The dining-room of the house in Half Moon Street was small and cosy. The walls were painted a creamy parchment. There was only one picture, a good Duncan Grant. It looked well over the marble fireplace, with a strip of concealed lighting above it. The long curtains of rough texture and oatmeal colour, the sage-green carpet, the Sheraton table and chairs, all seemed good to Hamer as the firelight shone upon them. It had cost him a pretty penny – this room and the rest of the house.
Well, why not make it the house he had always intended to have? It was the last house he would live in. No more moves after this. That was pretty certain. It was January, 1924, He would be fifty-nine before the year was out. If Ann had lived, she would already be sixty.
Old Pendleton came in with the coffee as a clock on the mantelpiece chimed eight. He brought The Times and the Manchester Guardian, too, and laid them beside Hamer’s plate. There was a tremulous earnestness about his actions, his soft-footed tread, his deferential stoop. He had not yet recovered from the shock of finding himself in such luck. He was not so old as all that, but Hamer always thought of him as old Pendleton because two years without work had put their lines on him. He was a Bradford man. Jimmy Newboult had found him and brought him and his wife to see Hamer when the new house was being prepared. Now there they were, the sole staff.
“There’s a parcel, sir. Will you see it now?”
Hamer said he would, and as soon as Pendleton brought it into the room he knew what it was. “Unpack it,” he said, “and then bring that old sabre that’s in the hall.”
When the thing was unpacked, it was lovelier than he had hoped, It was an oblong box, beautifully carved, standing on four claw feet. The side that faced you as it stood up was of glass, and this side was furnished with little gold hinges, so that you could let it down and get at the interior, lined with velvet of a rich royal blue. Set in the velvet at the back was a small gold plate, inscribed: Peterloo, August 16, 1819.
Old Pendleton had brought the sabre, and Hamer hung it on the hooks let into the case to receive it. Then he shut the door and pressed in the little catches. He was so pleased with the thing that he took it up at once and carried it to his study. There he placed it on top of a low bookcase that he had had in mind all along as its destination. He stepped back and looked at it admiringly.
“Well, what do you think of it?” he said to Pendleton, who had followed.
The old man stood with his head on one side for a moment before pronouncing: “A reg’lar museum-piece, sir, if you ask me.”
That was what Lettice Lostwithiel had said, Hamer reflected as he walked back to his coffee and newspapers.
*
It was so long ago since that night when he had met her on his quarterdeck and she had predicted that the Labour Party would govern the country. So many years, and so full of war and death and disaster that they seemed twice as many as they were; and then, when he had met her last week she had remembered. “Well,” she said, “have you got any secrets to tell me? Am I talking to the Foreign Secretary? I’ve had to wait a long time, but I was right, you see.”
She did not know that she had touched him on the raw. Foreign Secretary. It was what he wanted. It was what he thought he ought to have, but didn’t know yet what he was going to have. All he knew was that Ramsay MacDonald intended to be Foreign Secretary as well as Prime Minister.
He gave her some non-committal reply, and they walked on side by side through the Green Park, where he had overtaken her, with the roar of Piccadilly on their left. It was a dull afternoon, deepening toward winter dusk. The lights were coming on in the buses and the shop windows. “I don’t know,” he said, “whether you’d care to look at a picture I’ve got – a Duncan Grant?”
It was a safe appeal. They shared this passion for pictures and had met more than once at art shows. They crossed over into Half Moon Street, and he apologized for the confusion of the house. The workmen were still in it, and the rooms were cluttered with furniture, draped and unarranged. But the dining-room was already finished, in order; and Lady Lostwithiel, standing before the picture, approving it, approved the room, too.
Pendleton brought in some tea, put it on a little table before the fire. Lettice walked about the room, admiring this and that, pausing now and then at the table to sip her tea. The sabre had been thrown down on a chair, and alongside it was the leather casket that Birley Artingstall had made so long ago. The lid was up, and she looked curiously at its unexpected contents: a curl of brown hair, an old, faded, dirty ribbon, and a ribbon that looked a little newer. Hamer came over and stood at her side. Very delicately, she put a long white finger inside the close convolutions of the curl and lifted it out of the box. The dirty stained ribbon came too, attached to it. She turned to him, holding it up for his inspection. With a rather malicious smile she asked: “An old flame?”
The girl Emma, the Old Warrior’s little love who had stood a-tiptoe on his foot to kiss him. Dead already for nearly half a hundred years before Hamer was born, And yet it was true enough. She had been a flame, filling his days with passion, giving pith and point to his early crusading years. He gave a light laugh, took hold of the ribbon and lifted the curl off Lady Lostwithiel’s finger. He shut it back into the box. “A family relic,” he said. “It goes back further than I do. I’m afraid it could recall no flame of mine unless I were Methuselah.”
Then she took up the sabre. “Now this is something I do know about,” she said, and mockery was dancing in her blue eyes that the years had done nothing to dim. “I remember how you threatened to cut down old Buck with this. What a ruffian you were! I believe you would have done it for two pins.”
She picked up the sabre, and the weight of it bent her slender wrist. She put her other hand to it, holding it out straight before her.
“How did you come by it in the first place?”
“I told the story often enough in St. Swithin’s.”
“Ah! St. Swithin’s! What a long time ago that is! We lived in different compartments then. I don’t remember that I ever heard the story.”
And Hamer, who had told the story so often, who had known how to infuse it with pity and passion, told it now in bald, bleak words that tinkled emptily in the comfortable room.
“You shouldn’t let it lie about like this,” she said when he had done. “I don’t suppose there are many genuine Peterloo relics left. It’s a museum-piece. Let me have a case made for it. I’d like to do that. I’d like it to be my contribution to your new house.”
She was full of pretty enthusiasm, and called on Pendleton to fetch a two-foot rule. Very businesslike, she took the measurements, wrote them on a piece of paper and tucked it into her muff.
“There!” she said. “I’ll put that in hand at once.” He walked with her to the door and she held out her hand. “You know, don’t you,” she said, “that I wish you the very best of luck? I should feel happier if you were in Downing Street instead of that man MacDonald.”
So should I, he thought, as he walked back to have another look at his picture. So should I.
*
But he wasn’t going to be at No. 10, or even at No. 11. He knew now that he was Minister of Ways and Means. The Rt. Honourable Hamer Shawcross, P.C., M.P. It was a good enough job, a job that would demand all he could put into it, seeing that the Labour Government had inherited not only office but the messy clutter of drift abroad and trouble at home that the Coalition had piled up. He opened a letter or two, thinking ironically of this Coalition Government that was going to hang the Kaiser, squeeze as much out of Germany as the Spaniards had squeezed out of Peru, make an England buzzing with work, larded with plenty, Well, the Kaiser’s neck was still unstretched, Germany was a dry sponge, and England was indeed a land fit for heroes to live in: fit for nothing else, as he had said during the election, because if you weren’t a hero you might as well die as try to live in the conditions the Coalition had created.
He looked at the postmark “Cwmdulais” on a letter, recognized Arnold Ryerson’s handwriting and put it aside. There were so many letters from Arnold lately, all telling the same tale of grief and woe in the coalfields, expecting the Labour Government to wave a wand and magically cause barns to burst and purses to overflow. Well, it wasn’t going to be so easy as all that. They had damned the Coalition up hill and down dale all through the election, and now, for the first time in history, it was Labour’s turn to rule in Britain. The lines that the years had put into his face deepened. No, it was not going to be so easy as all that. The soap-box Socialists were going to have a shock.
He got up as the silvery chime of the clock told him that it was half-past eight. (Not the clock in the fretwork tower that Jimmy Newboult had carried over the snow to Baildon. That was in Pendleton’s bedroom.) Pendleton helped him into his coat in the hall, gave him his black felt hat. He took up a dispatch-case and stepped out into the still grudging light of the January morning. The wind was blowing shrilly in Half Moon Street, rushing in wild eddies hither and thither in the Green Park. He walked very upright, a tall inspiring figure that people turned to look at, across the Mall and St. James’s Park to the back steps into Downing Street. He took them at a run, almost as enthusiastically as he had done his morning mile thirty-five years ago. A press photographer was ranging Whitehall and snapped him as he went up the steps to the Ministry of Ways and Means. Nine o’clock had not yet struck. It was his first morning in attendance at the Ministry. He was going to show the civil servants that an era of activity was upon them. So much to do!
