Hamer and Ann had no child but Charles. In 1905 Charles was eight years old. On an autumn day Hamer and Ann took him down to Graingers, the preparatory school for Hungerbury.
In the train on the way home Ann was very quiet. She could not get out of her head her last sight of Charles. The matron who was holding his hand was a kindly-looking woman, and Ann had no doubt that the headmaster, with whom she and Hamer had taken tea, was both kindly and intelligent. But to Charles, clearly, they might both have been Hottentots of an unaccustomed ferocity, but, as he stood, a frail-looking and forlorn little figure, backed by the virginia creeper flaming red about the school porch, it was evident that he had told himself that though they were Hottentots, he must not show his fear. A cab had come to take his father and mother to the station, and Ann’s last glimpse of Charles, as she waved through the window, was of him standing there with a white smile on his face: the smile she had seen once or twice before: when he scalded his foot by overturning a kettle, and when a fool of a maid told him that the kittens had been drowned. Ann knew that this white smile was Charles’s public face; and that, as soon as he found privacy, it would dissolve in misery. It was as heart-breaking to her as the thin shrill whistling in which the child indulged when he was afraid.
But it was not only Charles’s misery that was on her heart: it was her own defeat. Charles had been from the beginning taken out of her hands. He had not gone to a board school, but to a series of little private academies. This arrangement had at least permitted her to see him every day. Now that he was gone, she felt empty. She and Hamer had two rooms in Lizzie’s North Street house, and the run of the rest of it. Ellen, who was seventy-two years old, was living a superannuated life at The Hut, with a maid ministering to her needs, which were few, for she was hearty and active. And Ann, standing on the placid country station, looking forward to the years ahead of her, felt superannuated too. So long as she had had Charles she had felt a person of some importance, and she had not bothered with active political work. She didn’t feel that it would be easy to pick it up again. She was forty-one. Hamer was forty.
She stood on the platform in a white silk dress, very tight in the waist, very billowy in the skirt, which was all aerie flounces, and she carried a white folded sunshade in her hand. She did not open it, for the heat was gone out of the day which was now marked by a tender luminescence. The station flower-beds were full of dahlias, coloured a deep burgundian purple, and of Michaelmas daisies, big top-heavy sunflowers, golden-rod, and many flowers she did not know. The colours were muted in that late autumn light, and they held for her the sadness of all things whose youth is ended and whose dissolution is at hand.
So she was quiet in the train, sitting opposite Hamer who took a book from his pocket and began to read. Now and then she looked at him with the pride that the years had deepened. The moustache was gone now; the face had taken on the contours that the years would do nothing but engrave and confirm. The wing of dark hair falling across the broad brow had a line or two of grey in it, and occasionally his old childish gesture asserted itself: he swept it back with an impatient hand. His big sombrero hat was tossed on the seat at his side. A black silken bow was at his neck. The Spanish cloak he affected had been thrown on to the rack.
This was the man who had defeated her, and as the train ran through the bloomy dusk, stopping at all the little stations that seemed no more than flower-gardens, and he read on, marking a passage here, making a note there, she knew that a thousand such defeats would not change her pride or abate one jot of her love for him. The Diplomatic Service! He had at last broken his precious secret to her, and she had said Yes, Yes, to it all, knowing in her wise heart how long are the years, how fragile is the planning of men.
*
Hamer at last put down his book. “Well,” he said, “I think he took it like a little man. He should be happy there.”
“I think he will,” said Ann, “once he’s got over his first few weeks. He’s a sensible child.”
“I feel I’ve done my best for him. The board school – all that sort of thing – I think you were wrong, my dear.” He leaned forward and spoke urgently, laying a hand on her knee. She felt he was justifying himself. “I’m as good a Labour man as the next, but I think I see farther than most of them. D’you mind a little boasting?”
She smiled and shook her head.
“They think Labour’s always going to be what it is now,” he went on. “They can’t see it as anything but a handful of working men in the House of Commons, perpetually in opposition, perpetually arguing about an extra ha’p’orth for the poor. That’s wrong, utterly and absolutely. I see Labour as a great party, a successful party in fewer years than you may think, a party in office, not haggling about ha’p’orths but handling the finances of a nation, administering all the great offices, conducting this country’s relations with the empires of the world. That’s coming – coming soon. Balfour’s weakening. This Government won’t see the year out. It’s coming all over again,” he smiled. “A general election. Another fight in St. Swithin’s. I’m not afraid of that. I’m dug in there now. It’s going to be a Liberal Government next time. Take that from me.”
She gave him her serious attention, but she was smiling in her heart at his urgency. He was still the bright confident creature who rushed so surprisingly into her life and Lizzie’s that day when she had gone with Arnold to meet “the boy Shawcross.” He was like this even then. “Take that from me.” Well, he was usually right, and, right or wrong, she could take a lot from him.
“Yes,” he went on, “a Liberal Government, but a great many more Labour members in the House; and that’s a step to what will come as sure as the sun is going down behind those chimneys. I mean a Labour Government. We’ve got to be ready for it. We must breed and train the men for it. We must be ready for dignity, responsibility, power. We’ve got all the trade union leaders we need, plenty of Ryersons and Jimmy Newboults. What we shall lack is statesmen.”
“Poor little Charles!”
“Fortunate little Charles! But, believe me, all this is going to happen long before Charles is ready. He will not be one of the creators of it, but one of the inheritors.”
“Meantime, there’s Charles’s mother, now out of work, in a manner of speaking.”
“There’s work enough to do, God knows.”
The train was joggling over the points, edging into the dark cavern of the station. Hamer got up, put on his hat, switched his cloak down from the rack. He would put it on to stride up the platform. It was part of his inseparable outfit. The newspaper cartoonists loved it. The porters on the station would recognize it and nudge one another. “Hamer Shawcross.”
“Yes, work enough,” he repeated. It was a saying often on his lips: “So much to do. So much to do.”
She had not intended to tell him just yet what it was that had come to her mind as she sat, surveying her own lonely estate, watching the purple twilight deepen over the land. But suddenly she said: “Lizzie and I have always believed in votes for women. That movement is about to take a lead in political affairs. Take that from me.”
He jumped down to the platform with his youthful agility, and held out a hand for her to follow. She saw that his face had darkened. “Keir Hardie believes in it,” she said.
Her pattering stride went with his swinging gait along the platform. He looked down at her sideways. “Well, I don’t,” he said flatly.
“Will you say that on a platform in St. Swithin’s at the general election?”
“I’ll say it anywhere, at any time. Why?”
“Because I shall go to one of your meetings and put the question.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
“I would and I will. Let me tell you.”
It was another of his sayings. She threw it at him half-playfully; but as they came out into the bustle and chatter amid the bright lights of the fruit stalls and bookshops she saw that his face had tightened, and she felt her resolution tightening, too.
“We must take a cab,” he said. “I’ve got so much to do.”
He was falling into the habit of taking cabs. He would not have dreamed now of walking from King’s Cross to North Street.
He held up his hand and a hansom stopped at the kerb. The cabby saluted with his whip. “Evenin’, Mr. Shawcross.”
