Love and Money Page 12

  In appearance, as the photograph in the Annotsfield Recorder shows, the young doctor was tall and erect, with a graceful slender figure; his hair and whiskers were dark and curly; his eyes, large, brown and bright, had a remarkable expression of kindness and affection. His high forehead gave his face a look of noble seriousness, but his smile was exceedingly merry and pleasant. He walked with a springing, lively gait; his hands were long and slender and his touch was gentle. He had a particular tenderness for children, whose confidence he seemed able to win without making any of those artificial bids for their favour which are so nauseating. He could be stern on occasion, however, as his first visit to the Delph Inn was to show.

  Rosa Boocock had summoned him there to see her husband Michael, who as all Whindale knew was rapidly drinking himself to death. When Archibald entered the inn that evening with his light quick step, three or four men, of whom Michael’s cousin Eli was one, were drinking and smoking in the taproom, Rosa and an Irish maid she had, called Annie Callaghan, were behind the bar, and the Boococks’ child Susan, a mite of five or so, was clinging to her mother with her face buried in Rosa’s skirts, and wailing on a high persistent whining note, very irritating to the ear. Silence fell as the doctor entered except for Susan, whose crying sounded even more shrill now it was not half-drowned by the noise of the men.

  “I’m glad you’ve come, doctor,” said Rosa. She lifted the flap of the bar and came out to greet him, and Susan perforce • dragged after her, “He seems in a right fever. But whether he’ll see you or not is more than I can say.”

  “I must see him,” said Dr. Archibald, in his courteous gentlemanly tones, quiet but firm.

  “Well, I’ll go up and see,” said Rosa reluctantly. “Leave go, Susan!”

  She turned towards the stairs, which ran straight up out of the taproom.

  But just then Michael Boocock himself appeared at the top of the stairs. He was raging with drink and fever, his face flushed deep red and his black eyes rolling; a heavy, swarthy coarse-skinned man, in his nightshirt, which he had torn open at the neck, with his hairy legs and chest showing, he looked an ugly and frightening customer enough, and it was not surprising that Susan screamed at the sight of him.

  “Will you keep that damned child quiet, Rosa!” shouted Michael. “How d’you think I can sleep through her everlasting bloody howling?”

  Susan screamed again, and Michael, swaying on his feet, stumbled down a step or two and leaning over the wooden railing snatched up a bottle of gin from the bar and brandished it over Rosa’s head. There was a gasp of horror from everybody present except Rosa, who threw up her head and glared defiantly at her husband. Then all in a moment Dr. Archibald sprang up the stairs and with the edge of his hand hit the side of the drunken man’s wrist sharply. I suppose being a doctor he knew just the right spot to strike; at any rate Boocock’s hand jerked upwards, the bottle flew up out of his hand in a wide curve and fell heavily, Dr. Archibald caught it in his left hand in mid-air and replaced it quietly on the bar. It was done so neatly and skilfully, almost like some trick at a fair, that some of the men could hardly help giving a guffaw, and Michael himself burst out into wild laughter. But you can imagine that Rosa and Annie and little Susan stood gazing up at the young man as if he were an archangel. Dr. Archibald himself was not at all amused.

  “Think shame to yourself, man,” he said sternly to Michael, “for frightening the child so. Go up to your bed at once if you value your life—you should never have left it.”

  He did not attempt to touch the drunken man, nor did he spread his arms across the stairway to prevent him descending, either of which might have provoked Michael. He just stood there with one hand hanging by his side, the other resting lightly on the banister. Perhaps frightened by the doctor’s reference to the serious nature of his illness, Michael after a pause turned and shambled away upstairs. Dr. Archibald followed him.

  The doctor remained quite a while upstairs, and when he came down his face was serious.

  “Is there anyone you can send across to Whin Grove for medicine this evening?” he said. “If not, I will return with it myself.”

