The Rt. Hon. Hamer Shawcross, P.C., M.P., with a dusky red carnation in the lapel of his evening coat, with the jewel of an Order glinting beneath the stiff white butterfly of his tie, his hair shining like burnished silver, accepted the soup from the waiter at the Lord Mayor’s banquet. The Prime Minister, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, sat a few places to his left; the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his harsh, hairless prelate’s face, was to his right. It was turtle soup.
A flunky bowed at Hamer’s shoulder and handed him a note. Many eyes watched him as he took the horn-rimmed spectacles from their case, adjusted them to the bridge of his handsome nose, and opened the twisted paper. What affair of state could not await the dinner’s end?
Hamer read: “Turtle soup reminds me. Remember t’tortoises? T. H.”
The minister’s face flushed with annoyance: flushed as duskily red as the flower he wore. The man was hovering there as though perhaps there might be an answer. Hamer gave an impatient shake of the head, raised his eyes, and beheld Sir Thomas Hannaway grinning impudently from a distant table and raising a glass in greeting. Hamer did not respond. He turned to the turtle soup and his Archbishop.
*
When the boy got home that night from Birley Artingstall’s party, he found his mother and Mrs. Ryerson sitting by the kitchen fire. There was a teapot on the table, and the fingers of both the women were busy. Ellen was darning; Mrs. Ryerson, her maimed fingers as active as whole ones, was knitting. She got up when Hamer came into the room, and said: “Well, you tell him, Ellen. Now I must go and get t’bread going.”
She went, with that air she had of expending a good deal of energy even upon the business of leaving a room, and Hamer sat down in the chair she had vacated. Ellen was swathed from head to foot in heavy black, relieved only by the cameo brooch at her throat. “We’ve been having a talk,” she said, “about what we’re going to do.”
She spoke in a low voice, keeping her head bowed over her work. She did not want him to see that her eyes were red. “We could go in with t’Ryersons,” she added after a moment.
At first Hamer did not understand, then he flushed, getting to his feet and sweeping the hair back from his forehead. “You mean share their house?” he asked.
Ellen nodded. “Mrs. Ryerson and I could sleep in one bedroom and t’little ’uns in the other. You and Francis could have the front room downstairs. He’s a nice lad.”
Hamer looked at her incredulously. “No!” he said fiercely. “No!”
Ellen spoke patiently, as though she were not surprised that he found this hard to stomach. She rolled into a ball the pair of socks she had finished darning and stretched another sock across her fingers. “It’s no good talking like that, lad,” she said. “People like us don’t save money. There’s just enough to go on with from week to week, and now that your father’s dead there’s nothing but what you earn. He was getting thirty-five shillings a week. You’re getting seven-and-sixpence. T’rent’s five shillings. We can’t eat and dress on half-a-crown. I’ll have to go out and work as it is. But if we go in with t’Ryersons, we could save in all sorts o’ ways.”
It seemed logical, unanswerable; but again Hamer shouted: “No! I’m not going to give this up. It’s our home.”
“Aye, I know that, lad, but there’s nowt comin’ into it now.”
At that, she began to cry quietly, and Hamer, who had not seen her cry till these last few days, stood with his back to the fire, his hands in his pockets, scowling to hide from her that his own eyes were smarting. Suddenly there came into his mind something Mr. Suddaby had said about Lord Lostwithiel, who had never seen Ancoats, living at ease on Ancoats rents. Even when Gordon had been paying the rent, the question seemed no more than academic; but now he realized that if this rent was to be paid it must be paid out of his earnings. “Why should we pay rent, anyway?” he burst out angrily.
Ellen dried her eyes and looked up at him in surprise. “Nay, now tha’s talking daft, lad,” she said. “Rent’s rent, and it’s got to be paid. Talk like that, an’ Mr. Richardson’ll soon ’ave thee on t’street.”
“Well, we’re staying here,” he said firmly. “Do you understand that? – staying here. Where my room is upstairs. Where your kitchen is. Where old Grandfather lived, and Father lived. It’s ours, and we’re going to keep it.”
She liked to hear him talk in that way. He looked proud and resentful. She stood up, tumbling things from her lap on to the rug, and took his face between her hands and kissed him. He didn’t seem to like it. He was not used to being kissed. He drew away like a sensitive animal that hates to be handled. At the door, he paused and said: “I’m going up to my room to think. I don’t know what we’ll do, but we’re not going to share with the Ryersons.”
“There’s no fire in your room,” she said. “We’ve got to think about coal now.”
“I can do without fire,” he said. “I can do without a lot of things. But we’re not going to do without a place of our own.”
When he was gone, Ellen picked up the things from the floor and went on with her darning. She felt sad and lonely. She wished he had stayed there and sat in the fireside corner where the Old Warrior had sat and where Gordon had sat. Why couldn’t he do his thinking, such as it was, there instead of in a cold bedroom? She could feel his body stiffening away from her kisses. She did not hold him as she had held those two others. But she felt proud and glad when she thought of his handsome angry face. What was there about him that the Old Warrior had never had – that Gordon had never had? She made up the fire, and, unconsciously, she made it up very quietly, so that even so small a noise should not disturb him.
*
Mr. Richardson was a bachelor, living in two rooms in George Street, where Mr. Wilder’s house was. He was not a companionable person: his job didn’t lend itself to that; but he liked, especially in the winter-time, to look in at the Lostwithiel Arms on a Saturday night. He did this partly for business reasons. If he found a notorious rent-ower spending his money on booze, he would fix his eyes, hung beneath with blue heavy bags, upon the offender, and so force upon him a realization that this was an enormous offence: to be throwing down his neck, in burning spirits or frothy ale, the good money that was owing to “the office.”
But this was secondary. Though not companionable, the man liked to be in company. He would talk to nobody, and few wanted to talk to him; but there he would sit, in the chair that was reserved for him on Saturday nights, his feet to the fire, his glass on the mahogany table, the gas in its round, white, opaque globe glowing above his head, the landlord attentive. The Lostwithiel Arms was not a “free” house. Not only did Lord Lostwithiel own the land it stood on; he was a dominant shareholder in the brewery company that ran the place; and so, to the landlord, Mr. Richardson was in a way Lord Lostwithiel’s very vice-regent, to be treated with honour and deference. The explosions of drawn corks were almost, on these occasions, a salute of guns. Mr. Richardson’s eye-pouches, his oiled quiff, his short spikes of moustache, the rigid collar that uplifted his chin, the yellow waistcoat sprigged with green and red flowers: all these things and the landlord’s deference were a rampart about him as he sat observing the artisans in their rough clothes, their clogs, their mufflers, standing at the bar and spitting into the sand. That Tom Hannaway of all people, a whipper-snapper, a person who had never been in the bar before, should walk casually over, seat himself at Mr. Richardson’s table, and engage him in conversation: this seemed to the landlord an outrage.
Tom Hannaway had come in and ordered himself half a pint of bitter. He sipped it as though he didn’t like it. He was a popular fellow, and he stood a few drinks, and soon had his little circle happy. “’Ows trade, Tom? Tha seems t’ave brass to chuck about.”
“Not so bad,” said Tom, “not so bad. I make ends meet. Once I’ve paid the rent there’s not much to worry about. But fifteen bob a week takes a bit o’ finding.”
A little consumptive mechanic swilled the dregs of his beer round and round in his glass, looked at them sadly, and said: “Fifteen bob? That’s a bob more than Darkie Cheap ever paid.”
“Maybe,” said Tom. “But it’s what I pay, all the same. Ask Joe Mathers there. Joe’s taken my rent to Mr. Richardson for me more than once – haven’t you, Joe? – when I’ve been out and Mr. Richardson hasn’t been able to get at me.”
Joe nodded. “That’s true enough, Tom. Fifteen bob it was.”
Then Tom, who from a dark doorway had watched Mr. Richardson enter the pub half an hour before, cried with surprise: “Why, there’s Mr. Richardson himself! Isn’t the rent of my bone-yard fifteen bob a week, Mr. Richardson?”
Mr. Richardson looked as if he did not want to discuss the matter, but he was seen to nod. It was then that Tom walked across from the bar to the nook by the fire and said: “Thank you for confirming that, Mr. Richardson.”
The rent-collector, who usually remained till ten o’clock and then went home full of a gentle melancholy, rose to his feet and almost roughly put Tom aside. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’ve got affairs to see to at home tonight.” No one but Mr. Richardson heard Tom Hannaway say: “I’ll be calling on you.”
He called half an hour later. When they were alone in the dingy little room of the lodgings, Mr. Richardson snarled: “What do you want?”
Tom had not been invited to sit down. He did so, and waved his hand toward another chair, as though he were the host. He smiled, showed his strong young white teeth. “Mrs. Burnsall owes you a good deal of rent for that lock-up shop on the corner of Broadbent Street.”
“That’s my business, and I don’t want you sticking your nose into it,” said Mr. Richardson.
Tom ignored this. “I’ve been lending a few shillings to one or two people,” he said frankly. “Mrs. Burnsall wanted to borrow two pounds. I couldn’t let her have it. I want that shop. It’s time I expanded my affairs.”
Mr. Richardson, who had not taken a seat, stood with his back to the dull smouldering fire, looked down at the youth, and sneered. “Expand your affairs, eh? Affairs! Running a bone-yard and robbing the kids of their pennies for swinging on a few ropes. Hannaway’s club!”