The recognition pleased him, but he remained silent as the cab sped through the London evening towards Westminster, with the lamps coming out and hanging their soft chains of radiance along the violet dusk.
*
The autumn morning was chill in the north. Old Hawley Artingstall stood on the hearthrug at The Limes in Fallowfield and warmed his dwindling shanks. He gazed through the window at the white rime lying on the grass, tightening the edges of the fallen chestnut leaves. It was nine o’clock. The Artingstall diligence was not a thing you could set your watch by in these days. Hawley’s body was shrunk and his mind was sluggish. He went up to town when he felt like it, and sometimes he didn’t feel like it at all.
He was a disappointed man. He had hoped for a knighthood, if not a baronetcy. It would have been attractive: Sir Hawley Artingstall. He had contributed liberally to the Conservative Party funds, but his ample bribes had not had the hoped-for and customary result. His second wife, the red-haired Hilda, had left him. Both the children she had borne him were dead. He was not only disappointed: he was lonely. He sometimes thought with regret of his early days with Lillian, and a deepening tenderness was in his memory of Ann.
He often sat in this room and dreamed of the mornings when he and Ann had gone up to town together, she so fair and eager in the victoria at his side, he so keen, alert, ready to scowl if Haworth were half-a-minute late bringing the carriage to the door. He hadn’t it in him now, he admitted. His business, formed years ago into a public company, had been going downhill, and that chap Hannaway had been as steadily going uphill.
Mr. Councillor Hannaway. He often glowered at the fellow across the floor of the Council chamber in the Town Hall: he the alderman glowering at the councillor, who never returned the look save with a cheerful impudent grin.
Only the other day, walking across the mosaic pavement of the Town Hall landing with his shoes clicking loudly on the stone, he had found an arm through his, and there was Hannaway, dressed up to the nines, a rose at his buttonhole, a silver-headed malacca cane in his hand.
“Well, Artingstall, come and have a look at this.”
He led him down the stairs, out into Albert Square, and at the kerb was one of those newfangled motor-cars, with a driver sitting high up in front.
“What d’you think of it?” Councillor Thomas Hannaway asked.
“Ah reckon that’d give thi owd diligence a start and beat thee to t’post.”
Hawley had little to say. He couldn’t get on with the fellow. He didn’t like his business methods: Hannaway had set up a chain of drapers’ shops all over England. “Hannaway’s.” You saw it on some fascia wherever you travelled, and you knew it meant the same thing as cheap and nasty.
“Remember t’first time tha met me?” Hannaway asked.
Hawley remembered it well enough, because this fellow was always reminding him of it: how he had told a street urchin to call him a cab, and the brat had been full of back-chat, even going so far as to hint that some day he might buy Artingstall’s.
“I remember well enough, Mr. Councillor,” said Hawley with pompous formality. “When are you going to buy Artingstall’s?”
Hannaway got into his chariot which shivered and rattled and finally shot off in a blue stink. “Ah’ve bought it!” he shouted.
And, by God, he had! By God! By God! Hawley swore to himself when in the privacy of The Limes he discovered the hidden machinations of Thomas Hannaway. Using all sorts of people for his cover, he had been busily buying in the Artingstall shares, till now he owned more than Hawley himself, more than all the other shareholders, till he was, in effect and practice, Artingstall’s.
It was the final blow to old Hawley. It left him spiritless and lethargic, not caring much whether he ever went to town again. At ten minutes past nine, when in his vigorous heyday he would already for some time have been making the fur fly in the shop, he succumbed to the odour of the coffee and kidneys, and walked into the dining-room, where the Manchester Guardian lay folded on his plate.
Hawley was not deeply interested when a headline told him that there had been a “Fracas at the Free Trade Hall!” and that women had been thrown out into the streets. These women! They were at it everywhere. Sir Edward Grey, Winston Churchill, and a few other Liberal leaders were stumping the country, telling the people how sweet the world was going to be when this Conservative administration was swept away and a Liberal Government reigned in its stead. And wherever the expositors of the Liberal gospel went, wild women leapt up and demanded to be told whether votes for women made a part of the promised Liberal paradise. They screamed. They kicked up a fuss. And usually a few stewards got them by the scruff of the neck and threw them out into the street. It was all very undignified; Hawley could not believe that votes for women would come this way, and, for himself, he hoped they would not come at all.
He put a succulent forkful of kidney into his mouth, and was flicking over the page with impatience when, incredibly, his own name flashed upon his sight at the bottom of the report. He turned back and read: “Mrs. Shawcross is, of course, the wife of Mr. Hamer Shawcross, the Labour Member for the St. Swithin’s Division of Bradford, and the only daughter of Alderman Hawley Artingstall of Manchester. Mrs. Light-owler is her aunt, sister of the late Mrs. Hawley Artingstall and a daughter of the late Sir James Sugden. Mrs. Ryerson, the third of the ejected women, is said to be the wife of a trade union official in South Wales.”
Hawley could not believe his eyes. Ann chucked out of a public meeting, manhandled like a Saturday night drunk? It couldn’t be true! And that old fool Lizzie Lightowler: the woman must be over fifty! So far as he was concerned, she could do what she liked, the tough old hen. But Ann—!
He didn’t know much about Ann. They had drifted hopelessly apart. At Christmas time they sent one another cards with snow, holly and glowing lanterns on them, and for the rest she sent him two or three letters a year. There was one not long ago. It was not often she opened her heart to him, but he could read between the lines of that last letter that she was distressed at the thought of losing Charles. She had not wanted him to go: it was this chap Hamer, a climber if ever there was one, Hawley thought to himself.
He finished his breakfast and sat in an armchair by the diningroom fire, trying to get this incredible affair straight in his own mind. His thoughts wandered back through the years – back to the wedding breakfast in Ackroyd Park. He remembered how Ann had seemed to him exalted, and how he had ruminated that one of these days she might fly off the handle.
It had been a long time coming, but it looked as if it had come. Somehow, it gave him satisfaction to reflect that this would be one in the eye for Hamer Shawcross. He couldn’t believe that this was what Shawcross would want. Well, he had asked for it. He had forced the girl’s hand where the child was concerned. He had left her in a dead end, and he must thank himself if she took her own way out.
Suddenly, to the old man, the affair seemed not so disgraceful as it had at first appeared. He chuckled as he sat in his chair, He lit a cigar and smiled at the glowing point. This would shake up that complacent young devil Hamer. Good for you, Ann! It was a Viking stroke. They’d called old Birley the Viking. It was a long time since he’d thought of old Birley, dead and gone so many years. He thought of him now with reminiscent affection, and of Ann with pride. The warmth of the fire took possession of his old limbs. The cushions were soft and the frost still sparkled without. There was a time when he would have rejoiced to be out in it, feeling his blood tingle. But not now, not now. He let his head loll backwards and stubbed his cigar. The housekeeper who came to clear away the breakfast things tiptoed out on finding him asleep. Hawley Artingstall asleep at half-past nine in the morning! Ichabod! Ichabod! An hour and a half ago the stinking rattling chariot had taken Mr. Councillor Hannaway townwards.
