“Come ye out from among them and be ye separate.”
That was Hamer’s war-cry as 1918 wore to a close. Once more he felt free and happy. He had cast off the shackles; he would run his own race.
Now while the country was still giddy with victory, not yet knowing the victory for bran and chaff, now while all things seemed possible and the prostrate enemy could still be looked upon as Golconda to be infinitely mined, the Government flew opportunely to the polls. “We have given you the victory. Now give us carte blanche. Keep our glorious Coalition in being. And if any candidate is against the Coalition, let him beware! We will not pin our coupon upon him, and then let him see what will happen to him.”
And Hamer replied: “To hell with coupon and Coalition. Let Labour stand once more on its own feet. Come ye out from among them and be ye separate,” And Labour came out, and was smitten hip and thigh. The Coalition went back with 478 members to back it. Labour had sixty-three. And Hamer Shawcross was not among them. After so many years, St. Swithin’s turned him down.
*
“You’re feeling better, my dear. You’re looking better,” Ann said, as they sat at breakfast in North Street. She smiled in the patient understanding way that had grown on her during the war. “I think you’re feeling more honest.”
Hamer looked up from the newspaper that was folded open beside his plate. He gave her back her smile. He liked this new Ann. She was not the girl he had married, in the sense that he was still, unchanged and unchangeably, the man who had married her. And she was not the disturbing, estranging person who had flamed into being when Charles went to school. He had come at times dangerously near to disliking that woman as certainly as he had loved the other. But this new Ann – and not so new: she had been growing before his eyes for some years – was neither to be loved nor disliked. “The angel in the house.” He had always thought it a clap-trap phrase; but it came as near as any to fitting this patient, tranquil woman, who, he felt, had not expended her fires but was diffusing them in a general spiritual warmth rather than blazing them away at a point of action.
“I think you’re feeling more honest.” She seemed to understand him as well as ever. “I am,” he said. “Not that I ever felt very dishonest. There was need for Labour to be represented in the Cabinet, and I should have liked the job.”
“Were you very disappointed?”
“Yes, I was. But now I think it’s all for the best. Not to have been in the Cabinet may be an asset to a Labour man in the days that are coming.”
She smiled again at his frank opportunism. “Well,” she said, “I’ve no doubt that if you’d been in the Cabinet you’d have made an asset of that, just as you’ll make an asset of not having been in it.”
“All my assets will be no good,” Hamer said. “I shall be slaughtered in St. Swithin’s.”
At that she opened her eyes. “Oh, my dear! I hope not! Surely not!”
“Do you remember,” Hamer asked, “the little lecture I gave to Charles on the use of the word surely? No, no, my dear. Surely nothing in this wicked world. You know, you’ve lost touch, lost interest, with this game I’m playing. You don’t appear to know that nine people in ten are going to hoot like Yahoos for this miraculous Government which has given them the victory. Bill Jones who lives by the gas-works at Bethnal Green isn’t going to realize that it was he, sticking in the muck on the Western Front, and Tom Smith, and all the rest of them, who did the trick. He and his missus and all his pals were going to vote for the victorious Government, and we poor fools who tell the Government what to do with their coupon, we’re going to get it in the neck.”
“Oh, Hamer! I hope not.”
“That’s better. I won’t deny you the consolation of hope.” He poured himself more coffee. “You don’t know the cream of the joke so far as St. Swithin’s is concerned.” He picked up a letter from beside his plate. “I got this this morning. It tells me the name of the coupon candidate – Coalition-Tory, to give him his official title – who’s going to boot me out of my dear old seat. Would you like to guess?”
“How can I?”
“Alderman Sir Thomas Hannaway of Manchester.”
Ann’s hands, resting on the edge of the table, involuntarily clenched into white-knuckled fists. Her face darkened. She got up, walked away from the table, and sat down in a rocking-chair by the fire. I must not hate that man. I must not hate him. The words swam through her mind. She strove philosophically to see Tom Hannaway as a human soul in error, deserving her pity and understanding.
It was he who had ordered that the hose should be turned upon Pen. It was he who had insinuated himself into her father’s business. She would never forget the pitiable state of old Hawley the last time she had seen him: fat, lethargic, dozing throughout the day by the sitting-room fire at The Limes, having nothing to do, conscious of impotence, uselessness, unimportance. That was in the early days of the war when she was recovering her health. She and Lizzie had gone to Manchester. She had been like a child, seeking a comfortable, known, secure environment, and what she had found had shocked her and made her worse. The old man was bald and paunchy and his face was mottled and ugly. She understood with poignant force the old phrase “senile decay.” Lizzie had taken care to get her away as soon as possible. Hawley died soon afterwards, and she heard later with inexpressible disgust that Thomas Hannaway had bought The Limes and was living there. It seemed to her like a triumphal dance on old Hawley’s grave.