*
Pendleton put some coal on the fire in the study and asked if there was “anything more.”
“No, no!” said Hamer. He flashed the smile that lit up all his face, that made you think all his concern was for your particular well-being. “No, no! You go to bed now.”
The old man permitted himself to say: “You ought to be there yourself, sir.”
“I’m all right. I’m not a bit tired.” He smiled again, this time dismissively. Pendleton went out and shut the door quietly.
No; he was not a bit tired. He sat down in the creaking armour of his evening clothes and rejoiced in his strength. It was midnight. A table-lamp by his chair and the firelight on the hearth were all that illuminated the big book-filled room. He looked out into the gloom: at the rows and rows of familiar volumes; at Ann’s portrait half-seen on the distant wall; at the sabre in its velvet lining catching a comfortable glint of fire-shine. He pulled a big foolscap book on to his knee, took out a fountain-pen and began to write in his firm, flowing hand: “Charles was at the dinner tonight. There was no opportunity for us to speak.”
It had been a day! At the Ministry, in the House, at Downing Street, back at the Ministry, home to change, on to the dinner at the Hyde Park Hotel. Hovering behind the chairs at the top table was a big chap wearing a boiled shirt and an evening coat of huntsman’s pink, who bellowed at the right moment in a voice that made the glasses rattle: “Ladies and gentlemen: the toast is Literature, coupled with the name of the Right Honourable Hamer Shawcross, Privy Councillor, Member of Parliament, His Majesty’s Minister of Ways and Means.”
“My friends,” he said, “I am coupled to Literature by the frailest links. The Muse so many of you here so worthily serve would disdain, as merely utilitarian, the small offerings I have myself from time to time laid at her feet. But there is one link which I cherish in my heart – not utilitarian but creative. I am if not the father at least the grandfather of a masterpiece – Charles Shawcross’s Fit for Heroes.”
Well, he would let Charles see that he knew how to hand him a bouquet: rather an overblown one, for he knew well enough that Charles’s “proletarian” novel was a long way from a masterpiece, though it had created a bit of a stir. He waited for the applause to die down, for the necks that had twisted round toward the blushing Charles to come back in his own direction, and then went on: “But if Literature owes me little, I owe Literature much; and no doubt the most appropriate thing for me to do tonight will be to tell something of the enchanted flasks I have drained, the magic doors by which I have been permitted to travel occasionally in those realms of gold wherein you are the privileged citizens and ministers.”
How it flowed out of him! Suave and easy and honeyed, the words cascaded from his lips: the cavern in Manchester – “piled like some fantastic Aladdin’s cave with jewels whose worth it would be beyond the wit of man to compute” – the little bookshelf in an Ancoats backbedroom – “Ah, my friends! the bitter life of the poor, adding penny to penny like some diligent church mouse as much entitled, surely, as any other mouse to run free and delighted in the granaries where you creators spill your grain in the careless profusion of genius.”
They liked it. Sometimes, in moments of frank self-recognition, he was amazed how easy it was to make them like it. There was no one else in the Labour Party, except Ramsay MacDonald himself, who could do this sort of thing. Assemblies of architects had listened with apparent deep appreciation to just this kind of diffuse and woolly generalizing about their art, and on his engagement list, he knew, there were dinners of artists, librarians, teachers, who would all expect – and not in vain – to find him breathing over their particular Edens like a roseate and ambiguous dawn.
There was “no opportunity” for him to speak to Charles. In the break-up of the gathering, with earnest hands pressing his, with thanks for his wise words raining upon him, he saw Charles disappearing toward the exit, doing nothing to make the opportunity. Charles was dragging his legs and looking interesting, not in the fashion of a small boy with blue veins in his long delicate neck, hovering on an Ancoats doorstep long, long ago as the boxed-up body of the Old Warrior came bumping down the narrow stairs. Charles dragged his leg because it was made of wood, cunningly jointed with aluminium, and he looked interesting because the most careful surgery had not quite made the shot-away side of his face resemble the other.
*
“At one time,” Hamer went on, writing in the deep night hour, undisturbed by any sound but the silvery chimes telling the quarters, “I hoped that Charles might enter the Diplomatic Service.”
It was the first time he had put on paper the old dead dream. It did not die slowly. It was stabbed to death with one sharp blow that day when he and Ann had gone to see Charles in the charming hospital set up in a country house not far from Graingers, where he had been at school. It was on an autumn day in 1918, a day that seemed in every particular to recreate the occasion when they had taken the child and left him standing against the virginia creeper flaming on the school porch. They travelled down the same line, and actually to the same station. The day had the same autumnal quality as the train stopped at the little stations blazing with late flowers and then puffed forward between orchards full of ripe apples. They were retracing their steps into a past flushed with the deceptive glow of a time that seemed in retrospect as though it had known nothing but happiness. It was almost as if, at the end of the journey, they would find the eager boy who so often had run to meet them when they came down for the half-term holiday.
Charles came to meet them, but he did not run. He had not yet been furnished with a charming imitation of a leg. He swung slowly down the drive on two crutches whose ends were matted with autumn leaves. His face was still raw and repellent. When he saw them coming, he waited, leaning heavily on the crutches, unsmiling, his features full of pain. Ann felt her heart would break. She wanted to rush forward and throw her arms about him, but you can’t do that to a man swaying uncertainly on crutches. So she stopped in her tracks, gazing at him in a turmoil of love and impotence, till Charles broke the spell by saying with a bitter grin: “Vive la guerre!”
Then Ann and Hamer went up to him, standing there with a thin shower of golden leaves shaken down upon him by a little wind, under the blue sky, between the hedges full of honeysuckle and the red berries of guelder roses. It was a scene set for idyll, and Charles got his right armpit bedded deep down on the crutch so that he could hold out his hand and achieve an awkward shake. “I’ll show you round,” he said. “All very charming, don’t you think? The tennis lawns are in excellent condition.”
Ann wanted to cry out: “Oh, my dear! Don’t let it make you bitter. Don’t let it get you down!” as Charles sardonically told how easy it was to learn to play tennis with one arm, and how every day the doctors had new stories of one-legged dancing instructors and other heroes triumphing over the worst that could happen. But Ann did not say that, because she knew what man could do to man; she knew the bitterness in her own heart, planted there by the savagery she had suffered to achieve the vote which she knew now she would never use, the vote which seemed to her, now that it had come, as significant as one of these yellow leaves spinning slowly through the blue hazy air. She had trusted men, and fought them, and seen her cause triumph, and learned in bitter wisdom that the triumph was a pop-gun pellet fired against the walls of Jericho. So she walked at Charles’s side, holding her peace, as his crutches crunched on gravel, and dully smote the turf, and sounded sharply on the flags of the ancient terrace where they had tea looking out towards a view of Graingers’ roofs and chimneys infested with the white doves whose nests a two-legged Charles had once been agile enough to raid.
But Hamer winced occasionally at Charles’s acid sallies, and when the time came to go he said: “Well, bear up, my boy. You know you can count on me.”
Charles leaned on the crutches, his head sunk in his shoulders and thrust forward, a predatory mask. “Can I?” he said.
It was spoken so sharply, it was so unexpected, that even Ann looked up in surprise.
“Come,” said Hamer. “You know you can.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” Charles answered. “Mother and Pen Muff thought they could count on you, didn’t they?”
“Please, Charles, please!” Ann intervened. “That’s all over and done with. Your father took one view, and if I took another, that was no reason for him to change.”
“I agree with you, Mother,” Charles said. “That’s exactly what I have in mind. I don’t expect to count on Father if my views are different from his. Why should I? I don’t ask to.”
“Put it all out of your mind for the moment, my boy,” Hamer said with unusual gruffness. “Just give your thought to getting well.”
Charles let out a harsh cackle and looked down at his pinned-up trouser-leg. “Get well of this?”
“Get strong. Get your nerves right. Get as well as you can,” said Hamer. “Then will be time to talk. We’ll understand one another, never fear. What have you got in mind? What do you want to do?”
“I want to go on where you left off,” Charles said.