“Forty-five members,” said Tom. “I could tell the forty-five of ’em that you’re putting a bob a week rent in your pocket, and they could tell forty-five fathers and forty-five mothers. One of the fathers works in the Lostwithiel Estate Office.”
Mr. Richardson’s face took on a horrid mottled look. “You dirty little swine!” he said.
Tom smiled. “You heard the boys in the pub? There are witnesses that I’ve been paying you fifteen bob. My book only shows fourteen.”
Mr. Richardson sat down and licked his lips. “I don’t want to turn Mrs. Burnsall out,” he said. “She’s a widow.”
Tom Hannaway’s smile widened to an impudent knowing grin. “Of course you don’t want to turn her out,” he said, “but between you and me, old cock, she’s tired of paying the rent that way. That’s why she came to me.”
Mr. Richardson leapt to his feet and stood over Tom, his face wild with anger. He raised his fist to strike, and the boy, not smiling now, said quietly: “Don’t do that, Mr. Richardson!” Richardson sank again into his chair, put his elbows on his knees and his forehead in his hands.
It was Tom’s turn to get up now. “That’s better,” he said. “Now listen to me. Are you listening?”
Mr. Richardson moved his head up and down. “Good,” said Tom. “There are only two things to get into your skull. One is that I want that shop. I know what Mrs. Burnsall’s been paying for it, and that’s what I’ll pay you. The other is this: the rent of the bone-yard is fourteen shillings a week – in your pocket as well as in the books.”
*
Tom Hannaway had two more calls to make that night. First of all, he went to the widow Burnsall’s. She was at this time in her early thirties, and Tom was just eighteen. He remembered how, the last time the fair had come to the croft and he had gone up to the boxing platform, stripped of everything but his trousers, he had seen Mrs. Burnsall at the front of the crowd, with the naphtha flares shining on her face. The crude light brought out the height of her cheekbones and sank her eyes into dark pits. Tom thought she was an exciting-looking woman, and she gazed frankly at his fine arms and white body and at the little dark curl beginning already to sprout on his chest. Tom was a plucky boxer, not a good one; but that night he managed to rattle his opponent, to send him down to the count more than once, before he was himself, bruised and bloody, knocked almost unconscious.
He put on his clothes, and was making his way to his lodgings. feeling sore and sorry, when Mrs. Burnsall overtook him, walking fast. They knew one another slightly, as inhabitants of the same region.
“That was a good fight,” she said.
“But not good enough,” Tom grinned.
“I never knew you had such arms,” Mrs. Burnsall said, “till I saw you with your shirt off.” She took hold of him by the upper arm and squeezed his biceps. “You’re more of a man than a boy, already,” she said.
At the touch of her hand on his arm, Tom felt a shiver go through him. He broke away down the first turning he came to, though it was not his way home. “Good night, Mrs. Burnsall,” he said.
He had seen her once or twice since that, when he had been out with his truck, collecting junk. She had asked him to come into her house. He had not gone, but, gossiping on her doorstep, he had learned a lot about her. She was the only woman he knew who had money. She had married an old man of the most miserly habits. She was twenty-five then, and he died when she was thirty. A lifetime of the most ignominious scrounging and scraping permitted him to leave less than a thousand pounds. Mrs. Burnsall had fifteen shillings a week income. It was just not enough to manage on. So she had tried running the lock-up greengrocer’s shop, and now that was a failure.
Tom Hannaway was turning all these things over in his busy mind as he hurried through the night from Mr. Richardson’s to the widow Burnsall’s. The lock-up shop would not be a failure under his management, and what could be nicer for Mrs. Burnsall than to make up the few extra shillings she needed by taking him for a lodger?
It was the sort of house he was used to: two up and two down. But it was the most comfortable house he had ever been in. Polly Burnsall, surprised and delighted to see him, took him through to the kitchen. The steel of the fireplace and of the fender was shining like silver. The fire was bright. He had never before seen such a lamp as hung from the ceiling over the centre of the round table on which Polly’s solitaire cards were set out. It had a shade of red silk, and there was an arrangement by which you could push it right up to the ceiling or lower it to the table. There were big coloured pictures on the walls: lovely innocent children fondling St. Bernard dogs, red-coated British troops doing and dying against dastardly Indians who were having the nerve to try to hold India, languishing Greek maidens on terraces of marble veined with blue shining against an incredible sea. On each side of the fireplace was an easy chair, and the crockery was not packed out of sight in a cupboard but was ranged on a Welsh dresser and shone with cleanliness.
This was a sumptuousness which Tom had not expected; nor had he expected to find Polly Burnsall herself so spick and span, seeing that she could not have been long back from her disastrous failure of a shop. But her hair looked as if it had just been dressed; her high cheekbones were obviously fresh from soap and water, and her dress actually included a gold chain round the neck, passing to a watch tucked into her girdle.
Tom began to wonder whether the exciting things he had been dreaming about were not, after all, presumptuous and abominable. Polly put him into one of the easy chairs and asked if she should make him a cup of tea. He said “No,” and plunged at once into his business.
“I wanted to warn you, Mrs. Burnsall. It’s no business of mine, but old Richardson’s been saying he’s going to turn you out of the shop.”
He waited for her comment on that, but there was none. She sat at the table, with her chin resting on the knuckles of her two hands, looking steadily at him with her dark piercing eyes. It was almost as though she were trying to hypnotize him. He stared for a moment at a couple of bangles which had fallen from her wrists down her bare shapely forearms; then he went on: “Well, I wanted to warn you, see, and help you, too. I know you can manage if you get a bit more money, and I wondered if you would like to take me for a lodger. I could pay you fifteen shillings a week.”
Tom had settled in his mind on twelve and six, but something was working him up, and the fifteen shillings was out before he knew it.
She continued to gaze at him with black, inscrutable eyes, not moving her position. He did not know what emotion she was keeping under control, how passionately the woman who had married miser Burnsall desired this handsome, black-haired youth with the white skin and the red lips through which the teeth shone like hailstones when he smiled.
“Well,” and he managed to grin uncomfortably, “d’you think I’ve got a cheek? Could you do it at the money?”
“When could you come?” she said, and he was surprised, then thrown into a wild joy, to hear that her voice was as strained as his own.
“Tomorrow night,” he said.
In the passage she took his arm. “Come tonight,” she whispered. “Stay now.”
He shook himself clear, once again the confident Tom Hannaway, the man in control of the situation. “No. Sorry,” he said in his bold clear tones. “I’ve got to run on and see a man about a bit of business.”
*
This was the night on which Hamer and Arnold Ryerson had been to Birley Artingstall’s party. Hamer had gone up to his bedroom, fireless for the first time since it had been also his study, as the diary notes:
“This small fact brings home to me more than anything else the change in our economic situation. Mr. Suddaby is paying me seven and six a week. I am nothing more than an errand boy. I cannot expect him to increase my wages, and yet more money somehow must be got. I have read an enormous amount in the last couple of years, but what is the use of all that to me now? How terribly the scales are weighted against the poor! Had I been the son of well-to-do people, all this reading would have been to my credit. It would have been said that I was doing well. But now it means only that I have been neglecting to acquire the mean accomplishments that would give me employment. I begin to see how men are forced to be servile. I shall not be one of them. I will, somehow, get a more profitable job, but, however hard that may cause me to work, I shall not drop one single endeavour toward the raising of my condition. I swore this last night on the Old Warrior’s sabre. It caught my eye, hanging there on the wall, and more keenly than ever before I saw what the old man had meant when he called it a symbol. Hereafter, I shall never look at it without thinking of the unending battle between the rich and the poor. As this idea of swearing the oath came into my mind, I took down the sabre and was actually holding it above my head when Tom Hannaway came into the room.”
*
Ellen had told Tom to go up. She was too dispirited to accompany him. “You’ll find him in the room on the left of the landing,” she said.
Tom, who had never been inside the house before, pushed open the bedroom door, to find himself confronted by Hamer, holding the sabre above his head and muttering. Tom recoiled upon the landing. “For God’s sake!”
Hamer lowered the sabre till the point touched the ground. “Come in,” he said. He did not explain what he had been doing. He might have explained to Arnold Ryerson. To Tom Hannaway – no. He hooked the sabre back to its nails. “Sit down.”
Tom Hannaway slumped into a chair, took out a pipe, and, without asking permission, lit it. He looked round him in surprise. He had never seen a room like this before. It was unlike Mr. Richardson’s dingy lodging; unlike Polly Burnsall’s comfortable kitchen.
“This would be nice with a bit of fire in the grate,” he said.
Hamer stood before the cold fireplace, his hands in his trousers pockets, and scowled. “Can’t afford it.”
“You want a job with more money attached to it,” said Tom Hannaway. “I’ve come to offer you one.”
It seemed incredible. It seemed only a day or two ago that they were both at school, and here was Tom Hannaway talking about giving him a job! Some boys would have laughed. Hamer didn’t. He did not underestimate Tom Hannaway. He was perhaps the only person at this time, except Mr. Richardson, who had a feeling that Tom Hannaway was a personage, after his fashion.
“Tell me about it,” he said briefly.