  Whin Grove was the name he had given to his new mansion, from a copse of trees which lay just below it on the hillside. A footpath led down through this copse, across a footbridge over the Whinburn and up over the crag to Delph Lane.

  “Eli can send someone—or Annie Callaghan can fetch it,” said Rosa in an indifferent tone.

  “Very good. Tonight, please. And now, little one, let us look at you,” said Dr. Archibald, lifting Susan up and seating her on the bar.

  The child gaped at him. Considering what a handsome mother she had Susan was something of a disappointment. Rosa was a tall, strong, bosomy woman, with flashing dark eyes and a great deal of coarse dark hair and a rich carmine complexion; in his sober moments Michael was proud of her beauty and he had given her some big dangling earrings with red glass in them, which suited her grandly. But poor little Susan—perhaps because of her father’s intemperance— was a thin pale slip of a child, not exactly “wanting” as Whin Head folk say, but not very bright. At this time she had a nasty crusted spot on her cheek, and another of the same sort on one forearm—I imagine they were a kind of impetigo. Dr. Archibald turned her face gently to the light, and then took the flabby little arm in his hand and examined it. I don’t suppose Susan Boocock had ever experienced so kind and delicate a touch before; she gave one last sob and was silent.

  “She’s very fretful, doctor,” said Rosa.

  “It’s no wonder. These spots are very irritable and uncomfortable,” said Dr. Archibald. “They need a soothing antiseptic application. Miss Callaghan is beginning to suffer from them too, I see. I’ll send you a couple of boxes of ointment. Please see that they both apply it regularly.”

  At being mentioned like this and called Miss Callaghan in the doctor’s courteous tones, Annie blushed, as she was apt to do, being young and modest. Although she was Ulster Irish and Whin Head people are usually suspicious of strangers, she was well liked and to some extent pitied, for her situation at the Delph Inn cannot have been easy between Rosa’s temper and Michael’s drunken fits. Indeed no local girl would stay long at the Delph, and no doubt that was why Eli Boocock had brought Annie over from Ireland to be maid to his cousin’s wife. Eli was a cattle dealer and went over to Ireland regularly from Liverpool, returning with cattle which he drove across Lancashire and rested at Whin Head, before selling to butchers in the West Riding. It was understood that Annie was the youngest of one of those enormous poverty-stricken starving Irish families of that time who eked out a wretched existence on potatoes. Her picture—where I saw it I will tell you later—shows her all the same as a very sweet, kind, tranquil young girl with a beautiful budding young figure, a pure delicate profile, fine large hazel eyes, light brown hair and a very fair complexion. She was very good always to poor Susan, feeding her and nursing her and comforting her when she cried, and this was doubtless how she had caught the infection from the little girl’s skin. She took the child up in her arms now and went away into the back parts of the house with her at Rosa’s command, glad to escape from notice.

  Everyone in Whin Head began to think a good deal of Dr. Archibald after this Delph Inn incident, and it was from this time that they began to call him Dr. Tom. It was not only his courage in facing a man mad with drink and his neat trick with the bottle, though they admired both. Whin Head folk have plenty of sense and they respected a young doctor who in a mere moment, and while he appeared to be completely engaged with Michael, had seen what was wrong with little Susan and Annie, and decided how to cure them. For cure them he did. Annie’s wild-rose cheek was soon free of blemish, and though Susan was never either a pretty or a healthy child, at least her skin cleared. It is possible too that Rosa, though never a very fond mother, paid the child more attention now that the doctor showed such interest in her.

  Michael Boocock, however, was beyond curing because he was beyond obey
ing the doctor’s instructions. Dr. Tom brought him round that time and once or twice again, and after each cure kept him off the drink for some months by a mixture of stern measures and personal influence. But in spite of all his efforts Michael each time relapsed, sinking deeper each time into alcoholism, and at last died a year or so after Dr. Tom’s first coming to the district.