*
That sentence was the one sharp stab that killed the dream Hamer had so long entertained for his son. It was spoken so firmly, out of so deep a sense of conviction, that he recognized its final and inescapable quality. On the way back to town he saw that Ann was crying quietly from time to time, and he did not know with what words to comfort her. He had lost the way of it. He talked of the hopeful wonders of surgery, for all the world as though he were replying to a toast at a surgeons’ banquet. “Don’t you doubt it,” he said. “Charles isn’t finished. He’ll walk without crutches, and his face’ll show nothing but a few scars. It’s not surprising that he’s too out of spirit to think of his own future. We shall have to think for him. I wonder what he’ll do?”
Ann dabbed a handkerchief to her eyes and looked out of the window at the landscape darkening to a plum dusk. “I expect,” she said, “he’ll do like the rest of us. He’ll do what he wants to, till the time comes for him to wonder whether it was worth doing. But don’t think you’ve only got to get his body right. It goes deeper.”
Well, Ann should know something about that. They had got her own body right enough. She no longer started up in the night with evil dreams, crying aloud that she heard the jangling of keys and felt the nauseous suffocation of unwanted food pouring down her tubed throat. Through all that time she had slept in Lizzie’s room. The women’s campaign ended when the war burst on the country, and Lizzie, unharmed in mind or body, gave all her time to nursing Ann back to health. But Lizzie knew, and Hamer knew, that Ann’s mind had been poisoned with bitterness. That, at least, is what they thought, but the bitter cup had cleansed, not poisoned, her. It gave her an astringent wisdom whereby she saw the triviality of the shadows that the other two pursued, and an understanding that the things worth having in life are few, and easy to get, and not to be got by striving; above all, that truth, wisdom, beauty, justice, are there, absolute, neither to be implemented nor destroyed by the haggling of politicians.
She did not want to declare these things. She nursed them secretly in her heart, and her life grew in upon itself. She continued to sleep in Lizzie’s room, and Lizzie more and more treated her as she had treated, with a special consideration, the small child who came to Ackroyd Park, hurt by those who should have loved her, so many years ago.
And so, when Ann and Hamer came home to North Street that autumn day after visiting Charles, Lizzie was waiting, rosy, stout, white-haired, to pack Ann off to a warm bath, and then to bed, where she ate her dinner and read Marcus Aurelius, who fitted all that she now understood of life so much better than pamphlets and blue-books. She read, and she laid the book on the counterpane, staring at the fire and thinking of Charles. She thought of the day when Ellen had died, and she had run out to bring Charles in from Baildon Moor. They who had thoughtlessly seen so much of the old woman’s life were not in time to see the last moment which their imaginations blew out to a disproportionate significance, and Charles had said ruefully: “I wonder if someone will be too late when I die.” Well, he had died his first little death, and she wondered in what guise he would be resurrected. She imagined that that would depend a good deal on Alice Ryerson. She took up her book and read again, and presently fell asleep with her strange white glistening hair spread like an aureole behind her head. She had let it grow again. She did not have to fear now that men would seize it, and haul her through the streets like a trull, and beat her, making her heart quake with fear and her soul stiffen its armour for the fantastic, heroic, senseless crusade.
She had been asleep a long time when Hamer came in to say good night. She had not put out the light, but had tilted down the shade, so that a golden glow was upon her features that were extraordinarily tranquil. It moved him deeply to look at her, so near but so inaccessible. That was the word that fitted more and more what he thought of Ann. She said nothing, did nothing, to create that feeling. What she was, not what she said or did, had raised a barrier between them. “And yet, that was untrue,” he has said, for he recorded this moment in his diary. “She had raised no barrier. I am incapable of explaining the subtlety of what prevented me from understanding Ann as I had once done.”
He did not ask himself whether the whole thing might not be that she had gone forward and left him standing. He knew only that this sleeping tranquil woman seemed nearer to him than Ann, awake, ever seemed now. He bent down and kissed her, and, without waking, she crooked an arm round his neck, smiled, and pulled his head down to hers. She murmured “Always, always.” He disentangled himself gently, put out the light, and tiptoed from the room.
*
The outcome of his visit to Charles, and his deep sense of spiritual estrangement from Ann, left him feeling restless and unhappy. He went to the room which Lizzie had given him for a study, and took up the diary which more and more, as the years flowed by, provided an outlet for his self-questioning. “Have I been happy at all since the war started? Sometimes I think it would have been better if I had followed Ramsay MacDonald into the wilderness.”
Now he was getting down to it. Now he was probing the matter to the bottom. He had never been convinced of the war’s necessity or justice, and he had got nothing for his acquiescence. He had been offered no post in the Cabinet. He had been courted, flattered, used. He had been sent on missions up and down the country, and the Prime Minister had publicly in the House referred to the importance of his work in getting the South of Wales miners back into the pits in July 1915. In 1916 he supported the Compulsory Service Bill and received an ironical telegram from Charles at Oxford: “I’ve joined the army today. I’d hate to be kicked into it.” It made him wince, but it was not so bad as the wire that had come the year before from Cwmdulais on the day when the Prime Minister thanked him. It was signed “The Ghost of Evan Vaughan” and said simply: “Bravo, Peterloo.” He never knew who sent it. It was the sort of thing Pen Ryerson might have done, but Pen was committed to the war as deeply as he was himself.
That was the strange thing, he reflected, sitting there that night in North Street at odds with himself: the war had split them all up, set them off on unpredictable courses. He would have expected both Lizzie Lightowler and Pen Ryerson to take the extreme pacifist view. They had done nothing of the sort. The frenzy which had carried them along in the suffragist campaign was canalized into the new national direction. Lizzie’s days and nights were filled with a jumble of activities in canteens and sewing-classes, and Pen found work in a munition factory. Arnold, his daughter Alice, and Charles were the pacifists. It was that which made Charles’s telegram from Oxford the more bitter. All Hamer had to set against it was Lady Lostwithiel’s approval. She wrote to him: it was the first time she had ever done so. “I cannot say how pleased I was with your speech in the House yesterday. The support of men like you and Mr. Arthur Henderson is of immense importance, especially as one hears that Sir John Simon is likely to leave the Government on this issue.”
He wondered whether to reply, and did so. He did not say how near he had been to opposing the Government, but now he had waded in too deep to go back. He sent a note of polite platitude. He was a little distrustful of her. He remembered the occasion in 1915 when he received a card, decorated with a coronet, whereon the Countess of Lostwithiel requested the pleasure of Mr. Hamer Shawcross’s company at dinner.
It was a warm summer night, and he was aware of a mood of exaltation as the taxicab took him through the London streets to Belgrave Square. He would have been more, or less, than human if he had not recalled the circumstances of his youth. “On the way there, I thought of my youth, and hated it.” We have his frank confession, and can fill in for ourselves the images that his mind evoked as he drove that night to Lady Lostwithiel’s: the Lostwithiel Arms on the corner of an Ancoats street; Mr. Richardson, the Lostwithiel agent, calling on a Monday morning, when the back yards were fluttering with the week’s wash, his pocket stuffed with rent books; Darkie Cheap, living on his tiny corner of Lostwithiel property, thrown out to disappear no one knew where. So powerful this name of Lostwithiel had been in his childhood; and perhaps his imagination plunged forward to the time when he first found it incarnate in the splendid house that he and Arnold Ryerson had gazed on from the moor-top, and in the legendary Buck Lostwithiel who crossed his path in St. Swithin’s.
Now, stiff in evening clothes, renowned if for the moment almost neglected, learned as few men in his own or any other party were learned, handsome and commanding in any company, he was on his way to the lair of so much that had then been ogreish. “I must confess to a relish of this situation – perhaps it was no more than ironical amusement – as the cab put me down at that redoubtable door.”
Never before had Hamer crossed a noble threshold in the capacity of invited guest. Never before had he seen Lettice Lostwithiel as she was when she received him in the great drawing-room: so radiant, so gracious, the brief train of her wine-dark dress hissing upon the carpet as she came forward to shake his hand. Diamonds were sparkling at her throat above the white swell of her breasts. He was sharply aware of her as a beautiful woman, seen for the first time against her indigenous background.