It was going to be harder than he had thought. Tom Hannaway left him in no doubt about that. “You’ll have to be up early – at the market while the good stuff’s there. It’s not my business to tell Mrs, Burnsall why she’s made a muck of it, but that’s one reason: she’d never get up early enough. Come home with a few mangy lettuces and sticks of rhubarb. You won’t do that – not if you want this job. You’ll be in the markets at six, and you’ll open up the shop at eight, and shut it at eight at night. And you’ll keep accounts of what you spend in the market, and what you take in the shop, and we’ll check ’em over every night, an’ square that off with what’s left in stock. And there’d better not be much of that, because this is perishable stuff. I don’t want to see my money withering in the window.”
“I could buy the stuff,” Hamer said. “I don’t see how I can make people buy it. They do or they don’t.”
“Hey! Hey! Don’t start talking like that,” Tom Hannaway shouted, belching out a cloud of smoke. “That’s no way to talk when you’ve got something to sell. We’ll make people buy. I’ve been thinking up a few ideas. Window-dressing, to begin with.”
“I can’t dress a window.”
“Well, learn to, instead of filling your head with all this stuff.” He waved his pipe comprehensively toward the books. “Then I’ll tell all the club members. One night a week free for all whose mothers shop at Hannaway’s. And you see that all your friends shop there, too. Then there could be a few special ideas. I thought of tortoises.”
“Tortoises?”
“Yes. Why not? Kids love something like that. We give the mothers a book. I’d get a little stamp made, and you stamp the books for every shillingsworth of goods bought. When they get thirty stamps, they’re given a tortoise for the kids. You could feed ’em on lettuce. No difficulty about that. You want ideas.” Again he waved his pipe with a vague magnificence as if limning unimaginable tracts of thought. “That’s what got Mrs. Burnsall down. Too much bed and not enough brains.”
“And what do I get?”
“Fifteen shillings a week to begin with.”
“When do I start?”
“As soon as I’ve got the place ready. It needs a coat of paint. I couldn’t stand a dingy place like that. I reckon it’s the landlord’s job to brighten it up. I’ll see Mr. Richardson about that. I think he’ll do it for me.” Tom smiled quietly at some thought which Hamer could not share, got up, and knocked out his pipe in the cold grate. “You taking it?”
“Yes.”
“Good lad. I thought you’d be looking for something, with the old man gone. I expect,” he added, with a condescending look at the bookshelves, “it’ll mean less of this, but still—”
“It’ll mean nothing of the sort,” said Hamer. “Not if I can help it.”
*
In keeping track of Hamer’s career, it is often necessary to check what he said in the years of his maturity against the record of the diary. At the very end, when he became Viscount Shawcross, one of the first of the Labour peers, he was inclined to magnify his tribulations, unconsciously perhaps. It has already been seen that he almost persuaded himself that he had been one of those children disturbed from their sleep by the rattle of Jimmy Spit-and-Wink’s bundle of wires on the window. It has been seen how the “wolves” to whom fate threw him were nothing more savage than Mr. Suddaby. But the diary is a record made at the time, with no thought that in years to come it would see the light of day. It is, on the whole, a reliable document.
“Ah, my friends! Many of you here are here because of the selfsacrificing love and devotion of parents.” (This was an address to the undergraduates of a Scottish university.) “Do not forget them. If the world goes well with you, recompense them, though they will think your triumphs are all the recompense they need. If it goes ill, remember that anything you may be called upon to endure has already been endured by those who stinted themselves to furnish you with weapons which they themselves had not the opportunity to carry. I can speak – and I do it with humility – of a mother’s love. I can speak of a poor home smitten by sudden calamity, of the loaf dwindling in the cupboard, the oil failing in the lamp, the fire sinking low upon the hearth, and hope burning low in the soul. Against that grey background I see shining the unquenchable flame of a mother’s love. Work must be found, and she was there, seeking, seeking, seeking, till the spectre that haunts the lives of the poor – worklessness – was at last banished.”
All this dying and dwindling and fading, all this seeking and seeking, suggests a long period of privation which did not, in fact, occur. The diary is clear:
“Now I’m a greengrocer! I suppose all the days will be more or less like this first one, so I shall write here what it has been like. Tom had already laid in at the shop a great deal of stuff that would not perish quickly – things like potatoes and carrots, turnips and parsnips, kippers, apples and oranges. I had not much idea what I should do when I got to the market. I was pushing the handcart along Great Ancoats Street at six in the morning – a wretched rainy morning, too – when a man driving a pony attached to a flat cart overtook me, and stopped. He asked if I was Hannaway’s boy, and when I said ‘Yes,’ he said Tom had paid him a pound to help me with the buying for the first week. I must say there is nothing about this business that Tom Hannaway has not thought of and provided for. The shop looks beautiful with its new paint outside and its scrubbed shelves inside, and he has provided the tortoises he talked about the other night. He is the sort of young man who seems bound to succeed with everything he does, which is something I do not feel about Arnold Ryerson. though I like Arnold better than Tom.
“I think I shall soon learn this buying business. It went well enough with a little advice from the man, and when I got back Tom was at the shop, though I had not expected him. He had written a list of prices, so that I shouldn’t sell anything too cheaply. He turned up again at half-past twelve, and told me to go home and get my dinner.
“We have sold a lot of stuff today, and my most interesting customer was Miss Harriet Wilder. She came with her father, of all people! She filled her string bag with stuff, but I think these purchases were only an excuse for coming to talk to me, though Miss Wilder says she will in future buy all her greengroceries from Hannaway’s. But I could see that Mr. Wilder wanted to talk about how my mother and I were managing now that Father was dead. I said my mother was going to look for work. She didn’t mind what it was, so long as we could keep our own house to ourselves. Mr. Wilder said the chapel caretaker, who is a very old man, was giving up the work and going to live with his married daughter at Oldham. He said it was usually a man’s job, but if my mother would like to have it, he thought he could arrange it with the chapel committee. This was in the morning, and I told her about it when I went home to dinner. She went straight away to see Mr. Wilder, who then told her that he had already arranged with the committee for her to take the job if she cared to have it. This is a remarkable stroke of luck, because between us we shall earn nearly as much as Father earned, though we shall both have to work much harder than we ever did. But there it is. Thank God, we are out of the wood, without any miserable period of wondering how on earth we can make both ends meet.”
*
He was at the market at six in the morning. By half-past seven, he had returned to the shop and put the stuff where it had to be. Also, if the window needed rearranging he saw to that. In the early days of his life as a greengrocer, Tom Hannaway had appeared on the pavement one morning at eight o’clock, examined the display critically, and then walked into the shop. He seized three or four lettuces out of the window and shook them angrily under Hamer’s nose. “What d’you call that?” he demanded. “Shrivelled! Withered! Horrible!” He threw the lettuces out into the road, then went after them and brought them back. “No waste,” he said. “Keep ’em for the tortoises, or if some kid comes in for rabbit-food sell ’em half-price. But don’t let me see that sort of stuff in the windows again.”
The next day Tom brought along a streamer, printed in gay colours: “The Dew sparkles on Hannaway Produce.” He pasted it across the window, looked at it with his head on one side, and, coming back, indicated a water-can. “Live up to that motto,” he said.
So now, by half-past seven, Hamer had looked to the window. Then he went home to breakfast. There was no early-morning running now, but the barrow-pushing opened out his shoulders, and he remembered to breathe deeply. Ellen could not get over her habit of looking at him solicitously. She could not forget the child with the dragging gait, the head that had seemed too big for the slender blue-veined neck. He knew what she was thinking. He got up one morning from the breakfast table, threw off his coat, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and flexed his biceps. “Get hold of that,” he said. Ellen pressed the hard muscle with her fingers which were now so rough and red with constant immersion in soda-water. “It seems all right,” she smiled.
“Stop worrying,” he said. “They won’t get me down.”
Mysterious hidden forces – “They” – were beginning to appear to his mind, forces associated in some vague fashion with the field of Peterloo, and the trampling, snorting, red-nostrilled horses of the Hussars, and with all that old Suddaby had been accustomed to talk about in his quiet hinting way. Associated, too, with the famished ragged horde clawing round the soup cauldron in Stevenson Square, and with a boy and a girl standing there hand in hand with tin mugs tied round their necks: hopeless, defeated, and unprotesting in their defeat. But They would not get down him, Hamer Shawcross.
By eight o’clock he was back at the shop and had opened for the day. Behind the shop was a tiny room, used as a store, with a window opening on to a back yard. When he was in there, no one could see him, for a curtain hung across the glass door that communicated with the shop. And no one could come into the shop without his knowing, because there was a bell that sounded when the shop door opened.
In this back room “They” met their adversary, wrestling through the hours. For there were long stretches of time with no customers, and then he would fling up the window, breathe deeply, and run standing. That is to say, he would throw back his head, lift up his knees – up, down-up, down – covering an imaginary mile; and then he would bend and twist and stretch, suppling his muscles and making his body do what he would. When all that was done, he would take from his pocket a primer he had got from Mr. Suddaby, and recite: J’ai, tu as, il a. There was not the time now, or the money, for those French lessons he had promised himself; but all the same, They were not going to get him down. Nous avons, vous avez, ils ont.
Back into the shop. No one about. With the fine-sprayed wateringcan he put the dew on to Hannaway’s produce. Tom would be here any minute, and Tom would expect to see the synthetic virginal freshness. Tom would have had a mechanical lark to sing over this happy garden had he been able to manage it.