And so Tom’s Rolls-Royce was accommodated in the stable where she had so often watched Haworth grooming the horse that pulled the Artingstall diligence to town with an eager fair-haired child sitting beside her alert father, and in the drawing-room, whose gilt-fluted white chair-legs were inseparably mixed with winter afternoon teas in childhood, Tom’s Polly spread out the table-games with cards and counters for Tom’s delight.
All that Tom did was sumptuously in keeping with his Rolls-Royce; and army clothing contracts, executed in his own factories which he had set up long since to supply his multiple shops, had enabled him to lavish the gifts to his party and to wartime charities which had now been appropriately rewarded with a knighthood. The twenty thousand pounds – all his fortune – which Hawley left to Ann would have seemed small change to Tom.
This was the man. I must not hate him. He had injured Pen. He had injured Hawley. And now, Hamer said, he was likely to injure him. “Well,” she said. “I should never have thought he was the sort of man you’d fear.”
Hamer laughed. “No, my dear. I’m not afraid of Tom Hannaway. But I shall not be fighting against Tom Hannaway. ‘We fight not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against darkness in high places.’ Are you coming to see me slaughtered?”
“What shall we do about Charles?”
Lizzie and Alice Ryerson answered that between them.
Charles was at home, and was daily attending a hospital. Lizzie had made him her charge. All her life long Lizzie had flung herself into cause after cause. Now she flung herself into the cause of Charles. Well on towards seventy, as hale as a well-kept winter apple and as wrinkled and ruddily-pleasing to look at, she announced suddenly that she had bought a motor car and had learned to drive it. She made herself Charles’s chauffeur, drove him to and from the hospital, and ran him about amid the last of the year in the Home Counties. That bobbed hair of hers which had been white and pleasing as a dandelion clock before she was thirty blew about her head, unconfined by any hat, as she drove and laughed and chattered, refusing to be overcome by the silent, emaciated, embittered young man by her side. She had fought so many fights: she was not going to be beaten in this one. At home she helped Charles up and down the stairs, put him to bed, helped him to dress. She would hardly suffer even Ann to give a hand with these things. Once, as he lay in bed, and she had brushed his long fair hair and given him a book to read, he suddenly put an arm round her neck and kissed her. He hadn’t done that since he was a child, and the old woman’s heart fluttered with joy. “D’you remember old Grandmother Ellen?” Charles asked.
“I should say I do,” said Lizzie. “I remember how your father rushed over to Manchester one day and brought her back to my house in Ackroyd Park. That was the first time I set eyes on her, She didn’t know what to make of him or me or life in general. We took her to a big political meeting that night. Eh! Those were days!”
Charles ignored her reminiscences. “You remind me of her,” he said simply.
She knew what he meant. Charles had always been a clinging child. He had clung to Ann, and he had clung to Ellen, and now, she thanked God, it looked as if he might cling to her. He had never been able to do without a woman who was stronger than he was himself. And so, when Ann raised the question of going North with Hamer for the election, Lizzie said: “Don’t worry about Charles. You can leave him safely with me.”
She drove Ann and Hamer to King’s Cross, and when she had seen them on the train she wired to Alice Ryerson at Cwmdulais, inviting her to stay in North Street. It’s my house, she said to herself. I can ask whom I like to stay in it. She was as tough as an old war-horse, but she wouldn’t last for ever. Charles would want someone to cling to when she was gone, and she couldn’t imagine anyone better than Alice Ryerson. Alice had all of Pen’s independence and vigour, all of Arnold’s solid reliability, and she fused these inherited qualities into something of her own, something heightened and made finer, polished and pointed in schools and college.
It was a drear December day, but before going back to North Street Lizzie drove about in the parks, full of dripping black naked trees and crawling mists, with lights springing up in houses and hotels, though it was not yet noon. She thought of her own happy runaway match, and of all she had seen since: young awkward Arnold Ryerson mooning after Ann, and Hamer Shawcross nipping in and carrying the girl off her feet, and now here were Arnold’s daughter and Hamer’s son ready, if she were not mistaken, to go on with this everlasting fascinating game of living that was much of a muchness whatever causes one fought for, whatever, for the moment, seemed the triumphant or the losing side. She laughed at herself as an old schemer who should know better, not seeing how thoroughly and swiftly her schemes were to work to their end.
Not that it mattered, she said to herself when Charles and Alice came in radiant a week later. Whatever she had done or left undone, this would have happened. It was only a matter of time.
Alice had borrowed the car, saying she would like to take Charles for a drive, and they came back from a registry office married. Lizzie looked at Charles hobbling on his crutches along the narrow passage of the North Street house, his face, raw and ugly, twisted by a smile, and at Alice, so small and tough, preceding him as if pushing a way for him; and she knew that this was a good thing, that whatever Charles might do could never be done alone, but must be done in the protective shadow of some woman stronger than himself.
*
“What will you do when you are beaten?” Ann asked. It was taken for granted now that Hamer would be beaten. His diagnosis of the situation had been accurate enough. Tom Hannaway had come primed with all the paradisaical promises, and Hamer had little to set against them except the bleak fact that he refused any longer to support the government that made them.
