The Crowded Street

Book 214: Virago Modern Classics

by Winifred Holtby

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Family Life; Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural; War & Military; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

This is the story of Muriel Hammond, at twenty living within the suffocating confines of Edwardian middle-class society in Marshington, a Yorkshire village. A career is forbidden to her. Pretty, but not pretty enough, she fails to achieve the one thing required of her - to find a suitable husband. Then comes the First World War, a watershed which tragically revolutionises the lives of her generation. But for Muriel it offers work, friendship, freedom, and one last chance to find a special kind of happiness...

Release date: August 18, 2011

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 311

Sample

FROM the crowded doorway to the piano at the other end of the room the surface of the floor stretched, golden, empty, alluring.
Ladies in white trailing gowns, the mothers and aunts of other little girls at the party, drifted across it like swans on
a lake. Their reflections floated after them, silver-white along the gold. When Muriel rubbed her foot against the floor she
could feel with joy its polished slipperiness, broken only at rare intervals by velvet-brown knots in the wood.


Mrs. Marshall Gurney was talking to Mrs. Hammond, so Muriel could wait in the shelter of the doorway. Soon she too would have
to cross that shining space and join the other children on the chairs near the wall. She was grateful for the interval of
waiting. It was fun to stand there, peering round her mother’s skirts at the straight rows of cracks running together up the
floor till they met somewhere under the piano. It was fun to watch the black jackets of small boys approaching small girls
in stiff muslin dresses who grew like paper flowers round the walls. It was fun to tell herself over and over again that this
was the Party, the Party, the Party—and even while saying it to know that the Party lay in none of these things; neither
in the palms nor the piano, the pink sashes nor the programmes, even though these had pencils dangling seductively from scarlet
cords; nor in the glimpse of jellies and piled-up trifles seen through the half-open door of the supper-room as she walked
along red carpets to shake the terrifying splendour of Mrs. Marshall Gurney’s white-gloved hand. No, the Party lay in some illusive, indefinable essence of delight, awaiting Muriel beyond the golden threshold of the hall.


“Muriel has been looking forward so much to your party,” Mrs. Hammond was saying. “She has never been to one at the Assembly
Rooms before.”


Mrs. Hammond was small and soft and dove-like. She cooed gently when she talked, and visitors spoke of her to Muriel as “Your
Dear Mother.” For the Party she wore a new lilac satin gown and amethysts round her pretty throat. Muriel knew that she was
more beautiful than anyone in the world.


Mrs. Marshall Gurney replied in the deep throaty voice that belonged to her because she was Mrs. Marshall Gurney. Muriel could
not hear what she said, but Mrs. Hammond answered with her gentle little laugh, “Oh, yes, she’s only eleven and rather shy.”
So Muriel knew that they were talking about her.


Grown-ups, of course, always did talk about children as though they were not there. Muriel wished that it wouldn’t make her
feel hot inside as though she had been naughty, or had begun to cry in front of strangers. Connie, she thought enviously,
rather liked it.


What did it matter? What did anything matter? She was at the Party. Her new dress had been made by her mother’s dressmaker.
It had cost her hours of breathless standing, trying to keep still while that dignified lady crept round her on her knees,
with pins in her mouth, for all the world as though she were only nine and a half like Connie, and were playing at bears.
There had been a lengthy ceremony of dressing before the nursery fire, with Connie dancing around irrepressibly, wanting to
try on Muriel’s sandals and silk mittens, and to touch the soft folds of her sash. All the way to Kingsport, dangling her
legs from the box-seat of the brougham—she always rode outside with Turner, because to sit inside made her sick—Muriel had
watched the thin slip of a moon ride with her above the dark rim of the wolds, and she had sung softly to herself and to the
moon and to Victoria, the old carriage horse, “I’m going to the Party, the Party, the Party.”


And here she was.


The ecstasy caught and held her spellbound.

Most of the chairs round the wall were full now. Mrs. Marshall Gurney had been seized upon by Mrs. Cartwright.

“It’s nearly time to begin dancing,” said Muriel’s mother. “We must get your programme filled. There are a lot of little boys
here whom you know. Look, there’s Freddy Mason. You remember him, dear, don’t you?”