Tom came, as he always did, at a quarter past one. Hamer wondered a little at the brightness of Tom’s eye in these days, and his even more- than-usual confidence and grown-upness. Tom was only eighteen, but in those days he seemed suddenly to have leapt into an adult aptitude.
But what lay behind this was a speculation outside Hamer’s range at that time. What he knew was that there was only three-quarters of an hour for dinner and that Tom’s good humour would be gone if he were not relieved at two o’clock sharp.
In the afternoon, it was the same performance: greengrocery, running a standing mile, bending and doubling and twisting, j’aurai, tu auras, il aura.
It was not yet four when he lit up. By half-past three the shabby Ancoats street was full of a grey creeping dusk, chill with a faint misty miasma that seemed to arise from the canal in Broadbent Street and slide and seep down all the ill-lit dingy ways. Then the gaslight sputtered, and its yellow radiance fell on Hannaway’s produce, again prudently and providently dew-scattered, and on the red apples and golden pyramids of oranges, and the tangerines wrapped in silver tissue, and the golden-brown flat kippers that once had been finny and stream-lined, and the oblong blocks of dates, compressed into so solid a compass that they looked as though enduring works of architecture might be achieved with them.
The lamplighter’s clogs rang out into the darkness, as the pale shambling Prometheus, carrying at the end of a pole his eternal morsel of smoky flame, went from lamp to lamp, thrust up the small tin trap-door, and passed on, leaving behind him a long-spaced trail of feeble lights. Feeble indeed and ineffectual they seemed, blooming in the grim Ancoats night, throwing into prominence by their consumptive and spectral auras the brave glow and glitter of Hannaway’s window. “Don’t spare the gas. When it’s dark, turn ’em all on, and keep ’em all on, all the time.” So spake Thomas, juvenile master of publicity.
Out of the night, out of the dark lanes and ill-lit streets, justifying Tom’s prescience, the children crept, pale moths attracted by the festive glare, pointing with skinny fingers at the dates that had swayed on camels across the insufferable light of the desert, and at the oranges that had glowed on trees in Spain, and at the cabbages and lettuces cunningly fresh and diamond-hung. They came, and hovered for a moment, and disappeared again, pallid and inscrutable goblins out there in the night, and Hamer saw their wan and glass-distorted features, and would not allow his mind to be distracted from its fierce and bitter concentration. Nous aurons, vous aurez, ils auront. They should not get him down.
Three and a half hours still to go, before, at half-past seven, Tom came to count the cash, check the stock, and take a general look round. Three and a half hours in which he remembered the old urgent promptings of Gordon Stansfield and Mr. Suddaby and Birley Artingstall: Read this! Read that!
Locke on Human Understanding, Grote on Greece, Gibbon on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hakluyt, Prescott: they were all in the drawers and cupboards of an old sideboard that Polly Burnsall had left in the back room. Under the golden rain of Tom’s extravagant gas-consumption, he brought his fields to ripening, reading with the same fierce and bitter concentration that he gave to Avoir and Être. He read leaning his elbow on the end of an upturned orange crate; and sometimes, rapt away into the world of his imagining, he would lift his eyes from the page, stare out into the black abysm of the night, peopled by shadows sliding from one plane of darkness to another, and, not seeing them, would see instead faces stretching back and back, down a long floor and up exalted galleries, and the orange crate would become a pulpit, a rostrum, and he the focal point of ten thousand watching eyes. Ah, my friends!
At eight o’clock Tom, whistling, hurried away to the ever moredeeply appreciated comforts that Polly Burnsall afforded; and Hamer, turning out the gas, locked up the shop and went home to his late “high tea.” Sometimes Ellen was there to give it to him, but often now something demanded her presence at Emmott Street. Then he would look after himself; but, whether she was there or not, he would go straight up to his room at half-past eight and write in his diary till nine. From nine to ten he read fiction or poetry; at ten he put on his hat and coat, and, with an ash stick in his hand, walked the streets till eleven. Then he went home and to bed. That was his day. And for a long time that was every day.
*
When the summer came, it was different. He didn’t need to listen for old Jimmy Spit-and-Wink. He was up, with the sun shining in at his window, at half-past five, and, pushing his handcart, he went down Broadbent Street with the clog-clattering horde rushing to reach the mill before the direful wailing of the buzzer died away. But no mill-gate closed behind him. He was there on the road, pushing his cart, with the sweet morning air about him and the sky stretched above the chimney-pots like taut milky-blue silk. No mill for John! So much Gordon had promised – poor Gordon who had been able, after all, to do so little of what he would have liked to do. No mill. But what instead?
Hamer didn’t know. He knew only that he was being driven, and that he responded gladly to the goad. He could not imagine anything finer than the grinding slogging life he was leading now, though he would have liked to live in different conditions. But give up a moment of there ardours and endurances? Not on your life!
Even at six in the morning there was no dew on Great Ancoats Street, no lark singing overhead. But at least, in those days, there was no stink of motor traffic, and, as he plodded along among the horse-drawn wagons and the handcarts like his own, all churning up the grey dust of the road, he felt strong and happy, contented for the moment with his striving discontented life.
What on earth possessed him to buy the wallflowers? If there was one thing that didn’t sell in Ancoats, it was flowers. They had come in from Cheshire; they were piled all over the stall of a little woman with cheeks as rosy as a pippin. Hamer had often seen her there before. The stall said her name was Margaret Billington. She dealt in nothing but flowers, and so he had had no dealings with her. But the scent of the wallflowers was so sweet and penetrating that it prevailed over the indefinable market smell that by now he knew so well: a smell compounded of wholesome things on the stalls and squashed pulpy things on the floor and horse-droppings and human sweat. The wallflowers were shining with authentic dew, and their ruddy-brown petals had a smooth velvet nap and made him think suddenly of the colour of Harriet Wilder’s eyes. Well, Tom could hardly be severe with him for investing in a dozen bunches. They cost him a penny a bunch, and he would price them twopence.
Mrs. Billington wrapped the stalks in paper, leaving the dewy petals uncovered. “The butterfly goes with them,” she said.
And there the butterfly was, though Hamer had not noticed it before, for the ruddy-brown of its folded wings was the very colour of the flowers. No dew and no skylarks in Great Ancoats Street, but, here in the market, dew sparkling on the wallflowers like sequins on velvet, and a butterfly whose wings were now upraised and pressed close together above its long, thin body, now dropped down and outspread in a gorgeous patterning of peacock colours.
He took the bunch with fearful circumspection, almost holding his breath, feeling his hand tremble, overjoyed when the flowers, the last purchase of the morning, lay upon his handcart with the butterfly still pulsing its wings upon them.
Already, when he got once more into Great Ancoats Street, the balm was gone from the morning. The sun had strengthened and promised a day of heat sizzling down upon the little houses packed in narrow rows. What was there here, in this stony waste, for this butterfly, this fragile lotus-eater, this drinker of dew? As the handcart jolted along the road Hamer watched the creature, fascinated, and it became a question of pride that it should go with him all the way. “If it does, something good, something lovely, is going to happen. I don’t know what. Something good, something lovely.”
The butterfly stretched its wings, quivered, fluttered an inch or two into the air. Hamer’s breath sharpened. Oh, what a silly game! Ah, now it’s down again upon the wallflowers that are the colour of Harriet Wilder’s eyes. He quickened his pace. Get back to the shop before it goes. Never, surely, has a butterfly with peacock’s colours on its wings been seen in an Ancoats shop. When, indeed, was a butterfly last seen in Ancoats, anywhere in Ancoats? Were there gardens in Ancoats, where now, in this month of June, roses would be blooming and bees fumbling for honey, in those far-off days when the Old Warrior and his girl marched behind Sam Bamford with the green sprig in his hat? Perhaps not even then.
So stay, butterfly. Surely you are a symbol of something wonderful that is going to happen in Ancoats today.
Suddenly the butterfly made up its mind, rose from the flowers, and zigzagged above the roadway, falling this way and that, as though, on this breathless morning there were airs unfelt by any but itself, strong enough to send it careening down invisible troughs and surging up unseen crests like a little yacht on a bobbly sea.
Hamer watched it go, rise higher and higher, till it was a speck disappearing across a roof-ridge, and then, with a half-rueful laugh at his own nonsense, he turned to the serious business of pushing greengroceries back to the shop.
He passed into Broadbent Street, and his heart gave a sudden bound. He would not have thought it possible that so trivial a thing could give him such joy. The butterfly, opening and shutting its wings, was perched on the parapet of the oozy canal that nowadays reminded him so little of Venice.
Hamer brought the handcart to a standstill. There was no one to see him. Broadbent Street had not yet reached the time of its second stirring. He tiptoed toward the parapet, one hand reaching out in a scoop toward the butterfly. But it did not wait for him. It rose, and went with its dizzy, zany flight up the black face of the mill beyond the canal. This time, it did not disappear. It came back and fluttered tantalizingly out of his reach; then, in its drunken erratic fashion, it fell once more upon the wallflowers, as though all the time it had been searching for that one spot of colour and odour and dew in this unaccustomed wilderness. Now it stayed where it was. Even when Hamer picked up the flowers and carried them into the shop, it stayed where it was. He took them into the little back room, butterfly and all, put them in a jam-jar full of water, and shut the door. The butterfly that was the colour of the wallflowers; the wallflowers that were the colour of Harriet Wilder’s eyes.
