Chapter Eleven

Lizzie Lightowler, unaware that Fate, or Luck, or Providence, or what you will, was about to speak through her mouth, sat up in bed, reading the Yorkshire Post. She was not ill; the indomitable creature could not be ill; but she was tired. A hint of a cold gave her an excuse for having breakfast in bed. But she couldn’t keep her mind off the affairs of the day; and now, the breakfast tray pushed to one side, she was reading the paper. Suddenly she hauled on the crimson rope suspended above the bed, and a bell jangled in the kitchen. Mrs. Marsden slippered leisurely up to the bedroom. “I want to see Miss Ann – at once,” said Lizzie.

“Excuse me, Arnold,” Ann said, when the message reached her. “Finish by yourself. I’ve had all I want.” She ran out of the room.

Arnold, too, had had all he wanted. He pushed aside his plate impatiently, went to the window and glowered at the chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies blooming against the wall of the disused stable. He glowered, and he also felt hot and uncomfortable, because he believed Ann had run away as though with relief. He had not said a word of all the words he had wanted to say. When it came to the touch, they had stuck in his gullet. But he would have said them, he told himself, beating his fists moodily against his thighs. And Ann, he was sure, had known what was coming. You can always tell, he thought, when someone knows. There had been something between them, passing from his own tongue-tied awkward dumbness to her unusual vivacity – a vivacity which seemed like a lively defence, a warding off. Yes; he was sure she had known what he was going to say. Then there had come that message from Aunt Lizzie, and Ann had fairly bolted from the room.

He returned to the table and gloomily swigged the half cup of coffee he had left there. Then Ann came back. “Arnold,” she said, “Aunt Lizzie would like to see you. Henry Thornton’s dead.”

He followed her up the stairs, and Lizzie called: “Come in, Arnold. You’re not afraid to see an old woman in bed, I hope?”

He did not know what was in her mind as she looked, with a scrutiny unusually keen, at this careful steady young man in broadcloth, with the heavy watch-chain, the responsible side-whiskers, entering the room. Her white bobbed hair shone against the dark of the mahogany bed-head. A shawl was round her shoulders. She looked as if she were enjoying her vacation. She gave a half-sigh as her examination of Arnold ended, took the spectacles from her nose and tapped them on the Yorkshire Post.

“Well,” she said. “Ann has told you, I suppose. It has pleased God to remove the Conservative Member for the St. Swithin’s Division.”

She waved Arnold to a chair and threw the paper across to him, folded open at the column which said that Henry Thornton, who had represented the St. Swithin’s Division time out of mind, had died suddenly in a hansom cab in Pall Mall, London, on his way home from a banquet.

“Overeating,” said Lizzie heartlessly. “I always thought that would be the end of him. You couldn’t have slipped a knife between his collar and his neck.”

“I never saw him,” said Arnold.

“I don’t suppose you did. He didn’t trouble his constituents much. He was at dinner here once when my husband was alive. I couldn’t stand him. But that’s beside the point. The point is that there’ll be an election in the St. Swithin’s Division.”

“The Liberals have got a prospective candidate – Crossley Hanson,” said Arnold, the efficient secretary. “They’ve been nursing the constituency for years.”

“Nursing is the word,” Lizzie replied. “Giving it the usual soft pap. What about a bit of solid Labour food for a change?”

“You mean a Labour candidate?” Arnold asked.

“Why not?” Lizzie shot at him.

“They’re few and far between, the right sort of people.”

“Well – there’s you.”

So that’s it, thought Arnold. That explained the twitter of excitement with which Ann had called him to the room. They had talked this over, and then sent for him. When Aunt Lizzie, long before, had mentioned Parliament in a casual, joking way, the idea had been too remote to take seriously. But here was something practical, immediate. He felt the sweat break out on his body and on the palms of the hands gripping the chair. Parliament was august, incredible. Working men simply did not go there. He knew that theoretically they should. Oh, yes; he himself had preached from his soap-box passionately enough on the representation of the people by the people.

“But – Parliament!” he gasped. “Me!”

“Don’t let that worry you,” Lizzie said robustly. “You won’t get in. But we’ll burst into the constituency. We’ll make a noise. We’ll get a footing there. Then we’ll stay on and, to use the lovely word, we’ll nurse it. It’s only a matter of time. Good heavens! St. Swithin’s! I should think ninety voters in a hundred there are working men.”

“And hide-bound Tories at that,” Ann put in morosely.

“Well, what of it?” Lizzie truculently demanded. “If God can turn apes into men He can turn Tories into Socialists. He just wants time. And now, Arnold, what about this – this – Shawcross boy? Ann says he’s coming to see you. Who is he? What’s he like? Have I ever met him?”

They began to tell her about Hamer Shawcross. Arnold said he supposed he’d have to put him up in the hut.

*

The hut was a rare concession from prosaic Arnold to romance. When you had passed through the homely little main street of Baildon out on to the moor, you saw, away to your left, a few rough fields that had been won from the ling and heather. You will see many such in the moorland parts of Yorkshire. The people thereabouts call them intakes.

Crossing the intervening strip of moor one afternoon that autumn, Arnold sat on the wall of the intake – a wall of time – blackened stones, piled and unmortared. Where he sat was the angle of the intake wall, and presently he slipped over it and sat down there with the wall at his back, the green field stretching before him, the blue sky above.

His years in Ancoats, followed by the years in dreary Thursley Road, gave him a heightened sense of the value of the freedom in which he now lived. But even the house on the road to the moor irked him at times. He was not alone there, and he wanted to be alone. The intake was roughly farmed by the husband of the woman with whom he lodged, and from him Arnold got permission to build his hut in the angle of the field.

A great many people got to know of that hut. “Ah, my friends” – this was Hamer Shawcross, M.P., on the housing question – “I have seen you herded in your slums, and what is more I have lived in them with you. I have looked at the houses of the poor with these very eyes of mine in every quarter of the globe. Festering in the heat of the tropics, freezing in the cold and damp of less congenial climes, the poor are shoved away to make what shift they can. At the very moment when I myself was entering upon that Parliamentary struggle for the betterment of the conditions of the people, a struggle into which, as you who know me realize, I have put, and shall put, every ounce of my strength and virtue (cheers) – at that very moment I was condemned to live in a shack, a hovel, with rude winds whistling in at the door, but, thank God, with the clean free sky above me, speaking with the immortal encouragement of the stars.”

He could do that sort of thing. No one was quite sure what the last phrase meant, but Hamer Shawcross, riding hell-for-leather on his oratorical mount, didn’t give people a chance to think what he meant. He was a very great politician. No doubt that was how, years later, Arnold’s simple hut did present itself to his mind; but that was not how it presented itself to Arnold. He was proud of it. He and his landlord built it between them out of odds and ends of timber. They covered the outside with waterproof felt. They put in an old stove whose right-angled chimney-pipe went through a sheet of asbestos which they fixed for safety to the wall, high up. They thought it was a good job, and certainly it was comfortable enough. Let it be celebrated, for it had its part in the history of the Labour Party.

Arnold was entranced when the work was done. He embellished the place. He took an old ladder-back armchair into it, and a table to write at. He rigged a few shelves for books, hung a paraffin lamp from the ceiling, and made sacks do for carpets. Wire netting stretched over a wooden frame and covered by a palliasse served for a bed on those frequent occasions when he had sat there reading till late at night and did not wish to walk back to the house. Out on the moor he had cut peat and had a stack of it against his wall.

It was half fun, a hermit lark; half seriousness, because he did get something out of his solitude. The quiet deeps in the inarticulate fellow were moved and satisfied when he came out at midnight, leaned on the wall, and in the utter silence looked across the moor, stark and elemental under the night. He could never, for the life of him, say any such thing as that the night spoke to him with the immortal encouragement of the stars. He merely felt, puffing stolidly at the last pipe, that this was a good life. Then he turned in, happy, to his palliasse.

*

“What about this Shawcross boy?” Aunt Lizzie had asked; and Ann, as she walked down to the Exchange Station with Arnold to meet the train from Manchester, had not moved in imagination beyond the point where Shawcross was indeed a boy. She remembered, though not clearly, the birthday party. She remembered sitting down with Birley Artingstall and Arnold and this boy Hamer Shawcross to a Christmas dinner. There was nothing about any of it to prepare her for what she met. Years afterwards, out of the emotional dazzle and confusion of the moment, there was only one thing that she could clearly recapture, and it seemed an incongruous thing. They were all three walking through the echoing subway that led from the station, when Arnold, in his trite way, babbled concerning Hamer’s travels: “Well, I suppose, as Pope says, the proper study of mankind is man.” And this extraordinary being who had somehow intruded on and smashed in a moment all her preconceptions, this swarthy, moustached giant with the piercing eyes and the ringing voice, who was overtopping them as he strode along with a big wooden box swung up as lightly as a match-box on his shoulder, gave a great laugh as he slapped Arnold on the back and said: “True, little one; but Pierre Charron said it rather more than a hundred years before Pope.”

And yet, she sometimes wondered, was it incongruous? It was so much a part of Hamer, this ability to confound and dazzle by fishing up a piece of knowledge that not one man in a thousand would have. She herself had never heard of Pierre Charron, but then, she asked herself, laughing rather ruefully, who had, except this being who seemed born to sweep women off their feet?

They were going up the steep hill which is Darley Street, and Ann had a feeling that she was having to put her best foot forward in order to keep up with Hamer Shawcross. Uphill, and with a box on his shoulder, but he seemed the quickest of the three. She walked between the two men. Hamer was taller than she was; Arnold was shorter by an inch or so. “It’s a long time since I ran a mile every morning,” Hamer suddenly said. “This air makes me want to do it. It’s good.” He breathed deeply. “Better than Manchester air.”

“You’d better not run a mile with that box,” Arnold warned him.

“It’s nothing,” said Hamer. “Try it.” He put the box down on the pavement and Arnold swung it up to his shoulder, but with difficulty.

“I wouldn’t like to carry that far,” he said. “What on earth have you got in it?”

Hamer answered, swinging the box back on his shoulder: “A cake for you from your mother. And also all my wordly goods, except my books. I’ve come for a long stay.”

“It’s lucky I can put you up,” said Arnold. “But Baildon’s a goodish way out, you know.”

“I do know. We’ll take the train to Shipley, then walk up the hill. I can manage that.”

“How did you know there was a train to Shipley and a hill to walk up? You’ve never been here before.”

“I am in the habit of consulting maps. Maps, globes, encyclopedias, dictionaries, concordances: learn to use these things, little one. They will serve you well.”

Arnold winced. Little one. That was the second time. Ann was aware of the almost imperceptible sudden shrinking-in of Arnold upon himself. She was aware, too, of the instantaneous apprehension by Hamer that he had hurt his friend. Hamer stopped and put the box down on the pavement. She thought for a moment he was going to take Arnold’s hand and apologize. He did nothing of the sort. He said: “Arnold, this box is more than I bargained for, after all. Could you take a turn?”

Arnold picked up the box and hoisted it to his shoulder – this time apparently without difficulty. “It’s not so heavy as all that,” he said, and they went on gaily. The box against his face prevented Arnold from seeing the other two. Hamer looked down and sideways at Ann with a conspiring smile, a smile which took her right into his confidence and seemed to say: “I managed that pretty well, didn’t I?” And Ann thought to herself: Yes, you did. I can see that you’re the sort of man who can manage most things pretty well.

When they had gone a little farther on, Hamer asked: “Why are we coming so hopelessly out of our way? We should have got the train to Shipley in Forster Square.” He seemed to have the map of Bradford in his head.

Arnold answered from behind the box: “We can pick up the train at Manningham. I thought we’d see Miss Artingstall home. The station’s not a stone’s-throw from her house.”

Hamer gave her another smile. So that’s it. He’d allow me to lug that box uphill, and now he’ll go on lugging it himself, because thereby he gets an extra twenty minutes of this girl’s company.

“If we had got in at Forster Square Miss Artingstall could have got out at her station,” he said, hoping to see her blush, and being rewarded. A train ride doesn’t take so long as a walk.

“It was thoughtless of me,” said Ann. Thoughtless was the word. She had been without thought, carried along in the trail of this vivid being who had so unexpectedly answered to the name of “the boy Shawcross.” They were turning into Ackroyd Park when she took possession of herself. She suddenly laughed aloud at the absurdity of their proceedings. Why hadn’t they taken the train? Or, if not the train, a cab? Or, if they had to walk, why hadn’t they left the box and called for it later?

“Really, Arnold,” she said, “we’ve been acting like a couple of mad creatures.”

Arnold put down the box and looked as if he hardly saw why, and Hamer said: “I’ve carried that box miles. Don’t let it worry you.”

“Well, at all events,” said Ann, “now that we are here, let’s see if old Marsden’ll do his best to find us some tea. There are dozens of trains to Shipley. You’re not in a hurry, are you?”

“I am not,” said Hamer. He picked up the box once more and followed Ann along the path that twisted through the rhododendrons.

*

Many years later: how many years it was! “Oh, the years, the years!” thought Lizzie: Mrs. Lightowler found herself at a great reception with which Sir Thomas Hannaway was warming his house in Eaton Square. She saw the tall form of Hamer Shawcross, the hale red face, the white hair, going up the stairs before her. When she herself was up, she heard Lady Hannaway – and what a miracle of preservation that woman was! – say to her husband: “I always feel proud, Tommy, that we knew him in Ancoats. It’s marvellous to think that he sprang from the people.”

Sir Thomas patted Polly’s stout arm. “Yes, my dear. And while he was about it, he took care to spring a good long way from ’em.”

Lizzie shook hands with her host and hostess, and hurried on, blushing hotly. There was a great deal at that time that she felt she could never forgive Hamer Shawcross. And yet there was so much that she would forgive him seventy times seven. The years, she reflected, as she passed through the boil and bubble of the senseless occasion, were full of him: the years of the country and her own years. Nothing could ever alter that. Let them say what they liked about him: he was a great figure. He filled a place that men would see to be empty when he was gone. There were not many people of whom you could say that.

From the beginning she had loved him, in the way that a woman already heading toward middle-age may love a young man; and from the beginning she had believed in his star and followed it.

He was easily, she thought, the finest-looking man in the room, and Lady Lostwithiel seemed to think so, too. She did not imagine that Lady Lostwithiel would have graced Tom Hannaway’s jamboree if she had not known that Hamer would be there. But handsome as he looked, with that Order which he liked to wear sparkling on his shirt front and the dusky red carnation at his buttonhole, this present apparition could not eclipse her memory of the old house in Ackroyd Park and the young Phoebus who had appeared there with Ann and Arnold Ryerson.

Lizzie found herself a seat under the ostentatious palms that Tom Hannaway had got in from some nurseryman. They tickled her neck, but at least they gave her privacy; and she thought of Arnold, who had been so grave and middle-aged-looking that far-off night; so grave still, rather stout and flabby, with heavy purple bags under his eyes, dreaming of nothing but his miners, working for nothing but his miners, whose case seemed so hopelessly doomed and damned. He insisted – it was the sort of honest, useless, dogged gesture he would make – on being with a squad of them singing about the London streets. She had seen him, and Pen with him, too, trudging the Strand, wailing those dolorous, heart-breaking hymns of the Welsh. Her bus had stopped, and the tune floated up – Jesus, Lover of my soul – and there was Arnold holding his blind Pen by the hand, carefully keeping himself on the side of the traffic. She had wanted to run down and throw her arms round them and cry “Oh, my dears! my dears!” but the bus jerked forward, pouring its blue exhaust into the foggy London air, drowning the sad singing; and, anyway, what was the use? One was old, and it was all so long ago.

A famous voice said: “Well, Liz!” and she was all excitement, dropping her bag, stumbling to her feet. Why did one always get up when one talked to him? she wondered. She was an old fool. He bewitched her: shining jewel and dark red flower.

“Lettice, I think you’ve met Mrs. Lightowler?”

Longer ago than you think, Lizzie thought. When Arnold was fighting St. Swithin’s.

“She goes back a long way, don’t you, Liz?” said the beautiful voice. He put an arm round her waist and gave her a little squeeze; then he passed on, and she sat down again, thinking that it was a very long way back indeed, and wondering whether he remembered the first thing she had ever said to him.

*

“Why! I thought you were a boy – something about fourteen, with short trousers and a Lancashire accent.”

He didn’t smile. He looked hurt. She was soon to learn how touchy he was. He said, with the arrogance that was to develop in him so deeply: “I, too, used to come to conclusions without evidence. There was a street in Manchester that I used to think was like a street in Venice. Now I know that it isn’t. I have spent nearly four years travelling the world in order to clear my mind of illusions. And if I have a Lancashire accent, I impart it to four languages in addition to my own.”