Muriel remembered Freddy. Once, when they had all gone to tea at his father’s farm, Freddy had taken Connie and her to play
on the stacks. They had climbed a ladder—dizzy work this at the best of times, paralysing when Freddy followed close on one’s
heels, recounting grisly details of recent accidents. Half-way up, Muriel had felt her hands slip under the weight of a great
sack of corn, and the earth sprang up to meet her before the grinding thud of her shoulder on the ground, when she fell as
those poor men had fallen. She had scrambled fearfully across the slippery barley straw, shuddering from the pain of a fall
that she had felt, although she still miraculously crouched on the top of the stack, instead of lying broken in the yard.
She had sat with her legs hanging over space at the top of Freddy’s lovely slide, clutching at the treacherous straw with
desperate fingers, watching the hens, small as flies, pecking in the yard below, while fear tickled the soles of her feet,
and fear breathed on her paling cheeks. Then, as merciful release or culminating agony, she was not sure which, Freddy had
pushed her over, and she had dropped limply down, down, down, with a blinding rush, till she lay half buried in straw below
the stack, past hope, past fear, past speech, past agony.


That had been a long time ago. But she did not now want to dance with Freddy.

“I don’t think—” she began in her prim little voice. She was about to add—“that I want to dance with Freddy,” when Mrs. Hammond
finished her sentence for her.


“Of course he’ll want to dance with you, dear.” Mrs. Hammond claimed that she knew what went on in Muriel’s mind—her own child’s
mind. She often finished Muriel’s hesitating sentences for her. “You mustn’t be so shy, dear,” she reproved gently. “Well, Freddy, how is your mother? I hope her cold is better. You know my little Muriel, don’t you?
Of course. You were so kind showing her round your nice farm that summer. Dear me, what a big boy you’ve grown since then! She did enjoy it, didn’t you, dear?”


The edge of Muriel’s chair had become a shelf of yielding straw, slipping, slipping beneath her. Miles away below, hens, small
as flies, pecked on the polished floor.


“Where’s your programme, dear?” asked Mrs. Hammond.

Muriel produced it, but hope died in her heart as the scarlet pencil moved in Freddy’s stubby fingers.

Polka, barn-dance, waltz. …

Her eye ran down the list of dances. Freddy’s name alone marred the virgin whiteness of the opposite page. At the thought
of the second polka she shivered. Still, he had only asked for one dance. That could not spoil the Party.


A gentleman with a red flower in his buttonhole crossed the room and sat down by the piano. From the way that he walked, Muriel
knew that he was going to be one of the funny ones. She could always tell.


The gentleman ran his fingers along the piano like playing a scale, only prettier. In a minute the black coats and muslin
dresses would twirl together in a solemn polka. Muriel did not want to dance. She wanted to sit and watch the moving figures
weaving strange patterns of shadow across the gleaming floor. She wanted to hear the music, and to tap her foot against the
side of her chair to the beat of its “One, two, three, four.”


The rows round the wall dissolved. Already Nancy Cartwright—a forward child, Mrs. Hammond said—had lured her blushing partner
towards the centre of the room. A second couple followed, and a third.


“Haven’t you got a partner for this?” asked Mrs. Hammond.

“Not just for this, Mother,” Muriel murmured, vaguely aware of duty unfulfilled.

“Oh, dear, well, let me see,” said Mrs. Hammond.

She rose and began to search the room. Muriel wanted to run, to call, to stop her; but she dared not venture into that revolving traffic of dancers. She sat very still, while the
circling skirts brushed against her knees.


If only she could be quiet, and watch and listen, somehow during her vigil the Party would come upon her.

From the ceiling swung dark festoons of gleaming laurel and holly, and vivid flags, and lanterns of orange and vermilion.
A child’s laugh rang out, challenging the echoes of the skipping tune. Oh, be still, be still, said Muriel’s dancing heart,
and somehow here shall be delight.


The drooping leaves of a palm tickled the back of the pianist’s neck. His left hand stopped banging out the bass chords and
swooped as though to kill a fly. It missed the leaf, and flung itself back on to the keyboard to do justice to the Fortissima
of the Coda. Back swung the leaf over the edge of his collar. Up went the hand, clutching and waving. There followed a battle
royal between the palm and the polka. Muriel’s chuckles now rose to her throat, but, being a polite child, she sought to stifle
them. This would be something to tell Connie. Connie might be trying sometimes, but her sense of humour was superb.