Ann took no part in the election. She remained at The Hut. She would not have even a daily maid in to help with the work. She had come up here not for a political fight. She didn’t want any more political fights. She wanted rest, quiet, the loneliness of the moors, and all of Hamer’s company that she could get. She got a good deal of it. She had never known him take an election as he was taking this one: it was almost as if he could not take it seriously. There were days when he did not address a single meeting, did not so much as bother to go up to Bradford. “This is not my time,” he said “I shall come back when their bellies are empty and their jobs are gone, and they know a thing or two about the facts of life. They’re not getting those from Tom Hannaway.”
So after dinner they would wash up their dishes and make up their fire, and Hamer would read aloud, or they would sit quiet, listening to the wind blowing through the firs and larches he had planted when the house was built and which now ringed it in with a dense plantation.
Thus they sat one night, he reading and smoking, Ann sitting on the other side of the hearth. Presently he looked up from his book and covertly watched her. He had marvelled of late at her capacity to be still. She would sit for an hour at a time without moving or speaking. But now she caught his eye, and they smiled at one another, and he said: “What were you thinking about?”
“I was thinking how we rush into things,” she said, “how we don’t wait. I’ve been such an impetuous woman.” She dug out an old affectionate phrase they used once to bandy between them: “Sorry you ever met me?”
He shook his head. “No. If it all had to come over again, I wouldn’t want it any different. Would you?”
“I’d want myself to be different,” she said. “I would want not to rush into things so. I was never anything much, you see, but I always acted as if I were – as if what I thought and believed were terribly important. Do you know this?” She recited in a low hesitating voice:
“Only since God doth often make
Of lowly matter for high uses meet,
I throw me at His feet;
There will I lie until my Maker seek
For some mean stuff whereon to show His skill.
Then is my time.”
“That’s very beautiful,” Hamer said. “Who wrote it?”
“George Herbert.”
“It’s very beautiful,” he repeated.
“We need to do less,” she said with apparent inconsequence. “The world is dying of causes and committees. Why can’t we just love one another and leave one another alone?”
She did not seem to expect an answer. Her eyes turned back to the fire and she fell again into reverie.
This was the last long evening he spent with her in The Hut, and it seemed to him, whenever he was there in the years that came after, that he could never exorcise, even should he wish to do so, the two memories that s0 poignantly remained: the memory of the girl who came to the place when it was a hut indeed, the girl so eager for sensual life and struggle, with whom he had lain through the long snowy night; and the memory of the woman with her life all but done, nostalgically dreaming of another world, under the delusion that she was thinking of a possible life in this one.
*
When he was in Bradford conducting his half-hearted campaign Ann walked alone far and wide over the winter moors, taking her meals in the tough stony Yorkshire cottages, coming home flushed and tired, more tired than she cared to admit, flushed with more than exercise. Hamer noticed her exhaustion; and it was with this in mind, that, when she asked what he would do when he was defeated, he replied: “Take you for a long leisurely holiday. I’ve been working hard now for a good many years, and while the Government is making a mess of things I think I shall clear out of the country. You must come with me. We’ll go abroad and stay abroad. We’ll wander about for a year.”
She raised the old objection: “What about Charles?”
Hamer was quite willing to leave Charles in Lizzie’s care; and then came the letter from Lizzie to Hamer, and a joint letter signed by Alice and Charles to Ann.
Ann suspected that all but the signature had been composed by Alice. It was a sensible letter. Alice had given up three years of her life to Pen, and now Pen herself, having learned to feel her way about every nook and corner of Cwmdulais, was anxious for the girl to go. It all sounded true. Ann could imagine how Pen would wrestle with and overcome her disability and how she would hate to have the girl, for whom she and Arnold had planned so much, tied up in the Rhondda Valley. “I can find plenty of journalistic work,” Alice wrote, “and I can keep Charles occupied and interested.”
It was all without rhetoric or emotion, and when Ann had read it she said: “This has made me feel very happy, my dear.” Hamer did not feel so happy, but he kept his opinions to himself and was glad at least that there would now be no obstacle in the way of their holiday. On polling-day he went up to town armoured with irony, cynicism, philosophy – what you will – prepared to be without a job on the morrow. As he was leaving, Ann said: “I’ve never met Sir Thomas Hannaway. Would you like to ask him to lunch tomorrow? Then we could get back to London in the afternoon.”
He had expected to be defeated, and the defeat was crushing. He was out by 12,637 votes. In the very enormity of the figures there was a sort of consolation. He wanted a rest. Well, this justified one!
It was very dull in the counting-room. He recalled the first time he had stood there, with the gas and fire blazing, when he was young and impulsive, buoyed upon visions that enabled him to ride gallantly over the crests without suspecting, as he so often did now, the dark engulfing deeps beneath them. Ann had been there, and Lizzie Lightowler not even middle-aged, and Pen and Arnold and little fanatical Jimmy Newboult. Old Buck Lostwithiel was still alive and kicking like the devil, and Lettice Melland, who had not yet married Buck’s son, was lit like a flame with youth and beauty. And now none of them was there but himself, and all this business which had seemed so romantic had faded into routine, something tiresome that he was anxious to have done with.
