The air was petrified when David finished. As he folded his papers calmly, he could see Harry Ogle beside him, his face working with a grim delight, Ramage opposite, apoplectic with hate and fury.
“It’s a pack of lies,” Ramage stuttered at last. “The meat I supply is prime.”
Ogle spoke up for the first time.
“Then God help prime meat,” he growled.
The Rev. Low raised a pearly, propitiating hand. He bleated:
“Perhaps some bad pieces, once in a while; we can never be sure.”
Harry Ogle muttered:
“Fifteen years it’s been going on — that’s your blessed once in a while.”
Connolly thrust his hands in his pockets impatiently.
“What a song about nothing! Take a vote.” He knew the way to settle the thing for good and all. He repeated loudly: “Vote on it.”
“They’ll beat you, David,” said Harry Ogle in a feverish undertone. Bates, Connolly, Ramage and Low always hung together in their mutual self-interests.
David turned to the Rev. Low.
“I appeal to you as a minister of the gospel. Do you want these sick people in the hospital to go on eating inferior meat?”
The Rev. Low flushed weakly and a look of obstinacy came in his face.
“I am yet to be convinced.”
David relinquished the Rev. Low. He fastened his eye upon Ramage again. He said slowly;
“Let me make it quite clear. If this meeting refuses to sanction a new and adequate advertisement asking for tenders for meat I shall forward these statements to the County Medical Officer of Health and ask for a complete investigation of the entire question.”
A duel ensued between the eyes of Ramage and David. But Ramage’s eyes fell first. He was afraid. He had been swindling the Council for the past fifteen years, selling bad meat and selling underweight; he was afraid, horribly afraid of what an inquiry might reveal. Damn him, he thought, I’ll have to climb down this time, damn the rotten interfering swine. I’ll get even with him one day if it kills me. Aloud, he said in a surly voice:
“There’s no need to vote. Advertise and be damned. My tender’ll be as good as the rest.”
A glorious wave of triumph swept over David. I’ve won, he thought, I’ve won. The first step on the long road had been taken. He could do it. And he would.
The business of the meeting proceeded.
THREE
But, alas, the results of David’s election to the Town Council proved sadly disappointing to Jenny. Jenny’s ardours were invariably so sprightly that the afterglow was always a little tarnished at the edges. And Jenny’s enthusiasm for the election went up like a rocket, burst with a beautiful display of stars and then fizzled out.
She had hoped for social advancement through the election, in particular she longed to “know” Mrs. Ramage. The afternoon tea parties which Mrs. Ramage gave were the haut ton of Sleescale: Mrs. Strother, the head master’s wife, was usually there, and Mrs. Armstrong, and Mrs. Dr. Proctor and Mrs. Bates the draper’s wife. Now if Mrs. Bates, why not Mrs. Fenwick? — that was the question which Jenny asked herself with quite a breathless eagerness. They often had music at these tea parties, and who could sing more nicely than Jenny? Passing By was such a beautiful song — quite classical in a manner of speaking: Jenny burned to sing that song before all the ladies of Sleescale in Mrs. Ramage’s elegant drawing-room in the big new red sandstone house on Sluice Dene. Oh dear, oh dear, chafed Jenny, if only I could get in with Mrs. Ramage.
But no recognition came from Mrs. Ramage, not even the faintest shadow of a cross-street bow. And then, at the beginning of December a dreadful incident occurred. One Tuesday afternoon Jenny went into Bates’s shop to buy a short length of muslin — Cousin Mayrianne writing in Mab’s Journal had just hinted that muslin would soon be the dernier cri for smart women’s undies — and there, at the counter of the drapery, examining some fine lace, stood Mrs. Ramage. Caught in this unguarded situation she looked quite amiable, did Mrs. Ramage. She was a big hard-boned bleakfaced woman who gave the queer impression of having been knocked about a bit and of having stood up to it with remarkable determination. But on this afternoon, fingering the pieces of lace, she had less determination and more pleasantness in her face. And as Jenny edged close to Mrs. Ramage and thought of both their husbands on the same council, so to speak, Jenny’s social aspirations went completely to her head. She came right forward beside the counter and, smiling in her best company manner to Mrs. Ramage and showing all her nice teeth, Jenny said prettily:
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Ramage. Isn’t it a beautiful afternoon for the time of year?”
Mrs. Ramage turned slowly. She looked at Jenny. The horrible thing was that she recognised Jenny, then ceased to recognise her. For, in one deadly second, her face closed up like an oyster. She said very patronisingly and formally:
“I don’t think we’ve met before.”
But poor Jenny, flustered and misguided, rushed on to her doom.
“I’m Mrs. Fenwick,” she murmured. “My husband is on the Town Council with your husband, Mrs. Ramage.”
Mrs. Ramage looked Jenny up and down cruelly:
“Oh, that,” she said, and raising the shoulder nearest Jenny she went back to the lace, saying in the sweetest manner to Bates’ young lady assistant:
“I think after all I’ll have the most expensive piece, my dear, and of course you’ll send it and charge it to my account.”
Jenny blushed scarlet. She could have died with shame. Such an affront, and before the nice young lady in the millinery! She spun round and fled from the shop.
That evening she whimpered out her story to David. He listened with a set face, his lips drawn into a fine line, then he said patiently:
“You can hardly expect the woman to fall on your bosom, Jenny, when Ramage and I are at each other’s throats. In these last three months I’ve blocked his rotten meat contract. I’m trying to hold up the grant of £500 he was calmly asking the town to whack out on the new road past his new house in Sluice Dene. A new road useless for everybody but him! At the last meeting I suggested he was contravening six different regulations in his filthy private slaughter-house. You can imagine he doesn’t exactly love me!”
She gazed at him resentfully, with scalding tears in her eyes.
“Why must you go against people like that?” she sobbed. “You’re so queer. It would have been so useful for you to be on the right side of Mr. Ramage. I want you to get on.”
He answered compassionately:
“But Jenny dear, I’ve told you getting on in that particular sense doesn’t exist for me now. Perhaps I am queer. But I’ve been through some queer experiences in these last years. The pit disaster — and the war! Don’t you think, Jenny, that it’s high time some of us set ourselves to fight the abuses that produce disasters like the Neptune disaster and wars like the last war?”
“But, David,” she wailed with unanswerable logic, “you’re only getting thirty-five shillings a week!”
His breast heaved suddenly. He stopped arguing, gave her a quiet look, then rose and went into the other room.
This impressed her with the sense of his neglect, and the hot tears of self-pity trickled afresh. Then she brooded, became sulky and ill-tempered. David was different, completely different; her cajoling went for nothing, she seemed to have no grip upon him at all. She tried with a certain pique to make him passionate towards her, but in that way too he had turned curiously austere. She could feel that the physical side of love, unsupported by tenderness, was repugnant to him. She felt it as an insult. She could feel passionate in a minute, come right out of a violent quarrel to be violently passionate, to want a quick and urgent satisfaction — she called it modestly “making things up.” But not David. It was, she told herself, unnatural!