All this without a smile – quite an oration. Lizzie smiled to herself, but did not allow it to appear. “Oh, Liz,” she thought, “you have touched raw withers. Sooth him! Sooth him!”

“Oh, dear,” she said, “you make me envious. When my husband was alive we travelled a lot, but now I hardly ever get out of England. Do come in now and sit down. It’ll be a treat to hear something of what you’ve been doing and seeing. But first of all, let us have tea.”

They went into the drawing-room, where a fire had been lit, and Marsden brought in the tea. Arnold Ryerson said: “I think, you know, Aunt Lizzie, Hamer and I ought to go as soon as we’ve had tea. It’ll take some time to get up to Baildon and settle him in, and then I’ve got that meeting at Keighley tonight. You’re coming, Ann, aren’t you?”

The colour rose in Ann’s cheeks. “I’d forgotten, Arnold,” she said; and, indeed, she had forgotten everything during the last hour. The prospect of seeing Hamer Shawcross depart as soon as he had swallowed a cup of tea, and then of going to Keighley to meet Arnold, seemed suddenly disagreeable. Lizzie was watching the girl closely. “You’d better excuse Ann tonight, Arnold – will you?” she said; and to Hamer’s surprise she added: “And you’d better excuse Mr. Shawcross, too. There’s no reason at all why he shouldn’t stay here tonight and go to Baildon comfortably in the morning. You take the morning off and wait there till he comes. Let me be selfish and have him here tonight for a good long talk.”

Arnold looked at the three of them: Lizzie with that authoritative way of hers, that way of settling things for other people; Ann, who was usually so calm and self-possessed, now flushed and confused; Hamer Shawcross standing there with a cup of tea in one hand, the other pushing back the hair from his forehead and looking as if he were weighing up a situation which he knew to be difficult and unusual; and he felt somehow that they were leagued together, leagued against him, that he was outside. There was no need for him to go. He could have stayed for a couple of hours and then caught a train to Keighley; but now he didn’t want to stay for a moment longer than he could help. He had not felt so desolate since the day when he stood in the snow outside Artingstall’s window and wondered whether he dared to go in and ask for his wages. He swallowed his tea, and said with a desperate effort at brightness: “Well, I must go. I’ve left my notes in the hut, and there are one or two things I want to look up. I’ll look out for you in the morning, Hamer. Good afternoon, Ann. I hope your cold will be well soon, Aunt Lizzie.”

As if in contrition, Ann went with him as far as the front door. “Hamer’s a bit of a surprise to me,” he said. “He’s – developed.” He added anxiously: “What d’you think of him?”

“Oh, my dear,” said Ann, “how can I think anything of a man I’ve only known for half-an-hour?” and she ran back to the drawing-room with the confusion wiped from her face and her eyes shining.

*

What were you to make of such a man? Neither she nor Aunt Lizzie had ever come across such energy and force. Before they had finished tea Lizzie had told him of the intention to run a Labour candidate in the St. Swithin’s division.

“When are you telling the electors?” he asked. “You should do it tonight.”

Lizzie looked up, surprised. “What! With old Thornton not yet in his coffin?”

Hamer put down his cup, stood up before the fire, looking to the seated women immensely tall, and demanded: “What’s that got to do with it? Look. The Tories have got all the advantage of having held the seat for years. The Liberals, you say, have a well-oiled organization. You’ve got nothing. You’ve got to start from the beginning. Make the beginning now – this very minute.”

“What on earth can we do now – this very minute?” Lizzie asked, more amused than impressed. She did not imagine he would have anything practical to offer.

“With your permission we can do this. I will go to town at once and find out who represents the Yorkshire Post. That’s the paper we want – it’s a daily – and we want the news in in the morning. Where is a good open-air pitch in this – this St. Swithin’s Division?”

Lizzie began to sit up, and so did Ann. “There’s Four Lane Ends,” said Ann. “There are always a lot of people about there – and three public-houses.”

“You should have a meeting there tonight,” said Hamer. “Tell the people that for the first time in the history of the division there is going to be a Labour candidate – and an independent Labour candidate at that, who will vote Labour and nothing but Labour.”

“And who’s going to address this meeting?”

“I am.”

There was silence in the room, save for the purring of the fire. The daylight was nearly gone. Looking back at the moment, Lizzie could always persuade herself that she recognized at once its fateful quality. “I am.” There was something as proud as Lucifer in the declaration, something which carried its own conviction. He stood there as straight as a blade, and the firelight shone past him, threw his immense shadow on the wall, and lit up the face of Ann, looking up at him with wonder and delight.

Suddenly Lizzie thought to herself: “Poor Arnold!” and aloud she said: “You carry a woman away!”

“Don’t you want to be carried away?” he asked. “Well, do you agree? Shall I go and tell the Yorkshire Post man that an important announcement about the St. Swithin’s Division will be made at eight o’clock at Four Lane Ends? They’ll report it. A Labour candidate is news all right.”

At last Lizzie smiled. “Go ahead,” she said. “I can’t resist you. But will you have time to make notes for a speech?”

“Notes? I shan’t need notes.”

“What will you talk about?”

He walked out into the hall where his box lay, hastily undid the straps, and came back carrying a leather scabbard attached to a belt. He drew out a sabre whose cold steel flashed in the firelight. “This,” he said. “This is the text and the sermon both. I shall talk about this.”

*

“But your cold, Aunt Lizzie! Do you think you ought to go?”

“Don’t be a fool, child. You must have seen that I was only pretending. And anyway, what cold could stand against a man like that?”

They were upstairs, putting on their coats. “He certainly is the most extraordinary person,” said Ann. “I’ve never met anyone like him before.

“If I’m any judge, it’ll be a long time before you meet anyone like him again.”

“I wonder how he speaks? It’s no joke addressing an open-air meeting. It can be horrible.”

“I don’t think you need worry.”

“Most speakers make politics so dull.”

But this one didn’t. “Men of Bradford, I want to talk to you about a murder. I want to appeal to you to help me to deliver criminals to justice.”

It was a startling opening. He had borrowed a large box from a shop near by, and he stood upon it where the four roads met. His great height could not be overlooked. A few people gathered round, but he did not begin until there were more than a few. He did not despise mountebank tricks. He drew the sabre from its scabbard, whirled it round his head, and then stood patiently till this unusual exhibition had collected all who were within sight. Then he began: “I want to talk to you about a murder. I want to appeal to you to help me to deliver criminals to justice. In 1819 this sabre cut down a young and innocent woman. It was a lovely June day. Bands were playing, flags were flying, the people of your neighbouring town of Manchester were making holiday.”

He told the story of Peterloo. Ann and Lizzie, standing by the box, were like children fascinated by the power of a born story-teller. They were so absorbed, listening to a voice whose range of emotion was to make it famous, that they scarcely noticed the crowd as enthralled as themselves. They saw the girl Emma setting off with her tall young lover, they heard the horrid hiss of steel through the air, they saw the man who was to be the Old Warrior walking distraught from St. Peter’s field with the blood-stained ribbon in his pocket and the sabre in his hand. Never, never, thought Ann, had she known an open-air meeting so quiet, so breathlessly hanging upon a speaker’s words.

“Ah, my friends, that was murder most foul, but it was murder in daylight, murder aboveboard. Still – this day – in your midst – the same crime is covertly committed. Not with the sword but with subtler weapons. Want and misery are turned loose upon you as the dragoons were turned loose that shameful day. Your life is sapped from you inch by inch instead of in one clean stroke, and those who should be your shepherds, securing for you your share of the rich pastures that clothe the world – these men are keeping you in subjection to those who swig the wine of life and leave you the rinsings of the cup.

“One of these fat shepherds lies dead in London. My heart does not bleed. No, my friends, it rejoices, because now there comes to you the chance to choose again. This time, choose wisely. You are to have what you never have had before, the opportunity to send to Parliament a man of your own class, with hands as hard as yours...”

The Yorkshire Post man approached him as he stepped down from the box. “I didn’t get your name.”

“Shawcross – Hamer Shawcross. I am known as Shawcross of Peterloo.”

The three walked back to Ackroyd Park. “Have you often spoken about Peterloo?” Lizzie asked.

“Never before in my life.”

“Then where did you get the nickname from?”

“I didn’t get it from anywhere. I just thought of it. A nickname helps. I hope it will get into the Yorkshire Post. Then you can put it on all the bills.”

“We haven’t come to bills yet,” said Ann.

“No. But we must deal with that tonight.” “Tonight!” Lizzie cried. “It’s ten o’clock.”

“You must get something into the printer’s hands first thing in the morning,” said Hamer. “I can distribute them in the constituency in the evening.”

They turned out of Manningham Lane and walked down toward the house. “It looks as though Arnold is going to wake up and find the election won,” said Ann.

“Not a bit of it,” said Hamer. “But I want the Liberals and Tories to wake up and find we’re there.”

They went up to the study on the first floor. Lizzie began to make tea, but Hamer did not wait for tea. “Do you mind if I rough something out?” he said, and sat down at the writing-table.

Presently Ann put a cup of tea at his elbow. He went on writing, drank the tea at one gulp when it was cold, and said: “How’s this?” He began to read:

“There’s an old Yorkshire saying ‘If tha does owt for nowt, do it for thisen.’ You Yorkshiremen of the St. Swithin’s Division of Bradford have been doing something for nowt for a long time, and you haven’t been doing it for yourselves. You’ve got votes and you’ve been giving them away for nothing to Liberals and Tories. It has not been your fault. You have had to choose between two evils. If you do it again, it will be your fault, because you are going to have a chance to vote for a man of your own class who will go to Parliament to work for your class. You will be told that this is a bad thing to do: no man should think of class: he should think of his country.

“What is your country? Is it the land? Who owns the land? Liberals and Tories.

“Is it the coal and iron under the land? Who owns that? Liberals and Tories.

“Is it the houses on the land? Who gets the rent for them? Liberals and Tories.

“Is it the money in the banks? Who gets the interest on it? Liberals and Tories.

“Is it the jobs by which men live? Who owns the mills and factories, the warehouses and workshops, the ships, forges, railways and mines wherein the jobs are done? Liberals and Tories.

“What then is this country that you are told to consider your country? What part of it did you inherit from your father? What part of it will you bequeath to your son? You did not inherit even the certainty of being permitted to earn a living. The bosses who make up what are called the two great historic parties could turn you out with a snap of the fingers. You may be able to bequeath this certainty to your son if you support a man who goes to Parliament with the intention of fighting for the working class.

“Men of the St. Swithin’s Division! Labour is in the field. The name of YOUR candidate will be announced in due course.

“Shake your chains to earth like dew.

You are many; they are few.”

The committee of three approved this pronouncement. It was eleven o’clock. Lizzie rose. “I think now—” she began.

“One moment,” said Hamer. “We musn’t let the grass grow under our feet.” He paced up and down, a hand in his hair.

Lizzie sank back into her chair with a laugh. “I thought we’d trodden the earth threadbare,” she said.

“Not a bit of it. Now let’s make notes of things to be done. If you want speaking in halls, book your halls at once. As soon as the opposition wakes up, they’ll try to spike you.”

“That’s true enough,” said Lizzie. “Ann, make a note of that.”

“And you’ll want committee rooms. Book them tomorrow.” Ann made a note.

“Speakers. Get hold of all the local talent, and some that’s not so local. Write to them at once, or you’ll find they’re booked up. You ought to get that man Keir Hardie down from Scotland.”

“I think we could,” said Lizzie. “We’ll try. Anything else?”

“Workers. We’ll want dozens – scores if we can get them. Put down any names you can think of to begin with.”

Ann put down a few names. Among them was the name of Pen Muff. Then at last Hamer got up. “I think we could go to bed now,” he said.

Lizzie twinkled. “May we?” she said. She was liking this starry dynamo immensely.

*

Ann came down to breakfast early. It was a glorious day. She threw up the windows to let its autumnal astringency flow into her lungs. She was exhilarated, filled with excitement at the many things to be done. She had slept well, but sleep had not banished the sense of urgency that Hamer Shawcross had instilled into her last night. He was like this day, she thought, as she breathed deeply of the air that was faintly frosted. It was a day that made you want to stir yourself, face up to something, defeat something.

Old Marsden came in with the coffee-pot. “Is Mr. Shawcross up yet?” she asked.

“Up!” the old man grumbled. “He was up before I was. When I came down, there he was stuffing things into that box of his. I give him a cup o’ tea, and off he went. He left this note.”

She took the note to the window. “Dear Miss Artingstall – I think I’d better be off to see Arnold. He knows nothing of what we’ve done, and I want to galvanize him. My thanks and apologies to your aunt. Remember, all we decided to do is urgent and important. Shawcross of Peterloo.”

She was disappointed. But what did you expect, you fool? she asked herself. And yet, the note seemed a part of the man. Galvanize... urgent... important. The three words were like fragments of his personality left behind. And, after all, the note was addressed to her, not to Aunt Lizzie. She folded it, and laid it beside her plate. Later on, when Lizzie had read it, smiling – “Can’t you see him striding past the Malt Shovel with that box on his shoulder?” – she put it away in her writing-table.

*

On the way up to Baildon, Hamer bought a copy of the Yorkshire Post. This would let Arnold see how people had been working for him while he slept! The two young men breakfasted together in Arnold’s room looking upon the village street. No sooner was the first mouthful of tea drunk than Hamer opened the paper. He would not have been surprised to see “Shawcross of Peterloo” at the head of a column. He saw nothing of the sort. He saw a column sedately headed “The Late Mr. Henry Thornton, M.P.” First of all there was a “Tribute from a fellow Member” half a column long. Then there was this announcement: “It is not improbable that, when the question of a successor to the late Member arises, the St. Swithin’s Divisional Conservative Association will consider the name of Viscount Liskeard, the heir to the Earl of Lostwithiel.”

Tucked away in ignominious obscurity below this was a further paragraph. “An open-air speaker named Hamer Shawcross announced in the constituency last night that a Labour candidate would be put into the field, pledged to independence of either the Conservative or the Liberal party. There has never been any Labour organization in St. Swithin’s, and it is not known who would provide the funds for such a candidature, or whether Mr. Shawcross had any warrant for the announcement he made.”

Hamer swallowed his disappointment. All that lovely stuff about Peterloo! Not a word of it. Not even a mention of the nickname he had invented for himself. “Well, Arnold,” he said, “you’re going to lose this election. They’re putting up one of the nobs – Lord Liskeard. The British working-man loves being represented by a lord.”

“Liskeard?” said Arnold. “That’s Lostwithiel’s son.”

“Right!” Hamer answered. “And you and I know something about Lostwithiel. Remember old Suddaby?”

“I do. He introduced me once to Friedrich Engels.”

“He did more than that for me. He introduced me to thinking. He taught me where Lostwithiel and his like stand in relation to me and my like. Little one, when I came to Bradford I had no idea that I was stepping into anything like this. You must let me stay and see this through.”

“If you can help, I shall be delighted,” said Arnold.

“I’ll help. I’ve begun helping. I spoke in your constituency – your constituency, my boy – last night. And this,” he went on before the astonished Arnold could speak, “this – slapping the Yorkshire Post” – this is all they think I’m worth.” His disappointment and anger broke out now. “But they shall see! Liskeard! Well, I’ve had the privilege of paying five shillings a week for years for one of Liskeard’s father’s hovels—”

“Your stepfather did, and your mother,” Arnold put in dispas-sionately.

Hamer had risen from the table and was striding about the room excitedly. “It’s the same thing, isn’t it?” he cried, quite persuaded in his heart that Lord Lostwithiel had for years bled him white.

“And hovels?” said Arnold. “They’re nice little houses, really.”

Hamer stopped, and brought his fist banging on to the table. “Who’s winning this election?” he demanded. “You or I?”

“Very well, then,” he went on, when Arnold merely shrugged, “let me go about it in my own way. Can’t you see this fellow is delivered into our hands?”

“Is he?” said Arnold, impassively buttering a piece of bread. “I’m not so sure of that. I’ve done a lot of work up and down these parts during the last couple of years. To get one man to see reason takes as much effort as to shift a ton of bricks from here to yonder.”

“Reason! Reason!” Hamer cried. “You don’t want ’em to see reason. You want ’em to see visions. They won’t know what they’re seeing when I’ve done with ’em. The point is, they’ll vote for you. That’s all that matters.”

“I shouldn’t have thought so,” said Arnold.