When the result was announced, Tom Hannaway smiled and put on his big overcoat with the fur inside, and Polly put on her big coat with the fur outside, and the three of them stepped on to the balcony. The cheers surged up toward Tom as he moved to the front to say his few words; and then there were a few half-hearted calls for Shawcross. He remembered how, that first time, they had borne him off, shoulder-high, in the light of torches. Well, he knew what they would like now: they would like to put torches to his pyre because he had told them the truth. Groans and hisses filled the night when he stepped forward, and here and there men shouted “Traitor!” He had difficulty even in getting a hearing, and when he did his words were few: “Men and women of St. Swithin’s: Many years ago, with the help of you who are now shouting against me out there in the night, I won this historic seat for Labour. Historic! You and I between us have made history here in St. Swithin’s. Now, for a moment, you have put back the clock. The clock of history is not like the clock in this tower above me. It goes backwards as well as forwards. It will not be long, my friends, before you awaken from your dream and find that the clock is slow. Then you will want me again. I shall be ready. Good-bye now for the moment. I shall be back.”
This was a true prophecy. Five years were to pass. Then he came back, and St. Swithin’s was faithful to him till the coronet was placed on his head and the Viscount Shawcross of Handforth needed to trouble himself with votes no more.
*
Sir Thomas Hannaway liked to drive his own Rolls-Royce. He liked to see Polly in her fine feathers leaning back among the crimson cushions surrounded by ivory fittings. The car made a cavalcade in itself; and it was Jimmy Newboult who once said, looking at Tom and Polly in the sumptuous interior, that it was a cavalcade of ivory, apes and peacocks.
“One can’t really dislike him – or her either,” Ann said, when the cavalcade had come and gone the next day. “I’m glad I’ve met them. They’re so childlike.”
To be Thomas Hannaway, whose face had launched a thousand shops, was something. To be Sir Thomas Hannaway, up to the eyes in affairs, with The Limes to live in in Manchester and an Elizabethan house in the green Cheshire countryside, with Consolidated Public Utilities growing under his watchful eye into something vaster than even he had dreamed of controlling – this was much more; but to be Sir Thomas Hannaway, M.P. – this was almost more than Tom could bear.
He was kindness itself to Hamer. He gave the feeling that his tender heart was nearly broken at having done him out of his seat. Anything he could do, Sir Thomas let it be understood, he would do with all his will. His concerns had ramifications from one end of the country to the other, and there were plenty of niches where he could fit in a man of talent.
“N0, Sir Thomas—” Hamer began.
“Damn it, lad,” said Tom magnanimously, “Hannaway to you.” “Well, I was going to say,” said Hamer, “that I’m a sort of professional politician. I’ve never mixed things, and I’m afraid it’s too late for me to start now.”
Lunch was over, and Sir Thomas produced a crocodile-skin cigarcase stuffed with cigars of magnificent proportions. “What are you going to do then?” he demanded, “look for another seat? You’re in the wrong party, you know, lad. I warned you years ago, when I came to the old hut you had up here.”
“No,” Hamer answered, “I shan’t look for another seat. St. Swithin’s is the only seat for me, and I warn you, Hannaway, I’ll have you out of it at the first dawn of reason. Meantime, I shall take a holiday.”
“Eh, Polly, listen to that! ’Oliday! When did I last take an ’oliday?” And Polly, playing up to the vision of a hard-driven Tom, ignoring his three-day week-ends in Cheshire or the Lakes, shook her head, sadly, wobbling the jelly of her neck and setting her earrings atremble. “Not for years and years!”
“Yes,” said Hamer to Ann when they were gone, “they’re childlike, I agree. They’re a couple of greedy gluttonous children, gorged with sticky sweets.”
*
“There was no reason,” Hamer wrote in his diary, “why Ann and I should not have waited for the spring weather before setting out, but, once we had made up our minds to go, something urged us to go quickly. And so I can look back with inexpressible joy to those few months alone with her.”
It was better every way that they should go at once. Hamer admitted to himself that it would be embarrassing to Charles and Alice to have him about the house. It was Lizzie’s place, and she could please herself what she did with it. Clearly, she wanted the young people to stay with her, just as she had wanted Ann in Ackroyd Park and him and Ann here in this house when they first came to London. When he got back, he would do what he had wanted to do for a long time: find a London house for himself and Ann.
