The last thing Birley Artingstall did for Hamer Shawcross was to make a scabbard for the sabre. The old man called at the house in Broadbent Street on the night when the boy was going through his few possessions, deciding what to take, what to leave behind. Ellen could not speak to him. It was a hot summer evening, and from force of habit she was sitting by the kitchen fire. Birley put his head through the doorway and asked “Upstairs?” She nodded, and when he was gone she relapsed into misery.
She couldn’t understand the boy. A few years ago, when Gordon died and she wanted to go in with the Ryersons, sharing a house, he was fiercely against it. Now that he had taken this whim to go off wandering, it seemed to him excellent. He brought it out as though it were a brand new idea of his own: “You could go in with the Ryersons.”
Well, so she could, and so she would. But she didn’t understand his way of living. She was not getting younger. She thought it was his place to stay at home and look after her. But she didn’t say this. If he wanted to go, let him go.
Mrs. Ryerson came in with her eager bustling walk. “Well, Ellen! You don’t want to sit there brooding. I’ve just put t’kettle on. Come an’ ’ave a cup o’ tea.”
They went out of the stuffy kitchen, along the stuffy street, into another stuffy kitchen, and sat down companionably together.
*
The five hundred books that he had chosen from Mr. Suddaby’s stock, and all the other books that he possessed, were crated and nailed down. They were to be left behind. Birley sat on one of the crates, took out his pipe and lit it. “So you don’t reckon on doing much reading, Hamer?”
“None at all, if I can help it. I want to see the things that other people read about.”
“Such as?”
“Venice, for one thing.”
If the boy had said Heliopolis or Babylon, Birley could not have been more surprised. “Venice!” he cried. “What on earth d’you want to see Venice for?”
Hamer stood at the open window, looking down into the street that, for longer than he could remember, had been his home. He had come there when he was two. Now for six months he had been twenty. A few boys sat on the canal wall, their legs dangling. The black water had a faintly evil smell in the torrid night. The mill face rose beyond it, stony and forbidding. Hamer turned back towards old Birley, who was puffing contentedly, well pleased with Ancoats. “Because,” he said, “I used to imagine that Venice was like that. I know now how daft that idea was; but my mind is full of other ideas – about places, about people – that are no doubt just as daft, but I don’t know it. Well, I want to get rid of those illusions. I want to know about things as they are.”
Birley took a long pull at his pipe. “Well,” he said, “a ship’s boy may have a chance to see all those things. And then again he may not.”
Hamer smiled, as though there were more in his mind than he cared to divulge. He took down the sabre from its hooks on the wall. “I shall take this,” he said.
It was then that the old man said he would make a scabbard. When it was finished, it was a fine piece of work: a curve of glistening brown hide studded with strips of brass into which all Birley’s love went in deeply-cut scrolls and arabesques. He made a belt from which the scabbard could hang. Belt and scabbard went into the small wooden box which contained all that Hamer Shawcross took with him. Birley paid for the cab which took the boy and his mother to the station, and he travelled with them. By chance, Tom Hannaway, stout and prosperous looking, was walking the platform. When he heard of the adventure on which Hamer was bound, he roared with laughter. “Well, that beats all!” he shouted. “I taught you a perfectly good trade – money at your finger-tips – and you’re off before the mast. Well, well: a rolling stone gathers no moss.”
Hamer gave him the look that Sir Thomas was so well to know forty, fifty years later. “I’m not looking for moss,” he said. “It grows in the shade, like toadstools.”
Tom did not wait to see the train out. He bustled off importantly on some affairs of his own. When the train swung round the curve, Hamer, leaning out of the window, saw only his mother and the tall figure of the old Viking with one hand on her shoulder, the other waving a black hat. When he came back to the same station three years later, only Ellen met him. The fascia which said “Sweets and Tobacco” over the shop in Great Ancoats Street was already faded and weather-beaten, for “Birley Artingstall, Leather” had been dead for two years.
*
“Such a consideration may not seem material to the Right Honourable gentleman, but I know what I am talking about.”