He slowly finished drinking his cup of tea, then looked at this strange friend of his who had come back so different from the boy he had known. He looked at the fingers, drumming impatiently on the window-sill, at the flushed, impatient face, caught by the morning light falling through the panes. He thought to himself: “You’re not one of us. There’s something about you – I don’t know what it is – but it’s not the stuff we’re made of – myself, and Pen Muff, and all the people we work with. You’ll use us and them. ‘They’ll vote for you. That’s all that matters.’ That’s it. That’s all that matters – to you. You’re honest, insofar as you believe what you’re saying when you say it, and when you deceive us you’ll be able to explain it to yourself, satisfactorily.”

That is what Arnold would have said to himself if he had been able to crystallize and formulate the vague uneasiness that troubled his mind as he looked at Hamer.

Suddenly, Hamer wheeled round from the window and said: “You’ll say next, in the fine sporting English tradition: ‘I want a clean fight.’”

“So I do.”

“My God! I’ll bet Goliath didn’t think it a clean fight when David did him in with a pebble. That was against all the rules of the good old ironclad. We’ll have to think of a few tricks like that. For one thing, I want to gaze on the Lostwithiel home. It’s not far from here, is it?”

“We can walk it in a couple of hours.”

“Good. Let’s start. I want a sense of contrast: Broadbent Street and—”

“Castle Hereward.”

“That’s it. Broadbent Street and Castle Hereward. We can get something telling out of that.”

“First of all, we’d better get your box round to the hut. That’s where you’re staying.”

Hamer could not but feel something cautious, something grudging and reserved, in Arnold’s attitude. Arnold himself was perhaps unaware that this was mixed up in the bottom of his mind with Ann Artingstall’s backing out of the engagement to go with him to Keighley, and with his knowledge that she and Lizzie had, after all, been be-glamoured into going with Hamer to Four Lane Ends. It was this which troubled him, which caused him to see Hamer as an unconscious deceiver, one who swept people off their feet for his own purposes. Hamer was more aware of this mist between them than Arnold was. He turned now to Arnold with a face lit by friendship. “Think of it, Arnold,” he said. “Broadbent Street, Old Suddaby, Birley Artingstall, those class-meetings with my father – we’ve had all that together. You and I are almost cut out of the same chunk of wood. There’s been a break this last few years, but now it’s beginning all over again. We’ve still got a lot to do together, you and I. I’m glad of that. It would help me to know that you were glad, too.”

Arnold looked at the appealing face, the outstretched hand. He could not doubt so candid an approach. “Why, of course, Hamer,” he said, taking the hand. “And our mothers still living together.”

“Yes,” said Hamer. “There’s that, too.”

Each took a handle of the box, and they carried it across the ling to the hut in the intake.

*

The sensation of the Royal Academy that year was Sargent’s portrait: “Lady Lettice Melland, youngest daughter of the Earl of Dunford.” Lettice Melland was twenty-three at that time. Hamer Shawcross, who in his later years collected a few pictures for his house in Half Moon Street, used to say that this was the only Sargent he would like to have. But it was beyond his purse, and anyway it was never in the market. He stood looking at it once in Lostwithiel’s house, and said to Lettice: “That is how you were the first time I set eyes on you.”

He had come across the moors with Arnold Ryerson, that day when he had first walked out to Baildon and they had carried the box to the hut between them. They were away before ten in the morning to gratify his whim to look upon Castle Hereward. They crossed the road to Dick Hudson’s, where, on a winter day long before, Ann and Lizzie had eaten a memorable tea, and then they climbed the rough escarpment of the rock and heather that took them on to Ilkley Moor. On that tumbled and elemental height they felt on top of the world. There was nothing to be seen but the sky above them and the rusty brown of the bracken and purple of the heather about them. The sky never became a clear blue; autumn had breathed into the air, so that whether they looked upward or forward there was a gauze between them and clarity. The larks were numberless, but they were soon out of sight. In no time at all, heaven seemed to open to receive them.

They had nothing to say to one another as they strode forward, the winy air singing in their veins, their feet tramping the path that twisted in and out, hampered with tough heather roots and stones that were polished by the feet that had gone this way immemorially. Now and then their passing put up the grouse that went on heavy wings and with a startled chatter deeper into the moor.

Presently they looked down on Ilkley, neat and prim in its valley, with the charming Wharfe flowing through it, and beyond Ilkley they climbed again.

“Another ridge or two,” said Arnold, “and we’ll see it.”

“See what?” Hamer asked.

“What we’ve come to see: Castle Hereward.”

“Oh that! Good Lord! Let ’em keep it. I’d forgotten all about Castle Hereward. I was enjoying myself. All this, Arnold” – he flung his arms wide, embracing earth and air – “this is anybody’s, This is ours. They can’t take this from us.”

Arnold grinned. “Spoken like a Shelley, Hamer,” he said. “But don’t be too certain. Can you hear the guns?” They listened, and heard them clearly. “And I don’t like the look of this chap. It seems to me we left the path some time ago.”

The path was clearly in the mind of this chap who was now rapidly approaching. “Now then, you two!” he shouted from a distance. “You’re disturbing the birds. Get out of it. Get back on to the path, and keep moving on it.”

Arnold turned obediently, but Hamer flushed suddenly a wild red and stood where he was. The man, a keeper with a gun under his arm, came up blustering. Hamer overtopped him by half-a-dozen inches. “Is that how you usually speak to people?” he demanded, danger-ously quiet.

“It’s how I’m speaking to you. Get out.”

“Why should I get out?”

“Because you’re trespassing.”

“Then you’d better prosecute me and recover the cost of any damage I’ve done. Isn’t that the legal procedure with trespassers?”

“Oh, a blooming lawyer! Get out, Mr. Lawyer, or I’ll show you what our usual procedure is. These are Lord Lostwithiel’s grouse moors, and I’m keeping the likes of you off ’em. Hop it.”

“Come on,” Arnold interceded. “We might as well get back to the path.” He looked at Hamer’s face, and saw that he was flaming with rage.

“Do you think I’m going to hop and skip because I hear this God Almighty Lord Lostwithiel’s name?” he demanded. “I’ll get back to the path in my own good time and in my own good way, and this dirty little hired scut with a gun can do what he likes about it.”

“I’ll pepper your backside with shot; that’s one thing I’ll do,” the keeper threatened, himself now roused; and he raised his gun. This was not three feet away. Hamer strode forward, and with a swift and unexpected blow he knocked up the barrel and the gun flew from the keeper’s hand. Hamer picked it up, pointed it into the air, and fired both barrels. Then, holding it by the barrels, he whirled it round his head and brought it smashing down on a rock.

“What do you do now?” he asked quietly.

For answer, the man flew at him. Never in his long career of jack-in-office had he been so treated. He, the trusty henchman of nobility, the guardian of the moor on which at that very moment, he knew, a prince of the blood was helping his master to slaughter grouse: he, defied and humiliated by a lout strolled out from the town! He flew upon Hamer like something loosed from a bow.

What should he know of all that boxing in an Ancoats bone-yard, or of the rough-and-tumble life that for years by land and sea had toughened the man before him and educated him in the use of his strength?

Hamer held him off for a moment almost playfully with one hand. “Listen, weasel,” he said. “Listen, big boss who keeps people from breathing God’s own air. I was enjoying the morning till I met you. You’ve annoyed me and upset me, but you’ve still got a chance to hook it.”

“Me! Me hook it!” the man gasped. “I’ll show you who hooks it off these moors.”

He tried to come in again with flailing arms. Hamer let him come close, seized him by the body, and whirled him upside down. A thread of water dribbled nearby into a marshy hollow. Holding the man by the feet, Hamer dipped his head in the oozing pool – one, twice, three times. Then he dropped him. “I hope that’s cooled you down,” he said. “Sic semper tyrannis, if you know what that means.”

A clatter of loose stones caused him, panting from the gigantic exertion he had put forth, and Arnold, white and apprehensive, to swing round simultaneously. A girl sitting sideways on a rough pony had reined up. Arnold removed his hat. Hamer, whose hat had whirled from his head in the struggle and whose tie was flying behind his ears, bowed stiffly. The girl ignored them both. She was dressed in tweeds and heavy shoes. She was very fair, with blue eyes and a complexion of what they liked to call in those days milk and roses. The fight had taken place in a little hollow. She had reined in on the edge of it, so that they looked up at her outlined against the vast blue of the sky. For all her loveliness, she looked as cold as ice; for all her youth, she seemed as hard as steel.

“Haslett, get up,” she said. “You look disgusting wallowing there.”

The keeper scrambled to his feet, his fingers wringing the ooze from his face. “I’m sorry, my lady. It was these men, my lady—”

Hamer intervened sharply. “It was not these men. It was this man.” He lightly touched himself on the breast. “I assaulted this fellow because he was truculent and offensive. I dislike truculent jacks-in-office very much. If he wishes to do anything about it, he can have my name and address.”

The girl looked at him coldly. “It is fortunate for you,” she said, “that circumstances make it inexpedient to do anything about it.”

Hamer was not aware what this meant: that the presence of a prince of the blood, popping away at the grouse less than a mile off, was incompatible with Lord Lostwithiel’s troubling himself with common brawlers. He bowed again.

“You’d better get away and make yourself decent as quickly as you can, Haslett,” she resumed, speaking as from a throne. “It was fortunate for you that a headache was causing me to ride back to the house. I came here because I heard shots. I didn’t expect to hear shots here.”

That was all she had to say. Her heel punched the pony’s barrel, and he started forward. Hamer and Arnold stood aside as she bore straight down upon them without looking at them. She leaned slightly forward and with a switch she carried pushed Hamer’s hat aside as though it might contaminate the pony’s feet. In a moment she was gone.

“Thank you, Haslett,” said Hamer, putting on his hat. “That was worth seeing.”

The man looked up scowlingly from an examination of his broken gun. “Hop it, you bloody swine,” he muttered. “And thank your Gawd it was Lady Lettice.”

They found the path and went on. Ahead of them they could see Lady Lettice jogging along on the pony. “Lady Lettice who or what?” Hamer asked.

“That’ll be Lady Lettice Melland,” Arnold answered. “She’s a daughter of the Earl of Durnford, and she’s engaged to Lord Lostwithiel’s son, Viscount Liskeard. I read about it in the Yorkshire Post last week. There’s a whole mob of ’em at Castle Hereward for the shooting.”

“Just a visitor, eh?” said Hamer. “And she told that keeper his business as if she were at least the owner of his soul.”

“I expect she’s like that. Some people are,” Arnold replied. “And anyway, she will be one day.”

“Yes,” said Hamer. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, and seeing that she’s marrying the lord’s son, it’ll all be hers some day. Well, give me her damned supercilious sniff down the nose rather than Mr. Haslett’s line of approach. I expect we shall see more of her, Arnold. I wonder what she would have thought if she’d known that one of the clods trembling before her cold patrician glance was going to have the nerve to say to the yeoman of St. Swithin’s: ‘Don’t choose Liskeard. Choose me.’”

He slapped Arnold on the back as a rise of land showed them the house they had come to see. There could be no mistaking it: this must be Castle Hereward. “You are living in great days, my boy. Behold, you puny David, there stands Goliath. Sound a horn. Beat a drum. Fire a rocket. Do something. Castle Hereward. There it has been since Domesday, running us, ruining us, milking us, arranging the wars we should fight in and the dens we should live and die in. It’s formidable, it’s terrific; but we’ve challenged it, and we’ve won the first symbolic round. In the person of the armed flunkey, who says ‘Keep off’ it has received a punch on the nose, and we’ve got away with it.”

Arnold was not so exuberant. The path went narrowly between two rocks before winding down to the valley in which Castle Hereward stood. Arnold sat at the foot of one of the rocks, leaning against it, looking at the great house. “That’s been there a long time,” he said. “It’ll take some shifting.”

The house lay the best part of a mile away. The land slipped down at their feet, a declivity of undulating purple, then, in the valley bottom, it flattened out into delicious green with the silver of the small river Hereward threaded through it. Beyond the river the green stretched backward, flat as a baize table supporting the gorgeous toy which was what, at that distance, the house seemed. The autumn sun winked in its windows; into the autumn air its innumerable chimneys gently exhaled blue spirals of smoke that soon were one with the blue sky. It was a building of vast irregular masses which had piled themselves together through the years, achieving a haphazard and careless beauty that brought turrets and chimneys, parapets and crenellations, towers, oriels and gables into a harmony that seemed to sing there on the greensward, between the shining river and the woods that climbed behind the house in a rich confusion of reds and browns and yellows to complete the picture with their fagged rock-infested line drawn across the mild blue of the October sky.

It looked as insubstantial as a dream, and Hamer knew that it was as strong as hell.

“Well, there it is,” he said. “That’s it.”

“Yes, that’s it,” Arnold answered. He puffed at his pipe, watching the diminished shape of Lady Lettice Melland on her pony passing over a little humpbacked bridge that spanned the Hereward. “You came to see it. What do you think of it? It frightens me.”

Hamer stood erect behind his sitting friend, and he glared down at the house. “Don’t let it,” he said. “See it as it is. Remember that it’s made up of innumerable five shillingses drawn from innumerable houses in innumerable Broadbent Streets, and of royalties out of pits where men like you and me and our fathers sweat, and out of Darkie Cheap’s bone-yard and the beer they drink in the Lostwithiel Arms. No, Arnold; don’t let it frighten you. It’s resting on our backs. It’ll tremble when we stir. It’ll crash when we stand upright.”

Arnold allowed himself a wan smile. “That would go down well at a meeting,” he said.

“Trust me,” Hamer answered. “I don’t waste my stuff.”

He drew a breath of the invigorating air deep down into his lungs, and continued to stare almost with a mingling of love and hate at the mighty house. In the midst of the central group of buildings there was a great apse of glass, split up by the shafts of what he knew must be tall stone mullions. His fancy played with the immense hall, soaring up to a high roof, that lay behind that pile of windows, with the light quivering upon the floor in green and crimson stains where it had filtered through heraldic glass. “With it all,” he said, “it’s glorious.” And added, to Arnold’s amazement: “I sometimes wonder who my father was.”

*

Those who in later years thought that Hamer Shawcross’s oratory was worth analysis divided it into three phases. There was what they called the St. Swithin’s period to begin with. It lasted long beyond the time of the St. Swithin’s by-election, but it was that election which made the method known, and seeing that it turned out to be a famous election, as we shall presently discover, its name became a label for the early Shawcross oratory. Even after Hamer had been elected to Parliament and had said something frank on the floor of the House, a Tory member shouted across at him: “We want no St. Swithin’s here.” Hamer replied: “I readily understand that the honourable Member wants no saints here of any description. He is content to snore eternally in the company of those publicans and sinners, and occasional political harlots, who have contrived to make this House nothing but a shed for sheep-shearing.”

That, in itself, was not a bad example of the rude hostility of speech that people were calling “St. Swithin’s.” It caused Hamer to be suspended from the sittings of the House, which was what he had wanted it to do. The most brilliant speech might pass unheeded: a suspension was always reported.

The second phase was the stateman’s, clouding issues in rosy verbosity; and the third was the practised windbag’s, the unending garrulity of a man who had always talked too much, who could not stop talking, and who could not himself have winnowed a peck of sense from the chaff with which he littered the floor.

But now he was young and eager, striding bright-eyed into his first arena. He was magnificent; he was inspiring; and he was nobody at all. He had not even invented the crude advertisement of “St. Swithin’s.” He was Hamer Shawcross, distributing handbills on an autumn night in the streets of a poor Bradford quarter, with Ann Artingstall walking on one side of him and Pen Muff on the other.

*

It would have suited Arnold Ryerson to join them that night, but he was not permitted to do so. He was worried and shaken: so much had happened in so short a time. Yesterday morning he had come pelting down from Baildon, feeling irresistible, convinced that, given the opportunity, he could ask Ann Artingstall to be his wife. A regular avalanche of events had swept upon him since then. He was to stand for Parliament; Hamer Shawcross had arrived; machinery had been set in motion all around him; and he, who prided himself on having a cool organizing brain, found that things were being done with no coolness at all, indeed with heat and dispatch, and yet as effectually as he could have done them himself. Worst of all, Ann seemed to be caught up and to be spinning in this vortex of energy with such momentum that he felt she would have no ear for the personal matters that were burning in his heart.

When he and Hamer turned at last from their contemplation of Castle Hereward he hurried into Ilkley and took train to Bradford. Hamer walked back to the hut. “I’ll be at Ackroyd Park tonight,” he said. “I’ve promised to distribute some bills.”

It was a dullish afternoon for Arnold and Lizzie and Ann. They worked hard in Lizzie’s study, writing letters, codifying information they would need for their campaign, studying a collection of the late member’s speeches which Lizzie had carefully preserved and which would enable them to make a pretty contrast of his promises and performances. Tea was brought up to them, and they worked on. Towards seven o’clock Lizzie said: “I hope Mr. Shawcross will get here in time for dinner.”