*
She came with her string bag at three in the afternoon. Ancoats was like an oven. Hamer stood at the shop door. As far as he could see, all the little house windows were up, but the cheap lace curtains hung down as rigid as board. The sky was a strip of brassy light burning above the canyon of the street. Women sat on the yellowstoned doorsteps, apathetic as cows in a summer field, and a few children tumbled in the gutters, stirring the dust and the dry rustling shreds of paper. In one side of the shop-window was an array of bottled lemonade, cheap and venomous-looking yellow stuff, one of Tom Hannaway’s seasonal “lines.”
“Well, Hamer.”
He turned. Harriet had come from the other direction. She looked pale, wilted. She had been getting like that lately. The wild colour that had been in her cheeks when she came from Chester had been fading in the Ancoats murk, and this present spell of torrid heat made her droop like a tree whose root has been cut through.
“Hamer.” She had taken to calling him that. He was growing, and his breadth was keeping pace with his height. He was beginning to look like a man, and a lot of people were beginning to call him Mr. Shawcross. But he preferred this. Hamer.
He followed her into the shop. She suddenly stood still, gazing at a piece of paper fastened by a drawing-pin to the side of an upended orange crate. It was the complete conjugation of the verb Avoir.
“Hallo! I didn’t know you were doing French.”
Hamer blushed. “I didn’t intend you to know. I thought I’d taken that down.” He unpinned the slip of paper and put it in his pocket.
To his surprise, she put her hand, which was no longer brown but as thin as ever, on his sleeve. “Don’t do that,” she said. There was a smile in her tired eyes.
“Don’t do what?”
“Bottle it up. Let me talk to you. Shall I?”
He nodded.
“Good. You’re bottling everything up. I’ve felt that for a long time. Your mother’s told me about things you’re doing: all the reading and writing. It’s hard, all that sort of thing, when you keep it to yourself. There used to be Mr. Stansfield, and that boy Arnold Ryerson, and old Mr. Suddaby.”
“You seem to know a lot about me!”
“It’s your mother. She talks a lot about you. You must forgive her. She’s very proud of you.”
“Well, I do miss all those people – Gordon and Arnold and old Suddaby.”
“I’m sure you do. Try and find someone else. Look at this French. Rather than let me know anything about it, you fold up the paper and tuck it away as though it were something to be ashamed of. Don’t bottle things up. You see, I know. My father was like that. He was as poor as you are. He’s told me how dreadful it used to be, studying without anyone to help, without an encouraging word. Now he’s a great scholar.”
At that Hamer looked up wistfully. That was something – a great scholar. That was not everything, but that certainly was something that he wanted to be.
“Is he?”
“Yes. Many Wesleyan parsons aren’t,” she added with a smile. “But he is. He’d like to know you. He complains that there’s hardly a soul in his circuit with whom he can have a good crack about the things that interest him.”
“I don’t think he’d find me any great shakes.”
“You don’t believe that,” Harriet said. Her hazel-brown eyes looked him frankly up and down. “No. You don’t believe that. You’ve got an opinion of yourself, and,” she went on hastily as he tried to break in, “you’ve got a right to it. I don’t know how long you’re going to be satisfied with this” – she looked round the stuffy little shop – “but it won’t be any longer than you can help. Now, let me try you in Avoir.”
He began to run through the tenses. He was nervous and confused. Now and then she had to prompt him; and when he had done she said: “Good! But you want someone to teach you the pronunciation. Let me do it.”
His face lightened. “Will you – Harriet?”
“I’d love to. Come round on Sunday night after service and have supper with me and Father. We’ll have a good talk and arrange things. Don’t be afraid of him. His father was a bricklayer.”
The talk had given back to her face something of its old animation, its ugly-monkey attractiveness. “I’ll buy two bottles of that awful-looking stuff in the window,” she said. “We’ll drink to your stepping-out. Because you’ve got to, you know.”
They did that, and, as there were no glasses, they drank from the bottles, and the horrible liquid gas made them belch companionably. Then Hamer said: “Come and see what I’ve got in here.”
He opened the door of the back room, and there was the butterfly, beating its wings against the window. “Oh, the lovely thing!” Harriet cried. “Let it out! Let it out!” She threw up the window. The butterfly, dazed for a moment, fluttered dizzily in the air without, as though unable to apprehend its freedom. Then, zigzagging higher and higher, it disappeared into the torrid crash of the heat.
“There!” said Harriet. “Things like that should be given the use of their wings. Don’t bottle them up.”
*
Mr. Wilder was not the great scholar that Harriet imagined him to be, but he was an intelligent and well-read man. He had acquired enough Hebrew to rummage his way, if need be, through a passage of the Old Testament in its original tongue, enough Greek to make him at ease with the Greek New Testament. His Latin was better than his Greek or his Hebrew, because he had not learned it for any other reason than that he wanted to. He read his Latin authors for fun, and his French authors, too. Those were his four languages, and, for the rest, he was a man who loved good things in his own tongue. When his wife was living, he would often roll out a hundred majestic lines of Milton without pause or hitch, or a long passage from Shakespeare. These two, with Wordsworth, were his favourite poets; and the great prose writers, too, had taken such a hold on his imagination that, without having consciously learned them, he could recite the flowing periods of Browne and Addison, Bunyan, Swift and Jeremy Taylor.
Since the death of his wife in Chester, he had tended to shrink in upon himself. Here in this Ancoats circuit he had made no friends. His long pale face had grown longer and paler, and, when he was not engaged in circuit tasks which could not be put to one side, he sat in his study with his favourite books about him, now reading, now, with a book face downwards on his knee, abandoned to reverie and reminiscence.
It was perhaps as much for his sake as for Hamer’s that Harriet brought the two together. Now the outline of Hamer’s day began to change. After the evening meal, he would, as usual, go to his room and write in his diary, but after that, instead of settling down to read, he would, as often as not, go round to the Wilders’. Harriet coached him in his French, Mr. Wilder set him going on Latin, and night after night they sat there till eleven o’clock discussing some book that all three had agreed to read.
This was literally the first home that Hamer had gained access to in a familiar and continuous way. He had occasionally been in Birley Artingstall’s bachelor room, but nowhere else. It did him good. Harriet always brought in coffee. The first night he was there, as she was leaving the room with the tray of empty cups, it was Mr. Wilder who jumped up to open the door. The second night, and for all nights thereafter, it was Hamer. He learned to be easy in the company of a woman; he learned to take his hat off without embarrassment, to stand when she entered a room, to see that she was provided with what she needed at supper. Mr. Wilder’s manners had been formed in an old school; they were punctilious; and so were Hamer Shawcross’s to the end. It was a surprise to many, in those early days when a Labour politician was a curiosity that might be expected to have the uncouth habits of a performing baboon – it was in those days a surprise to find that this man exceeded most people not only in the range of his knowledge and in the felicity of its presentation but also in his physical appearance and deportment. To see the Rt. Hon. Hamer Shawcross, or, a little later, Viscount Shawcross of Handforth, wearing his full evening fig and greeting a lady at a reception in the mansion of some famous Tory hostess – ah! the grand staircase, the flunkeys’ plush, the chandeliers raining down their light on bare shoulders and proud tiara’d brows – that was a matter almost Arthurian in its grace and chivalry. Tory hostess? Ah, my friends, who would have thought it! What would the Old Warrior have said had he been able to project his vision into the future and see the small sharer of his Ancoats bedroom, the boy tossing on the pallet bed, casting his eye upon some debutante sprig of the nobility and thinking how sweet she would look alongside Charles? But Charles Shawcross is a long way off. This much, however, may be said: you, Harriet, with your wild elfin face and eyes the colour of wallflowers, you with that look of quick devotion which may be surprised in your glance now and then as you contemplate this emerging phenomenon of beauty and grace, you will not be Charles’s mother.
*
And why Viscount Shawcross of Handforth? Why Handforth? Well, when you are an old man, not far off your seventieth year, even though your body be still upright and your white hair have a shining vitality, there come moments, especially if you are left alone in the evening, when the mind loses its grip on the present and wanders back and back.
So it was with the handsome and dignified Minister for the Co-ordination of Internal Affairs. For once in a while he had an evening to himself. He had dined alone at his house in Half Moon Street. He had told the servants that, whoever called, he was not at home. They told him afterward that a Mr. Ryerson had called. He was almost sorry that he had not seen him. It was so many years since they had had a talk together. But, after all, what had they to say to one another? And there was this question of the title to be settled.
He passed from the dining-room to the library; that well-stocked library that was the admiration and the envy of many people. It was cosily lighted, and the coal fire shone on the bottom rows of the books. He browsed about for a moment with a cigar between his lips, pulling out a volume here and there. Sam Bamford’s poems. That went back a bit! That had belonged to the Old Warrior. Birley Artingstall had bound it in leather, and on a birthday night in Ancoats – the first time he had ever seen Ann – they had all signed their names in it. He turned back the cover: there they were – those names that had been signed more than fifty years ago – brown with age; Ann’s name between his and Arnold Ryerson’s, all three sprawling childishly.
