Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
A. J. Cronin
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
A. J. Cronin
Gracie Lindsay
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
It was on the fifth of May in the year 1911 that Daniel Nimmo got the news of Gracie Lindsay’s return. All that afternoon, which was warm and full of the promise of a fine summer, he had been pottering in and out of the dark-room of his little photographic studio preparing for an appointment with Mrs Waldie and her daughter Isabel.
At three o’clock they had not arrived. He sheathed his silver watch with the yellow horn guard, and gazed mildly through the flaking whitewash on his window into the empty street.
Dressed in an old cutaway coat, too tight and short for him, shiny black trousers, a celluloid dicky and a stringy black tie, Daniel was a shabby, an insignificant figure. His cuffs were of celluloid also, to save washing, and his boots might have done with mending.
His expression was thoughtful, absent, timid, and his lips, surprisingly rosy, were pursed, as if he were about to whistle. Not that Daniel would have whistled—he was too scared of drawing notice to himself. He was, indeed, a quiet, humble little man who had lived his 54 years without once creating the impression of importance.
The ra-ta-tap of hammers from the nearby shipyard made the air drowsy. They were building a new steamer for the Khedive Line—a fine order brought by the new agent, Mr Harmon, that would set trade buzzing in the little burgh of Levenford. By turning his head Daniel could see the big yard gates, dark green in the dull grey wall, opposite to Apothecary Hay’s premises on the corner.
Even as he looked a four-wheeler swung around Hay’s corner and came rolling and bouncing over the cobblestones towards him. A moment’s pause, and two women, edging their wide hats and leg-of-mutton sleeves fastidiously from the recesses of the cab, advanced across the pavement. The bell rang and Daniel, clearing his throat, hoping that the stammer which was his habitual affliction would not trouble him, turned to receive them.
Mrs Waldie, the contractor’s wife, entered first, her stout, comfortable form inclined a little forward, a long, rolled umbrella cradled in her arm and whalebone supports in her high net collar. Behind came Isabel.
Daniel, never quite at ease, had hurried forward with an offer of chairs and an observation about the weather, and now he took refuge in manoeuvring the camera while Mrs Waldie, glad to sit down in her tight button boots, watched him amiably, her red face shining with maternal fondness.
“We want a good likeness, Mr Nimmo,” she said indulgently, with a glance towards the faded chenille curtains screening the alcove where Isabel had gone to remove her hat. “ You understand the circumstances?”
“Indeed I do,” Daniel answered. “And very happy ones too.”
Elizabeth Waldie smiled. She was a good-natured woman, despite her over-dressing and the pretence of style that her husband’s position demanded of her.
“We are pleased about the engagement,” she went on. “Mr Murray is such a promising young man.”
“Yes,” Daniel agreed. “I’ve known Davie since he was a boy. A fine, steady fellow. And a good lawyer, too.”
Here Isabel came from behind the screen, a faint, conscious flush on her cheeks. She was a fresh-complexioned girl, brown-haired and blue-eyed, and of a plump, somewhat heavy figure.
Although pretty enough in her way, her general expression was dull and rather spoiled—her lips in particular had a petulant droop. However, she looked pleasant enough just now, at this state visit to the photographer’s, as though gratified that her likeness would soon be in a silver frame among the law papers on the desk of David Murray’s High Street office.
“Mother thought that I should have a background of a balcony.”
“It’s very fashionable,” Daniel nodded. “And, perhaps, with a book.”
“Yes,” said Mrs Waldie. “As though reading.”
Again Daniel inclined his head and, lowering the dusty roller back-screen of a marble balustrade, he posed his subject with an open volume beside a bamboo plant stand. His grey eyes were earnest behind his steel-rimmed spectacles, his little brown beard cocked at an angle both ludicrous and touching, as he strove for artistic satisfaction.
“You might droop the left wrist a little more, Miss Isabel,” he suggested finally, contemplating the effect with his head tilted to one side. Then he disappeared beneath the black cloth of the camera and exposed a series of mahogany-bound plates.
The operation over, Isabel resumed her hat and Daniel escorted the ladies to the waiting cab where, in parting, Mrs Waldie genially remarked:
“We’ll expect you at the wedding next year. I’ll see you have an invitation.”
As he turned back into the studio Daniel was grateful for that show of kindness, for he well knew that, measured by the yard-stick of Levenford opinion, he was regarded as a failure—a ridiculous, incompetent failure.
The truth was that, nearly 30 years before, Daniel became a minister of God, duly licensed in the cure of souls according to the Church of Scotland. Yet Daniel had never found a pulpit.
At the outset his prospects had been good, there was interest in the young man who had taken all these prizes at college. With true native reverence for “the book-learning”, Levenford proposed him for the parish church assistantship and named him to preach a trial sermon.