“Oh, surely he will!” Ann cried, on such a note of anxiety that Arnold could not bear to look at her face. He buried his head in his work, and said: “There’s nothing for him to eat up there, anyway.”

“At all events,” said Ann, “I’d better go with him when he takes the bills. I must have some air and exercise.”

“There’s no reason why we shouldn’t all go,” Arnold volunteered eagerly. “We’ll get the job done in no time.”

But Lizzie quashed that. “Sorry, Arnold. There’s too much to do here. You and I will have to stay.” He looked crestfallen, and she added: “It’s a shame, I know; and since you’re to be the candidate, we’ll have to take all this detail off your shoulders as soon as we can. But in the meantime, do you mind?”

What could he say? Nothing. And what could he do when both the women started up involuntarily, with brightened faces, on hearing Hamer Shawcross’s voice ringing out in the hall? Nothing at all. He smiled palely. “The moorland air seems good for Hamer’s lungs,” he said.

They all three stood, listening to Hamer’s and old Marsden’s voices downstairs. Suddenly there was a loud cackle of laughter. The women looked at one another almost in consternation. “I haven’t heard Marsden laugh,” said Lizzie, “since the day when we ran out of coal and every pipe in the house was frozen.”

Marsden showed Hamer into the room, and when the door was shut Lizzie said: “You seem to have amused Marsden. It isn’t easy.”

“Oh, I was just telling him how to conquer women, with especial reference to a Miss Pen Muff. You remember her? She was on the list of possible workers that we drew up last night.”

“I remember her all right,” said Ann. “But I’m surprised that you do.”

“I kept a copy of the list, and I went along to see her after writing my article.”

“Article?” Lizzie asked.

“Yes. It occurred to me at the hut that I’ve got to live, so I wrote an article called ‘We Shall Fight St. Swithin’s – and Why.’ I’ve posted it to London – to the Morning Courier. It’s a Liberal paper, I know, but more sympathetic to Labour than any other. It ends with a couple of phrases that Arnold knows: ‘Like a great castle, built stone by stone through the centuries, reaction looks solid and threatening. But we, the workers, know that it’s resting on our backs. It will tremble when we stir. It will crash when we stand upright.’ I’ve been to town to post it, and I called on Pen Muff on the way here. She doesn’t like you. She doesn’t like any of you. She hates your clothes, and she hates your bathroom, and she hates the way you ride home from Socialist meetings in stately carriages.”

He gave Arnold a knowing smile. “But she loves our candidate,” he said. “For him, she would wear a red cap, she would storm Bastilles, she would throw up barricades and fight behind them.” He held up a quelling hand as Arnold started to his feet. “No, no! There have been no inquisitions and no confessions. All this I gather merely from a few tones of the voices, a few flashes of the eye. They were enough to convince me that Miss Muff’s objections were not deeply founded, and that we could make her a good worker. She is going to join us tonight in the bill distribution.”

“And how did you persuade her?” Lizzie asked. “I have always found her a difficult young woman – very obstinate, though full of the right stuff.”

“I led her on with votes for women,” said Hamer. “I persuaded her that neither the Liberals nor the Tories will ever give women votes, but that Labour is likely to be sympathetic. I drew her a picture of a wonderful world, with women voters, women Members of Parliament, women in all the professions, stopping wars, giving baths to everyone – you know.”

There was something in the way he spoke those words “you know” that produced a moment’s consternation. “But I believe all this,” said Lizzie at last. “Do you mean you were telling Pen Muff these things with your tongue in your cheek? Supposing you were a Labour member. Wouldn’t you work for that?”

Hamer saw that he had stepped into a morass. He recovered adroitly. Standing before the fire, he looked down at the others, smiling with all the power of his charm. “Votes for women,” he said judiciously, “is one of the things I haven’t gone into as thoroughly as they deserve. I shall not commit myself on the strength of vague talk and imperfect examination. It is likely that when I have time to go into the matter I shall reach your own conclusion. In the meantime, I believe so much in the Labour cause that I am ready to use any means” – the smile left his face and he looked intense end impressive – “any means to induce people to work for us. If I can do it by preaching a doctrine accepted by people like you, whose opinion I respect, isn’t that common sense?”

His hand went straying through his hair. He looked a little uneasy till the two women’s faces cleared. He did not notice that Arnold Ryerson’s face remained perplexed. Arnold could see him standing that morning in the house at Baildon. “You don’t want ’em to see reason. You want ’em to see visions.” So it succeeded, the emotional bluff, even with a hard-headed girl like Pen. “I don’t see,” said Arnold, “much mirth for Marsden in all this.”

“Oh, well,” Hamer answered, “I was just fooling him generally with a picture of a woman’s world.

*

Among the spoilt papers on polling-day there were seven which may be said to have ended Arnold Ryerson’s ambitions as a candidate for Parliament. “These are interesting, Mr. Ryerson,” one of the officials conducting the count said to him, and handed him the seven spoilt papers. There were the three candidates’ names: Liskeard, Hanson, Ryerson. On these seven papers the name Ryerson had been crossed out and the name Shawcross written in, with the voter’s mark against it. “He’s our man. He’s the man we want to vote for,” these papers mutely cried; and Pen Muff, who was standing there with Arnold in the room full of excited people and buzzing gas flames, felt him wince, saw him look across at Hamer, whose bright excited face, with the hair falling down the forehead, was the most vital thing there; and she took his arm and led him aside, whispering: “Don’t let that hurt you, Arnie. You mustn’t – see!” – shaking him a little. “Promise me you won’t.”

He smiled and gave her arm a little squeeze. “That’s all right, Pen. And give him his due, it’s been his election. He’ll sit for this seat some day. He’s stolen my thunder. Well,” he amended modestly, “he’s introduced thunder where I would have rattled a can. There’s something grand about him.”

Pen wouldn’t have it. “Grand my foot! Look at him posing. Look at him showing that Melland piece what a grand profile he’s got.”

“Don’t you believe it, Pen. There’s only one woman for Hamer and he can have her any time he wants her.”

Pen looked at Ann Artingstall, breathlessly watching with all the others the papers pile up. Lostwithiel had come to be present at his son’s entry into Parliament. He had (and need have) no doubt it would be that. He and Liskeard and Lettice Melland made an aloof collected trio; Ann, Lizzie and Hamer a trio by no means collected. Ann’s face was almost strained with the excitement of the moment. She had forgotten the candidate; it was to Hamer’s face that from time to time she occasionally lifted her eyes in a swift anxious smile.

“You were rather interested in her yourself at one time, weren’t you, Arnie?” Pen asked.

Arnold had learned a lot about Pen Muff during the bitter weeks of the struggle. He did not have to blush and stammer with her now. “Yes, I was,” he said. “But she’d never do as a failure’s wife.”

Pen turned on him roundly. “What do you mean – failure!” she cried hotly.

“I’m not going to win this election, you know,” he said quietly. “I’m the loser here. It’ll always be like that with me. Don’t have any illusions about me, Pen old dear. I’m not a winner. Winning isn’t my style.”

She was annoyed into her roughest speech. “Don’t talk like a daft old fooil,” she said. “Tha’s lost nowt yet, and onny road remember this: tha’s not lost as long as tha’s still fightin’, and by heck! if tha weds me, tha’ll have to fight till thi dyin’ day.”

Her sharp pale face fronted him aggressively, and he felt a warm surge of affection flowing about his heart. It was not the nameless ecstasy he had experienced when, on his favourite hill, or in the silence of the moor, he had thought of Ann and breathed her name. But it was something that he knew was good and durable – right Bradford cloth, if you like, he thought to himself with an inward smile, jannock stuff that won’t wear out in a lifetime. He spoke to her in her own fashion of speech: “I was going to ask thee to take this ring, lass, if I were t’winner.”

“Ah don’t want thee,” Pen said, “because tha’rt a winner. Ah want thee, win or lose, so long as tha’ll fight.”

“That’s a bargain, Pen. Win or lose, for good an’ all.”

Pen looked about the room, feverish with mounting excitement, thick with tobacco smoke, overheated by the fire blazing in the grate and the gaslight flaring from a score of jets. “There’s you and me,” she said. “An’ there’s Hamer Shawcross and the Artingstall girl. An’ there’s yon Lord Mutton’ead and his piece. That’s strange, Arnie” isn’t it? Three young couples, all about to be wed. We’re all starting from here. An’ what different roads we’ll go! I wonder what’ll become of us all?”

Well, we know now, Pen; and it was to be something strange enough; but this was not the moment for speculation. The counters: were finished; the bourdon of talk fell to silence. Old Lostwithiel went on smoking his cigar, refusing to let the moment rattle him; Lord Liskeard, his young sunburnt face working with emotion, could not keep up the aloof pretence. He took Lady Lettice Melland by the arm and went up to the table where Arnold was standing with Hanson, the Liberal candidate, both drawn with excitement.

LISKEARD	7859
RYERSON	6001
HANSON	3213

It was amazing. Liskeard looked for a moment as if he had been struck a blow. Then his face cleared: after all, he had won. He glanced round, anxious to do the magnanimous thing. Arnold was standing at his side, but it was as though Liskeard did not see him. He strode towards Hamer Shawcross and took his hand. “You nearly beat us,” he said.

Lady Lettice Melland held out her hand, too. She smiled sweetly. “But, after all,” she said, “we won. Sic semper tyrannis, if you know what that means.” He knew all right, and felt gratified that she had remembered.

Now, from the square outside the windows, cheering, booing, hissing and the noisy clatter of rattles told that the result had been made known to the crowd. Lostwithiel, of whom so many fantastic tales were told, Lostwithiel with his hair dyed dull black and the paint faintly touching up his parchment cheeks, and with the eyes that so few men cared to look at glowing like embers beneath his smooth high forehead, Lostwithiel who, it was said, had slept in his coffin every Friday and slept with the coffin under his bed every other day of the week since his wife died twenty-five years before, touched Lord Liskeard on the arm. “Better show yourself, my boy. Come, m’dear,” he said to Lettice Melland. “Take my arm.”

There was no one else in the room for him. Liskeard might condescend to smile at his Liberal opponent and shake hands with the man who had given him such a jolt, but Lostwithiel – no. He was a fantastic and legendary character. Born in the year before Trafalgar was fought, he could remember cheering at the news of Waterloo. As a boy of twelve, walking with his father in London, he saw the Prince Regent assaulted on his way to open Parliament. He had seen a man hanged for robbing a rabbit warren at Castle Hereward, and another, in a bitter winter, transported for life for cutting firewood from a tree. At fifteen he ceased to be Viscount Liskeard and became the Earl of Lostwithiel. His father’s last words to him were that England was going to the devil, and Lostwithiel had believed this all his life. He hourly expected the time when the damned Radicals would not leave him a penny to bless himself with. He had fought in several wars, had shot a man in a duel, had trapped wild animals and found gold in Canada, had sailed round the world before the mast on a clipper, no one knowing that he was not Buck Roberts till the voyage was over, when he knocked the bullying skipper over his own rail into the East India Dock before humping his box and going ashore.

At sixty he married an exquisite child of sixteen, Lady Theodora Loring, youngest daughter of the Duke of Buckhurst. She died nine months later in giving birth to this young Viscount Liskeard who now, with Lostwithiel and Lettice Melland, was advancing to the open window through which the cries of the Yorkshire crowd came in out of the raw night.

After his child-wife’s death Lostwithiel ordered his own coffin, set up a racing-stable, and became the most popular man on the turf. His popularity increased with the increase of his fame as a “character.” His acceptability to the crowd, paradoxically, was heightened by his outspoken contempt for working people – “the scum,” he said, “on which we lilies precariously float.” Buck, the name under which he had served as a sailor, stuck to him. Crowds of workmen had been known to stop his four-in-hand when some classic race was near, shouting: “Give us a tip, Buck! What’ll win next Friday?” He would shake his fist and yell: “You always want something for nothing. Never mind betting. Work, you— so. Racing isn’t for the likes of you.” He would drive on amid shouts of “Good old Buck!”

Now, at eighty-five, erect as in his cavalry days, and wearing the fashions of fifty years ago, his life was bound up in young Liskeard whom he had educated with all propriety, and who, he thought, might with luck be able to keep a couple of hundred a year when the damned Radicals had done with the country. At the moment, things were not so bad. Lostwithiel’s royalties from South Wales coal-mines alone were worth something like £60,000 a year.

Hamer watched the three pass through the open window on to the balcony. This was Lostwithiel; this – incarnate at last – was the name that old Suddaby and others had dinned into his young ears as the enemy, that which must be defeated. It had seemed easier when it was just a name. This painted old skeleton affected him as Castle Hereward had done. Reluctant admiration tinged his antipathy.

The crowd was yelling for a speech, and Liskeard, no orator, gave them a few words. Then they started shouting: “Buck! Come on, Buck!” and Lostwithiel went to the front of the balcony and flourished his stick at them. “You nearly let him down,” he shouted. “What do you mean by it, eh? you damned scoundrels. You’ll have to do better than that, you know – much better than that.”

But Arnold’s supporters now took up the cry. “Get orf it, you old cockatoo. Let’s ’ave the Labour man. Ryerson! Ryerson!” And when Arnold had spoken, someone shouted: “Shawcross!” and many voices took it up: “Shawcross! Where’s Shawcross?”

The already familiar voice answered, to everyone’s surprise from the midst of the crowd. Aware of dramatic values, he had slipped out unseen, and now shouted: “Where should I be except here among my own people? Thank you all a thousand times. This time we shook them. Next time we’ll shatter them.”

“That’s reight, lad!” yelled an enthusiast. “We’d ’ave done it this time if it ’adn’t been for t’bloody Liberal. Give Shawcross a shoulder. Shawcross of Peterloo!”

The name had arrived and stuck. He was hoisted aloft, and, high above all heads, he drew the sabre from its scabbard. For a moment before they bore him off in tumult, he could see the figures on the balcony. He could see Lettice Melland holding Liskeard’s arm, and Pen Muff holding Arnold’s. He flourished the sabre towards Lostwithiel and shouted: “Sic semper tyrannis!” He added: “And that means, boys, St. Swithin’s for Labour next time.”

*

That was the end of the fight: the victory to Liskeard, the glory to Hamer Shawcross, who disappeared amid a shine of torches. Lostwithiel watched him vanish round a corner, then turned to his son. “That’s the enemy,” he said. “That’s the man you’ve got to watch.” He waved his stick towards Arnold Ryerson and Hanson. “Never mind those two. They don’t matter,” he said in his penetrating grating voice. “But that other chap” – he wouldn’t utter the hated name – it’s a pity we didn’t run him down. He’s the one that’ll lead the workers astray. Workers! What are they coming to these days? They’re losing their guts. There was a time when hanging didn’t frighten ’em. Now you can’t sack ’em without their running to a union. The country’s going soft. Come on. I want a drink.”

They took him to the big railway hotel and left him in his room with a fire burning, a cigar in his fingers and a brandy-bottle on the table. “Get to bed,” he said, “the pair of you. Lettie, come here. Give us a kiss. That’s better. And look after him. He’s got to do something. My father was in the government, and he’d better be, too. His mother would have liked that. She’d have been forty-three. Did you know that, Lettie? Forty-three if she was alive today. Run along now.”

Lettice put a cushion behind his back, pulled the table nearer to his hand, and kissed him again on the high white forehead. She hated kissing his painted cheeks. Then they left him.

As soon as they were gone he pulled the cushion from behind his back and hurled it across the room, knocking over a spindle-shanked table. He took a comforting draught of brandy. Brandy was the stuff in all emergencies. It was the Prince Regent’s tipple. “Harris, pray bring me a glass of brandy. I am not well.” That was what the Regent said when he first saw Caroline, the blowsy German wench they had brought over to marry him. It went the rounds. He remembered his father coming home and telling the story with a chuckle. Yes, he remembered that and he remembered a lot more. He could remember Farmer George dying and the Regent becoming King, and old Silly Billy becoming King after him. He was already in his thirties when little Victoria came to the throne, and now there she was, a fat pop-eyed widow playing the deuce with the Prince of Wales, a decent feller who had just been shooting at Castle Hereward.

He remembered all that, and he remembered that right along the line there had been trouble, trouble, trouble. It was only by a fluke, b’God, that there was a monarchy at all. The Regent and his damawful brothers nearly finished it. Risings, demonstrations, Reform bills: always something seething under the surface. He could remember Peterloo that this feller – this Shawcross – had babbled about so much. A lot of fuss and nonsense about a few hotheads cut down. There were more killed in his own coal-mines any week, and no one raised a stink about that.