This was both insolent and true. It was not the way in which the Prime Minister was accustomed to being addressed by an unknown Member, on his legs in the House for the first time. But it made people look at the Member for the St. Swithin’s division of Bradford, and the Member wanted to be looked at. He could stand being looked at: six feet two inches high, broad, brown, with an upturned moustache that he shaved off later in life. He was dressed as well as any man in the House. He never wore a cloth cap, as Keir Hardie did. He liked good clothes. But, though well-dressed, he was not conventionally dressed. He looked more like an artist than a politician. A bow of black silk was at his throat. In the streets he wore a black sombrero hat and never an overcoat. A flowing cape looked better. He carried his walking-stick like a rapier.
This was the new Member upon whom the House turned its regard as he declared insolently: “I know what I am talking about.” It was a question of trade with the Argentine, and he knew more about trade with the Argentine than the Prime Minister would ever know. He had lived in the Argentine for six months, and though the Prime Minister, even had he lived in the Argentine for six months, might conceivably still have known nothing about the place, that was not conceivable with Hamer Shawcross. In six months, he added Spanish to his languages, read the local newspapers, talked to every Spaniard who would listen to him, and sucked them all as dry as he had sucked Mr. Wilder and Harriet.
It was his longest stay in one place during the three years of his wanderings. He had no intention of serving a long term as a ship’s boy. He used the ship as he used everything else. It was to get him to some far-off spot whence he could start a course of uncharted vagabondage. He left the ship at the first port it touched, which was Buenos Aires. Mr. Suddaby’s twenty pounds were sewn into the belt that Birley Artingstall had made. With this round his body and the sabre in his box, he got ashore on a dark night. He kept out of sight – lodging at an obscure inn, till the ship sailed.
The next day, he bought some decent clothes, and in the evening ventured out into the street. It was now that he acquired his taste for cloaks and sombreros. Perhaps he wished to be reminded of an experience that burned into his mind. At twenty years of age, he could indeed say “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,” but, when all is said and done, those bookish travels, those inward explorations, did not alter the harsh, binding fact that, save for an occasional journey into the surrounding countryside, he had never once set his foot outside the bricks and the acid soot and the summer stench and winter fog of Ancoats, where no bird sang, where no green thing grew, where a butterfly looked as exotic as a tiger.
On the voyage out, sick and sorry and overworked, always worried and sometimes frightened, he had no opportunity to savour that release which he had come to find.
He would never forget it: that night of bloomy dusk and incredible stars, the metallic crepitation of strange trees, the accent of a liquid foreign tongue singing a song to the accompaniment of plucked strings. The white dust rose about him as horses trotted by, drawing open carriages in which men and women lolled with a frank acceptance of sloth that was new to him. The warm luminosity of the street lamps made him think of the always-misty aura which, even at midsummer, seemed to hang about the lamps at home. Now he was knowing. “This is Buenos Aires. When people say Buenos Aires, I shall know.”
He walked about aimlessly, full of content. Tomorrow he would have to look for work: tonight was his own. What work he would do he did not know. He thought that he could teach English or write the letters of some business house that had dealings with England, but before he could do either of those things he must learn some Spanish.
The diary is not a very humorous document, because Hamer Shawcross was not a humorous person; but even he could not resist the humour of this drunken Englishman who was shot through the door of a drinking-house and flapped upon him, as he writes, “like a great bat.” The image is apt enough, for the man appears to have been wearing one of those cloaks that were to impress themselves so deeply on Hamer’s imagination; and this was undulating hugely about him as he almost swam through the air, head first, propelled by a boot. His long white hands, the right grasping a silk hat, made one breast-stroke before he belly-flopped at Hamer’s feet. He sat up, put the hat upon his head for no other reason than to raise it to this stranger who had stopped to look down upon him, then began to sing, in Spanish, that Dona Eulalia was a bitch and that he hated her white face and violet powder.
This was the first Englishman Hamer had met in Buenos Aires. He raised him up tenderly and stuck to him, because he thought the fellow might be useful. He took him to his lodgings, and arranged to call upon him the next day. He doubted whether the engagement would be remembered, because the man insisted that his name was Tommy Carlyle and that they were in Ecclefechan. He insisted, too, that Hamer was John Stuart Mill, the only man in Ecclefechan who knew the meaning of liberty.