Ann was quietly happy, like a self-possessed child on holiday. She had spent very little time out of England, and the mere foreignness of things was enough to please her. During the winter months they moved about without rush or bustle among the smaller, less frequented places of the French Riviera. They were received as eagerly as the first swallows. It was delicious to wake up in the mornings and to find the sun so often shining on blue water and to smell the growing mimosa that she had never before known except as a feathery joy in shops or hawkers’ baskets. Through the advancing year they wandered along the Mediterranean coast into Italy, and from Venice Hamer wrote to Ernst Horst in Berlin. He did not tell Ann that he wanted Horst to see her because he was one of the greatest European specialists in tuberculosis. She knew only that Horst was a Socialist whom Hamer had met before the war at international conferences. They had liked one another and had corresponded in English and German until the war came.
It was a long time before Horst’s reply reached them, and while they were waiting for it Ann enjoyed the sunshine of the Lido and became brown and vigorous-looking, but by now Hamer was in a ferment of worry. This hale skin did not deceive him. A little effort exhausted her, and at nights she coughed unceasingly. He would steal back into her bedroom after she had left it, and examine her handkerchiefs in the laundry-basket, looking for the tell-tale flecks of blood. At last he found them, and then he hurried to the telegraph office and sent an urgent wire to Horst. When he got back to the hotel, Horst’s letter was there. It came from a village in the Harz Mountains that Hamer had never heard of, and said that Horst would be delighted to renew an acquaintance which he had never ceased to think of with pleasure. They left Venice the next morning.
Of the many books that Hamer Shawcross wrote, the only one that was not in some way political was the memoir of his wife. He wrote it to assuage some need in himself. It was Charles who induced him to publish it: Charles who had inherited so little from his father save the artist’s touch which in the older man was never given free play. We must go to Hamer himself for the story of Ann’s last days and death:
From the time we left Venice (he wrote) I knew in my heart that we were moving towards her grave, and so, I am sure, did she. But she did not complain. She never lost her tranquillity. It was early in May. We travelled through orchard-lands that were like foaming seas of pink and white breaking upon the green background of the land, and no regret was forced from her that she must soon be leaving a world capable of so much enchantment. All she said was: “You know, my dear, Browning shouldn’t have longed to be in England in April. I think it’s wiser to take beauty and happiness where you find them. We should just thank God for allowing us to be alive in a world of such lovely appearances, and have done with it.”
It was late one afternoon when we reached the little station which Horst had told me was the nearest to his village. Ann had been sleeping for an hour, and when I awoke her she started up violently and sprang to her feet. “Oh, I overslept,” she cried, and before I could stop her she reached up for her heavy dressing-case and swung it off the rack. It slipped from her hand on to the seat, and she suddenly leaned forward, collapsed upon it. I saw blood trickle from her lips.
Horst was at the station, dressed in very old and shabby clothes of a professional man, and with him were two tall young men wearing German country clothes: stained leather shorts, jerseys, and feathered hats. They all three clicked their heels and bowed, and he introduced the boys as his sons Axel and Georg.
I explained what had happened, and while Horst and I helped Ann on to the platform Georg and Axel took the luggage. Ann was laid flat on the table in the little waiting-room. Horst took off his old frock coat and placed it under her head. I saw that his shirt was thin and worn, torn here and there. He bent over Ann and murmured: “Be tranquil, Liebchen.” She was tranquil enough.
Presently the two boys, who had disappeared, returned and whispered to their father. They went out again, and when they came back they carried a few planks nailed together, with a thick feather-bed resting on them. They gently lifted Ann and placed her on this stretcher, then carried it out to where a small rugged horse stood attached to a flat cart. The stretcher was laid on the cart. All these improvisations had happened with speed and without fuss. Horst left his coat folded under Ann’s head on the mattress. Without self-consciousness, he took the horse’s head and we started off, Georg and Axel carrying a suitcase on either side of the cart, and I walking behind.
We walked for about three miles, adapting our pace to the slow amble of the horse. It was uphill all the way, at first through tidy vegetable gardens and orchards, through blooming hawthorns and laburnums. The sun was shining strongly and the air was full of the song of birds. Then the acclivity sharpened and we were in the woods, dark with firs, silent, and resinous to the smell. The sun did not reach us and the sky was a blue strip unwinding over our heads. I saw that Ann’s eyes were open, fixed on the shining of this inaccessible heaven.
It took us nearly an hour to reach the village where Horst lived. It stood on a plateau cleared in the forest. All the cottages were wooden. You stood there and looked down steeply over the dark heads of the trees climbing up from the valley below, and then, looking behind you, you saw the forest climbing still to the distant blue of the sky.
There was something enchanted about the place. All the German fairy-tales I had read as a child seemed incarnate in this forest, in these wooden houses, in these two grave blue-eyed boys walking on either side of the country cart, in the geese on the green, and in the tall fair-haired girl who came towards us out of one of the cottages. Horst briefly introduced her as Marta. Then he spoke to her urgently and rapidly, and she ran back to the cottage.
