“I know what men say of me. The favourite word is arrogant. Very well, I accept that. I am arrogant, if it is arrogant to have never been without awareness of my own worth. I am as God made me, and He made me with a sense of work to do and a sharp impatience with circumstances and people that got in the way of my doing it. Is this arrogance? Call it so if you like. I know that when Lostwithiel – Liskeard as he then was – defeated me in 1892, I felt as though he was holding up the march of history. As he was. Was it arrogance to be bitter then? I was bitter.”
This belongs to a very late stage of the diary. In the early parts, the young man is content to record. Toward the end of his life, the old man, increasingly aware of himself as a personality, is apt to parse and analyse himself, and to justify his ways to men.
It was an understatement to say that he was bitter when Lord Liskeard defeated him in the St. Swithin’s division in the General Election of 1892. It was the first substantial reverse of his life, and what made it worse was that his vote was only a few score more than Arnold Ryerson’s had been. There was not much kudos in the fight, either. He had burst like a bombshell into the constituency when Arnold fought the by-election. The eyes of the country were on St. Swithin’s. Newspapers would use what he had to say about it. This General Election was another matter. The fight raged throughout the country. There was no reason why the particular spot known as the St. Swithin’s division of Bradford should attract attention. Old Gladstone, the Liberal war-horse, was uttering his last snort. This already legendary, rough-hewn, huge-beaked figure, eighty-three years old, with a Home Rule Bill for Ireland up his sleeve – he was the cynosure. In the light of that spectacular sunset, what happened to Mr. Hamer Shawcross was of small account. His defeat was unnoticed. Perhaps that was as bitter a thing as any. He was so convinced that he was by now a figure, as indeed he was. He was the author of Tyler, Ball and Company, of Work without Wages and Wages without Work, two books which brilliantly presented the lot of those who lived by working and those who lived on rents and interest. Besides these three enormously popular books, he was the author of innumerable tracts that brought him a steady income, he was accustomed to be consulted at every turn by those who hoped soon to bring an Independent Labour Party into being, and wherever there was an agitator’s job to be done – and, goodness knows, in the conditions of the time these jobs were innumerable – Hamer Shawcross’s eloquence was enlisted to blow up the fire. He and his sabre were here, there and everywhere, and he had indeed every reason to know that he was a national figure. But the cold fact remained that he was still battering in vain at the door of Parliament, and that Liskeard had slipped in again, and that, nationally, it seemed to matter to no one whether he was in or out. What caught everyone’s eye was that Gladstone was in, to give the old Queen another bellyache, and that Keir Hardie was in. She wouldn’t, of course, know what Keir Hardie meant, but Lizzie Lightowler knew, and Hamer and Ann knew. It put a pleasant coating on the pill of Hamer’s defeat.
*
They walked home together through the summer night to Lizzie’s house: she and Ann, Hamer and Jimmy Newboult. Jimmy’s white fanatic face was strained with the work and worry of the last few weeks. He felt that the defeat was all his fault. Henceforth, whenever anything went wrong with Hamer Shawcross, Jimmy Newboult was to take it upon his own heart.
“No man was ever more faithfully served than I was served by James Newboult.” This was the tribute of the diary years afterwards. “Our meeting was casual, at the time when I first went to the St. Swithin’s division. When my friend Ryerson was defeated there and I was chosen as the prospective candidate, we began to build up a strong organization with Mrs. Lightowler as chairman of the committee, my wife doing the secretary’s work, and Newboult as election agent. His father died soon after the election Ryerson fought, and Mrs. Lightowler removed Newboult from the slum he lived in and set him up in a small tobacconist’s and newsagent’s shop. He made a success of it, and all his leisure he devoted to my affairs. He would not, at that time, accept a salary, but he remained tenaciously concerned for my welfare up to the time when he became my parliamentary private secretary, on my appointment as Minister for the Co-ordination of Internal Affairs. That our long – and to me, lovely – association ended under a cloud has been a matter of gossip; but my conscience in the matter is clear, and if, contrary to my wishes, this private record is ever made public, this at any rate will stand daylight: that whatever, at the end, James Newboult thought of me, I have never ceased to think of him as a noble spirit, dedicated to the service of his fellows and tireless in heaping good upon myself.”
What then – that hot summer night, walking up Manningham Lane with Hamer’s hand laid across his shoulder – could Jimmy imagine. of what might happen “at the end?” He was a man of the passionate present moment, and all that he could receive into his mind was the bitter truth that they had fought – fought like the devil – and lost. He could recall Lostwithiel’s painted sneer as he led his son to the window to receive the cheers of the dupes who could not see the light. “How do they do it? How the devil do they do it?” he demanded angrily, flinging down his hat in Lizzie’s hall.
They went upstairs to the old den that had seen so many of their conferences, listened to so much of their hope and fear. Lizzie threw up the window and the air that flowed in was at furnace heat. She stood looking at the poplars drawn like black quills upon the luminous air, and at the hills beyond them, where a young moon was following the sun down the sky. “The baby helped,” she said.
The baby indeed had been most opportune. The Viscountess Liskeard, who had done so well as Lettice Melland, did even better this time, canvassing for a few days, then taking to her bed, so that the rum our of her illness sent a wave of sympathy in Liskeard’s direction; then allowing it to be known that the illness was but the prelude to a “happy event,” so that sympathy changed to genial good wishes; and finally producing a daughter on the eve of polling-day. Old Buck Lostwithiel drove about in his drag, calling on the burgesses to “vote for the Honourable Molly’s father” and distributing largess for the drinking of health to “dam and filly,” as he gaily put it.
“We’ll keep up the succession,” he shouted into the torrid Town Hall Square when the result was known. “I suppose by the time the Honourable Molly’s twenty-one, you’ll have votes for women and women members doing their darning in the House of Commons. I’ll be in my grave by then – but not much before then – soh, no! – and my son will be in the House of Lords. Then you’ll want a new member. Well, we’ve produced one for you on the eve of this happy day. You need never go outside the family.”
“Yes,” said Lizzie, “undoubtedly the baby helped.”
They stood round her at the window, looking into the silent night. Hamer’s arm was still on Jimmy’s shoulder. He knew what Jimmy was feeling, and the friendly gesture said to Jimmy: “It’s not your fault – not your fault at all.”
“Well,” said Lizzie suddenly, “I’ve always liked this view. I liked it the day my husband brought me here, and I’ve never got tired of it. But this is good-bye. There’s nothing more to be done here.”
“There’s everything to be done,” said Hamer. “There’s St. Swithin’s to be taken from Liskeard.”
“That’s your job,” Lizzie answered. “And you’ll do it. I’m not afraid of that. But Keir Hardie’s in. Labour is in. Why are we moping? Why are we standing here as dull as cod on a slab? You, Jimmy Newboult, why aren’t you singing Hallelujahs? Don’t you all see what it means? The thin end of the wedge. Our people – Labour and nothing but Labour – are in Parliament. I’m going to London. The scene has shifted, my children, and I want to be in the middle of it.”
Hamer, indeed, saw what it meant. He had seen it just as soon as Lizzie. But he was not yet ready to rejoice. It was still incredible to him that he – he! – had been rebuffed.
*
It was characteristic of Lizzie Lightowler that within a week of making up her mind to go to London, she was there. She found a little house in North Street, that opens off Smith Square in Westminster; she hustled the decorators at one end and the furniture removers at the other; and, when all was done, she looked ruefully at her new quarters that lacked the space of the square black Bradford house and that had no outlook on familiar hills climbing to the moors. But she could walk to the House of Commons in ten minutes; and, lying in her bed at night, she could not only hear the boom of Big Ben but almost feel his reverberation, which seemed to her like the breathing of history.
On the sixth of August Ann and Hamer travelled to London. Neither knew much about the place, and they had not been there together before. Arm-in-arm, they walked out of King’s Cross Station into the dirty Euston Road which they looked upon with wonder that this wilderness of filthy brick and stone could indeed be the Babylon that they must capture.
They walked to Westminster: down Southampton Row, and along the Strand to Whitehall, and down Whitehall to the towers and pinnacles and crumbling stones: the Houses and the Abbey, Westminster Hall and St. Margaret’s Church. Now Babylon looked another matter. They stood entranced, Hamer holding the small wooden box which had travelled with him through five continents, Ann with a sunshade tilted over her shoulder. Buses and hansom cabs and four-wheelers flashed and rumbled by; pigeons tumbled in the air above the towers that were so white upon the blue; from the river came the hoot of tugs and the occasional moan of a siren.
“So this is it,” said Hamer at last; “this is what all the dusty work and drudgery means – to get through those doors.”
Ann pushed the sunshade farther back so that she could look up into his face. She was conscious of a shock of surprise at its hungry concentrated stare. “It means more than that,” she said. “Getting through those doors – yes, that’s a beginning. But it won’t be the end of the dusty work and drudgery. You’ve got to make ’em see in there all the dust and work and drudgery there is in the world, and make ’em see the people who endure it.”
For a moment he did not answer. He continued to stare toward the House; then “Eh? What?” he said. “Oh, yes, there’s all that, too.”
Ann was aware of a little chill that struck her in the hot August street. “All that, too.” Oh, that first and foremost and all the time, her heart cried; else what meaning is there in all I have been, all I have done, ever since the night I met you – the night that meant the loss of home, and parents, the swift change from everything I was till then?
Big Ben tolled two. “That’s the voice of it all,” said Hamer. “I hear that bell in my dreams. This is what Wordsworth was looking at, Ann, when he wrote the sonnet on Westminster Bridge, these very towers and spires. Earth hath not anything to show more fair. The Lake poet! Hasn’t that ever struck you as strange? Here was the man dedicated to the beauty of nature, living among lakes and mountains, famous as the poet of solitude. And he puts it all second best to this – the very heart of a great city. And, by God, he was right! This is it. Earth has not anything to show more fair.”
It was, Ann reflected, a typical Hamer observation. Often as she had read the sonnet, that thought had never struck her. “I don’t think anyone but you would have noticed that,” she smiled, tucking her arms in his. “Let’s go. From Aunt Lizzie’s directions, we can’t be more than ten minutes away from North Street.”
The day was good again, the little tug at her heart forgotten.
*
They found Keir Hardie in Lizzie’s house. They had met him before, but Ann at any rate felt she was looking at someone she had never met. Hardie got out of his chair and engulfed her hand in his. “I feel we ought to be introduced,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve met the most significant man in Great Britain.”