There were a dozen people at dinner. Lostwithiel was not there. ‘He was commanding a division in France. Lady Lostwithiel invited Hamer’s opinion of Orpen’s portrait of him in regimentals, and a Royal Academician was pleased to concur with one or two criticisms that Hamer ventured to make. There was a prelate of the first eminence, who complained of the strain which outdoor speaking was imposing on his throat. He had been, only that afternoon, addressing a recruiting-meeting from one of the lions in Trafalgar Square. There was a general, and a famous novelist who for years had jeered at kings and nationalism, but was now a happy convert to better manners; and an editor whose weekly article had a patriotic surge so imposing that its backwash might sink a liner. There was a member of the Cabinet who greeted Hamer with a wizard smile and oiled him with the unction of his approval.
Though the summer light still lingered without, the curtains were drawn in the dining-room. In the rosily-lighted gloom long-dead Lostwithiels looked out of their frames, and no doubt they had seen so much in their time that, if each man jack of them were alive and kicking, he would not bat an eyelid at seeing Hamer Shawcross in that company, sitting there on Lady Lostwithiel’s left, talking with fluent ease to her and the Cabinet minister on her right. On Hamer’s other side was a rich American woman who had given her Scottish castle for use as a hospital and who now hadn’t a European roof over her head except a villa at Cap Ferrat and a suite at Claridge’s.
Lady Lostwithiel was brilliant. She was sure, she said to her Cabinet minister, that, occupied as he was with the war all day long, he would welcome the chance to forget it for an hour or two. “And that applies to you, Mr. Shawcross, too, I’m sure.”
The Cabinet minister said that he, too, was sure of it. The Labour members who were supporting the Government had taken up a tremendous burden, and the way they were carrying it was not likely to be forgotten.
And so for a long time they talked of everything except the war. It was incredible what they talked about: they discussed pictures, of which the Cabinet minister knew nothing, and books, which revealed his love of going to bed with a thriller, and whether Wesley had prevented a revolution in England on the model of the French revolution, and whether, had the United States not revolted from the British crown, the British Empire would now be impregnable, so colossal a power that Germany would not have dared to raise a fist against her.
And then Hamer was aware that skilfully, almost insensibly, this had led back to the war which they were not to discuss, and that the Cabinet minister was deploring the outlook in the South Wales coalfield. It was not to be endured that at a time of such enormous national peril the miners should think of striking, but there seemed no doubt that they would do so.
“Forgive me if I’m side-tracking the matter,” said Lady Lostwithiel, “but a point of personal interest struck me the other day. I noticed from the newspapers that one of the men’s leaders down there is named Arnold Ryerson. That’s the name of the man Lostwithiel had against him when he first went to St. Swithin’s. I wondered if it were the same man. I think it must be. It’s a rather unusual name.”
She turned inquiringly to Hamer, and he nodded. “Yes. He’s been down there now a good many years.”
“You and he were hand-in-glove against my poor husband,” she smiled. “You must know him very well.”
“I haven’t kept in touch with him,” said Hamer. “Not closely, anyhow.”
“Ah! but to some extent?” It was the Cabinet minister, smiling and alert.
Lettice Lostwithiel stood up. A moment later she and the other women were gone, Hamer and the Cabinet minister, smoking their cigars, had left the table and moved over to the privacy of a nook by the fireplace.
“It really was extraordinarily lucky, Shawcross, that I should meet you tonight and discover that you know Ryerson in a personal way. I’ve watched Ryerson for a long time. He’s a man I admire for many things. I think he’s a man who would listen to reason from a friend.”
Hamer pulled judiciously at his cigar. “Ryerson’s idea of reason wouldn’t agree with yours in this matter, believe me. I know him.”
The famous smile flashed at Hamer. The Cabinet minister’s hand was laid on his arm. “You know him. And you know what your country needs at this moment.” The voice sank to a pitch of gravity. “I say no more about it. Except that to have met you here tonight seems almost as though Providence had intervened.”
As he was leaving that night Lady Lostwithiel gave him the feeling that he was being singled out for special favour. “Good-bye, Mr. Shawcross, You must come again. I always felt we should know one another better, understand one another’s point of view.”
He travelled down to Cwmdulais the next day.
*
Never before had he felt so furtive and ashamed. He was oppressed, choked, by a sense that he was being basely used. He believed that the miners were in the wrong, but that was not the point. He had not come voluntarily to tell them so. His visit had been contrived by people who would have been against the miners wrong or right,
He had not telegraphed to Arnold Ryerson. Through the fading end of the stifling summer day he climbed the hill from the station and, unannounced, knocked at the door of the house in Horeb Terrace. Arnold, coatless, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his shirt collar unbuttoned, himself came to the door. His hair was untidy and his fingers were inky. His big sagging body looked tired and his pouchy face was grey with a desperate weariness. He looked at Hamer for a moment, as if unable to believe his eyes, then held out his hand. “You’re too late,” he said. “They’re coming out tomorrow.”
A blow in the face would not have surprised Hamer more. Walking up from the station, he had wondered how to introduce his business. There was no need to introduce it. Arnold had divined it, writing him down instinctively as a messenger from the enemy camp.
“Come in,” Arnold said. “I’ll make you a cup of tea. I’m all alone here at the moment.”
He led Hamer into the front room, where the two desks were littered with papers. “Sit down,” he said, “and make yourself comfortable. Light your pipe. I won’t be a minute.”
He went out into the kitchen, and Hamer could hear the clatter of cups, the poking of a reluctant fire. He lit his pipe and looked about him at this room so different from the room to which he had been bound at this very moment last night. It was smaller and meaner than he had remembered. It was intolerably stuffy, and seemed untidier than when he had seen it last.
Presently Arnold came in and put down a tin tea-tray among the disordered papers on his desk. He poured two cups. “Pen’s out,” he said apologetically. “She goes down to Cardiff every day to work, and she’s staying tonight to see a film.”
They sipped their tea for a while in embarrassed silence. Then Arnold got up and walked to the window and looked down into the evening gloom, thickening in the valley bottom. “There’s one thing,” he said without turning his head, “that I shall never live to see. I thought I was going to see it, but I never shall.”
Hamer pulled on his pipe and waited for him to go on. “I shall never see you Prime Minister of England. I thought I should. But you’ve missed the tide, lad. The tide turned in August 1914, and you missed it. The right way was out into the darkness, and Ramsay Mac took it. This war seems very terrible. It is very terrible, as every war is. But there’s a sense in which every war is just flim-flam and flap-doodle, a dirty boil, and the real business comes after. When the real business comes, the man we’ll follow will be the man who always said that war was flim-flam and flapdoodle – as you did – but who went on saying it even when the war was there.”
He turned round from the window, and in the obscurity of the dingy little room his features could not be seen. “I wanted to say that, and I’ve said it, even though it’s not a nice thing to have to say. But there are so many things that are not nice. I don’t think it’s nice to see Arthur Henderson and Billy Brace in the Government. It sounds all grand and glorious, but I tell you, apart from anything else, it’s a dead end. You think Ramsay MacDonald’s in a dead end, don’t you? You’ll see. You’re a better man than he is, Hamer, but you’ve handed it all to him on a plate. There – I’ve finished. It’s your turn. Tell me what I ought to do to stop this strike.”
Listening to the flat toneless voice coming out of the faceless body, Hamer was intolerably oppressed. He felt as if he were listening to the voice of doom, and he recognized the inescapable accent of truth. He jumped suddenly to his feet. “Let’s get out,” he said. “Let’s walk. It’s so hot.”
“Are you staying the night?” Arnold asked.
“I’d like to, if I may.”
“Very well, then. We’d better go and get our supper. I’m no cook, and Pen won’t be back for hours.”
Just as he was, sleeves rolled up, collar open, Arnold went out into the passage, took down a cloth cap from a hook, and put it on. They went downhill, to the long village street in the valley bottom: the street along which Hamer had last walked in company with Evan Vaughan and a thousand marching men. Arnold pushed open the door of a fish-and-chip shop. “This is the best I can do,” he said.
The place was furnished with deal tables, scrubbed till the grain stood up in ridges. It was stiflingly hot, full of blue fumes and the stench of sizzling fat. The great cooking-stove and its cowl of aluminium shone with cleanliness. Arnold brought two plates of fish and chips to a table which was provided with a tin salt-caster and a bottle of vinegar. He bestrewed his plate with these and began to eat, picking up the food with his fingers. There were no knives or forks.