Daniel had such a sermon in his head, a fervent and well-reasoned sermon; for weeks past he had rehearsed it walking the countryside around Levenford with rapt eyes and moving lips. As he ascended the pulpit he felt himself word-perfect. He announced his text and began to speak.
For a few moments he went well enough, then all at once he became conscious of his congregation, of those rows of upturned faces, those eyes directed towards him. A shiver of self distrust swept over him, the more agonising, more paralysing in its effect since he knew the dreadful sensation of old. The blood rushed into his face, his forehead, his neck. He hesitated, then halted, lost the thread of his ideas, and began to stammer. Once that frightful impotence of speech had gripped him he was lost. He laboured on, of course, pale now and trembling with heavy beads of sweat breaking on his brow, the lyric ardour of his discourse turned to something pitiful. With every shrinking pulse of his soul he sensed and magnified the reaction of his listeners to his own deficiencies.
While he toiled and struggled for the words he saw t
he restlessness, the ripple which followed the realisation of his distress, the side glances, the half-hidden smiles. He saw the children nudge each other; he even heard, or fancied that he heard, a faint titter, hardly suppressed, from the shadow of the gallery, where the farm servants had their seats. At this he broke down completely.
Never did Daniel live down that first debacle. He tried and tried again, going as far as Garvie in the North and Linton in the East in his attempt to find a church, yet always without success.
Twice he managed to reach the “short leet” in small country parishes, but, when it came to the ballot, in neither case was he “voted”. Gradually he came to accept the mantle of the “stickit minister” and, obliged to find some means of livelihood—in the early upsurge of his hopes he had married—he fell back upon the skill which he possessed with the camera, becoming accepted in time as the town’s official photographer.
Here the steeple clock struck five, and Daniel locked up the studio for the day. Then, according to his custom, before setting out for his home on the northern outskirts of the town he crossed the street to have a word with his neighbour, Apothecary Hay.
The druggist’s shop was dark and narrow, and musty with the smell of aloes, asafoetida and liquorice root. Shelves of dark green bottles filled one side, and behind the long counter, close to a gas jet that stuck out like a yellow tongue on a marble slab spattered with red sealing wax, stood the druggist himself, compounding a pill with acrimonious melancholy.
Apothecary Hay was a lean, cadaverous man with a long bald head streaked with ginger hair, and drooping whiskers of the same colour. He wore a short alpaca jacket, green with age and the stains of drugs, which showed his bony wrists and his death’s-door shoulder blades. His air was sad and bilious, his attitude that of the most disillusioned man in the whole universe. Nothing surprised him. Nothing, nothing!
And he believed in nothing—except strychnine and castor oil, John Stuart Mill and Charles Bradlaugh. He was Levenford’s professed free-thinker. He cared for no one, not even his customers. He threw his pills and potions across the counter as though they were rat poison. “ Take it or leave it,” he seemed to snarl. “Ye’ve got to die in any case.”
He seemed, indeed, to take a singular delight in the shortcomings of humanity—that was his sense of humour—and yet in some strange fashion, perhaps the attraction of opposites, he was Daniel Nimmo’s closest friend.
Two other men were in the shop which served as the district’s unofficial club—David Murray and Frank Harmon, the Khedive Company agent, and it seemed to Daniel that as he entered a sudden silence fell.
Harmon, a newcomer to the town, was a bachelor of forty, a tall, finely set-up figure in well-cut, cosmopolitan clothes, with thick curly hair, strong white teeth, and an air of restless vitality beneath the careless expression upon his florid face.
He nodded easily towards Daniel, and reached for the “pick-me-up” on the counter before him. Murray, on the other hand, was noticeably subdued, disinclined to meet Daniel’s eye. A good-looking young fellow of 27, pale, dark, with cleanly chiselled features and hair which needed cutting falling untidily across his brow, he kept tugging at his short moustache with a sort of strained intensity.
“Good evening, all,” said Daniel pleasantly. “I hope you’re well, Apothecary.”
Hay took no notice whatsoever of this remark, but went on grinding with his pestle, pausing only to bite off a sliver of liquorice root which he took from the side pocket of his faded jacket.
He was inordinately fond of the root, and he chewed it continually with a peculiar acrid rinsing motion of the jaws, as though trying, pertinaciously, to gnaw a hole in his own cheek. This continued for some minutes, but at length, without raising his head, he spoke from the corner of his mouth.
“You haven’t heard the news?”
“No,” Daniel smiled. “ Is the town on fire?”
“It may soon be!” There was a pause, then giving the words their full emphasis, Hay declared: “Your niece … Gracie Lindsay … is coming back to Levenford.”
Daniel remained perfectly still. At first he did not seem to understand the other’s meaning, but gradually his face changed. Reading his emotion, Hay went on with a dry constriction of his lips.
“It would appear her husband died—up-country in Mysore. Gracie sailed last week on the Empress of India.”
