Fame is the Spur by Howard Spring

Author:Howard Spring [Spring, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784976507
Publisher: Apollo

Chapter Thirteen

Mrs. Ryerson did not leave the house in Broadbent Street to which Ryerson had taken her on their marriage till she was carried out feet-foremost. But that was to be a long time hence. She was as tough as an old brier-root and went on tackling the business of living for many, many years. Soon after Ellen had left her, her eldest daughter married a monumental mason, a fellow whose infinite cheerfulness was undimmed by his daily occupation of chipping into stone and marble the records of human evanescence and mutability. It was almost as though he must make up for having death in his chisel by having laughter in his soul; and so he whistled as he worked, persuading pathos into a cherub’s face, mournfulness into an angel’s wing, and storing up in his mind the choicer epitaphs, to be retailed at night with appreciative laughter.

Mrs. Ryerson liked a good laugh, and she was delighted when the young people made their home with her. She knew that this would be a load off Arnie’s mind. Arnie was always a one to worry about his mother – not like some, she thought darkly – and since Ellen had left her, he was worrying in every letter about what she was going to do. Well, now she was all right. He could look after himself; and it was her opinion that he needed looking after a great deal more than she did. He had mentioned a girl named Pen Muff more than once in his letters; and she was not surprised when he turned up in Broadbent Street, bringing this girl with him, after the election. She was a lean, tough-looking little thing, and Mrs. Ryerson liked her. She wouldn’t have liked Arnie to marry anyone who was la-di-da; and Pen certainly wasn’t that. “She’s the sort that lasts,” Mrs. Ryerson reflected. “They can’t down that sort. She’ll be able to tackle things as well as I can myself.” It was a bit of a do, having two weddings on top of each other; and what Arnold was going to live on when he was married she didn’t know. He said he had saved some money during the last few years, and that he and Pen were going down to the Rhondda Valley, where her sister lived, to look about them.

Neither of them had ever been out of the North, and on that spring day in 1890, they left the North behind them as the train slid out of the mean and sordid purlieus of Crewe. It was a transformation so sudden as to be dramatic. One moment, the soot-blackened station with the blasted trees, skeletons of trees, barkless, leafless, all about it; the next, the deepening green of the South. Both Pen and Arnold were accustomed to see field divided from field by walls of loose-piled stones, zigzagging for miles across the grey-green of northern grass. Now they looked on hedges as green as the rivers of paradise, foamed with hawthorn.

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