“I always come here,” he said, “when Pen doesn’t come home.”
Hamer followed Arnold’s example, picking up the greasy food with his fingers. He did not eat much. He was glad when the meal was over, but he had to wait till Arnold had eaten doggedly through his portion. Then they went out, and the night air was gratefully cool after the mephitic fog of the little saloon. They climbed uphill again, past Horeb Terrace, and still up till they were beyond the highest house in the place, among the ling and the bracken that recalled the ancient peace and loveliness of the Rhondda. They sat down where the heather cushioned a rocky buttress, and they lit their pipes and watched the tip of the full moon beyond the opposite hill climb till the whole orb was clear, swimming in silvery luminescence.
And there was nothing to be said. The tobacco smoke scented the air; the clank and stutter of shunted trucks came up to them, but remotely, without urgency; the moonlight bewitched every common object; and they lay back against their stone, still warm with the sunshine of the long summer day, and for a long time said nothing at all.
But at last Hamer said: “You’re quite right, Arnold. I came down to do what I could to stop the strike.”
“You can do no more than I can,” said Arnold, “I’ve tried, hard enough to stop it myself. But I’m not God Almighty.”
“You tried to stop it?”
“I did. I can understand what the men feel. The fat will get fatter out of this war. You know that as well as I do. The men know it, too, and if they get off the rails and try to force an advantage for themselves out of a situation that’s enriching so many others, I for one don’t blame them. I understand them, I don’t blame them, but that’s not to say I encourage them. Whether I like the war or not, it’s there. There’s no hope for you or me or the miners, or anything we stand for and have worked for, till the damned thing’s over. Surely to God, Hamer, you know I’m realist enough to see that? There’s no need for you to come down from London to tell me that?”
He spoke with unusual urgency, and Hamer, who had come prepared to say so much, had nothing to say.
“Very well, then,” Arnold went on. “Industrial disputes will hang the thing out. I don’t want them. It’s not the time for them, but,” said Arnold, getting up and knocking out his pipe on his heel, “you can tell your friends in London this: that once this dirty business is over we’ll fight ’em, by God, yard by yard, inch by inch, till we get what’s due to us out of this industry or smash it to blazes in the process.”
Hamer lay still, quietly pounding with a stone at the smoulder Arnold’s tobacco had made in the heather. “Meantime,” he said quietly, “the strike begins tomorrow.”
“The strike begins tomorrow, and if you want any kudos out of it,” Arnold said bitterly, “I’ll see that you get a public meeting where you can tell the men what you think of them.”
“I’d like that.”
“All right, You can have it. Come on now. Let’s see if Pen’s back”
Pen was not back, but she came in presently, a strange haggard woman, yellow as a canary from the fumes she worked in. She seemed to Hamer to have lost much of the old keen edge, to be softer and quieter, and he guessed that this was because she and Arnold differed about the war. It lay between them, but they knew how to step over it. They treated one another with an exquisite consideration. More tea was brewed, and they sat drinking it in the sickly yellow light of an incandescent gas mantle, with the window flung open upon the hot night. Pen would not discuss the war, or her work, or the strike. She talked about the film she had seen, and about the high old times she and Ann and Lizzie Lightowler had had when the suffrage crusade was blazing, and about Alice, who was teaching in a secondary school in Manchester. But she did not say much about Alice, because she knew that Alice was a sore point with Hamer. She seemed to be blessed tonight with a fine sensibility that he had not known in her before. He remembered that the last time he saw her was when she had come, a persecuted mouse, to the house in North Street, and he had as good as shown her the door. Her magnanimity pleased and surprised him.
He did not sleep much that night. His bed was in the back room wherein Pen and Arnold had spent the first night of their married life, the room that looked out on the slope of the mountain running up to the sky that now had lost the moon’s lovely and mysterious light. Clouds were banking up in a hot accumulation as if all the heat that had tortured the valley throughout the day were sucked up and there made visible. He lay with nothing but one sheet over him, thinking how long it was since he had slept in such a room as this, and listening to the low rumble of Pen’s and Arnold’s voices clearly audible through the thin wall. He had hardly dropped off into a light troubled sleep than he was awake again, listening, taut, to the clang of thunder and watching the fiery zigzag of the lightning draw infernal hieroglyphics upon the black sky. He had once feared thunder intensely, and still disliked it, and the strangeness of the little room, his isolation from all that had now become customary and familiar, tinged the present dislike with the old infantile fear.
Perhaps it was because he was lying now in just such a room as the room in which his fears had visited him, the room into which, he knew, lying awake and shivering, Ellen would surely come to sit by the bedside till he was asleep and the storm was rumbling to extinction in the far fringes of the town. Whatever the cause, he lay unhappy and aware of a slight sweating, as the room flickered into startling clarity and then fell upon darkness again, and the thunder boomed and rocketed with increasing violence among the hills.
Presently there was a flash so startling that he persuaded himself he heard the hot sear of it, and then a stuttering crescendo of thunder that ended in a disruptive explosion more violent than any he had ever heard. He would have got up and lit the gas, but the house in Horeb Terrace was so curiously provided that the gas was in the downstairs rooms only. He leaned out of bed and was fumbling for the matches and candle he had placed on a chair alongside it when a shuffling of footsteps sounded and his door opened. Arnold was standing on the threshold, and a lightning-flash coming at that moment picked him out with the clarity of a spotlight. A long white night-shirt trailed its hem about his feet encased in large worn carpet slippers, and over this he had thrown on a raincoat that reached his knees. The flash faded, and the yellow shine of the candle he carried in a tin candlestick was thrown upwards on to his tousled hair, his grey heavy troubled face, whose dominating note, Hamer saw in that illuminating moment, was an immense kindliness and a rock-like steadfastness. There was comedy in the figure Arnold cut at that moment, but Hamer did not see it. He felt about twelve years old, and in Arnold all the protective and comforting influence that had been about his childhood was suddenly incarnate.
“Are you all right, lad?” Arnold asked. “I remembered you didn’t like lightning.”
“Aye,” said Hamer, dropping into the easy tone, “I’m all right, Arnold, but thanks for coming.”
Arnold walked over to the window and pulled the heavy serge curtain across it. “That’ll keep it out a bit,” he said. “Pen’s gone down to make a cup o’ tea.”
Oh, the everlasting tea of the Ryerson household! But as the storm continued to roar, there was something comforting in the sound of Pen moving about downstairs, and when presently she came up, as queerly dressed as Arnold was, with tea and biscuits, Hamer enjoyed the midnight picnic, and they were all more happy and easy with one another than they had been for a long time.
They talked for half-an-hour of old days in St. Swithin’s, and then Pen gathered up the tea-things and went. Soon Arnold followed her. First he pulled back the curtains and looked out into the night, “It’s takkin’ up, lad,” he said. “Ah can see t’moon, and thunder’s nobbut a belly-rumble.”
He held his candle aloft and looked down with what Hamer divined as a sad anxious affection. Then he went, shutting the door softly behind him. Hamer was soon asleep, his mind bemused with thoughts of Ellen: not old Ellen dragging out her days at Baildon, but an Ellen younger than he himself was now, who had seemed so long ago to be all that he understood by providence.
*
When he came down in the morning, Pen was gone and Arnold was frying sausages in the kitchen. It was a lovely summer day, fresh and cool. After breakfast Arnold went out, and Hamer sat in the front room, reading the newspapers and writing letters. He made a few notes of what he would say when he met the miners. By eleven o’clock Arnold was back. He had arranged for an open-air meeting to be held at three.
It began as a turbulent and disorderly meeting. Hamer spoke from a lorry. Arnold was his chairman. No one else stood by the two as they climbed up to espouse their unpopular cause. Arnold did not say much. “Now, you men, you’ve known me long enough, and you know my one concern is for your interests. And you know, too, that I think you’re playing the fool in coming out now. When I’m with you I tell you so, but when I’m against you, neither you nor anyone else is going to make me pretend I’m not. However, you know all about that. I’ve told you often enough, and you’re not here today to hear it all over again. So I’ll shut up now and ask Hamer Shawcross to talk to you.”
The men listened to Arnold quietly, interrupting with nothing but affectionate back-chat: “All right, Arnold. Sit down, mun, an’ let’s hear the big bug.” “Come orf it, Arnold. You ought to be down here, mun, not up there. We’ll have to get a new leader, boyo.”