Still Daniel said nothing: he could not speak, all sorts of instincts were rushing upon him. He turned mutely to Harmon, from whom he knew the information must have come.
“Yes,” the agent explained, with good-natured condescension, “we had word from our Calcutta office this noon. Nisbet Vallance contracted blackwater fever while surveying a new railroad for the company. His wife was with him. Behaved very pluckily, I believe, getting him out of the hills by stretcher. A charming woman. I met her last time I was in the East.”
Daniel swallowed the lump in his throat.
“Forgive me, gentlemen.” He blinked apologetically from one to the other. “ This is a great surprise … after seven years … so unexpected.…”
“Quite a shock for you.” Hay spoke with that same peculiar inflexion.
“Yes,” said Daniel simply. “ Poor Nisbet.… But it is a joy to think of having Gracie with us again.” He turned warmly, almost appealingly, to Murray. “She was a sweet lass, was she not, Davie?”
“Yes,” Murray muttered, without looking up.
There was a longer silence. Daniel unfolded his handkerchief and wiped his brow and neck.
“It’s been close today. Very seasonable weather. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go home. I must see my wife. I dare say she’s had word. Good-night, gentlemen.”
He went to the door, opened it, and closed it quietly behind him.
So it was true, then, at last, what he had not dared to hope for all these years. As Daniel started on his walk home, by the quiet back road leading across the common, a wave of sweetness swept over him and his mind was filled by the tender vision of Gracie, his dear niece in her white dress—she had always loved white, and looked so beautiful in it— as he had last met her, one evening just before the tragedy, walking along Levenside with a bunch of meadowsweet in her hand. She had picked the flowers from the green river bank.
What a picture she made! The sun striking low upon the water set a radiance about her—“As a young roe come unto the river to drink”—instinctively the words had risen to his mind. Her face, vivid and small, was alive with animation, her warm brown eyes sparkling with the promise of life.
But what had she known of life at 18 years, poor child? He sighed deeply and his expression turned sad. But it brightened again as his thoughts travelled farther back and other, happier images crowded in upon him.
Among these, he saw her at the Children’s Cantata given under his direction in the old Burgh Hall. What a wonder she had been, what a little wonder—only ten years old, with a voice like a flute, such liveliness and grace and talent—well, never, never had he met talent like it since.
He smiled—for now he watched her at the Academy prizegiving, coming up for the calf-bound Pilgrim’s Progress she had won for Scripture knowledge—yes, he had coached her to win that, the best pupil he had ever had in his Bible class!
And again he saw her at the school picnic, a little thing of 12, a nice new ribbon in her hair, running in the small girls’ race, her thin legs twinkling, her pointed chin set forward in a passion of endeavour, and winning as he held the tape, yes, winning to his great delight.
Daniel’s eyes were misty now—he had cared so much for Gracie, with all the affection of a childless man. Somehow she was different from the common clay, finer, more precious in body and soul.
And somehow it had always seemed as though her father, Tom Lindsay, widowed when his only daughter was born, had never understood or appreciated her. Tom, at one time a thriving merchant in Levenford dealing in grain, fruits and provisions, and in his heyday Provost of the burgh, had
a harsh and irascible temper, and, towards the end, the business worries which culminated in his bankruptcy had hardened and embittered him.
Of course there were those who whispered that his actions towards Gracie were justified, but this Daniel never would concede, and with a sharp, indrawn breath, he once again reviewed the calamity which had so broken up her life.
It was the winter of 1903, and Gracie at 18, with her hair up and skirts down to her ankles, was like a rose just coming into flower, the belle of all the dances, waltzing her way into every heart.
Slim and sweet and gay, with some secret sparkling quality, she had no lack of beaux. What a Christmas that had been! When the hard frost came she skated on the Pond, hands in her tiny squirrel muff, her cheeks whipped by the wind, while the young men of Levenford flashed around her, cutting the figure eight, doing the outside edge, showing off, trying to attract her notice.
“Gracie’s a great one for the boys!” people had smilingly remarked. “They buzz about her like bees round a honey jar.” Well, that was true enough. There was young Simpson, the doctor’s son, Jack Hargreaves, and a score of others, yet most favoured of all was David Murray, then studying law at the University of Winton.
It was generally believed that David would be Gracie’s choice, when Henry Woodburn came upon the scene visiting his cousins, the Ralstons, who owned the shipyard in the town.
He was a stranger to the district, this Woodbum, a fair-haired fellow with a cough and slightly hollow cheeks. He drove his own dog-cart, a handsome turnout, and had ample money and leisure.
Gracie had gone driving with him often in the evening, warmly wrapped in thick rugs when the soft haloed moon climbed above the hills of Garshake and the racing tattoo of the horse’s shoes rose crisply from the frosted road.
There was some talk, of course, rumours that Woodburn was a wild young man who drank more than he should, that his lungs were affected, and that he really had been sent to this northern climate to recover his health.