His grave face softened to a smile, “Significant? No, no, Mrs. Shawcross. There’s a rising tide, you see. I happen to be the first bit of flotsam it’s pushed up on the beach. There’ll be more – lots more. But the significant thing is the tide. Remember that, Shawcross.”
He was thirty-seven – ten years older than Hamer. His face was of startling candour and integrity. Hair of a golden brown, already turning a little grey, curled above the broad serene forehead. The deep-set eyes glowed with purpose; the nose was beautifully shaped, and the beard failed to conceal the mingled strength and kindness of the mouth. He was a peasant. His face might have been a peasant’s or an enlightened prince’s: it was a man’s.
Ann was aware of his fearsome struggle: working at six years old, in the coal-mine at ten, wresting knowledge how and when he could. All this was written in the deep lines of the forehead, and the triumph over it was in the serenity that shone from the man’s face in an almost palpable emanation.
Hamer sat down and lit his pipe. “I’ll expect to see you on the wagonette tomorrow,” Hardie said with a smile.
“Wagonette?”
“Aye. It’s a daft idea some of the boys have. They want to take me to the House in triumph. It doesn’t run to a four-in-hand turn-out, so some of them have hired a wagonette, and we’re driving to the House in that. I’ll humour them, though I’d prefer to walk or ride on a donkey. But I’d like you to be there, Shawcross. After all, however we do it, it’ll be Labour’s first appearance in the House.” He leaned forward and laid his hand on Hamer’s with the extraordinary benevolence that was part of him. “That being so,” he said, “you have a right to be present.”
“I did not accept this invitation,” Hamer wrote in the diary. “I have an enormous admiration for Keir Hardie, but I did not want to appear at his side, riding in a wagonette. I excused myself on the ground that others had done more for the party than I had, but the fact is that when I ride to the House I shall ride in my own chariot, not another man’s.”
But he was there with Ann and Lizzie to see the chariot arrive. Parliament Square was full of eager movement in the bright August sunshine. Hansom cabs and broughams and victorias rolled to the doors of the House, bringing old members who had been re-elected and new members making their first acquaintance with the solemnities of the senate. There were famous figures to catch the eye and hold the attention: Gladstone, Salisbury, Buck Lostwithiel, driving his drag with Liskeard and a party of friends behind him.
“And there’s the Brummagem bagman,” said Hamer, as Joe Chamberlain, wearing his property outfit of orchid and monocle, staring his stupid unintelligent stare, passed through the door. “The Radical! The awful bogeyman who used to frighten the dear old Queen! Well! He’s lived and learned which side his bread is buttered on.”
It was a relief to him to talk. The sight of Liskeard entering the House had caused his heart to thump. There, given the grace of God, might be I. But the grace of God was strangely withheld; and a moment later there was old Lostwithiel, driving the drag homeward, grinning like the devil he was, and pointing Hamer out with his whip to Lady Liskeard. “D’you want a lift anywhere, Mr. Shawcross?” he shouted, checking the pace of his horses. “Can I run you up to St. Swithin’s? Plenty to do there, y’know.”
Hamer’s face flamed. He remembered this girl leaning from her pony to push with a stick his hat from out of her way, as though it were a piece of dirt. He remembered this vile old man charging upon him behind four horses in a Bradford street. He would have liked to throw something in their teeth. At that moment, strident in the hot air of the summer day, sounded the gay note of a cornet, and Keir Hardie’s wagonette drove up. The cornet-player made the hot air ring. The two horses trotted gallantly; the group of men in the homely vehicle had an air of mild festivity, as though they were boys permitted an unaccustomed day out. Hardie sat sedate among them, wearing an old cloth cap, a tweed suit, a flannel shirt soft in the collar. He jumped down from the wagonette, and, amid a little spattering of applause from his companions and a final hearty cadenza from the cornet, disappeared into the House.
Lostwithiel and Lady Liskeard had both turned to stare. They did not need to be told who this homely fellow was, nor did they need any lesson concerning his significance. Lady Liskeard turned from watching the little comedy, her face lit by a smile not without humour and sympathy, but Lostwithiel had a grin that was at once malicious and rueful. “Cheer up, my lord,” Hamer shouted. “Surely you can buy off a chap like that!”
Lostwithiel glared at him murderously, flicked his leaders, and drove away, with the wagonette hanging tenaciously to his tail.
“That’s that,” said Hamer. “Let’s go now.”
They began to walk back to North Street, and he saw that Lizzie Lightowler’s eyes were full of tears. “He’s so good!” she said. “I’m an old fool, a right old fool, but I feel so happy because our first man is such a good man.”
Lizzie got them tickets to attend a session of the House. They listened to Gladstone rumbling. They looked down from their gallery upon the Government bench, upon all the faces that had been legend and were now become flesh for the first time; at members sprawling in the heat, hands in pockets, papers over their eyes, frankly asleep; at members strolling in and out as casually as though what was being conducted here were the affairs of a coffee-stall; at the wigged speaker, the sword, the mace. They looked at Keir Hardie, sitting there, saying nothing, absorbing everything, taking the measure of his opponents, biding his time.
It seemed to Hamer a slipshod, unimpressive business, if he judged it by the standard of his reason; but he knew that what he saw was only a casual, momentary foreground, and what he felt was an immense background whose drama and potency he could not withstand. “At the bar of the Commons.” The words kept drilling through his head all the afternoon. Dull the House might seem, and at this moment pettifogging and parochial; but these were the common people of England. “Ah, my friends!”
Or were they? He looked again at Gladstone, Chamberlain, Hartington, Liskeard: out of the whole bang shoot of them, he thought, I doubt if there’s a man except Keir Hardie who knows the first thing about the common people save as a matter of bluebooks and statistics. These people the Commons? Yes, maybe, as a pleasant constitutional fiction. But a great deal would have to happen before the fiction had any relation to the facts.
“Looking at Hardie sitting there so lonely, surrounded by the hordes of the two great parties that had shared the sweets of office from time immemorial, I felt anew the urgency of our task. Pleasant though this brief London interlude had been, I hurried back to Bradford to take up anew the duty of pushing Liskeard out of the St. Swithin’s division.”
*
He never did push him out. That was always for Hamer Shawcross a sore point, almost a point of humiliation. Liskeard knew it. He could always touch Shawcross on the raw by reminding him of it. When they were both old men, and Lettice seemed twenty years younger than either of them, Hamer stood looking at her portrait by Ambrose McEvoy, hanging side by side with the portrait that Sargent had painted so long before. She had developed a wise and lovely face. Everything was in it except age. Her hair had retained the colour of its youth, and the painter had put a tiara in it, above the brow that had not a line to spoil its broad benevolence. The portrait hung in the great hall at Castle Hereward, and the evening sun, striking through the stained glass that filled the stone mullions, fell upon the floor in blues and greens and purples, and one pure ray shone directly upon the face of the portrait so that the diamonds in Lettice’s hair seemed to sparkle.
The whole scene within the great hall was just as young Hamer Shawcross, with a wonderful precision of imagination, had seen it when, years before, standing on the edge of the moor with Arnold Ryerson, he had first looked on Castle Hereward and on Lady Lettice Melland riding a tubby pony over the humpbacked bridge.
And now he was inside, and dinner was over, and he knew that Lettice, who had a perfect apprehension of his moods and needs, had asked the other guests to leave him to himself. Tomorrow night he had a big speech to deliver in Leeds.
He strolled into the great hall, a fine figure in his evening clothes, his snow-white hair shining in the light of the summer evening, a cigar between his lips. On the walls about him were the Lostwithiels and their women from time out of mind. There was old Buck with his satanic grin, as Augustus John had marvellously seen him; and here was this latest one of all: Lettice by McEvoy.
Hamer was a connoisseur, and he was looking at the picture, head on one side, assuring himself in all sincerity that he preferred the Henry Lamb portrait of himself which had appeared at the same exhibition, when a soft footfall on the polished boards swung him round.
Lettice’s husband removed the cigar from his lips and ranged himself with a smile at Hamer’s side. Hamer would never have believed that young Liskeard could develop into this formidable Lostwithiel who stood beside him. Two wars, three important Embassies, a tireless interest in the game of politics, had made the young man Hamer once knew a figure that would have rejoiced old Buck’s heart: oiled with the suavity of a diplomat, full of veiled power that was never turned on like the water of a torrent but pumped up endlessly at need like the water of a well. He didn’t mind Lettice’s interest in Labour cabinet ministers, though he never concealed from her his belief that the sooner the country was quit of them the better. Now his eyes looked out quizzically from his long bony face, and he said, waving his cigar toward the portrait: “Good, eh? You like it?”
“Within limits – yes,” said the Rt. Honourable Hamer Shawcross.
“Excellent, excellent,” Lostwithiel answered. “Within limits. Limits are so important. All through dinner I was thinking about the old days in Bradford. Bless my soul – how long it is since I saw St. Swithin’s! I expect you still see a good deal of the place.”
“Oh, yes; a fair amount.”
Lostwithiel chuckled. “You never pushed me out, you remember. I’m not easy to push out.” He paused as if to let that sink in. “Well, I’m told I musn’t disturb you. Happy cogitations.” He went in his discreet noiseless fashion, leaving Hamer staring at the portrait. “Not easy to push out.” Now what the devil did the fellow mean by that?
*
It was Buck who really pushed Liskeard out of his seat and let Hamer into it. Hamer turned to look at the John portrait, one of the painter’s earliest works, done in the year of the old man’s death. The old villain to the life. John couldn’t resist anything so racy, so utterly unique, as Buck Lostwithiel, boasting in his ninety-sixth year that the devil was not going to have him for a long time yet. There he was, grey hat at an angle, cigar at a slant, yellow gloves holding the ribbons, just as he must have looked when he set out to win his celebrated wager. Old Lord Carrickfergus, his bosom crony, had been visiting him at Castle Hereward. Lostwithiel was ninety-six that day, and at dinner, in the room from which Hamer had just emerged, he was in the humour of a skeleton elated at finding itself unexpectedly capable of locomotion. He kept up a crackle of reminiscence, aware of himself as a national institution, recalling episodes of a past so remote that the younger members of the party were tongue-tied with admiration, as though longevity in itself were an achievement. And, indeed, a longevity such as Buck Lostwithiel’s was an achievement of no mean sort, for the creaking old skeleton could still touch its toes, and drink its brandy. and get through a day with no assistance from anyone. He and Carrickfergus, ten years his junior, were bragging one against the other about what they could still do; and Carrickfergus was moved to say: “Well, Buck, I don’t suppose you’ll ever drive a four-in-hand again.”