In Ancoats. Well, you couldn’t call yourself Viscount Shawcross of Ancoats. You might as well have a Duke of Wapping or a Marquis of Whitechapel. He dropped into a chair by the fire and allowed his rigid spine to relax for a moment. No, not Ancoats. Strange; he had never wanted to be John Shawcross, but Hamer Shawcross; and now the Hamer was going, too. He would be just Shawcross. The way they called servants. That’s what they would have called his mother, before she married Gordon Stansfield. Here, Shawcross!
The memory of them all seemed to be flooding in on him tonight: Gordon and Ellen, Arnold Ryerson, and Ann, and Birley Artingstall. “Call myself Shawcross of Peterloo and have done with it,” he smiled wryly.
That’s what they had called him years ago, in the days of his earliest campaign, when he had carried the sabre with him, and flashed it at meetings – and nearly cut down Lostwithiel, by God! one day. He still had it. He had had a lovely box made for it, a craftsman’s job if ever there was one, the lid inlaid with rare woods. At least, Lettice had had the box made – Lostwithiel’s wife – and the sabre lay in it on a bed of royal blue. “Ah, so tha’s finished wi’ t’owd bacon-slicer? It’s nobbut a curio these days?” That was Sir Thomas Hannaway, who cultivated, as carefully as others sought to eradicate it, a northern accent which he had never possessed in youth.
Well, it was from back there somewhere, from those old days and earliest associations, that his title would have to come. The coals tinkled in the grate, little flames flapped their banners, and through the quiet of the night he could hear the dull unceasing bourdon of the traffic in Piccadilly, beyond the end of the street.
Far away and long ago. That was a title of Hudson’s. There seemed more grey than green in his old memories, more winter than sum-mer, more streets than hedges.
“Hedges! I love hedges! I can’t imagine England without hedges. D’you know, there used to be very few. There was a vast amount of open cultivation. You could stand on a hill in England then, and see miles of land with not a hedge on it. Then, I suppose, people began to be terribly fond of ‘my little bit’ and ‘your little bit’ and thousands of people had no little bits at all. So I ought to dislike hedges. But I love them.”
Slowly, down the long dwindling perspective of the years, the country road, white with the dust their boots kicked up, came into clearer focus. There the hedges were; it was almost as though they were marching through snowdrifts, so thick was the May blossom. The ditches in the hedge-bottoms were damp and full of the young uprushing green of late spring. Ragged robin and campion, and the tall swaying gold of buttercups, and the gleaming white plaques of dog-daisies, filled those hedge-bottoms, and the white curved shoulders of the hedge-tops rested against a tremulous blue that was full of the melody of invisible larks.
“Oh, this is good!” Harriet cried. “This reminds me of Chester, and the days we had when Mother was alive and we walked into Wales. Let’s do this often!”
Hamer shook his head. To ask him to take a whole day off in this wild and reckless fashion when there was so much to do, so much to do, was almost like asking him for a hundred pounds.
It was Whit-Monday. Everyone was on holiday. Manchester was dead. That was his excuse, and in those days he had to give himself a good excuse indeed when his nose came up from the grindstone.
All day long they walked. They walked under the silver-grey pillars of the beech trees; they pushed through hazel coppices and came upon little meres, scaring the coots and moorhens; they found a thrush’s nest and looked with wonder on the blue, black-spotted eggs; they laughed at the leggy antics of the Iambs. Harriet’s wild colour came back; she was as gay as though out of some immense beneficence of her own she had conjured the day and its glories for his delight.
“Oh, you’ve earned it, you know! You’ve earned it all,” she cried, as they settled down in a warm brown crackling nest of last year’s bracken to eat their sandwiches. “I’ve never known anyone work like you. It’s just ten months since you began coming to our house, and haven’t you got on since that!”
“Ten months. Is it ten months?” He hadn’t remembered, as Harriet had.
He lay back when they had eaten, and closed his eyes, and allowed the warm sunshine to play upon his face. She sat upright at his side, and looked at the broad forehead and the shock of hair tumbling across it, and at the long line of his mouth that could be so sulky and humorous and sensuous by turns. She would have loved to put the hair back from his forehead, or to lay her hand along his brow, or, she admitted to herself, trembling a little, to bend down suddenly and kiss the lids that were shut upon his eyes. But she didn’t do any of those things. She pulled a stalk of grass, and nibbled the end of it, looking at Hamer stretched out there unmindful of her, more aware of the warmth of the sun than of her glance, more sensitive to the calling of the blackbirds than to the beating of her heart.
“What are you going to do?” she asked presently.
“Lie here,” he said lazily, “and get baked right through to the backbone.”
“No, no. I mean – you’re not going to be satisfied much longer with the greengrocer’s shop, are you?”
He sat up and shook his head vigorously. “Of course not. But I don’t know what I shall do. I don’t know what I want to do. But something will come along, and then I shall do it. The thing is, to be ready. That’s what I’m doing – that’s what I’ve been doing for a long time – getting ready. So long as I can run a mile and preach a sermon, I’m all right.”
She smiled at this strange notion of equipment for a career. He smiled, too. “Well, you see what I mean – fit in body and mind.”
Harriet said: “Oh, you don’t need to be so fit in mind to preach a sermon.”
“You do to preach my sort of sermon,” he assured her earnestly. “Making ’em listen. Every man and woman hanging on your words.”
“Well, you can run the mile already. When are you going to preach the sermon?”
“Next January.”
She had not expected the answer to come so pat. “You seem to have it arranged.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I shall be seventeen in December. I thought I’d better wait till I was seventeen. But there’s no harm in thinking about it now. I’ll speak to your father and Birley Artingstall as soon as I have a chance. And now for that mile.” He leapt to his feet. “Here! Bring these! Follow me!” He piled coat and waistcoat and hat unceremoniously into her arms, scrambled down the little slope that separated them from the road, and started off. Head up! Knees up! A good easy lope! Before she was on the road he was round a bend. She followed, cluttered with his belongings, as proudly as though she were a page bearing the accoutrements of a knight.
They had tea at Handforth. How was Harriet to know that, years hence, more than half a century hence, an old man, looking backwards through the long tunnel of his years, would see that day, and especially that hour in the garden, with an inexplicable hard brightness, all its details clear save one. Foraging among his memories, it came to him suddenly, not one of those days of which one says “I shall always remember this,” but one of those days which, for no especial reason, mark themselves upon the mind, indelibly, for ever.
Handforth! He could see it all. He threw the stump of his cigar into the fire, burning down to a soft glow in the Adam fireplace that pleased his æsthetic taste so much. Yes. It was like turning on an old tune, finding in an album an old photograph. There was nothing remarkable about Handforth, a dullish village in the Cheshire plain; but he could recall the easing of his limbs as he sank, after much exercise, upon a bench in the garden. There were a few roses already abloom, though the time of roses was not fully come. The scent in the air was mainly lilac. It hung upon the senses like something palpable. Yes; Handforth and lilac-scent: the two were intermixed in his memory. There were beehives, too: some of white-painted wood and some of plaited straw. A woman brought them tea out of doors, under the lilac trees; and how they enjoyed it as the swifts hurtled by with their wild cries; the tea from a big brown earthenware pot, and the bread and butter and jam and the little fancy cakes. How they had enjoyed it, he and the girl who was with him. But that was where the memory broke down. Bright as a miniature in a gold frame the whole picture was, except for this one detail. He could not for the life of him recall the look of her face or the tone of her voice. Wilder – that was her name. Helen or Hilda Wilder, the daughter of a Wesleyan parson he had known before the wandering life of the circuits swallowed him up. He had never reappeared. As for the daughter... The old man put back the falling lock of white hair from his forehead, forced his mind to fish for this missing speck of the bright mosaic; but it was no use. And, after all, what women he had known! What changes he had seen! He could remember women swathed up in voluminous clothes, and women with leg-of-mutton sleeves puffing out their arms and bustles puffing out their sterns. He could remember that extraordinary time just after the war when they wore skirts above their knees. He had actually seen Ann like that, and Lady Oxford, too. Incredible. And now here they were going back pell-mell to the styles with which Victoria had charmed her Albert. Women! So many of them! How should he remember that girl at Handforth? But Handforth itself – that remained, glowing with light and beauty in those beginnings of his time when light and beauty were not common things. Well, then, he thought: Let it be Handforth; and, though he was not likely to forget such a decision, he drew a writing-pad on to his knee, took out his fountain-pen and wrote “Shawcross of Handforth.”
He contemplated the signature with his head on one side. It looked well. He wondered whether to smoke another cigar or read a book. He decided against both, leaned his handsome old head back in the chair, and closed his eyes. It was not often life let him have a night to himself.
*
He was seventeen; and he was eighteen; just turned eighteen, and this was the last night of 1883. A lugubrious and lamentable night, with but another hour to live. Its old eyes were closing in a blear weeping mist that clung to the hairs of Hamer’s overcoat as he hurried from the house in Broadbent Street.
He had run down from his room, with the notes of his address in his pocket. He looked into the kitchen where Ellen sat by the fire, bowed over the work in her lap with the immemorial and sacrificial stoop of poor women. She raised her head as the door opened, saw him standing there, tall, erect, already with something commanding in his very air and presence, and again a pang of remembering showed her a straight bright figure going out, and a cloth-veiled figure coming back supine upon a hurdle, and down nearly twenty years of time she heard again the brief decisive sound of the shot that stopped the agonized plunging of the horse. She withdrew her eyes from him, and the lamplight fell upon the grey lying in her hair like snow streaking shallow furrows in black land and upon the long needles glinting and clicking above the growing length of the muffler.