With a savage tug the gentleman at the piano had wrenched a leaf from the palm and flung it aside. At the expense of the polka
he had striven for peace. With a sudden burst of rapture, Muriel saw that it was the wrong leaf. Her laughter broke out, delicious,
uncontrollable.


Of such delights was the Party made.

Mrs. Hammond stood by Muriel’s side.

“Muriel, dear, here is Godfrey Neale. He arrived late and has not got a partner for this dance.”

Muriel rose politely to do her duty. Mrs. Hammond was so obviously pleased that Godfrey had not found a partner. And, after
all, the thing to do at parties was to dance.


Muriel did not dance well. Madame Bartlett, whose classes she attended every Wednesday, said that she was a stick. Music was
beautiful, especially the sort that made clean patterns of sound, interlacing like bare branches against a clear sky. But
while Muriel’s mind responded to its movement her body did not. She hopped round Godfrey with disconsolate politeness. Only her feathery slenderness made his progress endurable.


He was taller than she, and much, much older. Quite fourteen, she thought with awe. Godfrey Neale, Godfrey Neale; vaguely
she was aware of him as something splendid and remote, of a lovely house behind tall iron gates on the road to Wearminster.


They bumped into another couple.

Muriel became suddenly and devastatingly aware of her own shortcomings. She tried to remedy these by moving her feet with
conscientious accuracy.


“One, two, three, hop! One, two, three, hop!”


“I beg your pardon,” murmured Godfrey.

Only then did she realize that she had been counting aloud.

The next hop brought her down with unexpected violence on to Godfrey’s shining dancing pump.

“Sorry!”

“Oh, that’s nothing. A fellow kicked me at f—footer last week and made no end of a bump.”

“Did he really? How awful! Did it hurt?”

“Oh, nothing to speak of. I say! That was a near shave!”

In her concern, Muriel started suddenly to the right and nearly accomplished the downfall of the offending palm. She had just
been summoning her courage to lay before this dazzling creature her greatest conversational gift, the story of the tickling
episode. But their latest peril put her tale to flight. Still, she felt that some further effort was required of her.


“Do you often go to parties?” She, whispered so softly that he had to ask her to repeat her question.

Repetition emphasized its inanity. She blushed, gulping and trying to control her quavering voice.

“Do you often go to parties?”

“Not very often. These things are a bit slow. I like footer, and riding. I’m going to Winchester next autumn.”

“Oh!”

Muriel wondered what mysterious connexion bound Winchester to parties. Winchester, county town of Hampshire. Was that right? Hampshire—Winchester-on-the-Itchen. Muriel had been considered rather good at geography. Places could come real to you.
Winchester. Parties. She saw the city, rich with swinging lanterns, while down the lighted streets from every window the tunes
of polkas beat and sang.


“One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four!”


The music stopped. In the fairy streets of Winchester, and in the Assembly Rooms of Kingsport there was silence.

Godfrey dropped Muriel’s hand and clapped vigorously. He faced life with a genial determination to find every one as pleasant
as they so obviously found him. Though he had not exactly enjoyed his dance with Muriel, he smiled down at her kindly. She
was a queer little thing, but not bad, though she couldn’t dance for nuts.


She smiled back at him gratefully, as though she said, “Thank you for not telling me how badly I dance.”

He enjoyed the comfortable feeling of having conferred a favour on her. Muriel’s smiles were like that.

The polka was not repeated. The pianist turned to concentrate his attention upon the palm. Godfrey led Muriel back to her
mother.


“Did he ask you for any more dances, dear?”

“No, mother.”

That was the first dance. A second and third followed while Mrs. Hammond talked to Nancy Cartwright’s mother, and no one took
any notice of Muriel. She sat quietly, enjoying the Party. There seemed to be no better thing than to watch and listen.


Mrs. Hammond turned.

“Let me see your programme, dear.”

On the empty page Freddy’s name sprawled, conspicuous in its isolation.