They were not so quiet when Hamer got up. Before he could open his mouth there were shouts from all directions. “What are the bosses paying you?” “Why don’t you bring the soldiers?” “Who’s backing up the war?”
Hamer did not treat himself to any preliminary niceties. He stood there quietly watching for his chance, and seized it at once when that last shout came. “Your leader Arnold Ryerson isn’t, for one,” he said. “He wants to see this war ended because he believes it should never have begun. Who is getting in his road? You are!”
This renewed the uproar. “To hell with that!” “We don’t want the bloody war!”
“Whether you want it or not, you’ve got it,” said Hamer. “What an intelligent man asks is: How can we end it quickly? That is what my friend Arnold asks. Last night I sat at his fireside: the fireside of a man I have known and loved from childhood. I listened to what he had to say, and I divined that his heart was well-nigh broken at the thought that what he has worked for among you for so long was in danger of being torn to pieces. My friends, think twice before you destroy the work of a man like Arnold Ryerson.”
They were quieter now, and someone shouted: “Never mind Arnold, Arnold’s all right.”
“Of course he’s right. That is all I have come to tell you. He is right, and you are wrong. Let me tell you how right he is.”
He went on to expound the views which Arnold had expressed the night before. They had heard it all from Arnold, but Arnold was not capable of giving it the cogency it now assumed.
The interruptions had died away, and Hamer went easily on to an emotional conclusion. He pictured the minesweepers heaving on their little ships through the dark of a winter night, wondering if their fuel supplies could be maintained. “Ah! If only our friends in the Rhondda had not betrayed us!” He made them see the infantry among the rotting sandbags in the front line going over the top unaided by an artillery barrage. Why was there no barrage? Because the shells were not coming up. Why were the shells not coming up? “Ah, my friends, why indeed! How shall the great factories roar, how shall the shells they make reach the coast, how shall they cross the seas in ships, how shall they go from the base to the line if you deliberately snap the first link in the great chain? And so it may well be with their last breath that your brothers in the front line cry: ‘Ah, if only our friends in the Rhondda had not betrayed us!’ You can deliver them. But no! You have chosen to be like some doctor with the life-saving medicine in his hand who says to the dying man: ‘I can save you but I’ve raised my price!’ Stand out then for your thirty pieces of silver, and spend them with the world’s contempt muttering in your Judas ears.”
It was a consummate rhetorical effort. Not a cry was raised against him when he had finished. What contribution was made by this widely-reported speech cannot be precisely assessed, but the strike ended in a week.
*
Newsboys were running down the streets as Hamer and Arnold climbed from the lorry. They wore like aprons news-bills of the South Wales Echo: “Munitions works explosion. Many dead.”
Arnold heard their shrill cries, read the disastrous words they carried, and a chill premonition struck him to the heart. He remembered the far-off spring day when he and Pen had lain in the heather on the hills, and looking down had seen the crowd milling into the colliery yard. Their hearts were shaken by a common dread: Ianto! Ianto! Now, not knowing he had spoken, Arnold muttered: “Pen! Pen!”
Hamer had already snatched a paper from a boy and torn it open. Arnold read over his shoulder. It was very brief. The factory was the one where Pen worked. Many dead. Many injured. Cause unknown. No names. That was all.
Arnold was trembling, and Hamer put an arm about him. “Where’s the nearest telephone?” he asked.
It was at a public-house round the corner. He rang through to the Cardiff Infirmary. Arnold stood at his side, grey as a ghost, supporting himself by holding on to the corner of a table. Hamer would not use the word death. Not yet. Not unless it was necessary. Now he was through. “Is Mrs. Arnold Ryerson among the injured?”
There was a little delay, someone scanning a list. “Penelope Ryerson.”
“That’s it. Are the injuries serious?”
He listened to the reply and hung up. Then he laid a hand on Arnold’s shoulder. “She’s alive!”
Arnold stood up from the table. “Thank God!” he said, There was sweat on his forehead.
“They can’t tell me much more. I expect they’re at sixes and sevens, still receiving people.”
“I must go and see her.” He looked at his watch. “There’s no train for an hour.”
“Never mind the train. We’ll get a taxi,” said Hamer. He sought out the landlord and pressed a coin into his hand. “Get through to a garage,” he said. “Have a car sent up to Mr. Ryerson’s house at once.”
“Very good, Mr. Shawcross. Arnold, I’m sorry about this, mun. I hope it’s nothing much.” He grasped Arnold’s hand, and instinctively Arnold pulled himself together. He walked firmly with Hamer up to Horeb Terrace. Hamer put his few things into his bag. “You won’t want me in the way now,” he said.
The car was at the door, and so was a group of men who had drifted up from the meeting. “Good luck to you, Arnold.” “Bring back good news, boyo.” They crowded round him, trying to shake his hand, patting him on the back, giving him their affection, sharing his grief, in the only way they knew. “Thank you, boys, thank you,” he said. “I’ll give Pen your love.”
Then they were away, purring through the heat of the summer afternoon, with the windows down but stifled none the less by the dingy odours of the ancient cab. There was nothing they could say to one another. They knew too little and too much. Hopes and fears shuttled to and fro amid their blank uncertainty.
They reached the infirmary in the early evening. The waiting room was full of scared anxious people, some of whom did not yet know whether their relatives were living or dead. From time to time those who had been called out of the room came back to pick up a hat, a stick, a bag, and those who were left scanned the faces as though in the joy of some or the white blank misery of others they could read their own doom.
It was very hot. Half-an-hour passed, three-quarters, and then the door opened, and a thin dark young man looked round it. Arnold at once got to his feet and his choked-back anxiety took him across the floor in a stride. Hamer alongside him. “Why – Dai!” he said.
The young doctor took them into the passage and shut the door. This was Dai – the child of the poet Ap Rhondda and of Pen’s sister Nell, young Dai of whom Pen had talked to Arnold so long ago in the house in Thursley Road, Bradford. Dai the darling baby was now in command; Arnold stood humbly before him, looking imploringly at David Richards, M.B.
“I didn’t know you’d be at the infirmary, Dai,” he said. “I’d have tried to get you on the ‘phone.”
“It’s bad business,” Dai said. “They’ve raked in all of us they could get.”
“How is she?”
“I attended to her myself. You shall see her, but you can stay only for a moment.”
Hamer’s heart quickened as he noted the evasion. They were following David Richards down a corridor, up a flight of stairs. “May I see her?” he asked.
“Oh, this is Hamer Shawcross, Dai,” said Arnold.
Dr. Richards stopped and tapped his teeth with a finger-nail, considering. “All right,” he said, “but you mustn’t talk to her. And, Uncle, the less you say the better.”
They were setting off again when he stopped once more. “Oh, and look here. Don’t go back to Cwmdulais tonight. You stay with us. Go straight along there. I’ll come when I’m through. I’ve ’phoned to May to expect you. You’d be lonely up there in that damned hole. It may be some time, you know, before you get Auntie Pen back.”
All these warnings, Hamer thought. All these dark foreboding hints!
They were at the door of a ward. Dai pushed it open and beckoned with his finger. “Sister! To see Mrs. Ryerson. Only a moment, mind.”
He went on down the corridor, and Arnold and Hamer tiptoed into the hushed ward. The evening light was filtering through the trees that grew without, wavering in watery patterns on the wall. There was the faintest touch of rose and gold in those dancing beams, and that was the only colour that broke the snowy purity into which they advanced. The beds were like snowdrifts on a plain of snow, and on the last snowdrift of all was a higher pile of snow that was Pen beneath the white bedclothes. But here, at last, was an incongruous and pitiful touch of colour: Pen’s yellow hands resting on the coverlet, the lower half of Pen’s yellow face looking strange and inhuman, as though it were not part of a face at all, beneath the bandages bound round and round her forehead and her eyes.
They thought they had advanced as quietly as death into that polar purity, but as they halted by the bed Pen whispered: “Arnold!”
He knelt down by the bedside and put his face close to hers. “Yes, luv,” he said.
She spoke in a tired far-away voice. “I’ve been listening for you for hours. I heard those old boots. I told you to oil ’em.”