But with all the trouble and restlessness he had seen in his time, he felt he had seen nothing so deadly, so dangerous, as he had seen these last few weeks. He knocked the ash off his cigar and stared intently at the glowing end. “By God,” he said, “I wish I had run him down and made an end of him.” Because he knew, out of a vast, dark and intricate knowledge of men, that he had seen a leader, with all his years before him – all the years when Lostwithiel would be mouldering under the slab in the mausoleum at Castle Hereward, and this feller would be going on and on, and God knows what would be happening to England. “I could have done it,” he muttered, “and made it look an accident.” A number of strange accidents had checkered Lostwithiel’s career.

*

Hamer was not the man to be caught with accidents like that. As soon as the fight warmed up he knew whom he was fighting: not Viscount Liskeard but the Earl of Lostwithiel and Lady Lettice Melland. That was the combination of unscrupulousness and cunning and fresh young brain that he had to meet. It would be Lettice Melland, no doubt, who stole his advantage over the donkeys. Arnold didn’t want the donkeys, but Hamer was a showman in his early days and he thought they would be valuable. They were a counter to Lostwithiel’s four-in-hand. Wearing a tall beaver hat and a tight-waisted caped greatcoat, the old man was a grand sight sitting aloft with the ribbons in his gloved hands, a cigar in his mouth, and Lady Lettice fresh as paint beside him. There was a man to blow a silver horn at intervals; and all who cared might read the inscription on the slender banner attached to it: “Liskeard for Peace and Plenty.” The four skittish greys were soon better known than any of the candidates.

Hamer’s four meek donkeys, attached to a flat cart with a man playing a mouth organ upon it, paraded the division carrying a placard: “We can afford nothing better till Labour rules. These donkeys are fed on oats. Lostwithiel’s horses are fed on royalties from the mines he’s never seen.”

It went well till an opposition poster came out with a donkey’s head in each corner, Arnold Ryerson’s portrait in the middle, and the injunction: “Vote for the Asses’ Party. Return Ryerson on St. Swithin’s day and it will rain asses for forty days and nights.”

Pen Muff brought a copy of the poster into the Labour committee room, shaking with fury. It happened that only Arnold was there. “How much longer are you going to let yon chap run you an’ make a fool of you?” she demanded.

Arnold puffed steadily at his inseparable pipe, holding out the poster at arm’s length and smiling gravely. “Not bad,” he said. “We’re learning something about campaigning, Pen.”

“But this Shawcross—”

“Don’t be unfair, Pen. Whether we win or lose, we’re going to create a surprise in this division. And that’ll be Hamer’s doing – no one else’s.”

*

They got Keir Hardie down to speak for Arnold Ryerson. Randolph Churchill came early to speak for Liskeard, and when it was seen that the campaign was going badly Balfour came and packed St. George’s Hall, and Salisbury, the Prime Minister, sent a message. The Liberals sent an ex-Cabinet Minister or two to do what they could for Hanson; and when all these had come and gone none had left on the imagination of the St. Swithin’s division the vital, red-hot imprint left by Shawcross of Peterloo.

Antics were part of his stock-in-trade, and the sabre was part of his antics. Soon after the campaign had opened, he attached to himself a youth who always preceded him on to a platform, bearing the sabre as a mayor’s mace is borne. It would be placed on the table in front of the speaker’s chair, and when the meeting was over the procession would retire in the same way: sabre-bearer first, then Shawcross, then the chairman and any other speakers who happened to be present. Hamer allowed no one else to touch the sabre. The fooling became earnest: his own mind developed a feeling about the thing which he could not explain. Whatever subject his speech was to deal with, it began with the sabre. He would hold it aloft and recite, as though it were a vow:

I shall not cease from mental strife

Nor shall the sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.

The first time this was done, there was great laughter in the Tory press; but you can’t go on laughing when a trick is working. Lostwithiel found it working. He slipped into a back seat at a Labour meeting, watched this youth, handsome, flame-like, nearly as tall as himself, follow the sabre on to the platform; saw, when that vow was taken, that a great many people got to their feet and stood with bowed heads, and knew that something dangerous for him was starting here. “This is the sword of oppression,” said Hamer Shawcross. “I shall tell you how it is being used against us today.”

Landlordism was the theme that night, and Lostwithiel remained and writhed. “It was my fortune to be born and brought up in a street owned by Lord Lostwithiel. I can speak, my friends, with first-hand knowledge of the loving kindness of a Tory landlord. Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth. He must have loved us dearly, for he chastened us even as a tender father chasteneth his children. There was some slight reversal of the normal process, for in this case the children brought the bread and butter to the loving father. Any children would do, so long as they could contribute a scrap of butter or a crumb of bread. Black children as well as white. There was an old Negro whom we called Darkie Cheap...”

They listened to the tale of Darkie Cheap being thrown out of his bone-yard. Landlordism in the home. They listened to tales of lockouts in Lostwithiel’s mines. Landlordism in the job. They listened to the tale of Hamer Shawcross walking on the moor and being stopped by a keeper with a gun. Landlordism in God’s own earth. And then a bit of good “St. Swithin’s.”

“Ah, my friends,” Hamer cried, gazing straight towards the dark corner at the back which he knew Lostwithiel occupied, “it is inconceivable that this august being, whose roots go so far back in our history, spreading deep down out of sight and sucking their sustenance from the lives of so many simple men like you and me – it is inconceivable, I say, that even his ghost should venture to intrude into our midst tonight. But were the man himself here I should call him to his face an incubus that we must shake from our shoulders, a thief who intercepts the reward of our labours, a wielder under the cloak of legality of the ancient sabre of Peterloo. Have at him, and have done with him, in the person of this puny candidate that he and his like have the audacity to ask you to support.”

He paused there; and the voice, when it began again, was pitched on a low emotional note – the note that made them “see visions.”

“There was a night, a bitter winter night, when starving scarecrow children, clutching a few rags about their puny withered bodies, materialized like the ghosts of all the sorrows of the poor out of the side streets of Manchester. And, ah, my friends, the sorrows of the poor! Those children were the children of a Christian land. They were the kin of those to whom immortal words were uttered: ‘Suffer little children to come unto Me. Of such is the Kingdom.’ But, ah, my friends, there was no God to welcome them that night. They had come in the hope of receiving a little food. In this fat and opulent Kingdom – a little food! Some received it; some did not; and then the night swallowed them again with the pitiful tin mugs that they had brought to hold out like beggars under the bitter stars.

“How long, O Lord – how long, you men of St. Swithin’s – shall these things be? Come, not as suppliant shadows stealing timorously through the dark with tin mugs in your hands. Come as men erect, come in the daylight, come with both hands open to the feast. It is you who planted. It is you who reaped. Gather then into your own barns and serve on your own tables – and eat!”

He stood silent and straight for a moment while the applause broke round him. Then he moved out after the sabre. He would never remain once he had spoken. He ended on his high note, and went. That was part of his technique. Nothing would make him stay. Already he was able to state his own terms.

That night Ann Artingstall stumbled out after him, as dizzy as if she had looked too long on radiance; and Lostwithiel, summoning his son to his room in the hotel, said: “You’d better get that Manchester agent – that Richardson feller – over here. Send someone for him tonight. At once. You’re up against something, my boy.”

*

Hamer Shawcross and Arnold Ryerson opened their eyes when they saw on a Tory handbill the name of Thomas Hannaway, Esq. “Find someone who’s prepared to say anything for money.” That was Lostwithiel’s cynical command to Mr. Richardson. and Mr. Richardson turned with deep respect to Thomas Hannaway.

Thomas, at twenty-six, was already putting on flesh. Those days when he had boxed and run with Hamer Shawcross belonged to a past that seemed incredibly remote. Polly coddled him, fed him, kept him at her apron-strings. Once he had finished his day’s work, he had no other thought than to rush home, eat his dinner, and play the parlour-games with cards and counters that Polly loved.

With dinner over, the hearth swept and the lamps lighted, they were playing one such game in their new, neat house in Didsbury when Mr. Richardson called. Mr. Richardson was impressed. There was a sense of prosperity about the place: in the capped and aproned maid, in the gasolier of elegant proportions hanging in the drawing-room, in the clothes that Tom and Polly wore. The conversation was brief. As soon as Tom knew that Richardson came direct from Lord Lostwithiel, he had no more to say to him. “I’ll discuss the matter with his lordship.” His lordship was nothing but a name to Tom Hannaway.

Tom sat with Mr. Richardson the next morning in a room in the Bradford hotel, and when his lordship entered he received a considerable shock. Lostwithiel had slept badly, and had just got out of bed. He had put on an old red woollen dressing-gown, smeared colour upon his cheeks and shoved a comb through his lack-lustre hair. With his big thin white beak, he looked as gaunt as a sick eagle. There was a brandy-bottle in the sitting-room. He filled a glass with a hand that was a little unsteady, and when he had taken a drink he said to Mr. Richardson: “You can get back to Manchester.”

Richardson bowed and backed out of the room as though from the presence of royalty.

All this startled Tom Hannaway a good deal. The haggard old scarecrow had taken no notice of him, was standing indeed with his back to him, gazing into the fire. It gave Tom time to think. He’d be damned, he thought, if Lostwithiel was going to treat him as he had treated Richardson. No one had got the better of him yet, and this chap wasn’t going to, lord or no lord. In his bluffest Lancashire voice he said: “Ah don’t suppose tha’s dragged me all t’way from Manchester to give me the benefit of thi back. My time’s money. What’s tha want? An’ Ah doan’t mind if tha shakes hands.”

Lostwithiel swung round, looking thundery. Tom held out his hand. It wasn’t taken. One of Lostwithiel’s hands held the brandy-glass; the other remained in his dressing-gown pocket. “Well, as tha likes,” said Tom. “But come to t’point, and come quick.”

He wore a watch in a fob. He hauled it up by the seal that dangled importantly, placed it on the table, sat down, and crossed one plump leg over the other. “Tha can go to t’devil,” he thought. “At best Ah’ve got something to sell thee. At worst, tha’ can’t bite my head off.”

There were two things that Lostwithiel wanted to buy. He wanted someone, who knew that part of Manchester which Hamer Shawcross came from, to go on to a platform and say that Hamer Shawcross was a liar, that Lostwithiel was an excellent landlord. And also, he wanted this man Shawcross to be privately approached and bought off. “Get him out of the place – today if you can. I suppose he’s got his price.”

Now Tom was at home. “First of all, let’s discuss mine,” he said with a grin.

“Five hundred pounds if this man goes at once.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Nothing.”

“Now tha’s talking daft. It’ll cost me just as much time if he stays or goes.”

“What do you want?”

“Nowt for myself. Ah want to put a bit o’ brass in thi pocket.” The old man glared at him testily. He hated to hear money mentioned. He did not condescend to reply; so Tom proceeded to develop his thought. He had a nice expanding business, he explained, next door to Artingstall’s. Doubtless his lordship was not aware of the fact, but he owned the land on which both businesses stood. Anything which embarrassed Artingstall’s, even in a slight degree, was to the advantage of Hannaway’s. If Artingstall’s rent were raised, say, by five hundred a year...

Lostwithiel threw the remains of the brandy down his throat and banged the glass on to the table with such violence that the stem snapped. “You and your damned drapers’ shops!” he shouted. “I didn’t send for you to have a talk as one bagman to another. You are an impertinent scoundrel, sir. By God, you appear to have a low opinion of me!”

“My lord,” said Tom, using the title for the first time, and standing up red in the face like a fighting bantam, “you have asked me to bribe a better man than you or me. You must pardon me if my opinion of you is based on that fact. It is the only thing I have the pleasure of knowing about you.”

He stuck the watch into his fob, picked up his hat and stick, and moved towards the door. His hand was on the knob when Lostwithiel said: “One moment, Mr. Hannaway. Don’t be impetuous.”

*

Hamer took a night off from the rigours of campaigning in order to listen to Tom Hannaway. Tom was not bad. Hamer had never imagined that Tom could speak; but he did well enough. No inspired orator, he nevertheless managed, with his carefully nurtured northern accent, to get on terms with his audience – men of the world – one man to another. That was the line.

“Ah’ve come to knock this chap Shawcross off his perch,” he began. “Ah know ’im. We went to t’same school and played marbles in t’same gutter.”

“Tha’s stayed there ever since. That’s t’difference,” shouted a stalwart voice from the back.

Tom Hannaway accepted this good-humouredly. So far as he could see at the moment, his profits that year were going to be a thousand pounds. He had never touched that figure before. It wasn’t an income on which one could run a racehorse, but there was something soothing and satisfactory about the sound of the words “a thousand a year.” Money, always, was Tom’s armour. So long as he had money, you could call him what you liked, and he would smile. He smiled that night. He didn’t mind being told he was in the gutter. “Well,” he replied, “if Ah’m in t’gutter, the interrupter and I can talk as man to man. How are we goin’ to get out o’ t’gutter?”

Why, by the good old method of entrusting one’s fortunes to this famous family which for so long had stood for so much in British life. This Shawcross of Peterloo, as he called himself – God alone knew why, except that he’d bought an old sword in a theatrical outfitter’s and made up some fancy tale about it – this fellow had been presenting the Conservative candidate’s family as heartless vampires, sucking the blood of the poor. He had told what he imagined to be a damaging story about an old Negro, Darkie Cheap. Now what were the facts of the matter?

Tom presented the facts as he wanted his audience to see them, and drew an altogether delightful picture of the gay, carefree life of tenants under Lostwithiel’s overlordship.

All this didn’t worry Hamer at all. He could – and, by heaven! he said to himself, he would – answer it pretty hotly the next time he was on his legs. He leaned back in his seat, enjoying the relaxation after so many strenuous days and nights; enjoying, too, the companionship of Ann Artingstall who sat with him. As always when it was not in symbolic use, the sword of Peterloo was in its scabbard at his side.

Suddenly, he sat up, alert. Tom Hannaway had finished with Lostwithiel. “So much for t’record of his lordship. Now what about t’record of Mr. Shawcross of Peterloo? His lordship is the head of a great family. He fills his position with dignity and responsibility. What sense of responsibility has this man Shawcross got? Will you be guided by one who in his own affairs has no responsibility at all? Ask this Shawcross if it’s true that his mother is still slaving at t’washtub, and he doing nowt to help her...”

Hamer suddenly felt sick. It was dastardly. But was it? Wasn’t it the sort of thrust he would have liked to get in himself? – less crudely, perhaps, less brutally. And it was true. He couldn’t sit there and listen to Tom Hannaway developing that theme. He got up, sweating, and went out into the street. Ann followed, burning with anger, tender with sympathy. She tried to take his arm, but he shook her off impatiently, almost roughly, and went on with long strides.

“It’s unpardonable,” she said. “You must do something about it. You must answer him.”

He strode another ten yards before he said: “Answer him? I can’t answer him. It’s true.”

He seemed so distraught, so deeply wounded, that she grabbed his arm and compelled him to stand still. “Listen,” she said. “It may be true. But it’s not true in that crude way. I understand. Do believe that – I understand how such a thing could happen. You’re overworked – you haven’t had time to send her a little money – you’re...”

He cut her short harshly. “You understand nothing about it. What Hannaway said was true in the plainest and most brutal fashion. I just haven’t thought about her because I’m the sort of man who doesn’t think of other people. Since I’ve been here, I haven’t even written to her. What do you say to that, with your understanding?”

“It’s hurt you. It’s hurt you terribly,” Ann said. “It wouldn’t have done if you had been merely the cold brute that man suggested.”

“It’s hurt my pride,” he answered, “and that’s all it’s hurt – just my damned pride.”

He stood there scowling at the pavement, one hand on the hilt of the sabre. She had never seen him look so desolate, so little the master of a situation. “Come,” she said, full of love and pity for him. “Let us get back.”

“No,” he answered. “You go. Leave me alone.”

There was nothing to do but obey. She walked on, and when she had disappeared into the raw damp night he ran to the railway station. “Can I get a train to Manchester tonight?” he asked.

“Be slippy. There’s one going out in three minutes.” He bought his ticket and fell into a compartment as the train began to move.

*

There were few people travelling at that late hour. He had a compartment to himself, smokily lighted by an oil lamp. He lit his pipe and lay back in a corner. This was the first time for weeks that he had been able to sit down and think. Talking, writing, attitudinizing, fraternizing, reading with an intensity which even he had never known before, he had learned in one hectic lesson what public life could mean. But it had been left to Tom Hannaway to teach him this bitter truth which now stared him in the face: that he could have no private life unless it was of a sort that could be exhibited in the daylight. He had learned that lesson in one swift flash of intuition as he stood with Ann Artingstall under the gas-lamp, his hand on the sabre’s hilt; and with the speed of decision which was one of his characteristics he knew what to do about it.