*
“Take it from me.” You could usually take it from Hamer Shawcross. His flair for the political situation was uncanny. As he had predicted, the Conservative Government crashed that year, overburdened with the disgraceful debris of the Boer War. Campbell-Bannerman formed a Liberal administration, went to the country and came back triumphant. And in this new House of Commons there were thirty Labour members. “There’s a rising tide. The tide is the significant thing. Remember that, Shawcross.”
That was what Keir Hardie had said, and Hamer didn’t need to be told it. A man might join the Conservative Party or the Liberal Party, old and slow-moving both of them, and in twenty years be where he was at the beginning. The party of the rising tide was another matter. Not – he shook his hair back impatiently, as though he had caught himself out in a treasonable thought – not that that had anything to do with his choice of a party. Ah, my friends, I know the bitter lives of the poor.
Well, here the tide was, still gaining inch by inch. Thirty members in the House, and he one of them, he one of the leaders of them. There had been no trouble about holding St. Swithin’s, even though this time both Liberal and Tory had come up against him. It would have been one of the happiest elections he had fought, but for the incredible behaviour of Ann.
He had left her at The Hut at Baildon, and come up to London alone for the opening of the new Parliament. To find a small house, too, He had quarrelled with Lizzie Lightowler, told her he would use her North Street place no longer. He walked his quarterdeck and told himself it was past belief that the two women who owed so much to him should behave in such a fashion. Pen Muff he could understand. She had been in it, too.
His quarterdeck was the terrace along the Thames, opposite the House of Commons. He loved to come here and walk and think. On one hand the blackened time-smoothed granite parapet with the lamps springing out of it. Beneath his feet the long stone pavement, running forward in a lovely vista and almost always unfrequented. On the other hand the silver-grey Portland stone wall of St. Thomas’s Hospital with the plane trees rising above it, and above the plane trees the windows of the hospital in tier upon tier. They were lighted now, and the lamps springing from the parapet were lighed, and, on the other side of the river stirred by a cold winter wind, the windows of the House were lighted. In front of him Westminster Bridge and behind him Lambeth Bridge carried their lights across the dark water sucking and gurgling under their arches, and beyond Westminster the lights of great hotels and offices built up a fantastic faëry façade diminishing in a perspective that he could never look upon without emotion.
The great city! He loved it. He watched the barges forging down the wide roadway of the river, and the lighted buses crossing it on the bridges, and the twinkling lights of hansom cabs dancing like fireflies along the farther shore, and here, where scarcely a soul seemed ever to come, he could be private, swinging along in the cold January night with the Spanish cloak about him and the big sombrero hat crowning his splendid head. He was aware of himself as part of this metropolitan magnificence, this show so brave though superimposed, as he knew, not a few hundred yards from where he walked, upon the black misery of the Lambeth slums cowering under the medieval splendour of the Archbishop’s palace. But his back was to the slums, and he looked across the water to the wintry sky that, above the discernible and manifest lights enchanting the eye, pulsed and quivered with emanation of unseen mile after mile of lighted opulence and gaiety. A brave show. He had found himself of late coming again and again to his quarterdeck to look upon it. Never had it seemed lovelier. Never had it been more pregnant with allure, with the invisible and intangible promises that wove themselves so deeply into the tangible prosaic conflict of his daily life.
And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
Steals on the ear the distant triumph song;
And hearts are brave again and arms are strong.
Often on a night like this he heard the song. This immense pulsation of light over the unseen anonymous millions of London seemed the song made manifest. And of what triumph did it tell? What quality of conquest did he discern at the heart of his dreams? Quality of conquest? He never knew the mood which can parse and analyze laurels. He pressed forward. Or was pressed forward. “I felt sometimes that if I had hesitated in the course that from the first lay so plainly open, some influence would have blocked retreat and pressed me forward, willy-nilly.” (The Diary.)
That is at least honest. That was his accustomed mood; but tonight the mood was darkened because he was still smarting from Ann’s defection.
They had travelled north together: he and Ann, Lizzie and Charles. This was Charles’s first holiday from Graingers, and already the boy was a little apart from them, wrapped, though as yet ever so lightly, in the silky cocoon of an environment alien to them. For the first time in his life Charles had had experiences which they had not shared, could fall back upon memories in which they had no part. In the train he had gently contradicted something which Ann had said, giving as sufficient reason: “Old Robbie says so.” Questioned as to Old Robbie’s credentials, he would vouchsafe only: “Oh, he’s a chap.”
Ann was hurt by the small encounter, and reflected that now there would be an increasing procession of Robbies, vaguely anonymous and wholly authoritative chaps, from whom there could be no appeal. It must be so, of course it must be so, she told herself. No one but a fool could hope or wish to remain sole custodian of a growing child’s integrity; but this thought only threw her back the more sharply upon her resolution to guard her own integrity, too, and to sacrifice to Hamer not an inch of her political conviction.
He had pretended at first to take her woman’s suffrage work as a joke, an ebullience of spirit, that would boil over soon and be done with. Even when she and Lizzie had gone to Manchester to heckle a speaker who was certain soon to be a Liberal cabinet minister and had been ignominiously seized and roughly thrown into the street, he refused to take it seriously. But he read her a lecture: for the first time in their married life he talked to her like a Dutch uncle, begging her to remember the dignity of his position – that was his word! – and the der-ogatory effect her conduct was likely to have on his public position.
There had been an all-night sitting of the House. Lizzie had already gone out when Hamer came home, tired and irritable. He and Ann sat down together to a meal in the pretty North Street dining-room, with the pale winter sunshine falling on an importunate organ-grinder who, throughout their dispute, kept drooling “Good-bye, Dolly Gray.”
It was when Hamer referred to his dignity that Ann boiled over. She threw John Ball and Wat Tyler in his teeth, and every man jack of the agitators down to Keir Hardie, down to Hamer himself. Had they stood on their dignity? Was she doing anything they hadn’t done?
Ah, but these were working for a possible cause, for a reasonable end. Did she suppose that women would ever get the vote, that women, outnumbering men as they did, would ever voluntarily be granted the vote by men?
She seized on that word voluntarily, and told him she expected nothing of the kind. That was why the suffragists must do as they were doing. Would Gladstone have voluntarily brought in a Home Rule bill for Ireland? Would the Tories have voluntarily enfranchised men like Hamer Shawcross and Arnold Ryerson and Jimmy Newboult and Keir Hardie? Voluntarily! She gave him back his word with scorn.
He left his breakfast untouched, bathed and shaved himself, and, without sleeping, went to his work-room and was soon immersed. So much to do! So much to do!
*
The memory of the hot debate was between them as they travelled north but they had patched up a truce, and he could not believe that she would intervene in St. Swithin’s. He saw little of Charles, for the general election was upon him. Jimmy Newboult was at the station in Bradford to meet him, trusty as ever, forgetting none of the things that would minister to his leader’s comfort. He had a couple of cabs ready to take the little party and the luggage across the town to the Midland station where they caught the train to Shipley, and at Shipley two more cabs were waiting to take them through the deepening winter dusk up the long hill to Baildon. At The Hut Ellen had tea ready in the big firelit drawing-room, and as soon as tea was over Hamer took Jimmy off to his study where the fretwork model of the House of Commons stood on a low bookcase.