“Yes, luv,” he said again, and took her thin yellow hands in his pudgy paws.
She let him hold her hands, and did not speak for a moment. Hamer saw that Arnold’s eyes were streaming with tears, and presently they began to fall on Pen’s hands. Then she took her hands from his grasp and weakly felt his hair, his face, his eyes. She rubbed his eyes as though she would wipe away his tears, “Eh, lad,” she said, “don’t be a great fooil. It’s only my eyes. It’ll be all right. It’s only my eyes.”
Then the sister tapped Arnold on the shoulder. He got up clumsily, and, crying without restraint, went with Hamer out of the ward.
*
When Hamer looked back at the war years, each one had its poignant emotional content. Nineteen-fourteen was the year of his great decision, and though he appeared to make it easily, he made it with deep foreboding. He was not to be gulled with easy phrases. “The rights of little nations” didn’t take him in. He was well enough read historically to know that no great nation had ever thrown away its wealth out of love of a little one. No; it was fear of the further aggrandizement of a powerful nation that set the works going. The fatal hour inexorably came; and it was pretty to pretend that the gilded figure on a clock had struck it. But he knew better.
He knew that the cause for which he stood would receive a shattering blow in every country that took up arms. He wondered where his own party would be found, and was deeply comforted that so many of its leaders were prepared to join him in toeing the national line. By the end of the year, the sound of the new note in his own voice had ceased to surprise him. If no one else could fool him, he claimed the right to fool himself.
Nineteen-fifteen was a tangled complex of emotions, public and private. Again and again his nerves were wrung with humiliation as he realized that everybody with plums to offer must know that he had put himself in the market, and yet no one hired him. At least, no one gave him what he thought should be the full tally of his hire. He was used, and thanked, and left on one side till it was necessary to use him again.
And that was the year, too, of Pen Ryerson’s blindness. He stayed in an hotel in Cardiff that night, and suddenly, after he had got into bed, he broke out into a sweat at a thought that leapt into his mind. What if Dai Richards had not asked Arnold to stay with him for the night? What if there had been no Dai Richards? How easily Hamer had packed his bag in Cwmdulais! “You won’t want me in the way now.”
His vivid imagination pictured Arnold, had there been no Dai Richards, returning distraught in the dirty Rhondda Valley train to the unkempt little house in Horeb Terrace and sitting there through the long hot hours of darkness in lonely meditation, in agonized reliving of the moment when he stood before the sightless wreck of Pen.
He got out of bed, unable to sleep, thinking how, the night before, the flash of the lightning had brought Arnold eager with all the strength he had to offer. How much more, now that a more terrible lightning was searing Arnold’s sky, should he have been there to comfort and support his friend! It was a long time since he had so poignantly confronted himself. “My God!” he groaned. “What am I becoming? What sort of man am I?”
In the morning, in the London train, he read: “The Rhondda Strike. Shawcross Castigates the Miners,” And on the same page was the dire story of the explosion: the long list of the dead, the longer list of the injured. “Mrs. Ryerson, wife of the Rhondda miners’ leader, has lost the sight of both eyes.” There was no connexion between the two things, but that casual juxtaposition jarred him, and he threw down the papers impatiently. Lady Lostwithiel rang him up in town that night. She said she thought his speech was splendid. Charles, who was down for the long vacation from Oxford, was not at home, Ann said that he had telegraphed to Alice Ryerson, as soon as he read of Pen’s injury, and was gone to meet Alice who was travelling from Manchester to Cwmdulais. Hamer saw little of Charles that holiday. Pen had to stay for a long time where she was, and Charles and Alice took Arnold away, That was the end of Alice’s school-teaching. She remained at home, when Pen came back, to guide her mother’s footsteps, as her mother had once guided hers.
It was altogether a nerve-racking year, Hamer thought, and 1916 was little better. That was the year of compulsory service, of Charles’s joining up, the dead despairing middle of the war, when retrospect and prospect alike were lurid with hate and bloody haze. This was the time when he was most tempted to walk out, to go, though late, into the wilderness, to withdraw from a scene in which all that he had stood for appeared to be foundering in a sea of blood and fire.
It was Jimmy Newboult, of all people, who prevented him from taking that step: an incredible Jimmy Newboult, another of the war’s enigmas, a Jimmy Newboult wearing a colonel’s uniform and several decorations for gallantry in the field, commander of a mob that had gained some notoriety as the “Wool-Winders’ Battalion.”
Pacing the streets between the House of Commons and North Street – the dark wartime streets with the searchlights crossed upon the peace of the sky like naked blades shutting the gates of paradise – this Jimmy, home on leave, listened as Hamer laid bare his soul, came near to confessing that he had sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, and was waiting for the pottage still.
Jimmy came to a stand under a blacked-out street-lamp, and its little trickle of light dribbled down upon his face, white and fanatical as ever, but ennobled now by his daily consorting with death. “No!” he said. “You! When you betray a cause, Hamer, may God strike me dead.”
There was such devotion in the man, a depth of loyalty so rich and unsullied that Hamer was moved to the very marrow, as he had been when the fantastic scene was enacted in Bradford and Jimmy Newboult became his man.
“Nay, Hamer. You’re tired. You’re wearing yourself out. You’re doing too much. No, no. Nothing’s given away. When this is over, by God they’ll be able to deny Labour nothing. Stand by us boys, and when the time comes, we’ll stand by you.”
And Hamer said, as he had said once before: “I’ll try to be what everybody thinks me, Jimmy.”
*
Nineteen-seventeen was always muddy in his memory with the filth of Passchendaele, where Charles was; tragi-comic with the coming, that year, of votes for women. He listened in the House with ironic detachment to the easy platitudes with which those who had persecuted Ann and Pen made their recantation. Well, little enough Ann would want the vote now she had got it, or Pen, either, for that matter, he suspected.
It all seemed to him to be the more childish, without real significance, because in this year had come an event which he recognized as among the most significant of his times: the Russian revolution. His Labour colleagues were dazzled, delighted, gloriously aware of a new star in the East. His own heart was filled with doubt and fear. He was impatient alike with the optimism that saw the millennium rising unsullied out of the revolution’s bloody lake, and with the baser notion that it would be easy, by force or fraud, to keep Russia toeing the Allied line. He knew that Russia had gone her own way, finally and beyond recall; and he knew that it was a way he did not want to follow.
It was a little personal point that had given him his deep knowledge of what was happening. He was attached by a living link to this new act in the ever-shifting drama of mankind’s agony. Old Suddaby, sleeping by the fire in his Manchester cellar, Sheba the white cat, the silent catacombs of books, and the bells of the Old Church steeple shaking the air: all these were woven into his apprehension of the trend of events. These gave it human point and substance: Suddaby and Engels digging out their statistics in the Manchester streets and factories, Engels dispatching them, with the week’s dole, to Marx, hypochondriac and morose, piling up in London the fabulous documentation of his humourless paradise.
Five hundred books! Many a time in that troubled year Hamer, walking his quarterdeck, now war-darkened and oppressive, with the river black and turgid and mysterious sliding by: this river on the one hand, symbol of the eternal restless roll of time, and on the other the rectangular blocks of the great hospital dark against the sky, crowded with sick humanity, brief transient man dying there with every swing and turn of the tide: many a time in that year, walking there broodingly, he thought of the five hundred books that Suddaby, dying, had bequeathed him. Moved by an impulse to explore all that had been so powerful and dynamic in the old man’s life, he had sought out the shelves where Suddaby had garnered all that Marx and Engels had written, all the commentaries thereupon, all the dark and intricate imaginings of those who, blinded by the world’s injustice and the cruelty of men, pictured the white lilies of love and law springing from a soil watered with the blood of their enemies.
It was a most compendious and illuminating library of Communist literature. He did not delve into it for many years, and in the meantime he added to it whatever books on the subject he could come by. At last, reading in three or four languages, he explored that colossal edifice, wandered in its dark corridors and dungeons, surveyed its huge speculative chambers, climbed out where its minarets pricked up among fantastic and implorable stars. And he saw that it was all founded upon a fallacy: the fallacy that man could be just to man. And in 1917 he knew that, whatever any politician might do, he would witness one more of man’s superb and pathetic aberrations: the endeavour to apply this fallacy to the government of the race.