He counted the money in his pocket. The Courier was paying him pretty well. The article he had sent them – “We Shall Fight St. Swithin’s– and Why” – had been liked for its hard-hitting, uncompromising adoption of the Labour attitude. The attitude was still, at that time, something new; to find it so well expressed was unusual. Tied up though he was at all points with the work of the election, Hamer nevertheless suggested that he should send a daily report. This was agreed to; Lizzie was seeing that the paper had a wide distribution in the constituency; it was helping the Labour cause; and it was enabling Shawcross to live. All he had was in his pocket. He counted it. He could afford to buy Ellen a new bonnet and gown.

He had never bought her a thing. It seemed to him an appalling thought. As the train lurched and roared through the tunnel under the Pennines, his mind contemplated Ellen, and the hands that were so much harder than they had been when Gordon Stansfield was alive, and the face that was more deeply lined and that wore the mask of resignation and endurance that he knew so well on the faces of the poor. “And oh, my friends, the sorrows of the poor!” The words swam up out of his memory. The poor... the poor... What a convenient, anonymous lot they were! You could talk and talk about them, and they need not embarrass you. They remained – well, the poor.

The sorrows of Ellen Stansfield. That was another matter. He had never bought her a thing. Nearly four years away, and he hadn’t carried back a handkerchief for her. And then, off he had run, to discover at last this fascinating, absorbing, compelling career, which he saw now was something that must go on and on. No more doubt, no more question as to what it was he had been preparing for through all the toilsome years. His mind reverted to the thought of the small boy, holding Gordon’s trusty hand as they walked to chapel in Ancoats, a small boy watching the preacher face the packed audience of some anniversary occasion, and thinking as he watched how grand a thing this was: to be up there swaying, dominating, exhorting. Now he knew beyond a doubt that the small boy was right; for out of all the crowded emotions and experiences into which this adventure so unexpectedly had rushed him, none so exalted and fulfilled him as the exercise of this gift of speech which he now found himself to possess so abundantly.

He had rushed away from Ellen to all that, and he had forgotten her utterly in the sweet excitement of this impulsive dive into the sea that must now for ever bear him up. He roused himself, almost as if he were shaking the water from his eyes and taking stock after a literal dive. The train was grinding over the points outside Victoria Station. He got up, knocked out his pipe and put on his hat. Well, now they’d see. Thank you, Tom.

The sabre knocked against his leg as he strode down the platform through the mist that hid the high arch of the roof. He suspected that he looked a pretty fool. Well, let ’em think what they liked. He was wearing that sabre, and he’d go on wearing it. It meant so much: the old man lying babbling on his bed in Broadbent Street, and Gordon who had been with him when he brought the sabre back from the cemetery, and old Birley who made the scabbard and put such love into it. And Ellen.

It was only when he was walking up Great Ancoats Street through a cold and gritty wind, hard on midnight, that he began to consider Ellen’s side of the affair. Till now, his action had been a swift reflex, in self-defence. He was aware that what had happened in the St. Swithin’s division was not a common thing. He had long known that he was not a common man, but the knowledge had not disturbed him: it had been too far beneath the conscious levels of his mind. Now it was at the surface. Neither he nor anyone else could overlook the facts. Appearing out of nowhere, hurling himself into an unpremeditated situation, he was immediately the master of it because of the power that had been revealed in him to dominate the human material of which the situation was composed. To the people of St. Swithin’s his emergence was even more dramatic than it was to himself, because they were not aware of the intensive preparation that had filled his years with labour, or of the dreams whose vague texture this occasion knit firmly into a prophet’s mantle. What they took to be a lightning-flash was a dynamo that had been charging itself day in, day out, and was now for the first time harnessed to its job.

“I had got these people of St. Swithin’s,” says the diary with great insight, “so firmly in my power that I could see Lord Lostwithiel was both amazed and alarmed. His son, an amiable nonentity, was not capable of weighing up the situation. He had had no experience either of political life or of any other sort of life that mattered. Lady Lettice Melland was not experienced, but was extraordinarily quick-witted. She had a political flair, which would have made her at home, years before, in Holland House.

“But I wasn’t afraid of either the earl or the girl. I did not think Arnold Ryerson would be elected, but I felt we could give the Tories such a jolt that the Labour cause would be enormously heartened, and that, from this point, we could go on to make inroads which would shake the seat into our hands at an election not far ahead. I was doubtful whether we could do this with Arnold as our candidate. As I saw it, some means must be found, once the election was over, to suggest to him that in the interests of the Cause, he should find an outlet for his talent in some other direction. I thought it not unlikely that I should then be asked to become the prospective candidate.”

He had no leisure, while the election was in progress, to make daily entries. He dealt with this whole stretch of time in one long, considered summing-up on the very day when he had, in fact, replaced Arnold as the Labour hope in St. Swithin’s.

The diary proceeds: “That is why Tom Hannaway’s attack unnerved me. For the first time, something had happened that seemed to me dangerous. I do not think Tom Hannaway realized how dangerous. He would not have that much insight. But, hitting out in his wild way, he hit right where I could be damaged. The poor pride themselves on their family solidarity. ‘It’s the poor that help the poor.’ If Hannaway had proved that I had rifled Lostwithie1’s safe, been guilty of perjury, arson and highway robbery, he could not have injured me so much in the eyes of these people as by telling them that I had neglected my mother.

“I remember saying to Ann, in the first shock, ‘It’s true,’ without realizing how right she was in emphasizing that only the pressure of unusual events had led to this apparent estrangement.”

It must have been sweet to Hamer to write that last sentence. The whole entry is marvellously clear-sighted up to that point, where self-deception blurs it. “I realized that the very next day I should be questioned on the matter. Lostwithiel or Lady Lettice Melland would be quick enough to seize on this opportunity and to send hecklers to my meetings to bait me. I realized, too, what the answer must be, if I were not to lose all the ground that I had made. It must be simply this: ‘Here is my mother. Ask her.’ I went to Manchester at once, and it was only as I was walking up Great Ancoats Street, dark and empty, that I wondered what my mother would say about it. I might have known. Her love has never failed me.”

There again, one feels that Hamer is making a concession to popular sentimentality, and to his own. True, indeed, Ellen’s love never failed him. Often enough, in the years ahead, Ann was to see the old patient eyes of Hamer’s mother baffled and perplexed. They were to be filled, too, with tears of pride and joy, but ever and again Ellen was to long for the old times, for the fire on the hearth and the sausage at door and window, the coarse red curtains drawn against the bleak Ancoats night, and Gordon’s pen patiently scratching out the gentle exhortations to goodness that, from him, so little needed the shaping of sentence and paragraph. That was what she understood; that was where her heart felt at home. Her love never failed her son; but the meeting that night, when he so unexpectedly returned from Manchester, did not go off with quite the smooth acceptance of his will that the diary suggests.

*

The two old women had the house to themselves. All the young Ryersons were gone, the girls into domestic service, the boys into one mean job or another. They were all sending home a little; Arnold was sending home a good deal, and Mrs. Ryerson managed to get along. They were not old women so far as years went: Ellen at this time was fifty-six: but they had lived lives of labour and anxiety that put upon them prematurely the impress of the years’ passing.

They had become great cronies in the last few years. During the daytime they were for the most part separated, each going to her own work; but when night came on they liked to have one another’s company. Mrs. Ryerson could not read, and Ellen was no great shakes at it; but she had kept Gordon’s books, and she improved as she pored over them; and for a long time now it had been her practice to read to Mrs. Ryerson in the evenings.

The longer this lasted, the more they looked forward to it. It became with them a pleasant mania. They asked nothing more, when winter besieged their street, than to be by the kitchen fire, with a pot of tea on the table, David Copperfield or some such novel in Ellen’s hand, and the sewing or darning in Edith’s. That was the arrangement they had come to: as Ellen Stansfield read, Edith Ryerson would do the mending for both, her sharp little eyes assisted now by steel-rimmed spectacles, her maimed hand quick and agile. She had never allowed it to worry her. There was nothing she could not tackle.

The characters whose acquaintance they made during these evening diversions became more real to them than the inhabitants of Broadbent Street. “That Heep!” Mrs. Ryerson would exclaim at breakfast, clicking her tongue and shaking her head; and Ellen would say: “Micawber’ll get him yet.”

They were usually abed by eleven at night, having two beds in one room for companionship, but on that night of early winter in 1889 they sat up late. They were nearing the end of Great Expectations – “Dear, dear! That Miss Havisham!” – and Ellen, flicking over the pages, saw that they were few, and said: “Let’s sit up a bit, Edith. It’s a long time since we sat up” – as though this were one of life’s exciting, wicked diversions! – “let’s sit up and finish it.”

Mrs. Ryerson agreed by getting up, filling the kettle at the tap behind her, putting more tea into the pot, a little more coal on the fire, and spreading a shawl over Ellen’s shoulders. “Go on,” she said. “I want to know if he marries that Estella.”

It was nearly eleven o’clock. Ellen read on in her slow, hesitating fashion, read on to the end: “The evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”

Ellen closed the book and Edith stopped knitting. Two pairs of gnarled tired hands lay in two laps. There was nothing to be said about the tale that was ended. They loved it; they accepted it; it would stay with them always. They looked at one another with faint smiles, not speaking, but content – content with their simple lives and with one another.

They started to their feet as an urgent knock thudded the front door. They looked at one another as wildly as though it were the knock of destiny: as perhaps it was to these two women whose sons were being borne from them by strange currents. There was no light in the passage-way. Ellen took the oil lamp from the kitchen table and held it up, while Edith opened the door a crack and peered out into the misty night. Hamer pushed on the door and came in, seeming to crowd the narrow space.

“John!” Ellen cried. She could never bring her tongue to say Hamer.

She retreated into the kitchen, carrying the lamp with her, and when she had put it down he folded her in an embrace. Then he turned to Mrs. Ryerson and gave her his hand and his smile. She looked at him narrowly. “What brings thee home at this time o’ neet? How’s Arnie? Is owt wrong?”

“Arnold’s fine,” he said, sitting on a small wooden chair that creaked under him. “You’re going to have a famous son, Mrs. Ryerson.”

“Going to!” she said. “His name’s in t’papers.”

“Aye, but it hasn’t got M.P. after it yet. That’s what we want. That’s what I’m working for, and that’s what I’ve come home about.”

Ellen pulled the shawl round her shoulders and looked at him from the depths of her old broken wicker chair. “I don’t know what you’re getting at – you and Arnold,” she said. “I’ve read summat about it in t’papers, an’ it fair licks me. The workers – the poor. What’s wrong wi’ t’poor? What’s wrong wi’ me and Edith? What was wrong wi’ Gordon? If thi old politics could make a few more like him, there’d be some sense in ’em.”

“The grace of God,” said Hamer, who felt as if he were answering a heckler, “could make a man like Gordon in no time. It’ll take ages for politics to do it – even Labour politics – and that’s why we’ve got no time to lose.”

He looked at her anxiously. Had he silenced the heckler? She seemed to be mollified, and he smiled. “Give us a cup o’ tea,” he said. That was something she understood. She was happily busy at once.

“Well, tha’s not said why tha’s come home,” she said, putting the cup before him.

“Because I want you to help Arnold. I want you to come to Bradford.”

“What! An’ leave Edith? What’s Edith going to do?”

“It’s to help Arnold.”

Mrs. Ryerson licked her lips. She spoke huskily. “Ah don’t know nowt about politics,” she said, “but if it’s to help Arnie tha’d better go. I s’ll manage, luv.”

“Ah’ll not go!” said Ellen. “Ah’ll not! Ah’ll not!” She wrapped her arms about her body, as though to detain herself forcibly upon that spot.

Hamer sipped his tea and said nothing for a moment. Then he said: “I shall be going back to Bradford first thing in the morning. Whether I shall ever return to Manchester I don’t know. I can’t say what’s in front of me. But I’m asking you to come and share it with me, Mother – always.”

Ellen said: “Ah’ll not leave Edith. Ah’ll n—” and then broke down in tears. When he saw them flow, Hamer got up and stood over her, his hand lightly on her shoulder. “We’ll have to be away early,” he said. “By half-past eight.”

Mrs. Ryerson watched them go in the morning. All she said was: “Ah’m glad we stayed up an’ finished t’book, Ellen.”

She watched them turn out of Broadbent Street into Great Ancoats Street and then went back into the empty house to fetch her cap and coarse apron, her scrubbing brush and pail.

They were at Artingstall’s, buying a hat and dress, at nine o’clock. They were in the train at ten. They were in Bradford at eleven-thirty; and by twelve Ellen was installed in the room that Arnold Ryerson had once used in Mrs. Muff’s house. Hamer left her there, ran down to Manningham Station and took a train to Shipley. By one o’clock he was in his hut in the intake, stretched full length on the home-made bed, happy, relaxed, safe. He stuffed the pillows under his shoulders and looked about lazily. He could afford to be lazy; he could enjoy being lazy. He felt like a general who has made a stroke of incredible swiftness and averted a great danger.

The hut looked different from what it had been a few weeks ago. Considerate Arnold had removed all his own books and papers and clothes. Already the shelves were full of Hamer’s books. He had arrived with none, but every time he came up to the hut he brought something that he had bought in a second-hand book shop. In place of the solemn, solid, reliable treatises, expositions, political histories, that Arnold had pored over, there were novels and poems in three languages, the Anatomy of Melancholy, Urn Burial, The Compleat Angler, and much else that Arnold found perplexing. “What do you get out of these?” he asked with a puzzled look, turning the books over; and Hamer said, with a wide smile: “Sweetness and light, little one, sweetness and light.”

There was nothing to indicate political thought except a few Fabian tracts; and across the cover of one of them Hamer had written: “These parlour pussy-cats think they’re terrible tigers. They’ll move next door when we pinch their rug.”

On the table his writing things were spread with great neatness. Those who were looking for such indications might find a hint of luxury in the pen-tray, pen-holder and ink-well, all of fine silver, delicately engraved. He had found them in Venice and could not resist them. They remained with him to the end of his life.

Also on the table was a small leathern casket. Years ago, one day when Gordon had taken him to see Birley Artingstall, the old man had given him this. He had put into it the curl of hair and the bloodstained ribbon that he had found among the Old Warrior’s possessions. They were there now, together with a ribbon that Ann Artingstall had given him because she had no other present to give that far-off night when she came to his party.

*

Hamer lay there contentedly, looking round on these small intimate possessions. He must soon be up, get a mouthful of bread and cheese and beer at the Malt Shovel, and write something for the Courier. He was annoyed to see the window darken. It was not often that he was ditsturbed in the hut. The intruder, without so much as a knock, pushed open the door. “Ah, I hoped I’d find you in. I was told this was your den,” said Tom Hannaway.

Hamer did not get up or hold out his hand. He put his arms behind his head and nodded to a chair. “Sit down,” he said. “That is, if you can bear to make yourself at home in the company of something so contemptible as myself.”

Tom Hannaway let out a guffaw. “Tha’s been hearing how I basted thee last night. But that’s nowt, lad. Tak no notice o’ that. That was just a bit o’ politics. Don’t let it make any difference among friends. Thee an’ me’s run many a mile together. We’ll run many another.”

“You speak figuratively, I take it,” Hamer could not resist saying, looking at his visitor’s red face and plump body.

“Ah mean,” said Tom, putting gravity into his words, “that there’s a lot us two could do together.” He joined his pudgy finger-tips and leaned towards the bed so solemnly that Hamer burst into laughter. “You look like a doctor who’s given me an hour to live,” he said.

“Ah’m giving you something much better than that. Ah’m giving you a chance in a million. Listen, lad.” He rushed right to the point. “Labour hasn’t got a chance in St. Swithin’s. Labour hasn’t got a chance anywhere. You’re ambitious. You’ve got a certain amount of talent. No one denies that. And at the moment you’re being a damned nuisance to a number of people. Now listen to me.” He leaned forward again and poked a finger into Hamer’s chest. “A nuisance has its value. It’s like some damn’ silly little shack standing where a great building wants to be. Consequently, it can demand its price. You’ve been clever, lad. You’ve created your nuisance-value. Now capitalize it. There’s other parties besides Labour, and you’ll find a future in ’em. Mind you, I name no names, but I can tell you this: You could get a safe seat as a member yourself, and be kept pretty handsomely while you’re sitting in it, if you’d clear out of St. Swithin’s; Dear old Ryerson don’t matter. We know him. He’s not like you and me. Now what d’you say? I’d like something concrete,” said Tom, looking absurdly business-like.