So it was all through that Christmas holiday. Charles had but fragmentary glimpses of his father, usually at breakfast, and he did not see much more of his mother or of the woman he knew as Auntie Lizzie. Those two were in and out of Bradford every day, not, as had been their way in the past, to work for Hamer, but to make a nuisance of themselves at meetings and to organize meetings of their own. And so Charles was thrown more and more into the company of Ellen.
There was a perfect understanding between them. The old lady, whose life now was almost wholly in the past, had lost asperity and became very gentle. Charles, when the weather was too bad for them to go out, would sit for hours on the floor at her feet, reading a book. Sometimes she would stroke his hair; sometimes she would doze right off; not often did she have much to say; but sitting there close against her black skirts, the child felt as happy and secure as if he were sitting on a summer day at the foot of an old tree that had known the storms of many winters.
Occasionally she would put on her spectacles and read to him her favourite bits out of Dickens, and tell him about Gordon whose books these were, and about the Old Warrior whose sabre was over the fireplace in Hamer’s room, and about Hamer himself, a little boy playing in the Ancoats streets, working in an Ancoats greengrocer’s shop, boxing in a back street bone-yard. Once started, reminiscence flowed from her. It was as though a river, feeling already the pulse of the nearing tides, had begun miraculously to retrace its course, to rediscover, before the last engulfment, the slow twist and loops through green mature meadows, the dartings and sparkling leaps down the sunny slopes of infancy.
From all this Charles learned much that he had never known before about the nature of his own inheritance, and began to apprehend a background immensely different from the background of Robbie and other heroes of Graingers who were occasionally called for by rustling dowagers riding in carriages behind cockaded servants. He began to be aware, too, of his father as a public figure. He was a precocious reader, and whenever the name of Hamer Shawcross, M.P., struck his eyes in some public print he would devour what was said. The picture he built up was rebellious. This Mr. Shawcross seemed always to be getting reproved by the Speaker in the House of Commons, or addressing great meetings of discontented men, or predicting the overthrow of all that Charles, even after one term’s experience, dimly apprehended to be meant by Graingers.
This rebellious person fitted in well with the boy whose early years Grandmother Ellen sketched in for him, but not so well with the father he knew. “Hamer Shawcross” sounded to him almost like a character out of a book, a defiant, truculent, heroic character. Father wasn’t like that. There was a vague and undefined territory between these two characters that troubled him because he could not bridge it.
In her lonely time, when they lived in Moorland Cottage and she had that room, so little desired, to herself, Ellen had assuaged her solitude by cutting from the newspapers all the references to Hamer that she could find and all the reports of his speeches. She had hidden them in a drawer, saying nothing to him or Ann, and had read them again and again.
One day she produced this pile, and, to find the child some occupation, she told him to stick them into an exercise book. In the kitchen she made paste out of flour and found him a brush, and for a couple of hours he sprawled on the rug at her feet, absorbed in his task. When it was done, she told him he could keep the book. He took it up to his room and put it in a drawer. Day by day thereafter he read it, until some of Hamer Shawcross’s utterances were as firmly woven into his mind as familiar proverbs or as Ellen’s sayings. “Never mind what people call you so long as they don’t call you pigeon pie and eat you.” That was one of them. There had been a time when he sweated with apprehension lest one of the workers, going home through the winter dusk from the little grey stone woollen mill in Baildon, should pounce upon him and proclaim him to be pigeon pie.
*
In the room where, long before, Tom Hannaway had publicly charged Hamer with neglecting his mother, Hamer faced his friendly election audience. He had no fears. St. Swithin’s had long since taken him to its heart. His own flair told him that all was going well this time, and Jimmy Newboult, with a practised finger on the pulse of the constituency, had assured him that his return was certain. Jimmy wouldn’t say a thing like that merely to flatter.
He saw Ann and Lizzie Lightowler come in and take seats at the back. This was the first of his meetings they had attended, and seeing them sitting so quietly there his mind jerked back to a day long ago when he had joked about votes for women with old Marsden, now gone to his rest in Nab Wood cemetery, and Lizzie had asked what the joke was, and left him flat by her passionate assertion: “But I believe in all that.”
Well, if they had come to make trouble, let them have it, He wasn’t the dependent boy he had been in those days. He was Hamer Shawcross, and the knowledge that Hamer Shawcross didn’t believe in votes for women had been efficacious in the Labour Party. Except Keir Hardie, there was no man of influence in the party wholeheartedly espousing this cause – nor in any other party, if it came to that; and he flattered himself that, so far as his own party was concerned, his was the influence that kept them where they were. Hardie was the leader of the party, and here was the first important issue on which his influence was greater than Hardie’s. For that very reason, he felt a fanatic resolution to hold on, not to budge an inch.
He started to speak, wondering when and how the trouble would begin. He knew the game the women were playing up and down the country. They did not wait till question-time and put their questions in an orthodox fashion. That would be too tame; that would attract no attention. They jumped up early, popped a question, and, if it were not answered, or if the answer were not to their satisfaction, they tried to wreck the meeting.
He was going along well enough, but the sight of Ann and Lizzie sitting there teased and harassed him. He felt as though he were looking at a bomb which he knew must go off, and it was almost with a sense of relief that he saw Ann rise suddenly to her feet. He stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence. The audience looked round in surprise as Ann shouted: “Does Mr. Shawcross believe in votes for women?”
She was almost as well known in the constituency as he was, and there was a moment’s surprise, almost consternation. Then, as Ann remained standing, all the heads swung back towards the platform.If any one had thought that this was a put-up family show, arranged to air a question, the sight of the two dispelled the notion. Ann’s face was white and tense, Hamer’s dark with resentment.
He said: “If the speaker will put her question at the proper time, I shall then decide whether it is one that need be answered.”
Ann sat down, and Lizzie got up and shouted: “It’s easy to say Yes or No.”
Hamer’s chairman sprang to his feet and said: “I decline to allow any questions to be put to the candidate till question-time.”
Ann and Lizzie, in reply to that, stood up side by side and at the tops of their voices yelled the words that were growing into a mighty chorus up and down the country: “Votes for Women!’” Then they left the meeting.
It was the tamest interruption perhaps that any speaker suffered at the hands of the suffragists, but it left Hamer quivering with annoyance. The very fact that they had made their point and then let him down lightly, “walking almost contemptuously from the scene of their exploit,” as the Yorkshire Post said the next day, getting the utmost juice out of Wife Heckles Husband – this very fact the more deeply incensed him.
When the meeting was over, he felt he could not face Ann that night. But at the same time he could not forget the white tension of her face. He did not underestimate the nervous torture it must have been to her to outface him like that in the midst of so many who knew them both. Admiration and resentment battled in his stubborn heart, and when his damned dignity took a hand, resentment won. Walking the miserable streets in the cold drizzling rain, he finally hardened his heart, turned his back on this cause which, if he had espoused it, would have been the one cause of the many he advocated to which, in his old age, he might have looked back and said: That, at all events, came off. Though so much else was wind and water, that endured, that came through.