“Dear me,” observed Nancy Cartwright’s mother, “doesn’t Muriel know the children here? I must get Nancy to introduce her
to some little boys. Nancy’s getting such a little flirt. So popular …”


“Muriel is very shy.” Mrs. Hammond’s voice was, for her, quite stiff. “She really knows almost every one. But of course I
like a child to be a child; and she hasn’t been going about in the way these Kingsport children do.”


But in spite of her implied contempt for the more sophisticated Kingsport children, Mrs. Hammond rose at the end of the dance
and found another partner for her daughter. He was a small, pink person in a very short Eton jacket. He danced even worse
than Muriel, and in their progress they managed to do a considerable amount of damage to the other couples. After two turns
round the room he deserted her with relief. She stood by the door, a little dazed and intimidated, while far away she could
see the haven of her mother’s chair separated from her by a whirlpool of frothing muslin dresses.


Near the door sat poor Rosie Harpur. Everybody called her “poor Rosie” in a general conspiracy of pity. She had not yet danced
one dance. Her plump hands grasped an empty programme. Her round head nodded above the frill of her white frock like a melon
on a plate. She had straight, yellow hair and staring blue eyes, and reminded Muriel of her doll, Agatha, whom three years
ago she had discarded without regret.


Funnily enough, Mrs. Marshall Gurney was talking about poor Rosie at that moment. Muriel could hear quite well.

“Poor Rosie, I really don’t know what to do with that child. I wish that they wouldn’t bring her to parties. One has to ask
her of course, for the parents’ sake, but it’s hopeless to try to find her partners.”


Muriel’s orderly mind registered a new item of information. The unforgivable sin at a party was to have no partners. To sit
quietly in the drawing-room at home was a virtue. The same conduct in the Kingsport Assembly Rooms was an undesirable combination
of naughtiness and misfortune. In order to realize the Party in its full magnificence, one must have a full programme. All
else was failure. Enjoyment of the music, the people, the prettiness—all this counted for nothing. It was not the Party.


Shame fell upon her. Taking advantage of the general confusion when the dance ended, she tried to steal unobserved from the
room. Mrs. Marshall Gurney, however, saw her.


“Well, Muriel, quarrelled with your partner? How are you getting on?”

“Very well, thank you.”

“Plenty of partners?”

Plenty? Oh, yes, plenty. Three was more than enough. Muriel tried to reconcile her conscience to the lie.

“Yes, thank you,” she said.

The great lady nodded.

“That’s right, then.”

Muriel ran away.

She hadn’t told a story. She hadn’t. All the same, she felt as though she had.

Under the stairs she found a twilight alcove that would serve to hide her confusion. She was about to enter it when the murmur
of voices told her that it was already occupied. Back to the cloak-room she ran, growing now a little desperate in her longing
for solitude. A motherly old lady in black silk and bugles looked up from her seat by the fire.


“Well, dearie, have you lost something?”

Not daring to risk a second prevarication, Muriel fled.

The door of the supper-room stood open. Inside she saw a glitter of glass and silver, of quivering crimson jellies and high-piled
creams, of jugs brimming with orange cup and lemonade. There were no questioning grown-ups to drive her from that sanctuary.
She slipped inside and curled up on a chair near the door. From far away came sounds of music, of laughter, of occasional
faint echoes of applause.


She drew her programme from its hiding-place in her sash and, with her head cocked on one side and the tip of her tongue between
her lips, began to write.


“First polka … Godfrey.

“First Schottische … Billie.

“First waltz … Frank.”

And so on, to the end of the list. When the programme was full she surveyed it with pride. Now, it anybody asked her, it could be exhibited without shame.


How pretty the tables looked! In every tumbler a Japanese serviette of coloured paper had been folded. One was like a lily,
one a crown. Kneeling up on her chair she hung ecstatically over one arranged like a purple fan. A silver dish, filled with
pink sweets and chocolates in silver paper, stood at her elbow. How perfectly enchanting it all was!


Nobody could mind if Muriel took one sweet. They belonged to the Party, and she was at the Party. They were there for her.
And as she did not dance. … She used so little of the Party.


She stretched out tentative fingers and took a sweet, the smallest sweet, for she was not a greedy child. Daintily biting
it, crumb by crumb with her firm little teeth, she ate every morsel with fastidious delight.