“You won’t change your mind? You won’t come?”
She shook her head and said: “I’ll wait up for you.” Perhaps she wouldn’t have gone, anyway; but she couldn’t go there; she couldn’t go to this little chapel where, after a year’s preaching here and there, he was going this night to conduct the watch-night service. She waited till the front door banged and quietness and loneliness were like presences in the room; then she put down the muffler in her lap, and folded her hands above the muffler, and stared into the fire. She couldn’t go there, because that was the chapel where, blundering in her blind fashion through a night worse than this, she had come for the first time upon Gordon, talking in his comfortable voice that was a rumble charged with homely wisdom and goodness, though then she had been in no state to understand it.
She told herself she was wrong, she was wicked, to feel like this: that she couldn’t listen to the boy talking in the places where Gordon had talked. Mr. Wilder was enthusiastic, said he had never known so young a preacher with so powerful a gift, and already people were filling the chapels to hear him. She had heard him herself and marvelled that this was her son. Yet in her heart was a doubt, that no one shared; and the easy brilliance, the challenging eye, the persuasive gestures and the rise and fall of the voice that could plead, condemn, exhort: these, though they might make her marvel, could not touch her heart, as Gordon’s simple godliness had never failed to do.
She had no part or lot in the boy. Things had changed now at Hannaway’s. Tom had prospered and opened three more greengrocer’s shops. He had a man running the bone-yard for him. Hamer did all the buying for the shops and had the general supervision of them, while Tom himself went about with a gold watch-chain across his stomach and had walked right past his own mother without so much as a nod the day after she had suddenly leapt at Polly Burnsall and pulled her hair about her ears outside the Lostwithiel Arms.
Hamer didn’t have to work so hard now. He had his evenings at home, and Ellen didn’t see why he shouldn’t do what Gordon had always done and read and write in the kitchen. Saturday night was for him now, as it had always been for Gordon, sermon-writing night; and her eyes burned now as she remembered, sitting there with the knitting in her lap and her hands folded upon the knitting in the quiet house, that Saturday night a month ago when, after supper, saying no word but with her heart painful in its beating, she had put the red cloth on the table beneath the lamp, and the paper and pens and inkstand; and beside these she had placed the Concordance and the Bible and the Methodist Hymn-book, performing all that small significant ritual with which for so long she had associated some humble contribution of her own with Gordon’s endeavours.
It was her mute invitation to the boy to give her some part, some trivial, menial contact with all this spread of new wings, this striking into new ether, that was about him, what with his French and his Latin, and all these books, overflowing now from his shelves and pell-mell upon the chairs and window-ledge and floor of his room – all that, and this power of speech that was drawing people to hear him talk.
He looked for a moment, as if uncomprehending, at what she had done, and at her, almost virginally blushing at the advance she had made, where she sat in a quick pretended absorption once more over the mending work in her hand; and then he said, with that swift, placating smile, putting back the hair from his forehead: “I work so much better upstairs, you know,” and went, leaving her there abashed at the rebuff.
So, as the year oozed away its last wan and sickly hour, she thought of these things and knew she had no part or lot in him and that she would die in defence of one hair of his head.
*
Harriet Wilder met him, as she had arranged to do, at the corner of her street. He raised his hat and shook hands with her formally, because for a long time now he had forgotten that once wallflowers had made him think of the colour of her eyes. A street lamp cast a pallid light upon them, he trying to look grown-up, wearing an almost square bowler hat and a heavy ulster; she small and lithe, almost a foot below the height he had now reached, animated, full of chatter as a monkey.
She had taken to going with him wherever he was planned to preach, and more and more she knew, as Ellen knew, that she had no part or lot in him. She had pushed on all his enterprises; she and her father had given him all they had to give of time and knowledge and courtesy and approbation; and all this he had absorbed with an almost terrifying intensity.
That obsession to make a parson of him that had been upon Gordon Stansfield and Birley Artingstall was upon Mr. Wilder, too. He offered to start Hamer in Greek and Hebrew, and the boy said No. Some instinct told him the things he would want, and those were not among them.
He and Harriet moved out of the milky aura of the lamp. Their footsteps echoed in the deserted street. “Do you know any German?” he suddenly asked.
“No. Not a word.”
“Does your father?”
“No.”
He’s coming to the end of us, she thought. We’ve got no more to give him.
*
The little chapel was lighted by oil lamps. It was very cold and full of creeping mist. There was no side entrance to the vestry. You had to walk the length of the big room and pass through a door at the side of the pulpit. As he passed swiftly down the room, Hamer’s heart lifted to see that the little place was packed. He had been saying to himself all the evening: “If they come tonight, I’m all right – all right.” On such a night, when a fireside would be snug; and to a watch-night service, which was never much of an attraction anyhow: they had come! He was aware, with a sideways flick of the eye, of men with their coat-collars about their ears, women with shawls about their shoulders, all breathing smokily in the cold damp air,
He came out of the rabbit-hutch that was called a vestry, ran up the two creaking steps to the platform on which a table stood, and paused for a moment, erect, shoulders back, surveying them; then passed his hand slowly through his hair as he spoke the first words. That was one of his tricks to the very end: that pause – Here I am: look at me – that gesture with the hand as though smoothing his thoughts into order behind his brow. It persisted when the brow had become loftier and lined and venerable, and the thoughts as misty and inchoate as the Ancoats fog which at this moment was dimming the lamps and chilling the people’s bones.
He gave them their hymn in that voice which had a most clear and piercing quality, though he rarely needed to raise it:
The old year’s long campaign is o’er;
Behold a new begun!
Not yet is closed the holy war,
Not yet the triumph won.
Then he spoke to them from the text: “Ye have not passed this way heretofore.” It was a simple address, obvious as the daylight, as all his addresses then were; but it had the quality of his personality behind it. He was more and more, at this time, savouring his life as an adventure towards he knew not what. Few men could have sustained his emphatic belief in a great achievement lying ahead unless they had been upheld by some inkling of what the achievement was to be. But he had no intimation whatever of the lines his life was to follow. Every day was an unrelenting adventure, but an adventure in the dark, and an adventure full of unreasonable faith. And so he was able to impart to his audience something of this driving confidence in life, this challenge to lions in the path that proved to be only chained lions, this belief that though ye have not passed this way heretofore, ye shall pass, and come out safely on the other side. And if to this quality of almost pagan confidence he was forced to impute some religious tinge, to make some profession of faith that behind it all was a God of whom he was, in fact, not aware: well, that was in the nature of the case and of the circumstances in which he then found himself.
When the year had but a minute more to live, they all knelt in the clammy silence, going down upon the boards with a scuffle of heavy boots and clog-irons. “It seemed to me, standing above them” (so runs the diary, which throws the true light on the occasion) “that the year which was about to begin for all these people could hold nothing that the dying year had not held, and that was but a bare permission to live, and eat a little, and roughly clothe themselves. But when, presently, a jangle of discordant bells and a blast of hooters told us that the new year had come, they stumbled to their feet and looked at one another with the manifest belief on all their faces that in some way at which they could not guess this year would be different, though all experience should have taught them that it would do no more than bring them nearer to the grave.”
But it was true. There was an added lilt to their voices, a fresh buoyancy to their manner, as they greeted the year:
Come, let us anew
Our journey pursue;
Roll round with the year,
And never stand still till the Master appear.
They sang it with gusto, and then stood chattering about the building, seizing one another’s hands, and Hamer’s hand, and Harriet’s hand, and shouting “A happy New Year!”
A few desultory bells were still maintaining their clamour as Hamer and Harriet walked homeward. “It was a lovely address,” she said, pausing at the corner of her street. She held out her hand. “Well, a happy New Year.”
“And to you,” he said. “Many happy New Years.”
“It will be our last year in this circuit.” she said. “We move on in the autumn.”
“Good gracious!” said Hamer, “It’s incredible how time passes.”
She watched him till he was out of sight. He swung into Broadbent Street humming to himself: “Come, let us anew our journey pursue,” and it was of no celestial journey that he was thinking. He could look back on the past year with satisfaction. The year ahead was a challenge, an allure, a beckoning. He smote the door vigorously with the knocker. Ellen, drowsing by the kitchen fire, started up at the sound and went to let him in.
*
If it had ever been your luck to see Lady Hannaway driving in a mustard-yellow Rolls Royce through Hyde Park, you would have been hard put to it to recognize Polly Burnsall. She was eighty when she died. Sir Thomas was then sixty-five. There didn’t seem such discrepancy as when he married her. And “seem” is the right word. There had never been essential discrepancy. They had suited one another down to the ground from the beginning. Polly was another of Tom’s lucky speculations, perhaps the luckiest of all. She was the first woman he had; she was the only woman he had; he was desolate when she died.
If that devout Catholic Mrs. Hannaway had not pulled Polly’s hair round her ears and called her a Protestant bitch, Tom might not have married this woman who was to be his helpmeet and his stay. But the coarse insult in the face of all who knew her suddenly set to work in Polly’s mind forces that Mrs. Hannaway had not reckoned with.
Her resolve to marry Tom was born in that moment. She was a strategist, as a woman in her position needed to be. There were two things to be done: one was to make herself and her home indispensable to Tom, something without which his life would be unthinkable; the other was to wait till he wanted her money. She knew him well enough to be sure that that time would come.