But what, then, would it have mattered? From beneath the glory of his coronet, his mind, tinged as it was with philosophic irony, might have reflected that he was now in an hereditary place where votes do not corrupt, and where even the overwhelming vote of the women could not break through nor steal a safe seat on the lordly crimson benches.
*
But that was a long way off, and Ann was very near and very dear, so that when he came, close upon midnight, to The Hut, his heart was a bitter mixture of outraged tenderness, of wincing wounded self-esteem, and of self-righteous conviction that now he was a martyr stabbed with arrows on his own hearth. Since Charles had gone to Graingers, his room had been sometimes used for visitors. A spare bed had been moved in there, so that two people might be put up for a night.
He remembered this. There was no one stirring in the house. A lamp had been left lighted for him in the hall. He took off his cloak and great hat, and walked upstairs with the lamp in his hand.
Ann was sitting up in bed, the sheet drawn to her chin. Her hair was as beautiful as ever: the same white-honey glistening cascade that had fascinated his youth. It was streaming about her shoulders now. He noted all that, with resentment and hurt dignity in the ascendent, blowing cold over the deep tenderness of his heart, and noted, too, the white tension still in her face.
“Oh, my love!” she said, almost in tears.
The words abased her and glorified her. It was surrender. She was his at that moment on any terms. He said tonelessly: “I don’t understand you. You are trying to destroy me.”
It was monstrous, absurd, outrageous. And he knew it was untrue. He added with bathos: “I have come for my pyjamas.”
He walked to the bed and fumbled for them beneath the pillow. Ann shrank away, holding to the sheet lest he should see her nakedness. He saw it, and was shaken. But he would not give in. He took the pyjamas, unhooked his dressing-gown from behind the door, and said: “I shall sleep in Charles’s room.”
Then he was gone with the lamp, and the click of the shutting door sounded in Ann’s ears like the snip of fatal shears, She sat for a long time, with the sheet drawn up to her chin, staring at the darkness. Her body was hot with shame, and her heart was cold with anguish. For a long time her mind talked to itself. “I said ‘It seems such a little light’ and Hamer said ‘It is enough to love by.’”
She had never forgotten that. It was a Hamer phrase, a lovely phrase, and always it had been able to evoke the rapture of that night in the old rickety hut when the iron stove was blazing and the snow was falling on the moor, so that they woke to a wide white world seamed with little valleys of bluish shadow. “Enough to love by.”
Now he was gone out, carrying the lamp with him, and she wondered whether life could ever be the same again.
Not quite. The breath that clouds the mirror clears, and the reflection is bright again; but the mirror is tarnished at last by breath upon breath till the image is leaden, not crystal.
*
Hamer liked sleeping with Ann. The physical contact of their bodies, lying limb against limb, was pleasant to them both, and salutary, and tranquillizing to their minds.
During that December night the drizzly weather changed to frost, and he woke in his single bed unconsciously clutching the clothes tightly about him, aware of a sharp discomfort in one knee. He had felt it before, and it annoyed him beyond its cause. He was vain of his perfect health, his magnificent physique. “A touch of rheumatism” seemed to his mind, supersensitive in such matters, the first touch of blight in the bud, of worm in the oak, of rust in the steel. He hated illness, and, without opening his eyes, he lay there magnifying the rasp of the knee, suddenly aware of what had brought him to this single bed where his enemy had got at him, and blaming Ann for a day that was beginning badly.
At last he opened his eyes and saw Charles sitting up in bed with a dressing-gown on, writing by candlelight in an exercise-book. Another exercise-book lay on the bed.
Seeing his father awake, Charles put down the pencil whose end his small white teeth had pocked with nibblings, and said: “Hallo! What are you doing here?”
Hamer kept his face averted as much as possible from the child. This was another of his sensitivities. Charles had never seen him unshaven, unkempt. During his travels he had spent many nights in the homes of Labour leaders who appeared at the breakfast-table with scrubby chins and in shirt-sleeves. He hated it. So he averted his face from Charles and said: “I was very late getting home last night. I didn’t want to disturb your mother.”
Charles said nothing for a time; then he asked: “Do you like big words?”
Hamer permitted himself to laugh. “You bet I do, Charles,” he said. “Don’t you ever listen to people who say that writers and speakers should always use short words. Perhaps at school one of these days you’ll learn something about Anglo-Saxon. Then you’ll find a lot of fools who will tell you that good English is only written in simple Anglo-Saxon words. Listen to this...”
In his eagerness, for he did not often have a chance to talk with this intelligent son of his, he forgot his reticence and turned towards the boy. He intoned: “‘The multitudinous seas incarnadine.’ How d’you like the sound of that?”
Charles considered it, and said: “It sounds rich – like the fire shining on your curtains.”
Hamer laughed outright, well pleased. “Yes,” he said. “I think it’s better than ‘redden the many seas’ which is what it means. Oh, yes, big words can be grand things. They can make nothing very much sound pretty good. They can be like coronation robes on a piddling little king.”
“My word doesn’t sound very grand,” said Charles. “It’s ‘environment,’ but I can’t spell it.”
Hamer spelled it out for him, and the boy wrote it painfully. “What are you writing?” Hamer asked.
“An essay for school,” Charles said. “We’ve got to do a long essay in the holidays on anything we like. I’m doing one on the early life of Hamer Shawcross, M.P.” He read: “Our hero’s early environment was most meagre, for he played in bone-yards, and while still a child was a greengrocer’s boy near the canal which bounded the outskirts of his humble home, from which he sallied forth to the markets in the dewy morn ere many were risen from beds of sloth.”
Hamer ceased to smile. “Where did you learn all this?” he asked.
“From Grannie. And about the sword and the Old Warrior, and Gordon and Darkie Cheap, and your wretched estate.”
Charles’s hair had been uncut since the holiday began. It had begun to arrange itself again in tendrils, on his forehead, There he sat, blue-eyed, angelic-looking, nibbling the pencil, unaware that he had wrung his father’s withers.
“You know,” said Hamer reasonably, boiling within, “I don’t think it is usual to write essays about living people. I don’t think they’d like it at Graingers.”
Charles looked dismayed. “I’ve done a lot,” he said.
“That’s a pity,” said Hamer, “but I’m sure Alexander the Great or Cæsar would be better. I can give you a good little book on Alexander.”
He left the child dubious, but dutifully consenting to enlighten his headmaster concerning the exploits of Alexander.
*
Ellen couldn’t be kept out of the kitchen. She did not sleep much, and always before seven o’clock she was up and dressed and pottering about with preparations for breakfast. These winter mornings she wore an old blue woollen gown and a grey shawl hooded over her head, held under the chin by a safety-pin, Small as she was, she had achieved a serenity, a dignity of which she was unaware.
That morning, she was surprised, on coming out of her bedroom, to hear voices in Charles’s room. She recognized Hamer’s voice, and went downstairs full of perplexity. She was assembling cups and plates on a tray in the grey light when Ann came into the room, her face as grey as the morning. “Let’s have a cup of tea, Mother,” she said.
