Crescendo Read Free Page B

obvious like,” said Ernest, considering gloomily the long, sallow face, the heavy eyebrows, the serious dark brown eyes, which he saw in the glass when he shaved.
    â€œIt isn’t obvious to me.”
    â€œI didn’t mean any harm, Millie,” said Ernest in his slow tones apologetically. “I was only just supposing.”
    â€œYou’ve got no right to go supposing about me.”
    â€œNo. Well,” said Ernest on a valedictory note, beginning to edge away round the door.
    Millie followed him.
    â€œThinking of getting wed at long last, are you, Ernest?”
    â€œAye—well—I might,” conceded Ernest. Rallying a certain sardonic humour which he possessed (though Mr. Arnold, for instance, would never credit him with it, thought Ernest crossly) he added: “Have you any objection, Millie?”
    â€œNo objection at all, so long as you don’t marry me,” snapped Millie.
    â€œDon’t say that, Millie!” protested Ernest. He was so deeply wounded that he blurted out his real feeling: “I’ve always had a fancy for you, you know.”
    â€œThen why didn’t you say so before, gaumless?” exclaimed Millie, laughing up into his face.
    â€œWell, I were worried,” began Ernest seriously.
    â€œYou worry too much, Ernest Armley,” said Millie, for the first of a thousand times: “Ernest by name and earnest by nature, that’s what
you
are.”
    â€œWill you wed me, then?” said Ernest incredulously.
    â€œOf course! Auntie, Bertha, Nora!” cried Millie, running to the centre of the room and shouting joyously: “Me and Ernest’s going to get wed!”
    Ernest’s mother thought he was marrying beneath him, while Millie’s relations all wondered what she saw in that long glum fellow, but they all came round to the match in the end. “She’s a right good lass, is Millie,” said Ernest’s mother eventually, and Ernest was well aware of the verdict of his relations-in-law upon himself: “He worrits too much, of course, but he’s a real good husband.”
    Nobody, not even Millie herself, would ever understand how Ernest felt about Millie. They went to live up Walker Street, though it was inconvenient for Ernest’s work, because Millie’s relations were all clustered in that district and Millie needed her family to live amongst as a fish needs water. The house was always full of a hurly-burly of hearty, laughing, jolly people; there were Millie’s sisters and cousins and aunts, with their masculine counterparts, and Ernest and Millie’s three children, and their friends, and now that Nora was married, a couple of grandchildren as well. (Kenneth was courting, too.) That he, Ernest Armley, that solemn dull fellow who lost his first job before he’d held it a day, should have a house of his own, a wife who was an excellent if slapdash cook, three fine children—Nora was very nicely married to his own second-in-command, Kenneth almost out of his engineering apprenticeship, Iris at the Ashworth County Modern School and doing well—no! He could never believe it. Of course it was all due to Millie. He could never be sufficiently grateful to her. He felt deeply and tenderly protective towards her merry spirit; he must never let anything cloud that warm-hearted gaiety.
    Of course this feeling of responsibility for Millie tended to make him worry all the more…. For somebody had to worry, and Millie never worried. The only thing which upset Millie was if she hadn’t a good meal ready for him on timewhen he came in. The only time he ever remembered her crying, for example, in all the years of their married life, was when she dropped a dish of dehydrated potatoes which she had just hydrated and heated, during the war. The hot dish dipped from the oven-cloth to the floor and broke, and Millie burst into tears. (He was home on leave, Corporal Armley, at the time; that