Somehow, by the destruction of one set of men, written down for the purpose of the argument as bad men, there would flourish a worthier race of men automatically good. He didn’t believe it. Walking in the darkness between the river and the hospital, he knew that this weak and fugitive creature man, compounded of good and bad in every instance that had lived and breathed, would climb, if at all, by infinite slow organic degrees, not stream magnificently to heaven on the tail of a fiery bloody rocket.
*
And this, for one thing, was what Charles meant when he said in 1918: “I shall go on where you have left off,” Looking back upon it, Hamer thought that few things in his life had been more poignant than Charles’s endeavour to find in this new and bloody movement of the human tide a point of contact with his father.
There had been so few points of contact. They had missed it somewhere. While the boy was at school, he had seen too little of him, and when the moment came which might have remedied that, Charles fell desperately in love with Alice Ryerson.
Ann and Hamer had gone on a winter day to meet Charles at Paddington, returning from his first term at Oxford. He was tall and slender, fair and blue-eyed, and there he was coming along the platform with a suitcase in each hand and a gaily-coloured muffler thrown carelessly round his shoulders. The girl with him was short, but beautifully made. She was hatless, and a square-cut bob of black hair swung about her vivacious face in which everything was dark and sparkling. Her very complexion, dark as a gypsy’s, seemed to sparkle with health and vigour, and her eyes were as black and shining as onyx. Every movement of her body and turn of her head seemed to radiate purpose and energy. Charles, loping along at her side, had the look of a tall sailing-boat that would do well if the winds were light and with him; and Alice’s snub-nosed, dark pugnacious face made one think of a tough little tug that would ask no favours but would thrust its shoulders forward, into and against any wind and weather.
“Father – Mother – this is Alice.”
There was something naïvely proud in the announcement, as Charles put down Alice’s suitcase and his own and shyly kissed his mother. “This is Alice.” No need to say more than that, for his letters had been full of Alice, and looking at her now Hamer did not need to be told who would lead whom if those two walked together. They did not see much of Alice that time. She went straight away on some business of her own which had brought her briefly to London. Then she went back to Cwmdulais. But Charles’s words remained in Hamer’s ears. They sounded like the fateful announcement of a new important player appearing on the scene. And so they were. This is Alice.
That was the time when Ann and Pen and Lizzie Lightowler were in full cry, and Alice was with them heart and soul. So, therefore, was Charles, and this was where the somewhat puzzled estrangement which had kept Charles and Hamer apart, a passive feeling, not quite aware of itself, took the definite turn towards active antagonism. The boy who had wanted to write a hero-father’s life did not want to do so any more. It was not that Alice consciously depreciated Hamer in Charles’s eyes, but she was too honest to pretend to think him a hero. Just as Charles had sat at old Ellen’s feet and learned of Hamer’s boyhood, so now he learned more of that same story from Alice, who sketched in the part that Arnold Ryerson had played, and left Charles feeling a vague uneasiness, a sense that Hamer had subtly slipped away not only from friends but from allegiances. The war clinched the matter. It was, to Alice, outrageous that a Labour man should betray what she called the world solidarity of Labour, and Charles, without bothering to notice that this solidarity was as solid as a quagmire, went about depressed by a secret shame. Charles was of an age and under an influence which prevented him from seeing that, compared with his father at that same age, he was an uninstructed and half-baked fledgling. When Hamer faced his own heart, unobscured by the thickening golden mist of ambition, it was not the threat to the dubious solidarity of Labour that made him see the war in its naked horror: it was the crime of man against man.
*
Always, it seemed to him, he had been going to meet Charles or seeing Charles off. Taking the child to the station and putting him on the train for school; meeting the boy come down for the Oxford vacation; waiting for the overdue train bringing the youth from Cwmdulais. And now he was at Victoria, on a day late in 1917, waiting for the man returning from the wars. And there the man was, pushing his way with a mob of others through the barrier, where the free tea was given away to the heroes cluttered with packs and rifles: there was Charles with his second-lieutenant’s star on his shoulder, his clothes caked with mud, his eyes pathetically blue and childish in his thin immature face. They went in a taxi-cab to North Street, and when Charles had bathed and put on civilian clothes he looked less than ever like a soldier.
It was when they were half-way through dinner that Charles burst forth suddenly, as though something he had been keeping bottled up would out willy-nilly: “I say, sir—”
“Damn it, Charles,” said Hamer impatiently. “I’m not your commanding officer.”
“I say, Father, this Russian business is pretty good. It puts a different look on things.”
“In what way?”
“Well, in every way, surely.”
“Charles, I try to use the word ‘surely’ sparingly. The longer I live the less I feel safe in saying surely this, surely that.”
“But surely,” cried Charles impetuously, “nothing but good can come of the workers’ overthrowing a bloody tyranny.”
“I can imagine a great many things coming of it that are not good at all,” said Hamer reasonably. “It’s many a long year since I’ve done a day’s work as the Communists understand it. Possibly a man who has spent all those years cleaning out cowsheds or driving an obsolete Russian engine would therefore make a better hand than I would at running a government department, but frankly I doubt it.”
Charles pushed aside his plate impatiently. “You throw cold water on everything that’s young and courageous and experimental,” he said, flushing.
“Cold reason, if you like,” said Hamer. “Have you read Karl Marx?”
“I don’t need to read Karl Marx to know that this is a grand turning-point in the world’s history.”
“I have read Karl Marx,” Hamer went on relentlessly. He smiled; “When I talk to my colleagues, and to people in other parties, too, I think I must be the only man in the country who has done so. May I put you right on one point?”
“You don’t want to put me right. You want to put me in the wrong,” Charles declared.
Ann intervened. “Charles, Charles! Do you know there actually are moments when I think it would have been good to follow your father’s advice? There’s a confession now!”
Hamer leaned back in his chair, one hand in his pocket, one twiddling the stem of his glass. “The last thing I want, my dear boy,” he said, “is to check the things that you call young and courageous and experimental. But there’s nothing experimental about what is happening in Russia now. It was all laid down years ago, and we shall see an attempt to apply a cut-and-dried scheme of living worked out by a tired old mole who hadn’t the first idea of living himself. You say the workers have overthrown a bloody tyranny, That’s one way of looking at it. Another is to say that they have cut a nation’s throat. You don’t do that with impunity, Charles. Believe me, you let out a lot of good blood as well as bad. I’m for handing the sick man over to the doctors – drastic doctors if you like, with keen scalpels and deep cutting – but not to the slaughterers.”
“Figures of speech!” said Charles. His thin face was working with a furious dislike. “You’re an expert at them.”
Hamer looked at him sadly, and felt a very old man. “As you like, Charles,” he said with resignation. “But I’ve lived for more than half a century, and I’ve come to believe that there is more in life than bread-and-butter for what you call the workers, I believe they can have it – plenty of it – without destroying free art and science and letters. But you can’t have a dictatorship without destroying those things, and if you can tell me how millions of men who have run riot can be controlled without dictatorship, I shall be glad to hear what you have to say.”
But Charles had nothing to say except: “I thought you were a Socialist?” and to that Hamer made no answer.
*
So Hamer did not run after Communism, as so many Labour men did. What it had destroyed was clear. He waited to see what it would build, and had a pretty good idea what that would be. He wrote one of his swift journalistic pamphlets: “The Labour Highway and the Communist By-Road.” It was scathingly reviewed by Alice Ryerson in a Labour newspaper. That was his first indication not only that Alice was writing but that she had a dangerous effective pen.
But he didn’t mind this. His ambition was still restlessly stirring, and he hoped his stand against Communism, a doctrine which he knew would deeply infect his party, might draw upon him the eyes he still wished to attract. Arthur Henderson had resigned from the Cabinet. His sympathy with Russia had been too acute and too obvious. There was room for a Labour man of the first rank. When the year was a few months old Hamer gave up hope. And that was what 1918 was to him in retrospect: the end of what he had come to look upon frankly as a self-chosen degradation, the beginning of a series of attacks upon the Government, growing sharper and sharper as the year wore on through the despair of spring to the hope of autumn; this, and the return of Charles; and at last the end of the whole matter: the dawn of a peace which he envisaged with none of the delirium, none of the frantic hope, that turned London on November 11 into a whirling pandemonium.