As it happened, the man’s name was Thomas Carlyle, which had long been a matter of annoyance to him; but he was not inclined to dwell upon it so much when sober as when drunk. He received Hamer amiably enough the next day, learned that he wanted work, and said he would introduce him to Dona Eulalia Cardenas. He was reserved on the subject of Dona Eulalia, merely remarking that he had had enough of her, that he had had enough of Buenos Aires, and that he was pushing off for New York on the first available boat. Dona Eulalia wanted someone to come in daily to read to her in English. The pay would just keep body and soul together; but that was all Hamer wanted. It was arranged that he should start the next day. Outside the lady’s house Hamer said good-bye to Thomas Carlyle, who presented him with a copy of Sartor Resartus, autographed, and said he didn’t know what he had let himself in for.
A sense of humour would have made it impossible for Hamer to continue with that crazy occupation. The widow Cardenas, with the white face and violet powder that had driven Thomas Carlyle mad, received him the next day in the cool courtyard of her house. All round it was a pergola, vine-covered, and hanging from the pergola here and there was a parrot in a cage. There must have been a dozen of them: white and green and sulphur and crimson. A little fountain tinkled, and the parrots screamed, and Dona Eulalia, her oozing bulk confined in a prison of lilac silk, reclined on orange cushions. She handed Hamer the book he was to read. It was Jessica’s First Prayer.
He read for two hours, and at the end of the third day the book was finished. On the fourth day he began The Basket of Flowers, by the same author; and when that was done he began on Jessica’s First Prayer. These were the Dona Eulalia’s English library, not, it seemed, because of any difficulty in getting other books, but from choice. When Hamer suggested a change, she clasped together her pudgy hands emerging from a lather of lace and a tinkle of bangles, and said: “Ah, no! They are so beautiful!”
He began to understand why Thomas Carlyle had gone mad, taken to drink, and sung out his insults to the Dona Eulalia in the gutters. But it would take more than this to drive Hamer mad. He read on grimly. It was only two hours’ work a day, and the old fool paid him enough to live on. Meanwhile, with the passionate energy that he could always apply to gaining knowledge, he picked up his Spanish from books, from the streets, from the newspapers. After all, he could wait, and it was an experience to be sitting there in that courtyard, with the vines and the fountain and the parrots, and the burning blue sky above him. This also was knowledge for a boy from grimy Ancoats. This also was something about which he could say: “I know what I am talking about.”
*
It is not necessary to follow in any detail the wanderings of Hamer Shawcross during the next three years. The diary is not very helpful where this period is concerned. For example, under three consecutive dates you read “Lima.” “San Francisco.” “Samoa.” Nothing else. But one thing becomes clear. After leaving the Argentine, he earned his living by working with his hands. There is only one recorded exception, and that is when he spent a month arranging in Sydney the books of a mutton millionaire who had bought the contents of an English nobleman’s library. He seems gradually, and perhaps unconsciously, to have fallen into the intention of making this tour a study at first hand of working-men earning their living. He worked on boats and about docks, in mines and on railways. He sweated like a coolie in India and felled timber in Canada. In South Africa he worked in the diamond mines. Wherever he was, he read nothing but the newspapers of the country; and, whenever possible, he forced his way into any assemblies that were open to him, whether they approximated to parish councils, town councils, or meetings of Parliament.
An entry made in the diary in December 1888, when he was in Kimberley, is valuable to a study of his mind at this time.