Ann was lifted from the cart on the stretcher and laid upon the rough lawn, surrounded with flowering apple trees that stood before the cottage. The two boys, in that silent purposeful way of theirs, went in with the luggage. Their father followed them, and I was left alone outside with Ann. Her eyes were shut now. I sat on a corner of the feather-bed and took her hand in mine. It was limp and unresponsive. The sunset was washing over the valley down below me, and near at hand a blackbird was singing in an apple tree. Presently he flew away, shaking down a little flurry of over-ripe petals. I thought of what Ann had said about taking beauty where you find it; and I realized why beauty made Browning wish to be somewhere else. We want to escape from our own mortality which beauty mocks.
Horst came out with Georg and Axel, and they carried Ann into the house. A great bed had been dismantled in an upstairs room, brought down, and set up just inside the window of a downstairs room looking on to the orchard. Then we all went out, and the girl Marta remained to undress Ann and put her to bed. Axel and Georg went away together to return the borrowed horse and cart and feather-bed. Horst and I were left alone. He had put on his old shabby coat. I noticed now how worn his shoes were, how drawn and grey and anxious he was. I had not seen him for about six years. Then he had been debonair, self-confident, with the look and manner of a man who knew himself the master of his job. All this was gone. We sat in a room at the back of the house, and for a long time not a word was spoken. Then he rose to his feet and said: “So! Where now are our dreams, my friend?” He stood between me and the light, looking out upon the darkening climbing forest; then abruptly he turned and walked out of the room. I could hear him and Marta moving about next door, talking occasionally in low tones.
In a few moments Marta came into the room where I was. “Sprechen Sie deutsch?” she asked. “Ja,” I said; and she then apologized for having left me so long without food. She brought me coffee and bread, and neither was good. Then she went back to Horst.
I felt intolerably lonely, and when I had eaten I left the house and walked down towards the road by which we had come. I longed for someone to talk to, and hoped I might meet Georg and Axel. It was now dark among the trees, and a river of stars was flowing down the lane of the sky. Now and then I could hear the furtive scurry of nocturnal creatures and the melancholy calling of owls. The night was warm, and I sat on a log and waited for the boys.
Presently, far off, I could hear the sound of their feet, marching to a tune plucked out of a mandolin. It was a sad nostalgic tune. I could not distinguish the words they were singing. When I got to my feet and hailed them the music stopped. They greeted me with grave politeness, and when I urged them to go on singing they did so self-consciously for a verse or two and then stopped altogether. We returned in silence to the house where now candles were burning. On the threshold they simultaneously clicked their heels, bowed, said: “Excuse, please,” and disappeared I know not where. I saw nothing more of them or of Marta that night. I learned later that Marta spent the night on a pallet bed in Ann’s room.
I endured an agonizing hour in the candle-lit back room before Horst came in, shut the door quietly behind him and drew the curtains. He took a half-smoked porcelain pipe from the mantelpiece, lit it, and sat down. “So!” he said. “I have done all that I can. She is asleep. She is comfortable.”
He said no more for a time, and I could not put to him the question that was in my heart. But he knew it was there, and presently he said, looking past me into a shadowy corner of the room: “You will understand, my friend, that there is not much I can do. I am not the great Dr. Horst. I do not dispose of the resources of a famous hospital. No. I am a poor man in a poor country. I have lost everything – except my knowledge, you understand.”
He pulled for a time at the gurgling nearly-empty pipe, and then went on: “Shawcross, my friend, I could say to you: ‘Send her to Switzerland.’ I could tell you: ‘In such and such a sanatorium in Switzerland there is the great Dr. So-and-so.’ I could tell you what he would charge you, and I could describe to you every detail of what he could do to make her live, and how long he could make her live. My friend, it would not be long.”
It would not be long. I remembered a night in our North Street house when my wife, sleeping, put an arm around my neck and murmured: “Always, always!” Time crumbles our everlasting covenants: this was the end of always.
“Here,” said Horst, tapping the dottle from his pipe and laying it carefully in a tin, “here it would not be so long. We have not much food, not much butter or milk or eggs. And I – I have not the resources, you understand. So! You will decide, my friend. What I have is yours.”
I got up and took his hand. “Horst,” I said, “you and I were never enemies, nor can we ever be enemies.”
“I am no man’s enemy,” said Horst. “If I am the enemy of the wickedness in myself I am busy enough.”
He went out to look at Ann, and then he made some more of the bad coffee. I put a tin of tobacco on the table, and he half-filled his pipe diffidently. We talked far into the night. Marta, he explained, was Axel’s wife. She would look after Ann. She was a trained nurse. Axel was an artist – “but I ask you, friend, what is an artist now? There is a Chinese saying: ‘If you have a loaf, sell half and buy lilies,’ but if you have only lilies, like Axel, who will buy them that you may have bread?”
Georg wished to be a farmer – “like my father,” said Horst. “Yes, before I am a famous doctor I am a farmer’s son, and I am glad for Georg. It is good to love the land.”
It was Georg who had found this cottage, where he had a few goats and geese and a pig, and here he had brought Axel and Marta when both were near to starving, and here Horst himself had come. I never discovered what misfortune had overwhelmed so celebrated a man.