“Dammit, Ernie,” Lostwithiel squeaked in his high falsetto, “I’ll drive a four-in-hand this very night if you’ll have the guts to sit beside me.”
Carrickfergus received the offer with a smile, unfortunately for Buck a smile of disbelief. Buck tottered to his feet and cried: “I wager you five hundred guineas I’ll drive a four-in-hand at a hell of a lick five times round the measured mile. Come with me or not. D’ye take me?”
“I take you, and I come with you. Give me a horn.”
Carrickfergus, too, had now risen to his feet, and for a moment the table was held in the silence of consternation. Then Liskeard got up. “Father, I don’t think you are wise—”
‘“Wise?” said the trembling old man. “Who’s talking about wisdom? Come along, Ernie. Here – Bellows,” he shouted to the butler, “get the grooms. Get the drag out. Have the greys harnessed.”
Then Lady Liskeard intervened, rising and laying a hand on his arm, while her husband appealed to Carrickfergus. “I beg you, sir!” Lettice said. “Please! It would be madness at your age. It’s a bitter night.”
“Can’t I dress, gel?” he shouted. “Can’t I get into something warm? Those damned horses have been eating their heads off too long.”
There was now a regular hubbub in the room, the older people trying to restrain the two headstrong old men; the young thoughtlessly clapping their hands and urging them on. “The sort of thing that happened in the Regency,” one young fool was saying. “You’ll be a legend, Buck,” he added; and Lettice, white with anger, slapped him suddenly in the face. That was the second sensation of the night. The first was reported in every paper in the country; this one was not. But it started a feud which was never healed between two famous families.
When it was clear that nothing would deter the obstinate old men. Lettice made it her business to see at least that Lostwithiel was warmly clad. She went with him to his room, wrapped flannel round the frosty armour of his shirt, put a woollen muffler about his neck, and buttoned him into his celebrated bottle-green greatcoat with the capes and slender waist – there were two silver buttons at the back of it – and the flowing skirts. She took off his shining evening pumps and pulled thick bed-socks over his silken hose. Then she got him into his boots. She wanted to put on his head a deerstalker cap, and to tie the flaps over his ears; but at that he rebelled. “What, m’dear! Drive in that damned thing? And be a laughing stock for the rest of my days?”
“I’m thinking of the rest of your days,” said Lettice patiently, standing there, the firelight falling on her in her low-bosomed dress of flamy silk, the absurd cap in her hand.
The old man was smitten with sudden compunction. He looked at her with admiration lighting the dark orbs that were sunk so deep in their sockets. “By God, Letty m’dear,” he said, “you’re a fine-looking woman. That boy of mine is lucky. Give him a son, m’dear, there’s a good gel. Give him a son. We want sons – the likes of us – with the country in the damned state it is. Give us a kiss, m’dear.”
She never could overcome her repugnance at the idea of kissing his lips or painted cheeks. She could not now – this last time when it would be possible to do so. He was tall and upright, and he bent his head, and she touched her lips to his forehead.
“You’re sure you want to do this mad thing?” she asked.
He switched on his old grin. “Quite sure,” he said. “Give us a decent hat, gel. Let’s face my God like a gentleman.”
She gave him his grey topper and yellow gloves, and, fully arrayed, he stepped to the long mirror and surveyed himself. He adjusted the hat half-an-inch to the left. “There!” he said. “That’s how my father used to look when he drove down to Brighton to see fat George. That man was a bloody fool, m’dear. I’ve thought that all my life, and now I’ve said it. And a bore. And a boor. No gentleman. You’ll see changes, Letty, lots of changes. They’ll be due to fellers like that. They let us down.”
He walked out of the room and down the grand staircase, straight as a reed, but a reed shaking a little.
*
Carrickfergus had been given a horn, and he greeted approaching Lostwithiel with a silver blast. He, too, had been packed up for the adventure, and the guests had put on greatcoats and cloaks and were gathered in an excited group outside the front doors of the house. A couple of gaslights in big round globes shed a glow under the porte cochère. Liskeard, sick at heart, saw his father come out, and said nothing. This porte cochère, he knew, was one of the danger points of Lostwithiel’s venture. To pass under it was one of the constituents of driving the Castle Hereward measured mile. It had always been a favourite trick of Buck’s, a consummate handler of horses even in extreme age. Another danger point was the humpbacked bridge, which Hamer Shawcross had seen the Honourable Lettice Melland cross on her pony. Every inch of the way was known to Liskeard, and as he now feverishly surveyed it in his mind, he thought of these two as the worst places. For the rest, the road was straightforward enough, through parkland, but dangerous in the dark where it ran, twisting, downhill for a quarter-mile through a pinewood.
Lostwithiel smiled at Lettice, impulsively shook hands with his son, and took no notice of anyone else. He climbed to his seat, and Carrickfergus climbed up beside him. “Let ’em go,” he shouted to the amazed and frightened grooms who stood at the horses’ heads. With the lamps shining on the flanks of the wheelers, Lostwithiel’s whip tickling the leaders, the drag moved slowly out from the port cochère into the wind-whistling icy coldness of the night. It was eleven o’clock.
The grooms stood unhappily about. Liskeard, with dreadful providence, said to them, taking them out of earshot of the guests: “A couple of you get some stretchers. Get someone else – there’d better be four of you. Take them to the bridge. Keep out of sight. You’d better be under the bridge. You, Sutcliffe, get out a trap and bring Dr. Kershaw. Go on now. Move!”
He felt better at having done something, and rejoined the others. The night was moonless but starry. The wind was enough to blow the eyes back into one’s head. The drag had come out of the pinewood. He could see the lights streaking swiftly across the blackness, and thanked God when they slowed down toward the bridge. Then they speeded up again, and the thud of hoofs came driven down the wind. He herded the guests back toward the door of the house, out of the porte cochère. There were fifteen or twenty of them crowded on the steps, the women holding their cloaks about them, the men with collars up to their ears and hands deep in pockets, all breathless, excited, a little afraid. They were beginning to feel that there was something terrible and superhuman in that old painted skeleton riding the wind.
Liskeard held his breath as the sound of the racing horses came nearer: sixteen hoofs frantically pounding the gravel, shaking the earth. He prayed that Lostwithiel would take the porte cochère with caution, as he had done the bridge; but there was a bit of a twist at the bridge. Here the track was straight for a few hundred yards. The dive under the porte cochère was something Buck could never resist. Now he was on them. It was a swirl of sweating horse-flesh, a quick music of jingling metal, a rush of wheels that seemed to miss the walls by inches, a spatter of gravel. The gaslight flared for a moment on grey plunging flanks, the yellow whirling wheels, the alert desiccated figure, leaning slightly forward with the reins seeming to flow ahead out of his fingers like the conduits of his energy to the racing animals. They had one glimpse of his face, all bony lights and shadows. “One!” he shouted; and Carrickfergus blared on the horn. Then they were gone, and you could hear the breath of the little group come out in one sigh upon the night.
*
The grooms did not get under the bridge till Lostwithiel had passed for the first time. With the other men they had brought, they crouched in the few inches that were to spare between the masonry and the water. The wind searched them out, whistling like a flight of cold arrows through and through the narrow retreat.
“Christ Almighty!” one said, smarting at having been roused from the side of a warm wife. “T’bloody old man’s goin’ off ’is rocker. Break ’is bloody neck – that’s what ’e’ll do. If I ’ad a bed like ’is, I’d be in it a night like this, not drivin’ four poor bloody sufferin’ animals to distraction.”
“This is Friday night. ’E sleeps in ’is coffin on Fridays,” another asserted, blowing his fingers in the dark.
“That’s balls, that yarn is. ’E don’t sleep in no bloody coffin.”
“Honest to God, ’e do. Mr. Bellows told me ’imself.”
“’E’ll sleep in a bloody coffin tonight, all right. ’Ark! There they come.”
They were silent then, and awed in spite of themselves, as the ground shook, and the bridge rumbled, and the drag, once over the hump, took up its speed and hurtled toward the house. They crawled out, and, on all fours like animals watching the sport of exalted creatures, they gazed at the two receding heads black against the stars: the head of Carrickfergus round and unimpressive within swathings of shawl, the head of Lostwithiel, exaggerated by the hat, tall and insolent upon the pricked darkness of the night.
*
In the pinewood a white owl coasted down the long aisle cleft through the darkness by the roadway. It uttered no cry, made no sound, but hovered, listening and looking, then drifted forward like one immense white feather. It had been seen often enough by the boy whose father now lay under the bridge with a stretcher. He was an imaginative boy, and the great white owl obsessed his imagination. He had dreamed of it night after night, and in his dreams it was a terrible thing, making no sound, but hovering always over his head, pure as he himself was not pure. He strove to overcome his impurity, but could not; and so he resolved to kill the owl.
In the wood there was a hollow tree, and the boy, escaped from bed when he thought his father was asleep, concealed himself in the tree with an air-gun. The owl did not come, but there came something that terrified him: the sudden sound of hoofs, the creak of harness and the musical ring of bits and curbs. He shrank back into the rotting phosphorescence of the tree, and all the echoes of the wood were awakened as the horses crashed by, panting and pounding, and a whip cracked, and a high inhuman voice chanted among the great pine-trunks: “On there! A-yah! On there!” There was a flash of lights in the boy’s eyes, and he saw a tall man darkly against the greater darkness, and then the echoes were dying away and the wood was sinking back upon silence, save for the groaning of the sombre pine-arms rising and falling amid the wind’s lamentation.
When the boy fingered his gun he felt stronger. He peeped out of the death-smelling fissure in which he was concealed. The owl did not come, but the boy was patient. In the cold windy darkness he thought of his impurity, and rejoiced that before this night was done there would be no white owl to hover over him, an incarnate reproach.
He nearly died when the four horses rushed again through the blackness of the wood. This time the crying of a horn added unearthly music to the stampeding echoes, the hammering, snorting, creaking, rumbling inexplicability of the whole matter. The imaginative boy had been reading the Book of the Revelation; and his night-dreams and the white owl and these four horses charging to a horn’s music through the dark lamenting wood were tangled up in his unformed mind like the stars which he saw tangled among the branches writhing over his head. He waited for a few minutes to quieten the flutter in his breast, and then he began to run down the long aisle of the wood.
When he had run for some way, his flight inevitably suggested pursuit. He glanced over his shoulder, and the white owl was coasting through the darkness behind him. Terror nearly stilled his heart, but the need to kill the owl overcame the terror. He stepped off the path and crouched behind a tree, holding his gun. The owl saw or sensed him there, stopped itself upon the air, motionless and weightless as a great moth. Then the wings beat slowly; it approached the tree, passed it, and the boy, with shaking finger, pressed the trigger, of the soundless gun.