During this speech Hamer watched him with a lazy smile. When it was finished he swung off the bed. “I think better with a pen in my hand,” he said. “D’you mind if I clear this up? You interest me.”

“Go ahead,” said Tom, his face beaming.

He took the place on the bed and Hamer drew the chair up to the table. He sat down, took up his lovely pen, and, having gazed at the wall for a moment, began to write rapidly: “I, George William Geoffrey, Seventh Earl of Lostwithiel, being extremely apprehensive, to the extent even of blue funk, that Mr. Hamer Shawcross’s intervention in the St. Swithin’s by-election will be prejudicial to the chances of Viscount Liskeard, my son and heir, do hereby make offer to the said Hamer Shawcross of the following bribes, to be paid by me on condition that he immediately quit the constituency: (a) the sum down of £ ___; (b) the promise that I will promote his candidature in some seat selected by me, where he shall faithfully serve the interests of me and my class; (c) a sum, to be paid monthly, of £ ___ to maintain him while he sits in such seat. My hand and seal hereto attached testify that I will faithfully fulfil these conditions, should Mr. Shawcross signify his willingness to accept them.”

He threw down his pen, blotted the sheet, and handed it to Tom Hannaway. “Here is something concrete,” he said. “All that Lord Lostwithiel has to do is fill in the blanks and sign it. With that in my possession, I shall be in a position to consider my next step.”

Tom read the paper and tore it across angrily. “What sort o’ bloody fool dost take me for?” he demanded, his face purple.

“The question is readdressed to Mr. Thomas Hannaway,” said Hamer smoothly, opening the door.

*

It was an extraordinary day for Ellen. This Mrs. Muff with whom Hamer had made some rapid arrangements, and who seemed willing to do anything Hamer asked, even to the extent of shifting a washstand from in front of the fireplace and lighting a fire, brought up, later in the morning, a girl she called Pen, and Pen shouted down the stairs, and there was Arnold Ryerson.

“Mrs. Stansfield’s lucky, isn’t she, Arnie?” said Pen, pointing to the fire. “That’s more than you ever got when you were here.”

“John asked for it,” Ellen said, and Arnold explained: “Hamer, Pen. His other name’s John.”

“Does he get everything he asks for, whoever he asks?” Pen demanded a little sourly.

“I think he does,” said Arnold. “But don’t forget, Pen, Hamer does more than ask. Unto him that hath shall be given. Did you ever think what that means?”

“Aye, I’ve thought about it plenty. It means if you’ve got ten thousand quid you can lay it out at five per cent, and live like a lord on ten quid a week.”

“To apply it to what we’re talking about,” said Arnold in his grave pedantic fashion, “it means that a chap like Hamer has done so much to his own personality that other things – friendship, knowledge, power – just fly to him like filings to a magnet.”

“Well, we’ll be seeing a bit of you, I expect, Mrs. Stansfield,” Pen said; and once they were outside the door she added: “I couldn’t tick you off in front of his mother, but you make me sick, lad, the way you butter him up. And don’t run yourself down, either. Don’t be so damned humble. Think about yourself a bit more. Arnold Ryerson. It’s a good name. Say ‘I’m Arnold Ryerson.’ And stick your chin up as you say it.”

“I’m Arnold Ryerson,” Arnold said, obediently, rather shamefacedly.

“You old fool,” Pen said, nearly crying.

After lunch Arnold came again, bringing this time a stylish girl wearing a fur coat and a little round fur hat. “This is Ann Artingstall, Mrs. Stansfield,” he said. “D’you remember her? She came with her uncle Birley to Hamer’s party years ago. I’ll have to leave you together. I’ve got a busy afternoon.”

Ellen didn’t remember the girl a bit, but she seemed a nice girl. Ellen considered her covertly. She must be very rich. Old Alderman Hawley Artingstall’s daughter. She thought of the visit she had made to Artingstall’s that very morning: walking along miles of carpet, past acres of mirrors, among regiments of bowing and scraping shop assistants. She had been scared out of her wits and had clung to Hamer’s arm; but this girl, in whom all that commercial splendour should have been incarnate, did not frighten her. She talked about Hamer, and the wonderful things he was doing, and the certainty that he would have a splendid and important future. Then she said: “And now we must go and see Aunt Lizzie,” and Ellen, who was wearing the Artingstall dress, put on the Artingstall hat, which was decorated with clusters of cherries made of thin red glass, and they set out for Ackroyd Park.

What a day! thought Ellen. She had been scarcely a mile from the centre of Manchester since she married Gordon; and here she was meeting all sorts of new people, walking through this strange hilly town which was as dirty as Manchester and yet more blowy and vital; and now she was taking tea in a room the like of which she had never hoped to sit down in. Often enough she had scrubbed and dusted and polished in such rooms; and once or twice when Mr. Wilder was the minister at Emmott Street he had asked her and Gordon to tea; but Mr. Wilder’s house was nothing like this, with an old man wheeling in the tea on a wagon, and a silver kettle singing over a spirit lamp, and toast under a big silver dome. They didn’t sit up to a table as she and Mrs. Ryerson did; and Ellen felt that everything might have been most awkward if this Mrs. Lightowler that Ann called Aunt Lizzie hadn’t been every bit as nice as Miss Artingstall herself. She, too, seemed to want to talk of nothing but Hamer; and Ellen began to feel that she was the only person in Bradford who hadn’t the pleasure of knowing the extraordinary creature who seemed to have created such a stir.

But it penetrated her consciousness bit by bit. She had time to think it over, for Mrs. Lightowler said: “Well, you must stay till Hamer comes. He always looks in for dinner. And now, excuse me and Ann, won’t you? We’re going upstairs to do some work.” And despite Ellen’s attempt to get away – “I must get back to that Mrs. Muff. She’ll wonder where on earth I’ve got to” – she was put into a big easy chair and told to make herself comfortable. “Have a snooze if you like,” said Mrs. Lightowler. “No one will disturb you,” and with her own hands she made up the fire, and she and Ann went away.

They had drawn the curtains, and there was no light in the room but the firelight, and Ellen felt very tired, leaning back in a lovely chair. She thought, all the same, with some regret, of Edith coming home, as she soon would be doing now, to the house in Broadbent Street. Poor Edith would find it lonely, knitting by herself and now only for herself; and, despite all these new people she had met, despite Hamer himself, Ellen felt lonely, too, and wondered whether she would ever again live in any place she liked so much as Broadbent Street.

It was all so strange and sudden. She couldn’t make the boy out. But it had always been the same. There was always someone who thought he was different from other people. “No mill for John,” Gordon used to say; and Mr. Wilder had told her he might be a great preacher. “A very great preacher,” Mr. Wilder had said, “a very great power, under God.” And then there had been all that reading and writing that she couldn’t make head or tail of, except that it kept him shut in his room upstairs, as unsociable as you like. And, dusting up there, sometimes she came on books in foreign languages, and even pieces of writing in foreign languages in the boy’s hand, and she had wondered what it was all about, and he doing nothing but look after one of Tom Hannaway’s shops and seeming to want nothing better.

She hadn’t had much of him, she thought a little bitterly; and then off he must go, so that for nearly four years she had none of him at all. She wouldn’t for worlds admit how much it had hurt her; but other boys didn’t do that sort of thing. They stayed and kept a home for their mothers. Old Birley Artingstall was the only person to whom she had hinted these disquietudes. She couldn’t help it, that day when they were walking back from the station after seeing him off.

“You come and have a cup o’ tea this afternoon, lass,” the old man invited; and over the tea he talked about the boy. He’d watched him grow up, he said. He’d watched many a boy grow up; but this was a boy worth watching. This was a boy who was going to surprise people. “Don’t make any mistake about that, Ellen, lass.” This sudden shooting off overseas. Well, the boy was after something. Perhaps he didn’t know himself. The point was, he was seeking; and when he found what he was after – “why, lass, there’ll be people in Ancoats who’ll think the finest boast in their lives is to say ‘I knew Hamer Shawcross.’”

Half asleep before the fire, dreaming of old Birley’s prediction and of the things she had heard of Hamer that day, her mind inevitably streamed back and back, seeking some point to connect this present which as yet she could not grasp with the past in which its birth might be found. And once again she was at the point to which, now, her thought did not turn once in a year: the point where she stood, a silly girl, in a hall full of young people lit by firelight, sunk in fatigue. She saw again with extraordinary clarity the face whose contours she could never summon at will. She could not even remember his name. She felt a stab of jealousy and regret that Gordon had no part in this matter. No part? Why, if it hadn’t been for Gordon... She fell asleep, and it was of Gordon she dreamed. She was in Gordon’s arms, and she felt safe and warm and happy.

*

Ellen’s extraordinary day was by no means over. This – though she did not know it – was the last day of the great talk. Tomorrow would be polling-day. Arnold’s supporters had staged their biggest effort for that night. There was a derelict chapel in one of the streets of St. Swithin’s. It was soon to be pulled down, but the furniture was still in it. Lizzie had succeeded in hiring the place for this one night. Bills for some days had announced a “great Labour rally” at which all the talent was to be assembled, including Mr. Arnold Ryerson, the candidate, and “Shawcross of Peterloo.” This was the first time that Arnold and Hamer had appeared on the same platform. They had both instinctively avoided it. Pen Muff, too, would not permit it. She could not bear to think of Arnold being obliterated by Hamer’s personality.

Dinner at Ackroyd Park that night was a hasty and restless meal. Ann and Lizzie, worn out by weeks of work and strung up taut for this last effort, were anxious to be off. Hamer was silent. He had scarcely a word to say to anyone. Ellen was in a dither with the unusualness of her situation.

A four-wheeler came for them at seven o’clock. It was a fine night, cold but starry. The chapel, they all felt sure, was a happy thought. So many of these northern artisans were chapel-goers. They would feel at home. As they were getting into the cab, Hamer said to Lizzie: “You’ve reminded the lantern-man?” and Lizzie nodded.

They were the last to arrive. In the little vestry of the chapel Arnold was sitting poring over notes. Pen was with him; and there was Jimmy Newboult, the tall, white-faced, red-headed fanatical youth whom Hamer had chosen out of many as his “sword-bearer.” Hamer had a sure sense of the dramatic. He knew the value of Jimmy Newboult’s face which, during the processional and recessional marches, was set and grim and dedicated. There were also present the chairman, a Bradford boiler-maker, with an efficient, hard-hitting platform manner, and a good solid trade-unionist from Leeds who was to speak first. Arnold was to follow. Hamer Shawcross would end the meeting. Jimmy Newboult reported that the chapel was packed in floor and galleries. A table had been placed on the platform beneath the pulpit, within the communion rails, with chairs behind it. At half-past seven they began to file out of the vestry door into the chapel. The chairman went first, followed by Arnold and Pen Muff. Ann and Lizzie followed. The man from Leeds deferentially stood aside for Hamer, this famous young person of whom he had heard so much. Hamer shook his head impatiently, and almost pushed the man after the others. He laid a hand on Jimmy Newboult’s arm, detaining him. It was only when a slight but perceptible interval had separated him from the rest of them that he drew the sabre from the scabbard and laid it across Jimmy’s outstretched hands. Then he took Ellen’s arm, and, with head held high, followed the sabre into the hall.

If Ellen had been able to describe her emotions she would have said that she felt fair daft and dithered. She had never seen such jiggery-pokery in all her born days. That old sword that she used to clean on Saturday mornings with a cork dipped in moistened powdered bath-brick! She hadn’t seen it for years, and now there it was, going in front of her into the chapel, carried in that extraordinary way by a young man looking like a ginger ghost. And John taking her arm! That was queer enough. He’d never done it before in his life, so far as she could remember. He’d be kissing her next. By gum, she thought, the chapel is crowded an’ all! She had never seen Emmott Street, even on an anniversary day, so swollen with people. She longed for some quiet corner. The back of the gallery would do her fine; but there she was, wearing the new hat and dress, sitting next to John, with all those people gazing at her. She kept her eyes on the red serge that was stretched over the table.

There are people alive today who remember that meeting in St. Swithin’s, and, indeed, anyone who attended it could hardly forget it. It started off as a commonplace Labour propaganda meeting. The chairman bellowed his hearty platitudes, and caused Ellen to colour with confusion as he expressed his pleasure in seeing, on the same platform with Hamer Shawcross, the mother who had been all in all to him. The man from Leeds followed with a witty, racy speech; and Arnold, whom Pen had implored to do his best, not to be left in the lurch, certainly did do his best: as good a speech as he had ever delivered. Pen flushed with pleasure as he sat down, and looked along the table toward Hamer Shawcross, as if to say: “Beat that!” Hamer did not catch her eye, and she was startled by the abstracted look upon his face, as though his mind were miles away.

Then the chairman called upon him, with a flowery reference: “Mr. Hamer Shawcross, the thews and sinews of the campaign we are waging in this constituency.” Nearly everyone there knew him by this time, and when he rose a great wave of cheering broke towards him. In the midst of it, he turned, and to everybody’s amazement, mounted the pulpit steps. This little action was so unexpected that the cheering died down, and by the time he faced them, leaning slightly forward with the weight of his body resting on the hands that grasped the pulpit rail, there was a profound silence into which his first quietly-spoken words fell with effect. “My friends. I have come up here because I am going to preach to you from the word of God.”

He stood up straight, pushed back the wave of hair that fell across his forehead, and looked round the chapel: at the crowded floor, with people standing at the back, jamming the doors, at the galleries that could not take another man, and then down at the long table below him: Ellen’s red glass cherries, Ann’s hair coloured like white honey, the gleaming bald patch of the man from Leeds. Never before had he had such an audience. Only a fool would waste it by standing down there. Here he was commanding, isolated, Hamer Shawcross, Shawcross of Peterloo.

He took a Bible from his pocket, placed it on the lectern, and opened it at the twenty-first chapter of the Revelation of St. John. “I saw a new heaven and a new earth.”

Before he was done, there was not a man or woman in the audience who had not seen it, too. There was no “St. Swithin’s” about that address. It was only when he had finished that people noticed he had spoken for an hour. It was the longest speech he had made. He did not use a note. All the immortal promises of the chapter threaded themselves through a masterpiece of romantic oratory. He shall wipe away every tear. There shall be no mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more. The old things are passed away. The old things. He went through them all – the old things that every one there knew too well: the sorrows of the poor. Passed away! They held their breath, those people. They saw the widow’s tears assuaged, they saw a world of plenty and themselves living in it with freedom and joy. They saw Jerusalem come down from Heaven and dwelling among men, in England’s green and pleasant land.

He didn’t mention, as Pen Muff noted, a single thing that you could call a fact. He didn’t mention the candidate or the party; but only a fool could have missed the implications of his splendid imagery. This was a possible world he was painting for them: let them go out and get it. They would get it when the old things were passed away.

They were spell-bound, and knew not whether they were listening to speech or sermon; but they felt they could listen for ever to this shepherd leading them to delectable mountains. The healing of the nations... no curse any more.

There are those who say that this was the greatest speech Hamer Shawcross ever delivered – and there were close on fifty years of speech-making still before him. There are those who say that it was pure fustian, a shameless harping on the emotions of lives starved of the beauty he promised them, desolate for the hope he conjured up, hungry for the food he spread as plentifully and deceptively as banquets laid before Tantalus.

He himself has left in the diary a comment on this occasion which, whatever else it was or did, gave him the reputation, which he never afterwards lost, of being the greatest romantic orator of his party.

“After Tom Hannaway had left me, I wrote what I had to do for the Courier and then I lay on the bed in Arnold’s hut, thinking of the meeting that night in Selby Street chapel. I wanted to finish up the campaign on a high note, an appeal to the hearts of the people, because I believe that through their hearts, not their heads, one can get their votes. The fact of the meeting being in a chapel made me think of that twenty-first chapter. Rightly handled, the promises could seem heavenly or earthly. Years before, when I was a local preacher, I had dealt with this theme. I had liked it so much that I took it round: I preached on it in every chapel in the circuit. So it was firmly in my mind. I don’t forget those things. I made no notes, but lay on the bed, half-asleep, half-awake, letting the thing saturate my mind and trying over some good phrases. Tom went at two. I lay on the bed till six, and then went down to Lizzie Lightowler’s.

“As soon as I started I knew it was going to be good. There is sometimes a resistance about an audience. You have to beat them down. This audience ‘went under’ at once. It was as though they were hypnotized. And I myself felt, after I had been speaking for a little while, as though I were being used for the promulgation of truths that came from outside me. Often as I had spoken on this theme, never had I felt such conviction of the beauty and truth of what I was saying: so much so that I could almost literally see a world of peace and justice descending before my eyes and displacing the stony streets of St. Swithin’s. It was an experience of a peculiar sharpness and sweetness.