Ellen soon produced it, and Ann sat at the kitchen table, holding the cup in both hands as though to warm them, and sipping the tea occasionally.
“Don’t lay a place for me,” she said. “Tell Lizzie I’ve gone straight up to Bradford. She’ll know where to find me.”
“Not without a bit o’ food in you you’re not going,” said Ellen warmly. “There’s some queer nonsense goin’ on in this house, it seems to me.”
“Nothing that won’t soon mend itself,” Ann answered without conviction. She refilled her cup, nibbled a few biscuits, and, despite the old woman’s entreaties, went out.
Lizzie went, too, soon after breakfast, a silent meal. Hamer scarcely spoke. He permitted himself to be absorbed in the newspapers, and Charles had a book on Alexander the Great propped open by his plate.
When the meal was done, and Lizzie gone, and Charles retired to his room to meditate on Alexander, Hamer said: “Mother, could you spare me a moment?”
How many moments she would have spared him! How, day after day, and year after year, saying nothing to anyone, she had felt the uselessness descend upon her because he did not want her moments any more.
She went before him into his room, on the way picking up from the table in the hall a half-knitted sock of Charles’s. She did not sit in one of the deep leather chairs but on a rigid wooden one which kept her back straight; and the frosty sunshine fell through the window on to the blue gown and the grey hood of the shawl as she began at once to work.
She did not lift her eyes to her son, but was aware of his restlessness, his mental unbalance, as he stood towering above her on the hearthrug, filling his pipe with nervous fingers.
“How do you get on with Charles?” he asked when he had lit his pipe.
“He’s a dear child,” she said simply.
“I was having some talk with him this morning. He was telling me about an essay he’s writing to take back to school.”
She smiled as her busy fingers flashed, “Such nonsense! Why harass the child’s carcass when he’s on holiday?”
“It’s necessary,” said Hamer. “It’s a good thing for him. I’m trying to have him brought up in such a way that he won’t have to harass his carcass as I did – working all day and studying all night. I want him to miss that atmosphere altogether. I don’t see, myself, why he should ever be troubled by the knowledge that I grew up that way.”
For the first time, she raised her old eyes and looked at him, her hands ceasing their busy motion, and there was that in her regard which made him add hastily: “I mean, of course, not just now. It stands to reason that he’ll know, and that I’ll want him to know, later on. But he’s only a child. He’s in a new environment, and I don’t think it’s good for him to imagine that he and his people are different from the boys he’s meeting there.”
“Whatever he imagines won’t alter t’facts,” Ellen said sharply. “Of course we’re different – different as chalk and cheese. That’s the fact, lad, and facts’ll out sooner or later. Don’t thee forget Broadbent Street, or thee’ll come a cropper.”
Hamer puffed angrily at his pipe for a moment, then said: “Never mind me, Mother. We’re discussing Charles, not me, Charles’s mother didn’t come out of Broadbent Street, and half of me didn’t either, for that matter.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth he cursed the anger that had forced them from him: cursed, too, that hidden preoccupation with his own origins that often teased and excited his mind. He would not have been surprised if Ellen had got up and walked out of the room or if she had railed at him fiercely. She did neither. Her fingers let go the knitting which lay in her lap, and her hands folded above the knitting in her immemorial attitude of patience and endurance. She looked at her hands for a long time as if considering what to say; then she said, using the name he had not heard for years:
“I’m only an ignorant old woman, John, and you’re a great man. I don’t grudge it to you, lad. All credit to you. But give me a bit of credit, too. I may be ignorant, but that don’t mean I’m a fool. I’ve lived for seventy-two years, an’ that counts. I can put two and two together an’ see what’s what. I don’t think I’ve done anything to hurt your Charles, and never in this life, God help me, have I done anything to hurt you. And never will you make me change my opinion that everything decent in you – an’ that’s a lot – came out of Broadbent Street. Who your father was don’t matter all that. But when you’ve done thanking God for Gordon Stansfield you’ll be past hoping for.”
Hamer knelt suddenly at her feet in a swift impulse of penitence and sincerity. “And for you, Mother,” he said.
“That’s as may be. I haven’t been of much account to anybody – except perhaps to Gordon. Go on with you now. You’ve got your work to do. Go and leave me.”
It was his own room, and he had much to do there, but he said nothing about that. He went out of the room, and presently out of the house, and the urgent business of life caught him up from her again. Ellen sat for a long time, utterly without motion, living over every second of that strange interlude which somehow left her feeling moved and uplifted and happy. They had talked together, again, face to face.
*
As he walked his quarterdeck with the night wind moving about him and the London lights pulsating in the firmament, he was thinking of all these things and the things that followed. Pen Muff, whose name was becoming known throughout the country as one of the most savage of the women suffragists, had turned up with a cohort of Amazons, and with bells, rattles and catcalls had wrecked a meeting. As a suffragist, she had dropped the name of Ryerson. “Miss Muff,” “Pen Muff,” and in the more facetious papers “Little Pen Muffet” was getting into the public prints everywhere.
Ann and Lizzie often accompanied Pen Muff on her wrecking expeditions, not only in Bradford but all over the north of England. Sometimes they were away for days on end, and once Ann came back with her face bruised and her hands scarred from trampling feet. Lizzie had always kept her hair cut short, and to his horror Ann also appeared at The Hut one day with her hair gone save for a boyish vestige, which was grotesquely parted at one side and brushed across the head. “It’s not so easy for men to grab hold of,” she said.
She and Lizzie had left his meetings alone after their small symbolic interference. The truce was back, uneasy and tantalizing, yet workable. But, so far as Lizzie at least was concerned, it couldn’t go on. He felt that once the House was reassembled and he back in London, he couldn’t go on living in this atmosphere of constant strain and conscious accommodation. He told her so. “Don’t be a fool, man,” she answered brusquely. “We’re fighting for what we believe to be right, as you’ve always done yourself. If that makes us impossible to live with, there’s something wrong with your liver.”
*
He quickened his steps. He must get back to North Street. He was still living there, unable to find a house within his means. He was approaching the steps leading up to Westminster Bridge when a woman, who seemed in the dim light vaguely familiar, began to come down them. She came with a light tripping step, almost dancing, and her cloak breezed out like wings. Then he recognized her. They had never spoken, except during that brief encounter on the moor and in the course of polite formalities while votes were being counted at St. Swithin’s. He swept off his great hat, and Lady Lostwithiel paused on the pavement at the foot of the steps. Then she came forward and held out a gloved hand. “Good evening, Mr. Shawcross. So St. Swithin’s has sent you back again. May I congratulate you?”
Her hand was small, firm and warm. He held it for a fraction of time longer than he needed to do. The cold night air was suddenly alive with her perfume, as though a wind had stirred a bed of flowers. The light of one of the spherical lamps, rising from the wreathed dolphins on the parapet, fell on her lively face and dancing eyes.
“This is a lovely place for a walk,” she said. “I always take a little air here after visiting St. Thomas’s.”
She had begun to walk, and he turned in his tracks and walked at her side, hugely overtopping her, back towards Lambeth Bridge.
He hoped politely that no one of importance to her was ill in St. Thomas’s.