The owl gave a long angry scream, and then went beating forward on its way, swiftly, erratically, a damaged wing half-functioning, a sound one threshing the air to restore an impossible balance. This was the apparition that blundered, swerving madly, into the faces of Buck Lostwithiel’s leading horses, already excited by the fury of the old man’s driving. They reared and plunged, and all of Buck’s cunning in emergency was of no use then. They swung the drag round; it crashed into a tree and went over and the wheelers with it.
Here was the end that Liskeard had not foreseen, and when he and others came running with lanterns they found Lostwithiel with his brains kicked out and one of the horses lying on its side with the grey topper, impaled upon a hoof, twirling round and round as the horse thrashed.
Carrickfergus, unscratched, was hanging from a branch that had pierced the skirts of his coat; and a boy with a gun was already deep within the wood, making a detour to his open bedroom window.
*
And so the Viscount Liskeard became the Earl of Lostwithiel and removed his presence to the House of Lords. He had represented St. Swithin’s for a long time, for it was toward the end of 1900 that old Lostwithiel died. The new Conservative candidate was a stranger; the Liberals did not fight the seat; and Hamer Shawcross was elected. Eight years had passed since he sat in the House of Commons looking at Keir Hardie, the sole Labour member. They were eight years of grinding toil; the Independent Labour Party was no longer a dream but a reality seven years old; and still the Labour members in the House of Commons were fewer than the years of their party.
“But I was in. I could have been in earlier for some other seat, but I had set my heart on St. Swithin’s, and now Providence had removed the extraordinary person who had stood in the way. When the result was declared, it seemed strange not to see that legendary figure in the room, and Liskeard and his wife. Jimmy Newboult was beside himself with elation, but I felt flat now that I had achieved what I had worked toward for so long. The day happened to be my birthday. I was thirty-five, and I didn’t feel young any longer. When the shouting was over, and I had finally shaken off Jimmy, I walked up to Baildon alone. Ann had not come with me. Charles was suffering from measles, and even the declaration of the poll would not part her from Charles at that moment, though my mother could have looked after the boy well enough.”
*
Yes; there was now Charles. Charles was three, a child with an amazing constellation of names: Charles Gordon Birley Lightowler Shawcross. Hamer toiled up the hill from Shipley to Baildon repeating the absurd concatenation to himself. No mill for Charles. The phrase leapt at him out of a memory that already seemed, sometimes, incredibly far-reaching into the past: a memory of Gordon Stansfield and Wesleyan class meetings, of Birley Artingstall-Leather, and his odorous little shop; of Suddaby and his cat in the warm booky cavern shaken by the bells of Manchester Old Church. Tom Hannaway and the bone-yard and the fruit-shop with its synthetic dew, that girl – the parson’s daughter – her name eluded him, but he could recall her sharp enthusiastic features; Arnold Ryerson, toiling in Hawley Artingstall’s shop; boxing, reading, running a mile; the old ideal: the healthy mind in the healthy body.
Well, he still had that. He threw up his head, squared his shoulders, and took a deep draught of the grand Yorkshire air. He had never felt better. Three score years and ten. He’d done half of that; but, quickening his pace as he passed the old stocks and the Malt Shovel, he felt that everything was still in front of him: Hamer Shawcross, M.P.
He almost ran through the village street, dark and silent, for it was nearly midnight. Past the Moorland Cottage, now no longer his, out to the fringe of the moor. There, away to his left, he could see a light upon the darkness, a dusty red square that reminded him of the night when he and Ann had walked up to Baildon through a snowstorm and he had run ahead, leaping over the intake wall, to light the lamp in the hut. Now the house called The Hut stood on the field where the hut had been, and, frankly running now, he pushed open the gate at the spot where he had been accustomed to climb the wall, and hastened to Ann and Ellen – and Charles.
He was proud of the house. He had designed it himself and had it built out of money earned by his books. There was nothing much to it, except that every room was big. All his life he had lived in little rooms and suffered from their niggling suggestion of poverty. There was an entrance hall that was big enough to sit in, to stand about and talk in, to lounge in by a fireside. Apart from the kitchen, there were a dining-room, a large room which Ann and Ellen shared, and his own workroom. He had let his fancy go there on a huge fireplace. He loved to sit there reading at night, with his pipe on, the fire roaring, and the sense of the moor without filling in a satisfying background. Over the fireplace was the Old Warrior’s sabre, and Ellen recalled the past by polishing it on Saturdays with powdered bath-brick. The room was full of books, and comfortably near the fire was a big writing-desk with the Italian inkstand upon it, and Birley Artingstall’s leather box containing a curl of hair and a hair ribbon. One drawer of the desk was locked. It held a jumble of personal things, including a reproduction of Sargent’s portrait “The Honourable Lettice Melland.” Hamer thought it a fine work of art. The curtains of rich crimson velvet, and the red turkey carpet, were a gift from Lizzie Lightowler. With the deep leather chairs, they gave the room a great sense of well-being on a winter night, when the lamps were lit. There was not at that time any other lighting at The Hut.
But there was a bathroom, and there were three large bedrooms: one belonged to Hamer and Ann, one to Ellen, and one was the combined bedroom and nursery of Charles.
Charles, at three, was destined for the Diplomatic Service, though Hamer had said nothing of this to anyone, not even to Ann. To his constituents he said: “Ah, my friends, the dignity of labour! Old and trite as the phrase is, cast in your teeth though it may be as a cheap sneer, hold fast to it. Do not let go the deep security on which your status rests. The dignity of the arm wielding the riveting hammer, the dignity of the hand cunningly shaping the mould, turning the lathe, guiding the plough, the dignity of the back bent over toil in the town ditch and the country furrow; aye, and the dignity of the patient woman’s eye losing its lustre over the stitch, stitch, stitch, beneath the lamp in simple homes: do not lose this dignity. It is your pearl, and with it, when the time comes, you will buy your ransom.”
Whatever this may have meant, it had nothing to do with the Diplomatic Service for which Charles was destined.
Hamer was glad tonight, as he always was glad, to see the welcome light of his home shining across the darkness on the edge of the moor. It meant that Ann was up, waiting for him. He was still in love with Ann, though her political enthusiasms – or at any rate her political activities – had declined with the coming of Charles. No, certainly not her enthusiasms; for when they had discussed the education of Charles she had been all for sending him to the village board school. “I think he should mix with the children of working people. He’ll meet them there.”
Hamer did not want to make it a serious point of dispute. “It’s just a question of expediency,” he said. “Is it the wisest beginning, seeing that he’ll probably go on to a public school later?”
“But, my dear, will he? Isn’t there a perfectly good grammar school in Bradford? It’s an excellent place. He could travel to and fro daily. And if he gets a scholarship, he could go on from there to Oxford.”
Hamer smiled his most engaging smile. “I rather thought of his doing that anyhow.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Ann, perplexed. “I thought we didn’t believe in that sort of thing.”
“What sort of thing, my dear?”
“Why, making the universities the preserve of the rich.”
“Rich?” He allowed himself an ironical laugh.
“Well, you’d be rich enough to send him, or he couldn’t go,” she said with unanswerable logic. “And we are rich, compared with most people, when we combine what you earn and what I don’t. A lot of Labour people have raised their eyebrows at this house, I can tell you, my lad,” she added playfully.
He lost his temper a little then. “A lot of Labour people are fools,” he said. “Do they expect their leaders to live in hovels? That’s the worst of the damned party. It thinks down instead of up.”
“Well, we haven’t settled Charles’s future,” Ann said lightly.
“There’s time enough,” he answered, and took up his pen with the gesture which she had learned to consider a dismissal.
It was all nothing much, but it left them a little touchy with one another for some days.
*
Charles was asleep. There was no need to worry about him. Ellen, nodding with sleepiness, had sat up long enough to take Hamer in her arms and kiss him. It was years since she had done that, and he was embarrassed, but she was not. It would never cease, for her, to be a natural gesture. She said nothing. Since the telephone message had come at nine o’clock saying that he was elected she had said not a word. In their big comfortable room Ann read and Ellen knitted. They understood one another perfectly, especially since the coming of Charles. Now and then Ellen would allow her hands to fall into her lap, and would sit for five minutes staring at the fire. Ann did not break in on her cogitations. She could guess they were little more than a vague wonder, a difficult acceptance of an incredible fact, a pride that would disdain to utter itself. After a while, the old hands would take up the knitting again and go patiently on. Ellen felt much happier about Hamer and his incomprehensible doings since she had met Keir Hardie. Hardie had sat here, in this very room, and she had given him a cup of tea. “Well, Mother,” he said – and what a smile he gave her! – “thank you for the tea, and thank you for your son. You’ve given us a good boy.” He didn’t talk a lot of old politics like some who came there. He talked about his own mother, and their little cottage in Ayrshire. “A good place, Ayrshire,” he said. “That’s where Bobbie Burns came from.” He recited a bit of Bobbie Burns’s poetry, and the old lady was delighted, because this was perhaps the only poetry she would ever have recognized. It was a homely tag that Gordon had been accustomed to recite.
So she sat there nodding over her knitting, and thinking of “Mr. Hardie,” and wondering what Gordon and Birley Artingstall would have said if they had lived to see Hamer write “M.P.” after his name instead of “Rev.” before it, which was what they had both wished. And then he had come in, so tall, so much a man these days, glowing with his long walk, and she just kissed him and went off to bed.
When they were alone, he took Ann in his arms. She looked up at him with her eyes shining. “Well, my dear,” she said, “it’s been a long time. But now you’re on the other side of those doors we looked at in London.”
“How’s Charles?” he said. ‘I’d better go up and see him.”
“I shouldn’t if I were you. He’s asleep.”
“I won’t disturb him. I can step as quiet as a cat.”
They went upstairs together, and as they passed Ellen’s door, which had been left slightly ajar, they had a swift glimpse of the old lady, kneeling by the side of her bed, with her hands joined as simply as a child’s and her long nightgown falling in stiff folds about her. They were both queerly moved. “I had no idea she did that,” Hamer whispered, inside Charles’s room.
“I don’t think she does as a rule,” Ann said. “This is a special occasion, I fancy she’s commending someone and his work very particularly to God’s favour. She never talks to me about you, you know. If she believed in saints, I think she’d be asking Gordon Stansfield to intercede for you with the Almighty.”
