbeg, of all places! Not very dignified; rather – rather commonplace. And yet Frank and she, drawn together by the very opposites of their qualities – drawn irresistibly together – there had been no getting away from it. Both of them rather flushed, that lovely languid afternoon – just such an afternoon as this, when the dry larch needles in the Craigmore wood were warm to her moist palms, and the resin-oozing pines exhaled a heavy, heady scent. Beneath them the sweep of the bay; around, the hum of insects in the bracken; within her a happiness, rushing, ardent, soft. Not so backward then as at table, young Moore!
But Richard had been severe, inimical, holding to ridicule her association with a petty commercial traveller. Yes, though Moore professed, with some indifference, their own creed, Richard had disliked him: a nobody, he said, the product of Irish parents expatriated by the famine; peasants, he suspected, driven out by the failure of two potato crops, when turnips were thrown to the starving people, and th
e empty cart piled up with the corpses that lay upon the roadside. They came to Scotland, these Irish, to beget their prolific progeny, a mongrel breed: supplying chiefly the navvy and the labourer, or, in its higher flights, the bookmaker and the publican; a race unwanted, and uncouth.
Not a pleasant picture for Richard, proud of his Scottish birth and his good Murray blood, who later, at Eva’s whim, had linked his pedigree to a Jacobite strain.
Well, the issue had been plain, the upshot swift: Richard and she had disagreed in this, as in most things; as if she would, indeed, let anyone control her choice. They had simply walked off, had Frank and she, that day nine years ago.
That was why she was here, waiting at this gate, conscious of her happiness, aware quite firmly and unashamedly of her love for him.
He came nearer. She waved her arm – a restrained wave, no doubt, but nevertheless a wave; an action differing openly from the unobtrusive conduct of the age. In that year when the red flag still moved cautiously upon the public highway, normal wives did not greet their partners in matrimony in this immodest fashion. To wave the arm was not becoming! And he too, by an answering upraising of his hand, confirmed the act, established the certainty of misdemeanour.
‘Hallo!’ she challenged, smiling long before he reach her.
‘Hallo, yourself!’
He was a tall, loosely built man of thirty, not well dressed, with a relaxed carriage amounting to a stoop. His hair was light brown, his colour tending to be florid, his eyes a peculiar limpid shade of hazel, his teeth of an arresting whiteness. Some quality about him – his lounging air, the slackness of his gait, an indifference in his eye, mingling with an odd reserve – stamped him with a curious individuality, as though indolently he weighed the universe and found it worthy merely of mistrustful irony.
‘You’re late,’ said she briskly, noting with satisfaction, more for him than for herself, that the moodiness which so often clouded his brow was absent. ‘I thought you’d missed the 4.30.’
‘Moore misses nothing,’ he returned amiably, ‘except his prayers. You trust him. F. J. Moore!’