  There were those in Whindale who said in the next year or two that Dr. Tom and the widow Rosa Boocock might make a match of it, but others were equally firm that he wouldn’t dream of so demeaning himself. Some pointed to Rosa’s very great beauty, which before she married had driven men wild about her, and seemed greater than ever now that Michael was gone and she had more time to care for herself. But others said that a young man with a fortune of his own, who had been to Cambridge University and was related to the Thorntons of High Roebuck, would not ally himself to an innkeeper—Rosa having taken on the Delph licence. Certainly Dr. Tom visited at the Delph regularly— but then Susan, poor mite, was always ailing and in need of him. Dr. Tom never drank at the Delph Inn—but then he never drank anywhere, being a strong temperance man, almost a teetotaller.

  How does all this concern the Whin Head Mutual Spinning Company? Well, it seems it was in talk with Mrs. Boocock that the idea of the mill first entered Dr. Tom’s head. The young man was squeamish about sending out bills for his professional services and for the first year or so nobody received any; then it seemed that one of his Thornton cousins scolded him for this and took the matter in hand, for a whole flight of accounts reached Whin Head on the same day, all bearing the High Roebuck postmark. On his next visit to the Delph, Rosa Boocock told him frankly she could not pay it.

  “May I see the account?” said Dr. Tom politely.

  Rosa handed it to him. Dr. Tom took it with a slight bow, gazed down at it with mild thoughtfulness, then quietly tore the paper across and dropped it in the taproom fire.

  “You’re too good, too kind!” exclaimed Rosa. Now that she had got what she wanted, she was ashamed and began to make excuses. “Custom’s dropping at this inn all the time,” she said.

  It was one of Dr. Tom’s characteristics to be always genuinely interested in other people’s difficulties. He asked now:

  “Can you ascribe this decline in custom to any special cause?”

  “Aye, that I can!” said Rosa with feeling. “Every year there are fewer folk living here. It’s been years since anybody but you put up a new house in Whindale, Dr. Tom, and some of the old ones are standing empty.”

  “But why? Where do the people go?”

  “They get drawn away down to Roebuck Foot and Lower Whindale and even right away to Annotsfield, where the mills and the jobs are,” said Rosa bitterly. “In my childhood there was many a weaver busy at his loom in Whin Head——” She named some she had known who had now

  left the district.

  “It’s true the day of the hand-loom weaver is over,” said Dr. Tom thoughtfully.

  A man of education, interested in West Riding history, he knew where to look for information. (No doubt he used the same sources as I did later.) He soon found that Rosa was right. The population of Whin Head had decreased by a fifth in the last ten years, and in the last fifty years—that is, since the coming of machines to the wool textile trade—had practically halved itself. During the same period the population of the town of Annotsfield had risen by leaps and bounds, till it was a bustling, teeming city, with fresh buildings going up all over the place.

  That Whin Head should be a decaying community was for many reasons a cause of distress to the earnest young doctor. From affection he felt sad that Whindale should not flourish; the sight of the empty cottages pained him. As a physician, concerned for the hygienic welfare of the people, he deeply regretted these new machine-made concentrations of population. The fetid slums of the northern manufacturing towns were not unknown to him. How much more salubrious was the pure wild air of Whindale! How sad that the young men of the neighbourhood should be drawn away from the home of their forefathers, and venture themselves into all the temptations offered by the town! And all the while, the Whinburn ran down from the moors, a strong regular water-supply which textile mill-owners in towns would gladly pay thousands of pounds for, with a fall of some forty feet in a couple of miles, so that it would be the easiest thing in the world to run a mill by a water-wheel and water-power. Then the Whindale men could work in their own valley, within easy distance of their own ancestral homes. Why should they not work in their own mill too, thought Dr. Archibald enthusiastically.

  And so the idea of the Whin Head Mutual Spinning Company was born.