“Not unless you call a maid important,” she laughed. “I do, as it happens. She’s a good gel.” She had old Buck’s pronunciation of some words. “I come to see her every Friday. And – oh, dear – I forgot to commiserate with you. The suffragists seem to have given you a bad time.”
“Yes,” he said. “But that sort of thing can’t last. They are an excited and misguided set. They’ll fizzle out.”
Her laugh was very clear and silvery, “Oh, Mr. Shawcross! And I’ve always considered you a prophet! I’ve always told Lostwithiel to take note of what you do and say. Do you know, I’ve always thought you the most dangerous man in England? And so did old Papa Buck.”
He accepted the compliment placidly. “Dangerous to us, I mean” of course,” she added. “Wind-bags and ranters and scrubby trade unionists will never do us much damage, but you—” She shrugged her shoulders.
“And now, as a prophet, you’re letting me down. This suffrage movement is going to win, you know. I’ve tried to drill it into Lostwithiel. The Conservative Party ought to support these women tooth and nail. Because women outnumber men. Give them the vote and the future is ours. For, you see, women are naturally conservative creatures. I really believe that you understand this, and that that is why you oppose the suffrage.”
“You believe right,” he said grimly, letting the reasons that had dwelt in his heart out into the light of day for the first time, “But you can’t tell Hardie a thing like that.”
She stopped and looked at him sweetly. “No, I suppose not,” she said. “He’s utterly upright. However it worked, he would see it as a matter of right and wrong – wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t ask if it suited the party book.”
Hamer winced. “I am a politician,” he said bluntly. “I want to see my party in power.”
“You will,” said Lady Lostwithiel. “Don’t doubt it, you will.”
They came out upon Lambeth Bridge, and there she said: “Would you mind calling me a cab?”
He did so, and held the door while she climbed past him in a scurry of perfume. He shut the door, and she gave him her hand through the window. “We’ve talked nothing but politics,” she said. “I’m afraid that’s been very dull for you. We must meet again. There are so many other things in the world.”
Then she was gone, and though he had so much to do, he did not hasten to North Street. He went back and paced the quarterdeck. A week later he remembered that she had said she always came on Fridays. Perhaps the maid – that good gel – was better. Lettice did not appear.
*
Hamer remained in North Street. His resentment could not stand against Lizzie Lightowler’s gusty humour or Ann’s silent pleading, Lizzie was enjoying the crusade. Ann was not, She did not know how long, how bitter, the way was that stretched before her. Had she known, she would have trodden it just the same, But she hated it. She hated the public odium, the rude manhandling, the dust and wounds, She suffered in spirit as well as in body; but Lizzie seemed to thrive in spirit almost in proportion to her physical suffering. These were her great years.
Years! Hamer would never have believed it, Few people would have believed it; but the incredible struggle went on, increasing in ferocity, for longer than most wars endure. Throughout that time, Hamer and Ann led lives that lay apart. They shared the same house, but neither knew when the other would be in, where the other would be. There were days and weeks when they saw nothing of each other. Hamer got used to most things: he got used even to Ann’s being in prison: the finest women in the country were in prison: but when the hunger-strikes began, here was something he could not get used to. Never so long as he lived did he forget the first time the cab drove to the door, and Ann got down and tottered and fell. He ran out and picked her up, wondering at the lightness of this pitiful white-faced wreck of a woman he held in his arms, her eyes deep and burning, her sunken cheeks flushed. He carried her in and laid her on a couch. She was barely conscious, and when she could speak he broke out in an anguish of supplication. “My darling! Must you go on with this? Must you?”
A pallid smile dawned in her eyes, and she began to murmur: “I shall not cease from mental strife, nor shall the sword sleep...” and then she fainted again.
He knew what she meant. She was reminding him of the verse he himself had loved to quote long ago when they were fighting side by side in St. Swithin’s. It was the verse he had always recited with the sabre in his hand. What mental strife had he endured, what ardour of body, to compare with Ann’s? He stood looking down at her, distraught by the impotence of his own compassion, Poor Ann! Poor Ann! What did she imagine would come of it all? Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land? Did that come through giving votes to women? Did it come through giving votes to anyone? Did anything worth while ever come from the schemes and machinations of politics?
Looking at Ann, short-haired, haggard, the mere husk and dry shell of the girl he had loved, he was visited by a profound seizure of pessimism. For a moment he hung over a gulf where he and his like, all the makers of windy promises, the pedlars of paradise, swirled like a handful of inconsiderable dust. He saw with clarity that the immortal aspirations of men for freedom, truth, beauty, equality, could never know a secular satisfaction, and that this very fact made both the glory and the tragedy of human life. And all this, he confessed in that moment, was outside the sphere wherein he daily exercised himself.
He knelt down and drew off Ann’s shoes. The soles of her stockings were in rags, She was neglecting herself, Her feet were all but bare. He kissed them, knowing them to be the feet of a martyr.
*
But in 1906 all this was still in the future. The war of the women, and the politicians’ savage and bestial war upon the women, were hardly begun. Hamer for one still regarded the whole matter as one that would blow over, fizzle out, obligingly accommodate itself in one way or another. Scuffles and scrimmages round about the House of Commons were frequent; they were not unknown within the sacred precincts; and so he was not surprised, when walking through the lobby one October day, to find a knot of excited women waving their arms, shouting at the tops of their voices, denouncing the Government for its callous disregard of their claims. Policemen were roughly pushing the women out, and Hamer would have hurried on, thinking the matter of small importance, if he had not noticed Ann and Lizzie Lightowler among them. Ann’s arm was held behind her back in a grip that would have meant torture had she resisted. She was hustled out of the House, and Hamer followed to see how the matter would end. It did not end, as he had hoped, with the women being told to go home. In police custody, they were marched away through the mild October sunshine. Hamer turned back, whitefaced, into the House. This was the first time he had seen his wife manhandled.
*
Ann woke with a start in the prison cell. A grisly light was filtering through the grated window. She could just make out her surroundings. Lying on a hard board covered by a mattress coarsely stuffed with what felt like wood shavings, she looked at the cold stone walls of this tiny domain in which a tall man could not have lain down straight on the floor. The door was of iron, pierced by a hole. An eye peering through at her had been one of the horrors of the night before.
She had come, after sentence, in a dark van, jolting through the crowded streets of London with as little knowledge of her journey as if she had been a corpse in a hearse. She had no idea what would happen to her in prison. She had stood in the dock white-faced and stony-eyed, unable to summon up the wild bravado of some who yelled their battle-cry “Votes for Women” even into the teeth of the law’s majesty. She couldn’t do that sort of thing. She could only suffer, while shrinking from suffering with every nerve of her being.
It was still to her, staring at the grey morning wall, and shivering in the stony cold, a confused incredible nightmare: the stripping of her clothes, the hustling into coarse serge daubed with broad arrows. She drew great clumsy boots upon her feet, looking with wonder at the stockings on her legs, grotesque things ringed in black and red, as though she were about to play some farcical pirate part.