Her voice quivered and broke, and, by the dim light of the dip burning steadily with its little light painted sharply against its own halo on Charles’s table, he saw a tear slide from her eyelids and trickle down her face. “You don’t know, my dear,” she said, “how proud she is of you. Me too.”
She stood in the all but darkness with the feeble light concentrated in her glad troubled eyes. He suddenly felt humbled. “It’s no great thing,” he said, “that I have done. What I shall do now – that’s what matters.”
He put his arm round her waist, and they stepped the few paces together to the bed. They stood and looked down upon Charles.
The child was fair, like Ann, like old Birley Artingstall, and Birley’s Viking mother. His face was flushed, and blue veins were pathetically clear upon the alabaster of his thin neck. Charles’s hair had never been cut. It clouded his face and curled in tendrils upon his forehead. Hamer gently put a finger inside one of the tendrils and smiled to see the close coil stretch and then spring back when he took his finger away. Suddenly out of that crowded, jumbled, incongruous memory of his there sprang a thought. “I wonder whether the Old Warrior ever did that to the girl Emma who used to stand on his foot and then get on tiptoe to be kissed? I wonder whether he ever did it to the very curl that is in my box downstairs – the curl that the sabre sliced away?”
And, looking at the child, unstained as yet by the world’s soiling touch, he thought of all the soil and staining of the world, of all the wrongs inflicted and endured, of all his own high resolves for the world’s betterment, and the bustle, the business and the fuss that more and more obscured and hindered him. Suddenly, without premeditation, he did what his mother had done. At the side of the child’s bed he sank to his knees and buried his head in the bedclothes. He could feel Charles’s dainty feet beneath his forehead.
Ann did not kneel down. She stole from the room. When Hamer got up and found himself alone with the child, he did not know to whom he had prayed or whether he had prayed. But he felt stronger than when he had knelt down, clearer in his vision of the sort of world he wanted Charles to inherit.
*
He went down. Ann said nothing of what had happened upstairs. She came in from the kitchen with a teapot and two cups, and she put a log on the fire.
“This looks like a session,” said Hamer. “It’s past midnight.”
“I know. But I think we’re both too excited to want to hurry to bed. After all, in any man’s life there’s only one first day as an M.P. You should be thankful I’ve made you a hot cup of tea. If you’d married Pen Muff, it would have been cold tea out of a bottle.”
“Why on earth should I marry Pen Muff?”
“Any man could do worse than that. I’ve been speaking to her tonight.”
“Speaking to her?”
“On the telephone. Arnold rang up to know if you were in.”
“An expensive call for poor old Arnold.”
Ann poured out the tea and handed him a cup. “Not so much poor old Arnold,” she said. “You always speak of Arnold as if he were one of the world’s failures.”
“I imagine he’ll aways manage to be on the losing side.”
“He’s on the same side as you, isn’t he?”
Hamer sipped his tea, laid it down, and began to fill his pipe, considering this poser. “What I mean,” he said, “is that Arnold has that strange genius which can make a failure even of victory.”
“I’m not so sure that you’re right,” she answered. “I can see Arnold making a victory of failure.”
There was a silence of infinitesimal estrangement between them as Hamer struck a match and drew the flame into the tobacco. “Anyway,” said Ann, “you’ll have a chance to form a personal opinion. He’s coming up to Bradford.”
“After all these years? Whatever for?”
“Mrs. Muff is dangerously ill. He and Pen have been called to what looks like being a funeral.”
“I’m sorry,” he said lamely. “I like Arnold. Don’t make any mistake about that.”
“And another thing. I rang up Aunt Lizzie as soon as I heard you were in. Naturally, she’s off her head with joy. She says that when you are up in town, North Street must be your home.”
“For the time being, that will be excellent.”
“Meaning?”
“Why, that we must have a house of our own in town as soon as we can manage it.”
*
Hamer took up with the tongs a fine lump of coal and dropped it upon the fire. It smouldered for a while, then began to send out whistling balloons of gas, and finally, at a touch of the poker, fell into three pieces that blazed, duskily shining on the curtains and the red turkey carpet, the long rows of books, and the four people sitting in the comfortable leather chairs: Pen and Arnold, Hamer and Ann. It seemed natural to name Pen first of that couple, Hamer of the other. Hamer and Arnold were smoking their pipes; Pen sat doing nothing. Ann was fussing over a small tea-table that had been brought in to Hamer’s room after dinner. Ellen had gone early to bed. There was no light but the firelight in the room.
They were all tired and overwrought. Hamer had sat with Pen and Arnold in the solitary four-wheeler that went slowly behind Mrs. Muff’s hearse along the road to Nab Wood cemetery. It was a dreary day – a day of Bradford fog: cold and penetrating. Pen had never got on with her mother; to Arnold she had been little more than the woman who hired him a room; Hamer had scarcely even met her. There was something hurried and perfunctory about the way in which the poor woman was committed to the ground amid the swirling vapours and the dripping trees. And it was this very sense of the sadness of the woman’s end, alone and unfriended, which they had done and could do nothing to mitigate, that set all their nerves on edge, and gave them, in place of the assuagement of tears, a dour wish that all might speedily be over, ending what could not be mended.
They did not go back to the desolate house in Thursley Road. At Shipley, Hamer dismissed the funeral cab and hired another – as decrepit and mouldy-smelling, but at all events untainted by the dolour of the day’s doings. In this he took Pen and Arnold to The Hut, where they were to stay for the night in Charles’s room. Charles’s cot had been moved alongside his parents’ bed.
At Baildon the air was clean and heartening, but bitterly cold; and there now they all were, relaxed before the fire, watching the crimson flame spurt through the blue woolly smoke.
“Best Welsh steam coal,” said Hamer. “They produce good stuff in your part of the country, Arnold.”
Pen’s face, more pinched and wan than usual because of the experiences of the day, seemed to draw into a tight knot of anger. “Yes,” she said, “it’s good stuff is coal, when you’ve got nothing to do but warm your backside by it. But sometimes I never want to see a lump of the stuff again. If I were a miner, I wouldn’t strike, I’d just walk out of the damn-awful valleys and let anyone who wanted coal go an’ get it. How’d you like to do that? This is a nice room you’ve got here, a grand room for a Labour leader. The firelight’s fine and romantic. How would tha like it,” she demanded, falling in her excitement into the dialect, “if tha had to go down into t’pit and crawl on thi belly with a sweaty shirt stickin’ to thi back every time tha wanted a scuttleful? Go an’ ask ’em things like that in the House of Commons.”
She lay back in her chair and glowered at the fire as if it were her enemy. Nobody answered her. There was silence save for the fluttering of the flames and the noise Ann made trying to cover embarrassment with the tinkle of tea-cups. It sounded as joyful as if castanets had clicked in the fog over Mrs. Muff’s open grave.
“Tha’s overwrought, lass,” Arnold at last said gruffly.
“’Appen that’s so,” Pen admitted; and added reluctantly: “Ah’m sorry.”
The admission cleared the air a little, and Hamer went to the tea-table, took a cup from Ann, and gave it to Pen. Then he gave one to Arnold, whose appearance, now that they met after the lapse of almost a decade, startled him. He wondered whether he himself looked so changed to Arnold. Arnold had put on weight and gravity. He had the look of a man who took no exercise and spent long hours stewing in an office over matters that puzzled and perplexed him. And that, indeed, was what he did, now that he was one of the leading trade union officials in the Rhondda Valley. His face had become pouchy. There were bags under his eyes; his side whiskers were greying, and the hair was falling back from his forehead. The large hands resting on his knees seemed to express, more than anything else about him, a tenacity and resolution, and also, somehow, an immense pathetic puzzlement that there should be need of so much effort to bring about changes that seemed to him so manifestly necessary.
He laid his great paw on Pen’s fragile hand, and said: “I’ll tell you, Hamer, what’s the matter with this lass. She’s a bit disappointed because we’ve seen nothing of you in the Rhondda.”
“My dear Arnold, my dear Pen,” Hamer excused himself, “I’ve been up to the eyes. Nursing St. Swithin’s, travelling about the country, fitting in my writing – it doesn’t leave much time for calls.”
“Oh, I don’t mean in a social way,” Arnold explained, “though I dare say we could have given you a cup of tea and a bed to sleep in at Horeb Terrace. I mean, there’s plenty to do in Rhondda, and a bit of help from a man like you would go a long way, It’s not easy, Hamer, to see a great man in someone you went to school with, and played with in the streets, but perhaps I’m a bit clearer-sighted than some. I know what you are: you’re one of the big men of the party; you’re going to be bigger; and we could do with a bit of you in the Rhondda.”
His face went graver as he added: “We can do with a lot of you in the immediate future. We’re going to have a rough time. I’ve done my best, and I can’t make our men see reason much longer. If I’m not mistaken, there’s going to be violence at Cwmdulais before many days are over.”
Hamer got up and stood on the hearthrug, looking down at the other three. “Why shouldn’t there be violence?” he demanded. “There ought to be violence. There must be violence.”
Now he was not a comfortable host, entertaining friends at his fireside. His eyes flashed; he was the storm-raiser who had stumped the country for years past, found always where men needed to be spurred to hot action.
“I may not have been in the Rhondda,” he said, “but I’ve watched your struggle there. Ann knows that.” He pulled a tall folio from the bookshelves and flicked over the leaves. “Here is your record. There’s little that happens in the South Wales coalfield that you won’t find here.”
Arnold went and stood at his side, looked at the press cuttings, tables of statistics, manuscript notes, pamphlets, letters, stuck into the book. He noted that it had been taken from a shelf filled with similar books, and running his eye along the spines he read: Railways; Dock Labourers; Steel Industry; Agriculture; the Potteries; and every industry and subdivision of industry in the country. He marvelled at the industry and thoroughness of his friend.
Hamer laid the book on his desk. “You have been out two months. Your union funds are nearly gone. Your men are despairing. Your women and children are hungry. You are asking little, and the companies could pay it without turning a hair. What is left for you but violence? There are two courses open to you, and two only: go back, beaten by the well-fed who do not scruple to use starvation as a weapon, or take such action as will bring the eyes of the country upon Cwmdulais.”
Arnold did not for a time answer him. He stood uneasily on the rug, his heavy body sagging, his pipe sucking emptily in his mouth. Presently, he said: “I hate violence. I believe in human reason.”
The two women had put down their cups and sat looking at the two men, so manifestly fighting now the one to dominate the other.