Our talk ranged away from the family, but I could not get him to discuss political matters. That one abrupt exclamation: “Where now are our dreams?” had given me a glimpse into his disillusion, and it was only when the night was all but done and he was taking me upstairs to bed that he said: “There is no peace, you understand, Shawcross, no peace anywhere except in a man’s own heart.”
I did not expect to sleep that night, but I did. I was exhausted in body and spirit, and I slept heavily. When I awoke I was surprised to hear sounds of music. I looked at my wrist-watch and saw that it was nearly eleven o’clock. I jumped out of bed and ran to the window, to see a surprising sight. Ann, on a long wicker chair on wheels, was reclining in the sunshine under the apple blossom. Over the back of the chair was a blanket boldly striped in green and white and yellow. Axel Horst lay on the grass at her feet, plucking at the strings of his mandolin and humming softly. Down below them the dark green fleece of the forest fell away to the valley full of morning sunshine. It was a scene so unexpected and idyllic that my heart jumped with joy. All that had happened yesterday seemed like a nightmare from which I had awakened to a beautiful reality. Then I heard Horst’s footsteps coming up the stair. He knocked at the door, looked into the room, and came over to stand at my side.
“That is lovely,” he said. “You will remember this, Shawcross: that you brought your dear one to an old friend’s house, and it was a very poor house, but the good God made many lovely things instead of the things that your old friend would have given you if he could.”
We stood in silence for a moment, and then I asked him if Axel would paint Ann’s portrait, as she was there, under the apple-blossom with the green grass at her feet and the gay spring sky of blue and white over her head. And, working throughout the next week, which was a miracle of blossom and sunshine, Axel did this, so that always now, for me, Ann sits there with the gay bold rug behind her shoulders, her hair, which never lost its lustre, clouded against the apple tree, and Axel’s mandolin thrown in for signature, dropped carelessly against her feet as though, playing, she had tired and lain back to rest. It is there to remind me always that Ann died among friends.
She chose to die there. Horst and I told her the alternatives, and she said: “Why should I give up so much peace for a little more life? Dr. Horst, you have heard the saying that man is a soul dragging a carcass about with him?”
Horst was sitting on a chair at her side on the grass, his finger on her pulse. He nodded gravely. “So!” he said. “Epictetus is right.”
“Well,” she said. “I’m tired of dragging. Let me drop my old carcass here.”
Horst put her hand down gently and looked at her with infinite tenderness. “Not old,” he said. “Not old.” He himself cannot have been much older than Ann. He looked like her father.
She did not last long. May passed into June, and the disease went its way of attack and recovery. Sometimes she was out in the sunshine, wan and exhausted; and sometimes day followed day when she was on her bed indoors, with Horst and Marta hardly leaving her side. The boys, shy elusive creatures, came and went, doing every conceivable office. They cleaned my shoes and tidied my room, and if I found them at it they coloured, said, “Please, excuse!” finished what they were at, and disappeared. Now, thinking of these things, remembering that brief period when love and death went hand-in-hand, I sometimes wonder whether politics, which should implement the best desires of humanity, do not rather come between men and the untutored goodness of their hearts.
We had reached mid-June, summer’s height, when Ann died. The apple-blossom had all fallen and the roses had come, and still the wonderful weather held, day after day of beneficent sunshine and birdsong and gentle winds. Ann, on her reclining-chair, had been moved out into the garden. She had had a number of bad hæmorrhages and was very weak. I lay on the warm grass beside her, drowsy with sunlight. Georg’s geese came strutting on to the green, and Ann struggled to a sitting position to look at them. She began to laugh. “Look at the way they go,” she said. “So pompous, so political.”
The silly creatures, as though they understood and resented her words, turned with fatuous waddling dignity and began to retire in single file. There was something so comic about this solemn recessional that Ann’s laughter seized me, too. “The delegates are leaving the platform,” I said. That made her laugh the more heartily. It was so long since we had laughed at anything together. Horst, who was watching us from the window, came hurrying out. “No, no! Please!” he cried urgently; but Ann had reached the point of paroxysm: she could not stop laughing. Her whole body was shaking, and presently she began to gasp for breath. I put my arms round her. I was holding her, in the sunshine, under the roses, when her life spouted out.
Georg made the coffin. His hammer sounded through the longdrawn-out twilight of that midsummer day. The next day Horst and I lifted her into it, and Axel and Marta covered the coffin with roses laid upon sombre boughs of fir which they brought from the forest. The day after that Axel came up the hill, leading the same rugged pony, drawing the same flat cart, which had carried her from the station. He had pulled boughs from the firs on his way up, and the coffin was placed upon these, which strewed the cart. Then he brought out of the house a great bunch of roses, tied with green and white silk ribbons which I had seen fluttering from his mandolin. He laid this on the coffin.
Then we went, Horst leading the pony, I behind the cart, and behind me Marta, Georg and Axel walking together. The forest was cool and full of resinous scents, and the little spear-tips of the trees were lifted into a sky as blue as the periwinkle-flowers that Ann had planted at The Hut.