All this was jumbled in her memory with the sound of the boots clumping through stone corridors, and the jangling of keys, and the clang of the iron door. Then the long doleful night, rustling with strange alarming noises, made horrid with the sense of an eye at the peep-hole, Thou God seest me. Then fitful sleep, full of dreams: Charles, Hamer, Haworth in his happiest mood driving her through the leafy lanes of Cheshire. They were happy dreams, and she clung to them tenaciously, lying there in the grim half-light, till bells jangled, lights snapped on, and the routine of the jail caught her up.
*
Looking back upon it, Ann thought it an easy time. Scrubbing the board that was her bed, scrubbing the plank that was her table, scouring her few pots and pans with bath-brick, marching at the word of command down the clanging corridors to Divine Worship – her own mind ironically supplied the capital letters – exercising in the yard – round and round so drearily, round and round, with tall forbidding walls about her and a glimpse of pale autumn sky as remote and inaccessible as mercy – reading the Word of God, provided by the Christian authorities at a cheap cut rate which ensured small eye-destroying print, eating her skilly and loathing it: she got through the days somehow.
It was a time of dreariness and boredom, and she filled it with dreaming – dreaming awake and dreaming asleep – and with scratching upon the wall of her cell. She scratched with the point of a safety-pin taken from her clothing. “I shall not cease from mental strife.” It was something to do, and it made the verse her own. It was Hamer’s war-cry, and therefore it was doubly precious to her, for never had she loved him, never had she yearned for him, as in these days of their separation. He was wrong, woefully wrong, about woman suffrage; but who, she asked herself loyally, was not wrong about something?
*
Early on the morning of Ann’s release Hamer was walking the pavement outside Holloway Jail. He was not wearing his cloak and sombrero. He knew what happened on these occasions. There would be a crowd of suffragists waiting to hail the new martyrs, possibly to form a procession and march away on some new exploit which would land more of them in jail before the day was out. There was no end in those years to the candidates for martyrdom. Up and down the country the women were roused, hundreds of thousands of them, gentlewomen and harridans, peeresses, seamstresses, laundry girls, professional women: it was a great unifying wave of feeling, productive of a willingness to suffer which no uprising of men had seen in the long course of English history. There was no party allegiance about it. In all the parties the women were deserters, declaring their readiness to support any candidate who would take up their cause. Senseless, heroic, unheedful of consequences, the movement rolled on, sullied by violence, by arson, by every kind of destruction, advertised by anguish, by suicide, but redeemed by the quality which is rare and precious: the willingness to hand over, for a faith, body and soul to the torturer.
Women of this breed would be at Holloway, and Hamer did not want to recognize them. So he left at home his famous attire and lurked in the background. October was fading towards November, but the morning retained the quality of autumn, mild and melancholy. Hamer paced a regular beat from one corner to another, and suddenly, reaching one of the corners, he collided with a man who turned out of a side-street. It was Arnold Ryerson, rather shabby-looking, stout and flabby and grey. He had shed his side-whiskers, but retained a heavy moustache. More than ever, he looked like a tired engine-driver, soiled by contact with his locomotive.
Arnold’s face lighted up with the affectionate smile Hamer knew so well and he held out his puffy hand. “Well, Hamer!” he said. “Quite a great man you are these days!”
“My dear Arnold,” Hamer replied, “this isn’t very nice of you. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming up? You could have stayed with me.”
“No, no,” said Arnold, “I couldn’t bother you. Anyway, I’ve been travelling all night. I haven’t got much time to spare, you know. One of Pen’s little friends is in there.” He nodded towards the prison. “Coming out this morning. I’ve to take her back to Cwmdulais for a bit of a rest. She’s a nervous little thing – wouldn’t like to travel alone.”
Isn’t that like them? Hamer thought. Nervous little things who don’t like to travel alone, and they defy the State and all its majesty.
“Ann is in there, too,” he said, “and I don’t like it.”
“What – the idea of being in jail? Pen’s been in more than once. We don’t mind. We’re used to it in our family. Don’t forget, I’ve been in myself.”
There was no reproach in his voice, and anyway it was a long time ago – that night when Evan Vaughan gurgled out his life. “They’ve got as much right to citizenship as we have,” said Arnold. “The means they adopt are their affair.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in violence?”
“I thought you did.”
Hamer had no reply to that. They walked in silence for a while, then Arnold said: “It’s a long time since I heard you called Shawcross of Peterloo. I liked that name. It had a ring about it.”
“They die out, these old nicknames,” said Hamer. “I suppose it’s inevitable.
“Aye,” Arnold said simply. “We grow old. The kick goes out of us. It’s taking our women now to remind us of what we once were ourselves.”
He filled a pipe and stood heavily on the corner, sucking loudly as he applied the lighted match, Hamer saw that he was unshaven, and guessed that probably he had not had breakfast, He thought of saying: “Look, Arnold, come and have some food with me and Ann, and bring your little friend with you.” He was still thinking of saying it when Arnold shouted: “They’re opening the gates,” and rushed across the road.
Hamer did not rush with him. He stood where he was and watched the women carrying their banner “Votes for Women” close in on the gates. They clung to the heavy iron railings, waving bouquets, shouting their slogan, held back by policemen from the tree-shaded forecourt of the prison. When the prisoners came out through the big wooden doors and walked down the forecourt towards the gates there were delirious cries of welcome and applause. The crowd closed about them, formed a procession about them, began to march away as with victors. When the street was nearly clear, Hamer saw that Ann had let the tide slip round her and past her, and that she was standing alone, looking a little bewildered and bemused. Then she saw him, and came across the road with an eager run, and fell into his arms.
“I wondered if you’d come,” she said.
“You darling. Why did you wonder that?”
“You’re not ashamed of me – a jailbird?”
“Would it make any difference if I were?”
“All the difference in the world,” she said. “Hate what I’m doing if you must, but love me, my darling, go on loving me. Is that too difficult?”
She looked pale and ill, and her face was full of wistful pleading. He smiled at her sadly. “Very, very difficult,” he said. “But not impossible.”
“I dreamed and dreamed all the time I was in there,” Ann said. “I still feel giddy and as though I were seeing visions. I actually thought I saw Arnold in the crowd.”
“You did. He came up from Cwmdulais to meet a friend of Pen’s.”
“Oh, but my dear, you should have stopped him. You should have taken him home with us, It’s years since I’ve seen him.”
“He was terribly pressed. He had to get a train at Paddington.”
“Well, let us go. Can we afford a cab?”
“We can do better than that. See what’s coming.”
A motor-car stopped at the kerb beside them, a vehicle rare enough in those days to excite Ann’s wonder. She got in, and as they drove away Hamer said: “Lady Lostwithiel’s. I went to an art show the other day in Bond Street. She happened to be there. Did you know? she’s very much in sympathy with your movement. She insisted on sending the car.”
“It was very kind of her,” said Ann. She lay back in the cushions.
After her prison bed, it was like reclining on clouds. She looked at the car’s silver fittings. After the prison grey, they were charming to the eye. And she tortured herself all the way to North Street with the thought that while she was eating her skilly and moving round and round, round and round, in the exercise yard, Hamer was enjoying himself in Bond Street, and meeting Lady Lostwithiel who was so kind and so much in sympathy with the movement.