This was the Party. At last it had come to her, almost. Shielded safely from the alarming and incomprehensible regulations
of the world, she could find the glorious thing that had kept her wakeful through nights of anticipation.


She did not notice when the music ceased.

Suddenly there came a sound of voices from the corridor. An invisible hand flung wide the door, and they were upon her.

The room was full of people, and they were looking at her, mothers with disapproving faces, little girls and boys with smug
and round-eyed wonder, her own mother horrified, almost in tears, Mrs. Marshall Gurney, tactful and insufferable.


“Of course your little Muriel is welcome to the sweets. I dare say that she felt hungry. Children so love these almond fondants—from
Fuller’s.”


“Oh, Muriel, how could you be so naughty?”


It was dreadful to see her mother look like that.

“Muriel Hammond’s been stealing all the sweets! I say, do you think she’s left us any supper?”

That was Freddy Mason. He was laughing. They were all laughing. Laughing or scolding, or looking the other way and pretending
not to notice.


It was more terrible than the worst of nightmares.

But the hour that followed was more terrible still. Her mother wanted to take her straight home, but Mrs. Marshall Gurney
would not allow that. There she had to sit on that chair by the door all through supper. She had to try to eat the patties
and cakes and jellies. She simply could not swallow.


“She’s full up already,” said Nancy Cartwright ruthlessly.

How could Muriel explain that it had only been one little pink sweet, the smallest of the sweets, not even the fat round one
with an almond on it?


They made their escape as soon as possible, Muriel and her shamed, unhappy mother.

The drive home was almost the worst of all.

“Muriel, how could you be so naughty, dear? How could you disappoint me so?”

Fat tears ran down Muriel’s cheeks, and dripped on to the collar of her scarlet cloak.

Because her mother had forgotten that she had to ride outside, half-way home, Muriel began to feel sick. But she dared say
nothing, for all that she could say must be used as evidence against her.


“I never thought that my little Muriel could be so naughty and so greedy. Didn’t you know that people at parties don’t go and eat up all the supper? I don’t know what Mrs. Marshall Gurney will think.”


It was dreadful.

But how could she explain that it had only been the smallest sweet?

When they reached home, Connie was bobbing up and down on her bed in the firelit nursery.

“Was it lovely?” she demanded. “Was it lovely, Muriel?”

Mrs. Hammond spared Muriel the pain of a reply.

“Muriel has been a very naughty girl, Connie. And you must lie down and go to sleep and not talk to her.”

To be told no more? Muriel naughty? Good Muriel? Muriel who had always been held up as a model to naughty Connie? Here
indeed was a nine days’ wonder.


Connie snuggled down with expectant submission in her blankets; but even after Mrs. Hammond had kissed Muriel “Good night” with grave displeasure the culprit would say nothing.
She lay gazing at the flickering fire-light with wide, tear-filled eyes, and saying over and over to herself, “The Party was
spoilt, The Party was spoilt.”


For, in her unhappiness, this was the most poignant anguish, that by some mysterious cruelty of events Muriel had never found
the Party.


ON the evening of June 23rd, 1852, Old Dick Hammond, then still known as Young Dick, locked the door of the little oil-shop,
dropped the key in his pocket, and turned westward up Middle Street in Marshington. Beyond the village, black against the
sunset, a broken windmill crowned the swelling hill, even as the hill crowned Marshington.


“One day,” he vowed to himself, “my son shall marry a lady and build a house on Miller’s Rise.”

It was typical of Dick that he made his vow before the first sack had been sold from the factory that eventually brought to
him his moderate fortune. Yet more typical was the promptitude with which he forestalled his son and began himself to build
the house at Miller’s Rise. When Young Arthur Hammond rode to Market Burton to court Rachel Bennet, a house stood already
prepared and waiting for his lady. Whatever other objections the Bennet family might have raised against Rachel’s lover, at
least they could not deny that he was offering her the finest home in Marshington.