“Some time before this, I had come upon John Addington Symonds’s great hymn and had made up my mind that the meeting should end, unexpectedly, with the singing of it. I believe in the value of such dramatic moments. So I had arranged with Lizzie Lightowler to have the verses of the hymn prepared on slides and to have a man with a lantern in the gallery. A screen was hung behind the pulpit, where the choir usually sits, and, though no one but me and Mrs. Lightowler knew it, there was a man in the organist’s seat.

“I had not realized, when these arrangements were made, how well they were going to fit into the occasion. I ended by speaking of Labour’s crusade for universal peace, because that’s what I had to do – make these people feel that they were crusaders, not mere voters bought with a pint of Lostwithiel’s beer or a Labour promise of another sixpence a week.

“When I had finished I stood where I was. Most of the lights were lowered, and the lantern shone the first verse on to the screen, as the organist played a well-known hymn tune to which it could be sung. When he began it a second time, they had tumbled to it, and started to sing:

These things shall be! A loftier race

Than e’er the world hath known shall rise,

With flame of freedom in their souls

And light of knowledge in their eyes.

“It was amazing. The hymn was, of course, the perfect conclusion to what I had been saying, and as I listened to its harmonies swelling through the hot crowded chapel, I knew that I had succeeded: that these people were seeing not a provincial by-election but a purpose to which lives might be dedicated.

“I stood there till the last verse began:

New arts shall bloom of loftier mould,

And mightier music thrill the skies

And every life shall be a song

When all the earth is paradise.

“I did not wait for the end of it. Half-way through the verse I walked down the pulpit steps. Jimmy Newboult saw me coming, picked up the sabre, and came to meet me. He walked before me to the vestry. When the others came in, I was too weak to stand. Pen Muff gave me a drink of cold tea out of a bottle. My mother was on the verge of tears. She said: ‘It was beautiful. I wish Gordon could have heard it.’ Ann Artingstall was crying without restraint. Arnold Ryerson took my hand and said: ‘It was enough to make the very stones stand up and testify.’”

The Bradford boiler-maker and the man from Leeds went away together. Pen Muff took Ellen to the house in Thursley Street. Ann and Lizzie suggested supper at Ackroyd Park. Hamer merely shook his head, and they understood his mood and left him. Arnold said: “Are you walking up to Baildon, Hamer?” and Hamer said: “Yes – alone, if you don’t mind, old man.” Then Arnold went, too, and no one was left in the vestry but Hamer and Jimmy Newboult.

Hamer sagged in the chair, his long legs outstretched. Jimmy loitered about uncertainly, his lean face, that had those almost white eyebrows and lashes that often go with red hair, lit with livelier fanatical fires than usual. The sabre lay on the table.

Presently, Hamer got up. “Well, Jimmy,” he said in a voice utterly weary, “that’s the end of it. That’s all we can do. Thank you, and good-bye.”

Then Jimmy did a surprising thing. He picked up the sabre by the point, knelt suddenly on one knee, and tendered the hilt toward Hamer’s hand. Hamer divined the boy’s intention, hesitated, wondering, perplexed. What would people say? Damn people! He looked down at the burning bush of Jimmy’s bowed head, and laid the sabre lightly upon his shoulder. Jimmy got up. “Now I am your man,” he said. “Call me when you want me.” He seized his hat and rushed out of the room.

Hamer thoughtfully buckled on the scabbard, thrust the steel home. The little incident shook him, and uplifted him, more than anything that had happened that night. It might have been ridiculous, farcical. But it wasn’t. He thought of Jimmy’s white, dedicated face. No, it wasn’t. It was beautiful.

A couple of hours later he climbed the wall into the intake. He leaned upon the cold stones and looked out over the moor stretching away in shadowy undulations beneath the stars. His exhaustion was gone. He felt the lightness, the joyful relief, of the creator when his task is done. He leaned there for a long time, the events of the evening defiling in a satisfying procession before his inner eye. Far off a star tore from its moorings and streamed across the dark ocean of the night. It made him think of the tears streaming down Ann Artingstall’s face; and on the thought, he lifted his latch and flung himself upon the bed, dressed as he was, with the sabre girded to his thigh.

*

It was grand fun to have the noble lord for a coachman. You carried him on your back for years on end, and now, to show what a good sport he could be, here he was ready to take you in his drag to the poll.

A heartening morning, with the late autumn sun shining on the streets, and the early winter nip making the air as gorgeous as Bradford air can be, like a mouthful of wine. Heartening to the ears is the sound of the silver horn, spilling its music down these streets that hear little but the drone of the barrel-organ, the pom-pom-pom of solemn Teutons, blowing out red cheeks decorated with blond whiskers. Heartening the clatter of sixteen hoofs on the granite setts, as the greys lift their knees up and down with a pedantic precision, as though determined on voting day to put up an extra-special topnotch show for the benefit of St. Swithin’s burgesses.

Heartening the sight of my lord, the God-knows-how-manyth Earl of Lostwithiel, sitting up here with the ribbons nattily gathered in one yellow glove, the whip curling round his grey curly-brimmed topper, the tight-wasted, long-skirted greatcoat enclosing more decrepit nobility than St. Swithin’s is likely to see again for a long time. His hair, black and dull as indian ink, his cheeks neatly brought to the similitude of a June rose, a veritable rose at his lapel, he bestows the urbanity of his smile upon all who climb into the drag. “Good morning, Buck!” “Good old Buck!” they shout, and look enviously at the lucky dog who, being first in, has succeeded in sitting next to the Lady Lettice Melland, squeezed by the others into an unambiguous pressure of plebeian to noble thigh. O joy! O voting day!

The horn peals into the morning; his lordship touches the flank of a leader, drops the whip into its socket, and thus has a hand free to raise the grey topper to the housewives of St. Swithin’s, standing, arms folded or akimbo, on the yellow-stoned doorsteps of their houses. Lordly salutation! How can you resist it? Bring out your husbands.

The urchins of the district run, with a clatter of clogs, alongside the horses. They sing:

Vote, vote, vote for good old Liskeard,

Chuck old Ryerson out the door;

If I had a penny pie,

I’d dab it in his eye,

An’ he wouldn’t come to Bradford any more.

The horn-player plunges a hand into his pocket, pulls out a fistful of ha’pennies, and rains them down into the street. That’ll teach ’em who their benefactors are! That’ll educate the electors! Tally-ho!

The voters tumble out at the polling-booth. Lady Lettice Melland shakes out the coat which she will give to her maid tonight to be fumigated. The horn-blower places a cigar between Lord Lostwithiel’s lips and holds a match.

So far as one can see, his lordship is in excellent humour. A grin stretches his lean face, tightens to whiteness the skin on his high beak, as they call him Buck. But his heart is chewing over an insult as he sits up there puffing serenely into the sharp air. A letter had reached him that morning:

“My lord: An agent whom I can assume to have come only from a person equally wealthy and unprincipled, called upon me yesterday and made proposals to which I replied in the terms you find here enclosed. He seemed to think that his employer would hesitate to put his hand to the document, but it would be an historical record of such interest and curiosity that I give you the opportunity to prove him wrong. Your anything but obedient servant, Hamer Shawcross.”

There was enclosed a copy of the paper which Tom Hannaway had torn across, and which had been rewritten. Already, before the letter came, my lord had received reports of the Labour meeting in Selby Street chapel. Carried ’em off their feet. Had ’em crying and singing like Salvationists. Promising ’em the moon. My God! He’d seen plenty of that in his time, plenty of these chaps with dangerous tongues, but never one like this – such a good-looker, nothing of the hang-dog Radical-rebel cut.

And then the letter came, and the old man tore it angrily to shreds, chucked it in the fire. “Harris, pray bring me a glass of brandy!” He calmed his shaking fury, dolled himself up, and came down, outwardly debonair, to the service he had undertaken for the day. But he was seething yet. Run him down!

The greys were turned. The drag was ready to go back for more voters. He saw the man coming at the very moment when Lady Lettice said: “There’s Shawcross!”

*

There were a number of lame and crippled voters in the St. Swithin’s division. “I’ll see to them,” said Hamer, and made a note of all their addresses. He got a spinal carriage from a doctor who was in sympathy with the Labour cause, and he began his rounds. Ann Artingstall was with him.

The first house they called at was Jimmy Newboult’s house. It was in a street that stood back-to-back with another street. There were regular Siamese twins of streets, indissolubly connected by their spines. You couldn’t open a window at the back and let the air blow through. If you knocked a hole, you would be in the parlour of a house in the other street. At either end of the street was an earth closet, and it was Jimmy’s duty, on necessary occasions, to take his father there. A shattered fly-wheel had hit Jimmy’s father in the spine a couple of years before. It was Jimmy’s ambition to be able to move to the end house, nearest the earth-closet; and the fact of his having to nurture an ambition so improbable and unromantic was, before all else, the cause of his dissatisfaction with things as they were. This one silly fact had started the fanatical fires behind Jimmy Newboult’s pale eyes. The new Jerusalem that Hamer had promised last night no doubt meant many things to many men. To Jimmy it meant that inconceivably urbane fashion of living which did not compel an invalid to go half the length of a street to reach the closet.

Mr. Newboult was laid in the chair. Hamer took the handles. Ann and Jimmy walked on either side. They were in the middle of the road, nearing the polling-booth, when Ann said: “There’s Lostwithiel!”

Hamer had had his gaze on the waxen face of Mr. Newboult, lying there with closed eyes, and with parchment hands folded on the rug. He looked up and saw the drag with the four-in-hand a hundred yards away. Like him, it was in the middle of the road. He drew over at once to his left. The horses began to come on, and to his surprise they moved to their right. They began to gather pace, and he paused, wondering what to do. There was not much time to move an invalid up to the pavement with the delicacy that would be necessary, so he swerved the spinal carriage to the other side of the road. The horses at once changed direction, coming now at a lick, and Ann Artingstall screamed. Hamer let go the handles of the carriage and shouted: “Hold it here, Jimmy!”

Jimmy was white to the gills, but he did as he was told, conscious of faces peering from doorways and of shrill warning cries adding themselves to Ann’s shriek.

Hamer ran to meet the horses – ran as he had never run before – and reached them when they were twenty yards away from where Jimmy stood shaking and Ann was stifling her cries with fingers stuffed into her mouth. She was hardly conscious of the next few seconds’ happenings. It was all to her a wild scuffle, as Hamer leapt at the head of one of the leaders, forcing the pair across the road. She heard someone shout: “Put on the brakes!” and saw what was happening as another voice answered: “God strewth! ‘E’s whippin’ ’em on!”

She saw Lostwithiel’s whip belabouring the horses, his reins striving to defeat the thrust that Hamer was making away from the spinal carriage. She saw the red distended nostrils of the frightened beasts as they hurtled past, just clearing her and Jimmy Newboult; and the next thing she knew was that she was running, running, to where, sweating and trembling, the four horses were at last standing in the road.

Hamer had been dragged a hundred yards, holding to the horse’s head. The sole was hanging from one of his shoes, his face was wet with perspiration, and across one cheek an angry weal was burning. Ann had never seen such a blaze of fury as was in his eyes.

“You damned old blackguard!” he was shouting as she came up. “You tried to run me down. You did it deliberately, and you struck me deliberately with your whip.”

Lostwithiel was fuming, too. Anger could not drain the roses from his cheeks, but his black eyes smouldered as he yelled: “Stand out of the way! How dare you interfere with my horses!”

Hamer continued to hold the horse’s head. Get down to him. Horsewhip him in front of all these people. Humiliate him. The ideas ran through the old man’s mind like fire. It wouldn’t be the first upstart scoundrel he’d thrashed. He threw the reins to the hornblower, and clambered down as actively as a man half his age, the whip in his hand. Hamer let go the horse and took a pace towards him.

A crowd had gathered, licking its chops. It was not often provided with a spectacle like this. Shawcross looked a huge chap when he stood alone, but old Buck, straight as a ramrod, that big skirted coat flowing round his calves, the whip in his hand, overtopped him by an inch even without the tall hat. That made him look immense. He scowled like a gargoyle, thrusting his face into Hamer’s. “You annoy me, sir,” he said. “I don’t like you. You are in my way.”

“I should deeply regret it, my lord,” said Hamer, “if there were anything in me that could take your fancy. Let’s talk from an equal height.”

He snatched the topper from old Buck’s head and spun it into the drag. “That’s better.”

Never in all his life, not by one of his own class, had Lostwithiel been so coolly and publicly insulted. The blood surged before his eyes and he swung up the whip. At the same time Hamer pulled the sabre from its scabbard. He stepped back a pace and shouted: “I warn you, my lord! If you so much as touch me with that whip, by God, I’ll cut you down, old man though you are.”

Lostwithiel hesitated for a second, looking at the white resolute face on which the weal shone red. He had never seen such hatred and fury. It kept his arm from falling, and into the silence in which the gape-mouthed crowd stood and wondered there fell the voice of Lettice Melland, cool and quiet. “I beg you, sir, to come back. You are in the wrong of this.”

The old man let the whip fall to his side. He turned back towards Lettice. “Wrong? Wrong, m’dear? There can be no right or wrong between us and these people. I’ve seen ’em hung. I’ve seen ’em transported...”

“Come back, sir,” Lettice begged. “You are saying too much.”

There was a guffaw from the crowd at the admission; and Hamer seized the point. “D’you hear that, men? Go and tell your friends. Tell them that Lord Lostwithiel strikes at Shawcross of Peterloo when he’s hanging from a horse’s head, and dares not strike standing face to face. Tell them that this outfit of his is a tumbril taking you to your own execution. Keep out of it. Use the legs God gave you. Walk to the poll, and vote Labour! If you’re too lazy to walk, wait till I’ve got Jimmy Newboult’s father back home, and I’ll come and wheel you in a pram.”

There was a laugh and a cheer and a few timorous boos for Lostwithiel. Buck had climbed slowly back to his seat, taken up the reins, and put on his topper. He clicked to his horses. Lady Lettice Melland leaned out and said: “Allow me at least to apologize. And congratulate you on a brave action.”

Hamer took off his hat. “Thank you, my lady,” he said. “It is kind of you to congratulate me. But I cannot accept apology for something you had no hand in. That should come from Lord Lostwithiel. However, I think he has gained us a few votes, richly as we all deserve hanging or transportation.”

Lostwithiel swung round and growled: “Go to hell.” The horn sounded, and sixteen hoofs went gaily clickety-click. The air was no less heartening, the sun no duller; but he felt he needed a brandy. He turned his head and said tartly: “You had no cause to interfere, m’dear, no cause at all. Insufferable swine! I’d have whipped the hide off him.”

Lady Lettice was diplomat enough to make no answer, but she doubted it, and knew that Lostwithiel doubted it, too. She couldn’t get Shawcross’s face out of her mind. Clearly, he would have dealt with Lostwithiel as he would have dealt with a mad dog, with neither respect nor mercy.

*

Jimmy Newboult took the handles of the spinal carriage and pushed his father towards the polling booth. Ten yards behind, Hamer flip-flopped along on his broken sole, Ann Artingstall at his side. Last night he had seen her in tears. Today he had heard her shriek. He felt he was getting to know her. She was still shaken. She could see the four horses thundering by, with him hanging on, trailing, dragging, only by heaven’s mercy clear of sixteen thrashing ironshod hoofs. She shuddered, stopped walking, and leaned against a wall, overcome suddenly by nausea.

“What is it, Ann?” he said, and his voice was full of anxiety and kindliness. It was the first time she had heard him speak like that. Always till now ironic badinage or dead seriousness. The kindly note brought tears trembling under her eyelids, ready to fall. She managed to smile through them, and said: “I thought you were done for. But there you are. You look solid enough.”

She laid her hand on his arm, which was, goodness knows, solid enough. He placed a hand over it, detaining it there for a moment. “We could do a lot together, you and I,” he said. “We want the same things, don’t we?”

She felt her heart beating like an engine. “We must help Jimmy,” she managed to say. “It’s hard work for him – uphill.”

“It’s going to be hard work for all of us – uphill,” he answered. “We’ll all need comrades. Arnold will marry Pen. Had you noticed that?”

“What gossip for the busiest part of election-day!” she said. She tried to look severe, but he saw that her face was radiant. “I’m ashamed of you. Let’s get on with our work.”

“Very well,” he said. “But I shan’t be flinging myself under horses’ hoofs every day. I thought I’d propose while you were blinded by admiration.”

She had begun to run ahead, but at that she paused and waited for him to come up. “Blinded?” she said. “Oh, my dear, I haven’t had to wait to be blinded. I’ve been watching you for weeks with all my eyes and all my love.”