  At first when the doctor began to lay his project before the men of Whindale, they received it with some scepticism. Aye, it would be grand it there were a spinning-mill in Upper Whindale; aye, the Whinburn ran pretty well as strong up here as it did down the valley in Roebuck Foot, where there were several mills run by water-power. Indeed in the old days there had been small cloth-fulling mills whose wooden stocks were driven by a water-wheel, in Whin Head itself, but they had long fallen into disuse. So there isn’t a mill here, d’you see, doctor, and it would cost thousands of pounds to build one and fit it up like. Right out in the wild, too—no use denying, Whin Head’s a long way from most places.

  “It’s only three miles or so from High Roebuck,” said Dr. Tom impatiently.

  “Aye—as the crow flies. But spindles, you see, Dr. Tom, they aren’t crows.”

  “The stone is here, right on the spot. We could buy the field containing the quarry, and build in that very field, by the river, not a hundred yards from the stone. For eight or ten thousand pounds we could build a handsome spinning-mill which would give employment to generation after generation and make Whin Head prosperous for all time.”

  The weaver addressed, whom Dr. Tom in his trap had met at the corner of a lane, driving his donkey with his week’s piece of cloth on its back down to Annotsfield, fell silent and looked up at the doctor dubiously.

  “But where should we get ten thousand pound?” he said at last.

  “We should form a company—a limited company,” explained Dr. Archibald eagerly. “I’ve been into the matter with my cousin at High Roebuck. We should issue shares— ten thousand shares, perhaps, at five pounds apiece. The Whindale men would take up the shares. Then when the mill was running, each share would bring in interest—a little income, you see, for every shareholder.”

  “There’s not many folk i’ Whindale could find five pound to spend on a share.”

  “They need only put down one pound at first, then save up and pay off the rest gradually. I myself,” said Dr. Tom, colouring a little, “am prepared to take a thousand fully paid-up shares at once.”

  “That’s five thousand pound,” returned the weaver after some cogitation.

  “Precisely,” returned Dr. Tom.

  In those days five thousand pounds was a very large sum, and the weavers to whom in turn Dr. Archibald made this approach gazed at him with something like awe.

  “He must be better off nor we thought,” they concluded when they discussed the matter at the Delph Inn or in the “neddy-field” of one of the large mills down the dale. (The neddy-field was the place where the weavers parked their donkeys while they took their cloth into the mill, received payment and were given the yarn for their next week’s work.) The reply was usually: “Aye—Thorntons were always warm men. Well-lined. He can well afford it.”

  They were mistaken; the five thousand comprised all Dr. Archibald’s fortune, which with eager optimism he was risking in the service of Whindale. But it was a very persuasive argument to these unfortunate men, who were being squeezed out of their livelihood by mechanisation. Each week, when they arrived at Roebuck Foot or Annotsfield with their woven piece of cloth thrown over the back of their donkey, they met sourer looks, as the automatic loom gained wider and wider acceptance; each week their employers doled out yarn to them for a fresh piece, more grudgingly. Their work, uneve
n and slow compared with the product of machinery, was criticised and derided; their employers, if benevolent, constantly urged them to give up their loom and come into the mill; if less kind, constantly grumbled at their cloth and threatened them with unemployment.

  So it was that when a printed leaflet was thrust under their doors inviting them to come to a meeting in St. Matthew’s Sunday School, Whin Head, to consider the formation of a Whin Head Mutual Spinning Company, they all attended.

  The mood of the meeting was at first somewhat doubting. It had been hoped that some of the High Roebuck Thorntons would attend to support their cousin’s scheme, but none of them came, and the presence of the Vicar of Whin Head in the chair was a poor substitute in the weavers’ opinion. But Dr. Tom’s earnest, eager face, his manly eloquence, his kindly smile, the trust experience had taught the Whin Head folk to repose in his integrity, above all his committal of his own capital, overcame their fears; besides, they wished to be convinced, they longed for this solution to their economic problem. A burst of applause greeted the conclusion of the doctor’s speech, then the men leaned towards each other and began to discuss the proposal with animation. Suddenly Eli Boocock’s voice was heard above the hum of chatter.