“Arnold,” said Hamer, “we have known one another for a long time, and God grant that for a long time yet we may be comrades fighting side by side for the same things. But we don’t believe in the same methods. You believe in yeast. ‘A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.’ I don’t believe there’s always time for all that beautiful fermentation. I believe there’s a moment when you have to get your salmon with dynamite, not with a lot of exquisite rod-play. You’ve tried reason. You’ve tried to leaven the lump, and God knows the head of a coal-owner is a lump if ever there was one. You’ve failed. Admit it, man. You’ve failed, haven’t you?”
“There’s no failure except giving up,” said Arnold doggedly, unconsciously repeating what Pen had said to him long ago.
“You’ve given up when your men go back,” Hamer persisted. “You’ve failed then. You go back skinned alive; your funds gone, your men’s fighting spirit gone, and every woman in Cwmdulais up to the eyes in debt to the corner shop. I know. I know the lives of the poor. And you leave the owners chuckling. That’s the way to treat the dogs. If they won’t gnaw on a meatless bone, take the bone away. That brings ’em cringing.”
Arnold shuffled on his feet, knocked the dottle out of his pipe, and said: “I shall never accept the responsibility for violence.”
Hamer handed him a tobacco pouch. “I don’t ask you to,” he said. He reached behind him and took down the sabre from the wall. “All I ask you to do is to allow me to bring this to Cwmdulais. Convene a meeting for me. Will you do that?”
The best Welsh steam coal spluttered and threw out flames that licked the shining surface of the sword. Arnold looked uneasily at Pen. “Do it,” she said.
Arnold said: “Very well,” and sat down beside her.
Hamer stood alone on the hearth with the gleaming weapon in his hand. His face shone.
*
He travelled alone to Cwmdulais. A winter night was closing over the valleys as his train ran through the pitiless desolation. There was just enough light left in the sky to show him tall pithead machinery etched above hill crests, the wheels motionless. On the seat beside him reposed the sabre in its leather scabbard. There were no homeward travelling miners to crowd in upon his solitude. He had the compartment to himself, and his impressionable mind soaked itself in the melancholy emanation of these hills whose very ruin now seemed pointless.
When he alighted at Cwmdulais, a dully smoky lantern or two scarcely permitted him to see the platform. A porter watched the train out, and it was not till it was gone and he had been left standing there alone for some time in the darkness that Pen Ryerson came as though she had been hurrying. “Sorry Arnold couldn’t meet you,” she said. “He’s been busy all day at the union offices.”
With no further words, they went out and climbed uphill through the raw misty darkness. It seemed to Pen now that there had never been a time when she didn’t know that climb, and after a while, when they came to a solid block of a building slabbed upon the darkness, she said, as her sister Nell had said to her so long ago, and as most Cwmdulais folk said to visiting strangers: “That’s Horeb.”
At Horeb they turned left, walked a little way, and Pen said: “Well, here we are. It’s not as grand as your place in Baildon, but it’s got to do. My sister Nell used to live here with Ianto, her husband. He was a poet. He was killed.”
Hamer liked the asperities of this tough uncompromising woman. “Yes, yes,” he said gently. “I heard about that.”
“There’s a lot goes on here that you don’t hear about. Well, come in.”
The house was little changed since the days when Ianto shyly welcomed Pen and Arnold to it. The front room was used: that was the chief difference. In Ianto’s day it had been closed on six days of the week, and on the seventh the fire was lit and, between sermons at Horeb, the harmonium was played and hymns were sung. The harmonium went with Nell and young Dai and Pryce when they took up their quarters with old Richard Richards at the corner shop. Now the front room was a den shared by Arnold and Pen. A bookcase contained the solid political treatises, the blue-books and pamphlets, that were all Arnold’s reading. Hamer, at Pen’s request, sat down by the fireside, and when she had left the room he let his eye range along the shelves to see if his own books were there. They were: the books and the pamphlets. Nothing seemed missing. He was gratified, but said to himself that he ought not to have allowed Arnold to buy these things: he should have sent him inscribed copies. That would have pleased Arnold. But what had he done to please Arnold in these last ten years? Precious little. A letter every six months or so. He blamed himself for that, and admitted wryly that he was always discovering means of beneficence when the opportunity was passed.
Arnold’s writing desk was in the recess on one side of the fireplace; one which he guessed to be Pen’s was in the other recess. There were a few photographs about the room: old Mrs. Ryerson, looking as tough and energetic as Pen herself; one of Hamer – again a swell of gratification made itself felt when he saw that; one of the Ryerson house in Broadbent Street. It might have been the house in which Hamer had spent his own childhood. Evidently, Arnold didn’t want to lose touch with his origins. And what about me? Hamer asked himself. Would he feel pleased at seeing in the Baildon room among the crimson curtains and the red turkey carpets a picture of the house so crowded with memory: the sand sausages down to the doors to keep out the whistling draught, the red serge curtains drawn against the night, the firelight and lamplight, and the scratching of Gordon’s pen, the lift of Gordon’s head with the smile on his face, Ellen’s needles... click, click... and a small boy who dragged his leg, looked interesting, and dreamed formless magnificent sustaining dreams. All this the photograph might have recalled; and Jimmy Spit-and-Wink tapping the windows in the grey light before dawn, and the rushing clatter of the clogs and the moan of the mill buzzer – ah, my friends, so much of the life of the poor! But, with it all, he knew that he would not like to see that photograph hanging at Baildon. He would rather take from his locked drawer the reproduction of Sargent’s picture and frame that. But he wasn’t sure how Ann would take it, or some of his callers, either. They might not see it, as he did, as a beautiful work of art.
It seemed to him, sitting for five minutes in that room which somehow impressed him with a sense of happy comradeship, fruitful common endeavour, that the very room had succeeded in conducting an inquisition into his way of looking at life, and living life, and Arnold’s. It was a long time since he had taken such stock of himself.
He could not help noticing on Pen’s desk, which was right at his elbow, a number of envelopes with the initials “W.S.P.U.” printed on them; and when, presently, she came back, leading a little girl by the hand, he said with a smile: “You keep in touch with the firebrands, Pen? I see plenty of correspondence here from the Women’s Social and Political Union.”
“You’ll see more than correspondence one of these days,” she said. “This is Alice. Alice, shake hands with Mr. Shawcross. He’s your father’s greatest friend.”
Was there a hint of irony, a touch of sarcasm, in that? He couldn’t make up his mind, but told himself, in his mood of momentary penitence, that he had earned it if there were. This was Alice Ryerson, five years old now, and he was looking at her for the first time, as Pen and Arnold, a few days before, had looked for the first time at Charles. Alice gave him her hand without shyness and said: “How do you do, Mr. Shawcross?”
She seemed a self-possessed little creature, neatly dressed, with a round dark face that had round dark eyes and hair perfectly straight and black. “That’s your photograph,” she said. “Father shows it to me. It’s like you.”
He was good with children. They came to him eagerly, as a rule, as Alice came now, standing at his knee. “I knew your father,” he said, “when I was a little boy younger than you; and now I’ve got a little boy younger than you. So that’s a long time, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, “your little boy is called Charles. Father told me.”
“Yes, you must meet Charles some day. I think you’ll like him.”
Yes, indeed, she will like him. Look well at Alice. You are looking at a slice of your history.
“Well, bed now,” said Pen. “I expect you’ll see more of Mr. Shawcross in the morning.”
The child put up her face to be kissed, and then took her mother’s hand and went away without looking back.
*
Arnold came in soon afterwards, bringing Evan Vaughan with him. Vaughan was a small dark voluble man of thirty. His grasp made Hamer’s hand feel as though a wire rope had tautened round it. “By God, Mr. Shawcross, there’s glad I am to see you now,” he sing-songed, “and you an M.P. That’s something now to cheer up old Keir Hardie. It’s men like you he wants. By God, it’s about time you wass in the House. You’ve worked for it if effer a man did. All those books, too. By God, indeed now, mun, I don’t know how you find the time. It’s reading people we are in these valleys. Every one of your books I’ve read. It’s an honour to meet you. And, By God, we need you. Have you heard the latest? Troops! Troops, by God, in the Rhondda! Shoot us down. With the bloody Boer war on and all! Isn’t that shooting enough for ’em? Yes, indeed, it’s time you wass here.”
He stopped, still wringing Hamer’s hand, and gazing into his face, as though he had met a deliverer. Arnold intervened. “Now let’s have a bit of food,” he said. “You can do with it, I know, Evan.”
“By God, yes indeed I can now. The old woman’s ashamed to show her face at Richard Richards’s grocery. We’ve run up a bill there as long as a bloody elephant’s trunk. Yes, indeed, I can do with some food. You make a note of that, Mr. Shawcross. It’s without food we are in these valleys. Are they without food in Park Lane? Is that fair do’s – people with full bellies fighting people without food? By God it’s not! And now troops!”
And now troops. Troops! That was the word singing in Hamer’s blood as he followed Arnold and Evan Vaughan into the kitchen, where Pen was waiting before a spread table. He had urged Arnold to make Cwmdulais a place in the eyes of all the country. Troops would do it. Troops, by God! as this voluble little man kept saying. Troops! The everlasting secular arm of the high priests who owned the earth. Troops – Peterloo – he perhaps would look on deeds like those which had made the Old Warrior an ancestral voice uttering the woes of the people. The people. The common people. The stock from which I sprang. It was always romantic dynamite to his imagination. He sat at the table, appearing as calm as anyone there, calmer than Evan Vaughan, but tingling with inward suspense.
*
Five thousand men, women and children. He had never before addressed such an audience. Old Richard Richards had come in to look after Alice, which meant no more than installing himself in the front room with his pipe going, a book in his hand, and his feet – one flesh, one timber – extended to the fire. There was grey now in the beard of Ap Rhondda’s father, and his grave old face was set and drawn. The man who kept the corner shop, who knew that out of ten things passed over his counter only one was paid for: this man understood the depth of the disaster that had come upon Cwmdulais. He shook hands with Hamer, and looked with interest and speculation at so famous a man. “I’m glad to meet you,” he said, “and I hope you’ll do us some good. But I stand where Arnold stands, and where my son the bard Ap Rhondda stood. I am a man of peace.”
“But, by God, Richard Richards – troops!” Evan Vaughan shouted. “Wass you wanting us to be shot down like dogs?”
The old man shook his head and did not answer. Hamer and Arnold, Pen and Evan Vaughan, went out into the raw darkness.
The Co-operative Hall was in the bottom of the valley: a vast greylooming building of corrugated iron. At the back door a few men were hanging about. In the darkness there were confused and hurried introductions, and then they passed down a corridor, into an ante-room, and thence on to the platform. “I had never before,” Hamer wrote, “felt so dramatically that I had been thrown suddenly to the wolves.”
