Quality Corner (1901)
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The Salamanca Corpus: Quality Corner (1901) Author: Clara Louisa Antrobus (1846-1919) Text type: Prose Date of composition: 1901 Editions: 1901, 1902 Source text: Antrobus, Clara Louisa. 1902. Quality Corner. A Study of Remorse. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. e-text Access and transcription: December 2011 Number of words: 91,383 Dialect represented: Lancashire Produced by María F. García-Bermejo Giner and Verónica Domínguez López Copyright © 2012– DING, The Salamanca Corpus, Universidad de Salamanca QUALITY CORNER A STUDY OF REMORSE BY C.L. ANTROBUS AUTHOR OF ‘WILDERSMOOR’ETC. G.P. PUTNAM.S SONS NEW YORK & LONDON The Knickerbocker Press The Salamanca Corpus: Quality Corner (1901) [NP] ‘NORTH WAS THE GARDEN’ [NP] QUALITY CORNER [1] Quality Corner CHAPTER I WHAT time is it?’ asked the man at the window. ‘Half-past twelve’, carelessly answered the man in the street, walking on with leisurely step. It was not until he had gone some little way that the strangeness of the question struck him. Why, indeed, should, a man indoors ask the time of a man without? And at past midnight? The stroller stopped, reflected a moment, then turned back. He was an observant, idly inquisitive man; an artist, and the public was beginning to recognise him as such, honouring him after the fashion of Heliogabalus, with much feasting and final smother. Mark Parfitt liked the feasting, and sat tight, lest any should take his place. He meant to move up higher bye-and-bye, and he did. To-night, however, when he answered that curious question addressed to him from an open window, he was but a new-comer at the feast, a young man of three and twenty, who had had singular success with his first picture. His artist friends said that was owing to its being the apotheosis of ugliness. To which criticism Mark briefly replied, ‘It pays.’ [2] This summer he was spending his holiday in a manufacturing town in the Midlands, painting the portrait of the mayor. The smoke and grime and squalor did not repel him. On the contrary, he was interested. There were subjects on all sides, and he made a number of sketches that were very useful to him later. So the oddness of the incident struck him. Here might be another subject. At any rate, it was curious, and Parfitt turned back, as has been said. The street was not attractive. A row of small houses on the right, a canal on the left, and behind and beyond tall buildings and taller chimneys; all dingy, squalid—the back- yard of King Gold. Yet, under the black dome of night and smoke, the two magicians, Light and Shadow, threw an unreal picturesqueness on its dull misery. Away against the murky heaven sheet lightning played silently, incessantly, the Handwriting on the Wall. But few observed it, for the waving scarlet flames of yonder furnace leapt up every moment, not illuminating the darkness, but increasing it by bewilderment of olive-black shadows, fantastic, threatening, gigantic. The water in the canal shone glassy olive in the glare; while beyond, the dazzled eye saw nothing save yet blacker depths of gloom. When the The Salamanca Corpus: Quality Corner (1901) flames sank for a minute’s pause, the lightning showed the surroundings with tolerable clearness; and it was noticeable how, of the passers-by, those who walked easily by the lightning stumbled when the furnace flames shot up; whereas those who stepped confidently in the red glare hesitated when only that unheeded Handwriting lit the air. It was by the swift white light of that Handwriting that Mark Parfitt had seen the face of the man at the [3] window. The scarlet flames had sunk, and the lightning—it is more comfortable to call it lightning—had shone suddenly, broadly on the questioner; on the face of a student, a thinker, delicate, wide-browed, thoughtful, dreamy, hesitating. The deep eyes had looked out into the hot airless midnight with a kind of startled wonder; and the clear voice—a gentleman’s voice, Parfitt noted—vibrated with a thrill as of breathless haste passing into apparent repose, like the motionless-seeming of the spinning world. Mark was no fool. He recognised strong emotion when he met with it, and appreciated it as material that might be made useful to himself, as the sea-tides may furnish power to turn a merry-go-round. Also, he was naturally inquisitive. Here was something happening, something out of the common too, judging from the face revealed by the lightning. But Parfitt had lost the house. Which was it? All the shabby little houses looked alike. The window had been open, and a lamp burning within. Yes, but the night was hot, and