Strenuously as Hamer Shawcross was working for he knew not what—”Ah, my friends, think of Saul, who went out to look for the asses and found a Kingdom” – so Tom Hannaway was working, no less strenuously, with every step clear, defined, before him. Polly Burnsall knew of the awful agitations of his spirit when twenty or fifty pounds were at stake. These, at that time, were for Tom moments as shattering and full of suspense as any he would know later when his adventurous and restless mind had tens of thousands trembling before the blowing of some financial wind. Indeed, they were more nerve-racking, because he was chancing his all. There was not then a comfortable reserve tied up beyond the reach of ill-fortune.
Taking the success or failure of a new greengrocer’s shop with the enormous seriousness that Tom himself attached to it, Polly knew how to surround him at those times with the especial aura of her protection. She would take him off to town for a cheap meal in a restaurant, which was something new in his experience, then go on with him to a music-hall, and finally give his black tousled curls a resting-place on the bosom of which he never tired. “Forget it, Tommy. Just for tonight, forget it.”
This was so good for Tom after the crowded squalor of his home, and so good for Polly after years of emotional penury when married to her miser, that the breach of years between them meant nothing. It would all have been different if Tom then, or soon after, had met a woman of his own age who attracted him; but it was Polly’s luck that he didn’t, and his own luck, too, if it comes to that.
The little shop with “Hannaway’s” painted on the fascia remained next door to Artingstall’s, like a coracle under the lee of a galleon, so long as Tom Hannaway was alive. He never had the name changed, even when Hannaway’s and Artingstall’s were one concern. The sentimental affection for the success of an early venture which caused him to call his Derby winner Darkie Cheap would not permit him to have the little shop altered.
There was a sentimental streak in Hamer Shawcross, too. It deepened as the years went on, so that, when he was a famous and venerable figure, he could stand before that little shop, during one of his rare visits to Manchester, and, pointing to the name “Hannaway’s,” say to his companion without a blush: “In that, I see the finger of God.”
The diary puts it more prosaically. “So now that Tom Hannaway has decided to sink all his other ventures in order to buy this shop, I am at a loose end. The time has come when I must ask myself, as so many people have asked me: ‘What are you going to do?’ And still I do not know; but I feel the moment has now arrived when I must decide what I have been working for.”
*
As soon as Tom Hannaway knew that Darkie Cheap was behindhand with his rent, he made up his mind that the place must be his. As soon as he knew that Polly Burnsall was not making her business pay, he resolved to take it over. So with the shops he acquired later. His mind was of that sort that does everything swiftly or not at all. Thus it was when he wanted the little draper’s shop. He calculated what his greengrocery shops and the bone-yard would bring him if he parted with them, found it was nothing like enough and went straight home to Polly. “Polly, if you get hold of that bit of capital of yours, it’ll do us some good. It’s only bringing you in fifteen shillings a week, and it’ll help to give us a first-rate little business.”
But now the swift and instantaneous mind of Tom encountered a mind which could wait and wait. Polly had waited for some years, and now she knew that her moment had come. Tom had a week’s option on the draper’s shop. She would not decide; she could not decide; what if the business failed? At least now she had fifteen shillings a week between her and starvation; but where was a woman, with no status, no one to rely on, supposing this venture fell through? She kept Tom in a crisis of nerves for six-and-a-half days. She made imaginary visits to an imaginary lawyer who cautioned her, advised prudence.
“It can’t fail. When did I ever fail?” That was Tom’s sole contribution to the debate, with a thousand variations, throughout the week.
“But if it does? Where am I then? I’ve got no one. Who’s going to bother with a woman getting on for forty and without a brass farthing to her name?”
“My God, Polly!” Tom shouted. “Don’t I look after you? Do I think of you as a woman going on for forty? Well, then, blast your money, if that’s how you feel about it. I’ll go on selling cabbages. But I thought you’d want something better for me. I thought you’d want to see me out of this rotten slum and in the town by the time we married.”
“Married?”
“Of course married. You don’t think we’re always going on like this, do you?”
“Well, then; what are you shouting about? If we’re married, you can do what you like with the money. A married woman’s property is her husband’s. That’s the law.”
Tom looked at her flabbergasted. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that six days ago?” He snatched up his hat. “I’ll go and see that man.”
*
Though the finger of God was hardly apparent, save to prejudiced eyes, in the fascia of the little draper’s shop which marked Tom Hannaway’s transition from back-street trading to the limelight of a great shopping centre, yet some sort of providence was looking after Hamer Shawcross. Sir Thomas Hannaway himself expressed this once with the whispered remark, when the Minister of the Crown was hinting at incredible hardships in youth: “Y’know, he had a better time than most. Something always turned up to see him through.”
This was true. The very day on which he ceased to work for Tom Hannaway brought him a letter from a Manchester solicitor, which said that, if he would call at the office, he would learn “something to his advantage in connexion with the estate of the late Charles Suddaby, Esquire.”
He had not been near the old man for a long time. His daily work, his frantic studies, his sermon-writing and preaching, had kept him chained to Ancoats. Outside his work-time and preaching-time, he lived the life of a solitary. The Wilders were gone; he had not bothered to get on visiting terms with the new parson. He never went to town. Old Suddaby and his concerns seemed so remote that this, the first intimation of his death, stirred in the young man’s mind hardly more than a formal regret and a strong curiosity about what he might hear “to his advantage.”
It was with a feeling of exhilaration rather than of mourning that he set off along Great Ancoats Street. A day with no job to tie him by the leg was so rare that it was delightful; the weather was frosty, yet with a clear blue sky; and to sharpen all was this expectation of some piece of good fortune.
The lawyer’s office, full of black japanned tin boxes and bundles of papers tied in red tape, was over a shop in St. Ann’s Square. There was a fire burning in the grate, a carpet on the floor, and a picture of Queen Victoria over the fireplace, flanked, with splendid impartiality, by Disraeli on one side, looking like an Eastern necromancer, and Gladstone on the other, looking like the voice of God uttering Liberal doctrine. It was very cosy and reassuring.
Hamer sat in a chair by the fire as the solicitor read the will. There was small need to read it, but this man had written it himself and was not to be denied the joys of rolling out its involved and complicated inanities. When he had done that, he explained in two sentences what it meant. “So Mr. Suddaby leaves you twenty pounds and five hundred books, which you can choose yourself from the stock. Everything else goes to this Friedrich Engels, whoever he may be.” Then he added: “Oh, and there’s a letter. He left a letter for you. Here it is.”
Hamer walked out of the office with twenty golden sovereigns, more money than he had ever handled before, jingling in his pocket. He had the key of the shop, he had Mr. Suddaby’s letter; which he had not yet opened.
He had learned that only a week ago Mr. Suddaby was at work in his cellar, but already a sense of desolation and decay had begun to descend. The few shallow steps that led from the street level down to the door were littered with bitter winter dust, some broken bottles, tatters of blown paper. When he pushed open the door and inhaled the well-remembered smell, it seemed to him that there was now added to it some ingredient other than the perishing leather and mildewed paper and earthy damp that he knew of old. Then it had smelled like a cavern. Now it smelled like a tomb.
He shut and locked the door behind him, not wishing to be disturbed. He struck a match to light the gas, but already some zealous official had cut the gas off. He remembered where candles were kept, and found them. A feeble yellow flame trembled in the musty-smelling dark as he carried it towards the spot where Mr. Suddaby had been accustomed to sit. There, before the fireplace full of cold ash, was the rug on which Sheba the green-eyed cat had been used to drowse; there was the table, there the easy chair, with the old man’s ebony stick leaning stilI against it, as though laid ready to a ghostly hand.
Hamer dropped some grease upon the table, feeling a little compunction at so untidy an act, and stuck the foot of the candle into it. Then he sat down in Mr. Suddaby’s chair, and, his own movements being still, he became aware of the cold silence shuddering through all the deserted aisles of the catacomb. He took the letter from his pocket, flattened it on the table under the wavering light of the candle, and began to read. Began and finished almost in a flash of the eye, for this was all the letter said: “Don’t forget the sabre from Peterloo. Keep it shining.”
The boy got up and began to pace the dark labyrinth. He took but a few paces from the candle, and the darkness swallowed him up. The ways were familiar and he needed no light. Up and down and in and out he walked, pondering old Suddaby’s strange message. The sabre from Peterloo. It was no great distance from this cavern where he now walked, that bloody field on which the Old Warrior had seen his girl struck down, that field from which the frightened thousands had fled with the horses plunging among them and the blades whirling and falling.
What had it all to do with him? He turned a corner, and looked down the length of the cavern to where he could see the table and the candle upon it, far off, burning now with a small light, clear and steady. It scarcely illumined the old man’s chair. You could almost imagine him sitting there, quiet and collected. “What does he want me to do? What do they all want me to do?” the boy asked himself.
He did not stay then to choose his books. In the thin winter sunshine without, and all through that day, his own question plagued him; and when, that night, he lay in bed, having drawn back the curtain from the window, he gazed at the sabre where the streetlamp’s light lay upon it, and still it had nothing to say to him. It was but a serene and enigmatic curve of silver, except that now and then, when the lamp’s light wavered, it trembled for a moment, charged with a life and meaning that he could not understand.