The hall was dimly lit by gaslight – so dimly that the backmost rows of people could not be seen. The audience thus appeared to recede into infinity, an infinity dense with tobacco-fog, and, when Hamer entered, vibrant with song. They were singing in their native tongue “Hen Wlad fy Naddhau,” which Hamer knew meant “Land of My Fathers,” singing with all their hearts and souls, harmony embroidered on harmony, with the untutored perfection of the world’s greatest nation of singers. They did not pause when Hamer and the others filed on to the mist-blue platform, but, as though by way both of welcome and applause, swung back again into the chorus of their national hymn, sending the melody surging up into the unseen dome.
Hamer’s histrionic gift told him at once that this was no occasion for a chairman, for all the platitudes and pedantries of procedure. Here was a people worked by their own emotion to a melting pitch on which he could at once make an impress. He laid his hand on Arnold’s knee and said: “There’s no need to introduce me,” and sprang to his feet as the singing died away.
He waited for a few moments as the immense crowd rustled to silence, standing there poised above them on the edge of the platform: the foreground fairly clear: men in mufflers with caps on their heads, pipes or cigarettes in their mouths, thin dark little men for the most part with white intense faces, their women with them, and their children; and stretching back beyond these an immensity of diminishing white dots lost upon the darkness like stars upon a moonless midnight sky. He was moved and uplifted as he looked at them. He felt in his bones that this was going to be one of his greatest occasions.
“Land of my fathers,” he said. “That is what you have been singing. I do not understand your language, but you and I have at any rate one language in common. We understand the language of the poor. We are one in the brotherhood of misery. We are one in detestation of the wicked power which permits a few to stand before the doorway of the granary and jingle the golden key before our eyes, and say how many or how few grains shall be doled out to us, and for how many hours of sweat and strain. Those are the conditions of our lives, the conditions of all of us who toil for our bread, and coming here tonight, expecting to hear the rumble of anger, the sharp accents of a common fury, what do I hear? ‘Land of My Fathers.’ Ah, my friends! I have a bitter message to deliver. What is this land you sing of? You have no land! It was the land of your fathers, indeed, but is it yours? Look into your hearts. Look into your larders. Look into the account-books of your old friend Richard Richards, and ask yourselves in the light of what you will find there: Is this my land? Let us reason this matter out. Let us take our points one by one and answer them. To begin with, let us answer this: Is this my land?”
The question rang out with all the oratorical challenge that he could put into it. There was a moment’s uneasy silence, and then from behind him Evan Vaughan shouted: “No, by God, it is not. Not a bloody inch!”
The audience took up the answer, and Hamer knew that now he had them. No! No! No! came the shouts from all over the misty expanse that wavered in blue clouds before his eyes.
He took them through a catechism. Was it your father’s land? Whose land is it now? How shall the people recover what once was theirs and what the few have filched from them?
“You know of only one way: you withhold your labour; and what is the reply to that? Troops!”
He waited, and heard rising from all over the hall the harsh murmur, the deep resentful suspiration, that soldiers used as oppression’s Cossacks will always evoke. He turned to the table and took up the sheathed sabre, catching as he did so a glimpse of Arnold Ryerson’s white anxious face and Pen’s set jaw. He drew the sabre from the scabbard and held it aloft. “Troops!” he repeated. “Look well at this which I hold in my hand. It is what the troops bring with them. Look well, too, at this. It is what the troops leave behind them.”
He took from his pocket a curl of hair with a ribbon attached to it. “This is too small for most of you to see, but it is so big that its infamy should fill the world. This is a curl of hair and a bloodstained ribbon that once was worn by a girl whom this sword, on a field in Manchester, cut down in the beauty of her youth. She was one of us – a worker – and her name was Emma. What her other name was I never knew, and why indeed should anyone know? Our names are not engraved on monuments. Our memorials are found only in such records as the Pyramids, and the Boer War casualty lists, and in the hollow roads and byways that make their network down in the darkness beneath the Rhondda Valley. So never mind who Emma was. I will tell you her story.”
New to them, it was an old story to him, and he had learned to tell it with most moving power. It held them breathless, and when he had done there was a great silence. Into it he dropped his next words: “Troops! Such are the purposes for which troops are sent among the people. There are troops at this moment in your valley. What are you going to do about it?”
This was the moment. Pen looked sideways at Arnold, and her heart was wrung with love and pity to see the anguish in his face. The love was well-nigh to melting her, but she steeled herself against the pity. “By heck!” she thought fiercely to herself, “we should be dogs and less than dogs if all I have seen in the Rhondda this last few weeks did not make us rather die than go back crawling.”
*
Hamer Shawcross’s enemies always laid it to his charge that he incited the miners to violence. He always denied that he did anything of the kind. It is a point for casuists to settle. “What are you going to do about it?” he asked, and, sabre in hand, stood there and allowed them to answer the question for themselves. He knew that behind him was a hot-head on whom he could count, and when he had stood in a silence that seemed infinite and that lasted for ten seconds, Evan Vaughan’s voice rang out: “We can march. That’s what we can do. By God! Let us march now to the company’s offices. Who can stop us? We are thousands strong. We can take possession.”
In his excitement, Vaughan had risen and taken his place alongside Hamer on the edge of the platform. Was it a washing of hands, a public dissociation of himself from the decision now to be taken? “They decided for themselves,” Hamer Shawcross always said, “and I should be the last to say their decision was a wrong one.” At all events, he now left the platform to Evan Vaughan, put the sabre back into its sheath, and sat down.
Vaughan was in full harangue. “You have heard one of the great men of the Labour Party speaking to you words that are God’s gospel truth. He has shown you the grip that capitalism has on your lives, and always has had. He has shown you how capitalism has used its power in the past, bringing the soldiers, by God, to cut us down if we want so much as to open our mouths. Are we going to put up with that sort of thing any longer? I said we could march. Well, can’t we? There wass no harm in marching, wass there? We can march to the offices, and someone can go through the window and open the door. Then we can sit down. Here we are, we say. We wass reasonable men. We wass doing no violence, but sitting here waiting for a peaceful discussion. Now come on then. Tell us why there must be hungry bellies in the Rhondda and fat bellies in Park Lane. That is all we wass wanting to know.”
His verbosity streamed from him. Men began to shuffle, and Arnold Ryerson began to hope. The men had heard Evan Vaughan before. His torrential guff did not move them.
Then, while Vaughan was pausing for breath, a grave-faced man sitting on the platform, one of those whom Hamer had met at the door, got up and said very quietly: “My friends, our comrade Vaughan has made a proposal. There is no need for him to belabour it. The only question is: Do we march or don’t we? I say Yes. I shall now leave this meeting and walk quietly towards the company’s office. Let those join me who care to.”
He casually took a swig from the chairman’s glass, picked up his cap and walked out. Pen Muff followed him. Arnold gave her an agonizing glance, hesitated a moment, and went after her, exclaiming: “The meeting is ended.”
There was no need for those formal words. Already the hall was an uproar of shuffling boots and arguing voices. Men were streaming through the cavernous doors on either side.
The other men on the platform began to go. They all looked grave and troubled, as though the matter in hand were not to their liking, but if it had to be put through, then they would be in it.
Hamer followed them out into the dark street in the valley bottom. Under the lugubrious heavens which held no light of moon or star, a great crowd was milling and fiercely disputing. The man who had walked out first was standing under a gas-lamp. He shouted; “All you women go home, and take your children with you. And if any man doesn’t want to march with us, let him go home, too.”
Gradually the crowd sorted itself out, thousands disappearing into the darkness: a formidable army, close on a thousand strong, forming up into rough marching order. Hamer strapped the sabre-belt round his waist, and wore his long overcoat above it. No one could see the sabre. He looked round for Pen and Arnold, and found them, with Evan Vaughan and the man whom he now heard, called Llewellyn, in the leading file of four. He ranged himself at their side, and the march began. One or two policemen had appeared; they walked quietly side by side with the demonstrators as though they were part of the show, speaking to no one. Presently a police inspector, appearing as if magically out of the humid night, was walking with the leading file. For a time he too said nothing. Then he said: “Evenin’, Arnold.”
Arnold said: “Evening, Shonnie.”
Then again there was a silence in which the feet of the thousand went purposefully forward through the darkness measured off with a gas-lamp here and there. Presently Shonnie said: “Where are you off to, then, Arnold?”
Pen answered for him: “Just taking a walk. We’re all ratepayers. We’re allowed to walk in the streets.”
Tramp... tramp... tramp... down over the level-crossing where the railway lines gleamed as if ruled in new-cut leaden strips; along the siding; moving steadily in a direction that Shonnie could not misunderstand.
“I’d tell ’em all to go home, if I was you, Arnold,” he said.
This was not answered; and Hamer noticed, as they passed a gaslamp that the inspector’s face was kindly and troubled. “One of our men was in your meeting, Arnold,” he said. “I’m not risking any trouble. I’ve sent for Parry Powell magistrate. If he reads the Riot Act you’re done for. You won’t get into the company’s yard. The troops are quartered there.”
Arnold said: “Thanks, Shonnie,” and held out his hand. The inspector shook it, and then was gone as magically as he had appeared.
A pony-trap, driven at a lively lick, shot past the procession. “That’s Parry Powell,” said Llewelyn. “He’ll read the Riot Act all right. He’s got shares in the company.”
Then nothing more was said till the great iron gate was reached which gave admission to the colliery company’s yard. Suddenly lights shone in the yard, and the soldiers were seen, a posse of mounted men, sitting their horses negligently with great capes streaming from their shoulders down over the horses’ flanks. Then the silence of the marching men broke. Again there went into the night a deep suspiration of anger and loathing. Whatever they had come for, with whatever intention, all was forgotten at sight of the statuesque figures sitting the animals whose heads tossed up and down, sending an opulent silver jingle into the night.
The ranks broke. The ordered thousand became a mob, storming towards the gate. Hamer, Pen and Arnold, Llewellyn and Evan Vaughan were jammed against it. Llewellyn took hold of the bars and shook them. “We demand to see some officials of the company at the offices,” he shouted.
The horses’ heads went up and down; the riders sat them with an infuriating watchful contempt. Llewellyn shook the bars again, well knowing that he might as well knock his head against Land’s End.