“Carradus* was here again tonight, and for a wonder was talkative. He recalled his early days in Kimberley – not more than fifteen years ago. He told me that he had known Alfred Beit when Beit first came out here. I said to him that I supposed Beit had had to work like a slave to make his fortune. Carradus laughed and said: ‘Beit work? You don’t make fortunes like Beit’s by working. Let me tell you about Beit, He came out here as a clerk for a Paris firm named Porges. I don’t suppose they were paying him more than three hundred a year. He was always growsing about not being able to make ends meet. He wrote to his father in Hamburg and the old man screwed together a couple of thousand pounds and sent it out to him. Did Alfred buy diamonds? Not he! You can’t imagine what this place was like in those days. People were flocking here in droves, diamond-mad. They were shouting for offices– houses. That’s what Alfred gave ’em. He bought a bit of land and put up twelve shanties. D’you know what he got for them? Eighteen hundred pounds a month! Twenty-one thousand six hundred pounds a year for years and years – for at least a dozen years. At the end of that time, Alfred sold the land the shacks stood on, and now, boy, hold your breath and I’ll tell you what he got for it. Two hundred and sixty thousand pounds. No. You don’t work for a fortune if your name’s Beit. You put your mouth tight on the nipple, and suck.’
“There was no more to be got out of Carradus except a groan later in the evening: ‘God in Heaven! Why didn’t my old man have a son like Alfred and two thousand to lend him!’
“I suppose Carradus’s story is true enough, and it bears out what I have observed all over the world. It’s not the worker or the inventor who makes a fortune. It’s the smart chap who nips in and gets a hold on the land and what’s under it or on it. Old Astor in New York; the coal-royalty owners in England and Wales; Lord Lostwithiel with his Manchester slums; and half-a-dozen people with the richest slices of London. Who was paying Alfred Beit eighteen hundred pounds a month for twelve shacks? Why, thousands of people who produced the eighteen hundred pounds’ worth of goods that Mr. Beit was at liberty to consume. They had to produce this before they could start producing anything for themselves. This was the first charge – Mr. Beit on their backs, because Mr. Beit had been a smart chap. All very elementary thinking, I know, and if I open my mouth about it, someone will say: How can it be altered? But I’m glad to have seen all this with my own eyes – to have talked to Carradus who knew Beit, and to have seen and worked among the Negroes who bring the wealth to Mr. Beit’s feet like retrievers bringing bones. When you’ve seen things as I have, at least you know what you’re talking about.”
*
In the three-and-a-half years of his journeying, Hamer gratified only one sentimental desire: he saw Venice. He worked on a boat carrying a cargo from Cape Town to Genoa, and thence went at once to dispel the illusions of his childhood. All the time he had been away, he had lived thriftily; he had money to spend, and he remained in Venice for six weeks. He visited churches and picture-galleries, dawdled on the canals, and, characteristically, worried along with the newspapers and a dictionary till he could make something of the language. When the six weeks were up, he made his way on foot through Austria and Germany. At Hamburg he found a ship bound for Liverpool, and worked his passage home. In his diary, while he was on the ship, he wrote: “I don’t know what made me tear myself out of Ancoats as I did. The impulse to do it came suddenly, and now that the adventure is over I am glad I did not resist. Whatever life may do to me now, I have had these three-and-a-half years. I can honestly say that I feel a different being from the one who set out.”
He looked a different being. When Ellen met the train from Liverpool, she could hardly believe her eyes. This man of commanding height, with the bristling moustache, the square shoulders, the face which sun and wind had burned and weathered: this was something difficult to reconcile with the secret vision she had nurtured. For while he was away she had not remembered him as she had last seen him, much less imagined him as he would become, but with a fond aberration had permitted her mind to fall back upon memory of a small leg-dragging boy with a broad white forehead and a purple vein too prominently pulsing in his neck. She herself had shrunk a little, for she was then nearer sixty than fifty, and a swift consciousness possessed her that life had changed their positions. She had come out filled with solicitude and protectiveness, which one glance at her son made suddenly absurd; and this left her feeling strangely empty and bereft as though, at a stroke, one of the necessities of her existence had been swept from beneath her.
To Hamer, also, the meeting was not what he had pictured. All very well to write in his diary “I feel a different being.” Somehow, one didn’t expect other people to be different beings. The years had given him self-reliance. In most of the circumstances of life he could fend for himself. He had fought for work of every sort and got it. He had more than once physically fought and conquered with his hard bare fists. He had learned to throw himself unhesitatingly upon chance in strange lands whose customs and languages he did not know. He had come through all that; yet, during the brief railway journey between Liverpool and Manchester, he had been thinking of his mother in terms which now he saw to be untenable.