Fifteen years after Arthur’s wedding, the house was more than a mere dwelling place. Wind and rain had dimmed the aggressive
yellow of the brick walls, half covered now by ivy and the spreading fans of ampelopsis. The tender olive and faint silver-green
of lichens had crept across the slates roofing the shallow gables. The smooth lawn sloping to the laurel hedge along the road,
the kitchen garden overstocked until it suffered from perennial indigestion, the stiff borders by the drive, wherein begonias,
lobelia and geraniums were yearly planted out, regardless of expense; all these testified that the vows of Old Dick Hammond
had been fulfilled in no grudging spirit.


“Eleven bedrooms, three real good sitting-rooms, and no making up for lost space on the kitchens,” Dick had declared. “When
you go in for bricks and mortar, go handsome. It’s a good investment. Houses is summat.”


The house had been something more than the symbol of Old Dick’s fulfilment. It had been the fortress from which Rachel Hammond
had advanced with patient fortitude to recapture the social ground that she had forfeited by marrying Dick Hammond’s son.
Old Dick had mercifully died. When his continued existence became the sole obstacle to the fulfilment of his vow, nature performed
her last service to him and removed it.


The death of her father-in-law had made it a little easier for Rachel Hammond to live down the origin of his son, but even
by 1903 she still spoke with deference to Mrs. Marshall Gurney, and never passed the new store on the site of the old oil-shop
without a shudder. She kept her difficulties to herself, and no one but her sister Beatrice knew how great at times had been
the travail of her soul. Beatrice alone stood by her when she ignored the early callers from the Avenue and the Terrace. No
small amount of courage had enabled a young bride to refuse the proffered friendship of auctioneers’ wives and the Nonconformist
section of the village, when refusal might have meant perpetual isolation. Old Dick Hammond had been a mighty witness before
the Lord among the Primitives; but for a whole year of nerve-racking anxiety his daughter-in-law sat in the new house that
he had built, awaiting the calls of that Upper Marshington to whom Church was a symbol of social salvation, and Chapel of
more than ecclesiastical Nonconformity.


Beatrice alone supported Mrs. Hammond when she carried the war into the enemies’ camp by inviting a formidable series of Bennet
relatives, Market Burton acquaintances, and Barlow cousins to purify the social atmosphere of Miller’s Rise. Sunday after
Sunday these invincible reserves appeared in the Hammond pew. The success of that campaign had been slow but solid, and Mrs.
Hammond, sitting in her elm-shadowed garden on this summer afternoon bowed in gracious but satisfactory acknowledgment to
the hand that waved from Mrs. Waring’s carriage, rolling handsomely along the road.


She put down her sewing and gazed dreamily beyond the garden. The air was heavy with sweet summer sounds and scents, melting together into a murmurous fragrance; the breath of the wind on new-mown grass, the cooing of doves, the sleepy
orchestra of bees. On the upper stretch of lawn the two little girls, Muriel and Connie, were making a restless pretence at
lessons with the governess, Miss Dyson.


Mrs. Hammond paused in her work, a faint frown on her smooth forehead. Then she spoke, to herself rather than to her sister:


“Mrs. Cartwright said yesterday that Mrs. Waring is sending Adelaide to school.”

“School?” echoed Beatrice. Having been offered no clue yet, she knew not whether to approve or to decry. Seventeen years
spent as the one unmarried daughter of a large family had taught Beatrice Bennet that she existed only upon other people’s
sufferance. Since her parents had died, she passed her time in a continual succession of visits from one brother or sister
to another, paying for their hospitality by lending her approval, such as it was, to register or to confirm their own opinions.


Mrs. Hammond had not hitherto expressed her opinion on the subject of schools. Beatrice could therefore only wait and listen.

“To school?” she repeated, as her sister kept silence. “Did she say to which school?”

“She was uncertain.” Mrs. Hammond resumed her sewing. Her plump, white hands with round, beautifully-polished nails, conveyed
in repose a deceptive impression of gentle ineffectiveness. Directly she began to hem, inserting and withdrawing her needle
with sharp, decisive movements, the flashing diamonds on her finger cut through the idle softness of that first impression.
Her hands never fluttered uncertainly above her work. She moved directly to the achievement of her aim, or she kept still.
Just now she sewed, with rapid ease, a petticoat for Connie.


“Connie’s hard on her things,” she observed. “You’d hardly believe how fast she grows, and then she tears them like a great
tom-boy.” She sighed, clipping off a thread w