Now other hands joined his. Everywhere the bars were seized, and Hamer, carried away by the delirium of the moment, found that he too was grasping the iron, rattling, shaking, thrusting menacing fists through the bars. The soldiers, looking as sculptured as the sculptured folds of their cloaks, sat their horses, and the horses tossed their heads up and down and pawed the ground. One of them whinnied.
It was Pen who turned and shouted back into the crowd: “What are we standing here for? Walls can be climbed, can’t they?”
Then the thousand who had stood bunched behind the gate spread out to right and left. The air above the wall was bright with the light within; and now all along the length of it dark figures were silhouetted against the brightness, climbing, standing poised, gesticulating upon the air, dropping from view. Hamer stood back a little and watched that fantastic shifting frieze, and watched the men with backs bent on this side of the wall, others stepping upon those backs, climbing, leaning down then to hoist up the ones below. Most of the women melted away before this ordeal; but he saw Pen Ryerson appear suddenly, throw up her arms as though she were storming an aerie barricade, and vanish in a billowing of skirts and petticoats.
He went back to the gate and looked through. The soldiers had not moved. The time had not yet come for the secular arm, which sat there magnificently disciplined, not replying to any menace till authority gave the word. The crowd streaming across the yard ran between the horses, and chaffed the soldiers, and, exhilarated by what they deemed a victory, began to shout and sing. Now that they had their way, there was no harm in them. They ran happily towards the company’s offices.
Standing at the gate, almost alone now, Hamer’s heart suddenly turned over. He had seen this sort of thing before. He knew that the smooth surface of events was thin ice, which now might crack at any moment. He remembered the Old Warrior sitting by the fireside with shining eyes recalling the thrust and cut of the sabres as the crowd fled from the field of Peterloo. And he looked at the gate. Whither would these men flee? They would be like bullocks in a pen, with the slaughterer among them.
He turned to a man standing at the wall. “Give me a boost up,” he said brusquely. The man bent; he stood on his back, and, such was his eagerness, he nearly vaulted to the other side. He ran here and there, shouting:
“Arnold! Arnold! Where’s Arnold Ryerson?”
Arnold was standing with a few leaders outside the door of the office. “For God’s sake,” said Hamer breathlessly, “get that gate open before you do anything else.”
The man Llewellyn saw quicker than anyone what was in Hamer’s mind. “I can do it,” he said, and ran back, twisting in and out of the crowd. “He’s used to shot-firing,” said Pen, for even yet Arnold seemed not to have grasped the point. “A lot of the men pinch the stuff and carry it with them.”
But Llewellyn was not such a fool as to cause an explosion which might do more damage than the cavalry. He had a pistol in his pocket. There was one report as he fired into the lock. Then he swung the gate open. He came back as casually as though he had been away to wash his hands.
“Listen to me down there!”
Heads craned upwards. Arnold, Hamer and the others stood back from the door in order to look to the upper window whence the voice came. It was Parry Powell the magistrate.
“Arnold Ryerson, Evan Vaughan, Idris Llewellyn, I appeal to you three leaders of these men to take them away from this place.”
“We have come in peace,” Llewellyn shouted. “We demand to see officials of the company.”
“There are no officials here,” said the magistrate, a small red-faced man with glittering spectacles. He stood at the window importantly, took a pinch of snuff, and waved a yellow silk handkerchief before his nose. Shonnie, the inspector of police, and an officer of cavalry stepped forward from the darkness behind him. The milling and shouting in the yard ended abruptly. Everybody stood in silence to hear the colloquy between their leaders and the three at the window.
“Then where are the officials, by God?” Evan Vaughan shouted shrilly. “Isn’t it here they should be, Mr. Parry Powell magistrate? Are they stuffing their fat gutses in Park Lane while we eat bread an’ scrape in Cwmdulais? That’s not fair do’s, is it now? Give us fair do’s, Mr. Parry Powell. We want to wait in the offices, that’s all. There is no evil in us whateffer.”
In comment on this, a stone suddenly shattered the window at which the magistrate stood. He did not blink an eyelid. His yellow handkerchief fluttered again, and he shouted: “Mr. Ryerson, be advised by me. Conduct these men to their homes.”
Another stone was his answer, and then a small fusillade which broke several windows.
Parry Powell remained imperturbable. A glass splinter had jagged his cheek. He stanched the blood with his handkerchief and stood his ground. “I give you warning,” he shouted, “that I hold this to be a riotous assembly. You are trespassing upon private property; you are unlawfully damaging it.” He ducked before a stone, and went on: “Those of you who remain for longer than one minute may have cause to regret it. I shall regret it myself. One minute, Mr. Ryerson.”
He took out his watch and laid it on the window-sill. Arnold was sweating. His palms were hot; his shirt was sticking to his back. Pen put an arm through his. “You can’t back out, lad. You can’t! You can’t!” she whispered fiercely. “Let the swine do what they like. Let the country know what miners have to put up with.”
Arnold did not answer. He was no leader in that moment. He stood mute and miserable as the inexorable seconds fled by. The noise in the yard had broken out afresh. Stones flew from all directions. Hardly a window had a whole pane left. A few men, finding a railway sleeper lying to hand, were beginning to use it as a battering ram upon the office door when Parry Powell took up his watch and shouted dramatically: “Time!”
But now the uproar was too deeply under way to be checked by a word. The men continued to shout and storm, to hurl stones, to batter on the door, so that few heard the magistrate flinging out the words of the Riot Act into the chaos:
“Our Sovereign Lady the Queen chargeth and commandeth all persons being assembled immediately to disperse themselves, and peacably to depart to their habitations or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the Act made in the first year of King George for preventing tumultuous and riotous assemblies. God Save the Queen.”
Parry Powell with a final flourish of his yellow handkerchief disappeared from the window. Hamer took Pen by the arm. “You’d better come away now,” he said. “You know what that means?”
She shook him off. “Aye, Ah know as well as thee. This is where t’band starts to play.”
There was a fierce joy in her face. Hamer, who had incited more than one riot, for the first time stayed and saw one through.
The pandemonium in the colliery yard was now so great that he did not hear the word of command given. The first thing he was aware of was that the statuesque soldiers were immobile no longer. The horses were pushing their way relentlessly between the wall of the office and the crowd yelling before it. The soldiers and horses seemed very patient. There was no wild charge such as his mind associated with Peterloo. Soon, by mere shoving, they had dislodged the ram-batterers and established a long cohort which now, perfectly disciplined, faced outward to the crowd. Then steadily, unhurriedly, they began to advance, and the crowd to fall back towards the gate. It seemed a mere sweeping up of light unco-ordinated refuse. The horses’ heads went up and down and the bits jingled almost playfully.
Then Evan Vaughan turned and shouted: “Is it running away you all are, then? What wass it we came here for, by God? To run like bloody curs in front of a couple of fellers on gee-gees?”
Others turned with him. He stood his ground till a horse, thrusting remorselessly towards him, but at no more than an ambling pace, had its nose almost against his face. The excitement that had been simmering in the man all night blazed up. “Don’t you poke your bloody nose in my face,” he shouted, and, doubling his fist, he smote upwards with all his might into the soft flesh of the horse’s lower lip. The creature reared. Evan Vaughan had a terrifying glimpse of a girthed belly, and of a pair of gleaming shoes suspended over his head, of genitals and the massy knots of hind legs. He quailed backward from that frightening primitive spectacle, and the hoofs crashed to the cobbled yard with a clang not a yard from where he stood. He had not seen the soldier draw his sabre. A smart smack with the flat on the shoulder made the little man reel. He saw the sabre then, and, feeling the pain in his shoulder, he yelled: “It’s stabbed I am! By God, he’s stabbed me!”
Many men were now streaming out of the yard gate, but many others paused on hearing the cry, turned and saw the sabre. Stones began to fly again. Horses and the men who rode them were struck, and now it was no easy-going tolerant pushing of the crowd. Saddleleather began to creak urgently; now all the sabres were out, striking right and left, but striking always with the flat. The soldiers were out to inspire terror rather than to inflict injury. Hamer could see that, standing near the gate with a few men who feared the conflict but could not tear themselves away from the spectacle. The whole affair might have ended with bruised ribs and sore heads and bitter resentful memories but for Evan Vaughan.
Nearly everyone was out of the yard. There was a struggling angry knot at the gateway, obstinate, obdurate, having to be thrust out by the sheer weight of chest and swerving rump and the menace of the steel that had not once been fleshed. Vaughan ran outside the wall to a distant point, climbed over, and shouted: “Come on, boys, take ’em in the rear!” He dashed to the colliery office and began to climb through a broken window. A few soldiers detached themselves from the mêlée at the gate and spurred towards him. One reached him before the others and addressed him by name. The dreadful anonymity of uniformed terror had prevented everybody from recognizing a boy from this very valley. “Get out now, Evan Vaughan, you damn ole fool you,” he hissed urgently. “No one ’ooldn’t ’urt you, mun, if you’d get out.”
Vaughan turned from the window. “Johnny Rees!” he shouted. “Johnnie Rees, by God! You bloody traitor you! Cutting off the breasts of your own women you are, and disembowelling your butties!”
He hurled himself at the youth, snatching at his bridle. But the others were up now, riding urgently, and one of them was the man whose horse Vaughan had struck. He himself was furious at having to restrain his passion while his own blood was pouring into his eye from a gash caused by a thrown brick. He saw Vaughan and recognized him, and his rage with this recalcitrant fool boiled over. He stood in his stirrups and rode at the man at a good lick, and struck. And this time it was not the flat smiting Vaughan’s shoulder. It was the edge slicing his jugular and sending him down to gurgle out his life, by God.
“Now they know. Now they’ll have to do something,” Pen said. She was trembling, white with excitement, as she and Arnold and Hamer sat before the kitchen fire in Horeb Terrace. She was too overwrought to do anything. She lay back in a chair. “Murderers!” she said.
Arnold was not excited. He was miserable, and utterly and finally worn out. He had made a pot of tea. Three poured cups were on the table, cold, untouched. It was midnight.
“I can tell you exactly what they’ll do, lass,” Arnold said. “Nothing.”
Five minutes later Shonnie came in and arrested him in the most friendly manner.
“Arrest me, too,” Hamer challenged him. “I was in it, wasn’t I?”
“I have no warrant for your arrest,” said Shonnie. “Come on, Arnold.”
Pen did not say a word as they went. When they were gone she went off to bed, still not speaking. Hamer did not sleep. He spent the night sitting by the kitchen fire. In the morning he returned to Baildon, and shortly thereafter he took his seat in the House of Commons, where the Tory benches greeted him with hisses. Arnold went to prison. The miners went back to work on their old terms. Nothing was done.