He had forgotten, or never realized, that she was so small a woman. In her infrequent letters, she had never told him that she had lost her work as chapel caretaker and that she was earning her living, as Mrs. Ryerson did, by such odd jobs as she could come upon. She had picked up a lot of Mrs. Ryerson’s habits, including the habit of wearing an old cloth cap when out at work; and there she was now, having come straight from scrubbing some offices, with that cap aslant upon her grey untidy hair and a rolled coarse apron under her arm. She was so small and her eyes were so bright with emotion as she peeped up at him from under the peak of the cap that he remembered suddenly how the Old Warrior had always said that his girl used to stand on his foot and then get on tiptoe to kiss him. So would Ellen have to do now; and sure enough, when they had looked at one another for a moment, each feeling illusions fall away, she said: “Well, haven’t you got a kiss for your old mother?”
He stooped then and kissed her; and, feeling the protector, and no more – never again – the protected, he said: “Let’s get a cab.”
It seemed to her an extravagant thing to do; but he insisted, and, with the windows down, they went clipper-clop through the mild and misty sunshine of the late autumn afternoon, into the little street which in that light, if ever, would have looked like a street in Venice, and didn’t; and so arrived at the Ryersons’ door. It came to Hamer with a shock that he no longer had a home of his own. All the time he had been away he had not once thought what it might mean to Ellen to have no home of her own.
Hamer slept that night on a bed made up on a couch in the Ryersons’ front-room downstairs. Rather, he lay upon it, not sleeping. He had been accustomed to sleeping in strange places, but here he could not sleep. He felt as though no place he had been in had been so strange as this place which he should have known so well. The strangeness was in his heart, because once more he was confronted by the question which he had kept behind his back for three-and-a-half years. What to do?
Now it was a question that could be left unanswered no longer. In the first light of dawn he was up and dressed. He went out and sat on the canal wall, staring at the blank faces of the houses opposite, all with windows shut and blinds down, and at the pink suffusion gradually strengthening to daylight in the sky. He watched the street lamps put out and saw Jimmy Spit-and-Wink, incredibly old and decrepit, creep along the street and rattle at the windows. Soon came the rush of clogs with which he was so familiar, the savage bellowing of the mill buzzer, and then, once more, silence and solitude. No one had recognized him. Not a head had been turned towards the tall bronzed man lounging on the wall.
Suddenly he threw up his head and smelled the morning. Recollection flooded upon him, and, throwing his coat and waistcoat into the Ryerson passageway, he rolled up his shirt-sleeves, took a deep breath, and started to run. Automatically, he followed the mile route that he and Tom Hannaway had laid down. Nothing seemed changed, Brick, stone, soot, no green thing; long perspectives of identical small houses. He was breathing easily when he got back, to find Mrs. Ryerson on her knees yellow-stoning the entrance step of the house. “Good morning, Mrs. Ryerson,” he said. “Let me do that.”
The little grey woman got creakily to her feet and looked up at the tall smiling handsome man. Friendly, too, and charming. He knew how to be so. She wished for a moment that Arnold, pale and earnest, was like that; then loyally reminded herself that Arnie was all right. To most men making Hamer’s offer she would merely have said: “Get on with you” and continued her work. But she felt flattered by the attention and said, making way for him: “You look as if you’d come into a fortune, Mr. Shawcross.”
“I’ve just run a mile,” he said, “and I’m not puffed. Feel.” He took her small maimed hand, etched with fine lines of ineradicable dirt, tough as a parrot’s foot, and laid it on his shirt over his heart. “Not a flutter,” he laughed. “And d’you know what I decided to do while I was running?”
She shook her head.
“Go over to Bradford,” he said, “and see Arnold.”
He did not know that this was the answer to all his questions.
* There is no reference anywhere else to Carradus. He appears to have been a man whose acquaintance Shawcross made in Kimberley. There is a photograph stuck into the diary at this point, showing Shawcross with a short beard sitting on a bench outside a shack with another man, under whom is written “Carradus.” He is an older man than Shawcross, and looks of no distinction. Nothing is known of him.