people sit up late in manufacturing towns; many windows were open and lights burning downstairs along the street. ‘About half-way, and had dark curtains,’ said Mark to himself, as the red flames rose and fell, and the pallid lightning illumined the dingy dwellings he scrutinised so narrowly as he passed them. The gas lamps, only two in number, were useless, the glasses being hopelessly dirty and blurred, and the feeble flames within showing merely as yellow stars. He must depend, as the inhabitants did, upon the furnace glare and any light that might shine from heaven. Here was a dark-curtained window, and here [4] another and another. His footsteps sounded loudly on the pavement—Parfitt was one of those loosely- built men who walk heavily even in youth. He paused an instant, looking at the third house. Someone, a girl, drew the dark curtain a few inches aside and glanced out; then the curtain fell back in its place. In that moment she had seen Mark distinctly—a tall, narrow-shouldered man, slightly stooping, with sharp features, and pale eyes set too closely together. All this she saw by a quick outburst of scarlet light, while Parfitt, catching only the dim outline of a woman’s head, turned disappointedly away, to search other windows equally in vain for that clear-cut, deep-eyed, pathetic face that had looked out at him so vividly in the lightning’s gleam. He walked quite to the end of the street, where it joined a main thoroughfare. Opposite was an open space with a large building, the hospital. To the left was a theatre; to the right a church with an illuminated clock. Parfitt glanced up at it; five minutes to one. Twenty minutes since that question, ‘What time is it?’ had been addressed to him. Once more he retraced his steps, walking quickly, his eyes rapidly noting each house as he passed. Again no result. ‘Not worth while spending the night over,’ he reflected, ‘ yet The Salamanca Corpus: Quality Corner (1901) I had a sort of notion that fellow wanted me—wanted help somehow. Perhaps he didn’t want me—didn’t want anybody—rather not! Awful hole, anyway! ’ And thus thinking, Mark turned the corner into another street and walked briskly to his hotel. [5] CHAPTER II THE little town of Ringway sat huddled on its wood-crowned hill side like Puck on a leaf, and its ruler was the strong west wind that blew up from the Irish sea some twenty miles away. This warm wet sweeping wind clothed all the land with unfading green, as emerald in winter as in spring, and gave to Ringway a curious goblin beauty of sudden lights and transient glooms, of quick sparkling showers, of soft colouring of deep green moss and ashen-grey lichen and blue mist—a dusky Arcadia. Strangers came and called it pretty; then, because they could not see colour, they said it had no colour, and they departed in search of chromolithographic scenery. Ringway cared nothing. For nearly a thousand years it had crouched there on the old red sandstone, watching the forests change into wide pastures, and a dark blur rise in the north-east—the cloud of smoke that hangs ever over busy manufacturing Woffendale. Ringway looked on serenely at the murky patch and thanked Heaven it was not as its neighbour. Yet the near presence of that grimy Publican undoubtedly gave a unique character to the little place, for there was always the underlying consciousness of the rush and clang of that roaring hive of men. Amidst the shrill twittering of the darting swallows one seemed to listen for the throb of engines, to look for the furnace flames in the sunrise. A sense of [6] strife emanated from that north-eastern blur—Tubalcain working in his smithy outside green Eden. Ringway bred a sturdy race, not precisely what is understood by the word ‘rural.’ The people were quiet and stolid, with a slow fire in their veins that flamed up as suddenly as a naphtha well and burnt as inextinguishably. Norse blood is apt to turn Berserk. They felt uneasy about ghosts and the devil, witches and second-sight, and combined with all this a shrewdness in business and a proficiency in drawing eye-teeth that did not wholly please the stranger in Arcadia. They were a long-memoried folk too, and had usually taken a hand—and that a heavy one—in public matters. Therefore, if you conversed with the elders in friendly fashion, you would bye-and-bye hear how this man’s great-grandfather was ‘ out in the Forty- Five,’ how that man’s grandfather lost a leg at Peterloo, and how the forbears of another helped to kill the last wolf in the country, ‘two mile away over yonder.’ The market-place might be called the heart of Ringway, and just where the high road turned out of it stood Quality Corner.