Down in the valley, we jolted over a level-crossing near the station and came soon to the cemetery. It was a peaceful place, near a stream, with willows growing along the banks. We stood there till the grave was filled, and then Axel stepped up to me and handed me the big bunch of roses, tied with green and white ribbon. “Excuse – please!” he said, and bowed. I took the flowers and laid them on the loose earth, and I stood there for a moment looking down at the alien grave of one who had been so dear and familiar. Alien? I remembered what Ann had said a few weeks ago: “It’s wiser to take beauty and happiness where you find them.”
Horst laid a hand on my shoulder. “My friend,” he said, “your poet Meredith has this line: ‘Into the breast that gave the rose shall I with shuddering fall?’ So! All the world is the vesture of God. In Germany also we have roses. Leave her with us.”
*
Hamer was glad that he had been alone with Ann at the last. He had written to Charles and Lizzie, but there was no possibility of their travelling to Germany. Charles’s wounds were still too serious for that, and Lizzie would not leave him to Alice’s sole care. Alice was already busy, doing what she could to earn a living for them both, and she was helping Charles to forget his pain and bitterness by encouraging in him his one talent, which was a writer’s. There was something in Charles’s nature which caused other people to make plans for his future. You had not to know him long before you realized that whatever talent he might possess would have to be stirred up; and just as Hamer had planned for him a diplomatic career, so Alice now planned a career in letters. She did not imagine that Charles would ever write successful popular books; his talent was small and twisted with bitterness. She was prepared to make the money if he would make the reputation; and now, as well as her left-wing journalistic work, she began a novel. Even Charles knew nothing about it. If he had seen the title-page, he would have read: “Death Speaks Softly,” by Gabrielle Minto.
The letters from Charles and Alice were not very informative, and Hamer knew nothing of all this. Nor did he go home to find out. At first, he thought of returning to England. Dr. Horst, with Axel, Georg and Marta, walked with him down to the little station on the day after the funeral. Horst and Georg waved good-bye. Axel and Marta travelled with him as far as Hanover. They were beside themselves with delight. Hamer had insisted on paying Axel fifty pounds for the portrait of Ann. He knew that this was the only way in which he could make any of them accept a recompense for all they had done. Axel seemed as if he could not believe there was so much money left in the world, and now he and Marta were going to scrounge for paints and brushes and canvases, and buy presents for Horst and Georg.
Hamer said good-bye to them when they reached the city, and the next day he took train for the Hook of Holland, intending to cross to Harwich. As the train stood in the station at Utrecht, he leaned out of the window, and there walking down the platform with his nose in a newspaper was Vanderwinter, the Dutch Socialist, whom he had met many a time before the war. They began to talk hastily, as people will when the whistle may blow at any moment. “Ha! Horst! I’ve lost sight of him,” said Vanderwinter. “Where is he? What’s he doing?”
There was so much that Hamer wanted to say to this excellent old friend, that he suddenly pulled his cases off the rack and leapt to the platform as the train began to move. “I’m not in a hurry,” he said. “I’m not in Parliament now, you know. I’ll stay here for tonight.”
He stayed for a week. There were so many people Vanderwinter wanted him to meet, there was so much to discuss, there was a whole social cosmogony to be mapped amid clouds of tobacco smoke and endless talk.
“You ought to find time to go to Antwerp and see Der Groot,” Vanderwinter said on the last night of his stay in Utrecht.
Hamer laughed. “And Der Groot will want me to see Claesens at the Hague.”
“Why not?” Vanderwinter asked. “You’re a rich man without a job.”
Why not? The next morning Hamer set off to see Der Groot, with Vanderwinter’s “Why not?” still in his ears. He would perhaps never have a chance like this again. The tide would swing back in England. He would oust Tom Hannaway from St. Swithin’s. He felt that in his bones. Then all the fret and hurry would begin again. So much to do. So much to do. There might even be a Labour Government next time. Looking at the flat landscape streaming past the window, he meditated on this supreme ambition which was never far from his mind: to be a member of His Majesty’s Government. Foreign Secretary. He sometimes thought he would rather be Foreign Secretary than Prime Minister. All these distracted lands of Europe, all the lands of the world, the places he had seen as a youth. They began to flow through his mind as the landscape flowed past his eyes: scraps of half-remembered experience: the mad old Spanish woman with her fountains and parrots in Buenos Aires; that chap Carradus with whom he had worked in the mines of South Africa. Before he had reached Antwerp, he had resolved to travel again, as extensively, and even more intensively. That was one thing a Foreign Secretary should do. If he didn’t do it now, the chance would never come again; and, as Vanderwinter said: Why not?
*
Vanderwinter had called him a rich man. He did not know how rich he was. Ann’s will reached him at The Hague, posted by Lizzie. Ann had inherited £10,000 when she was twenty-one, and she had never used more than the interest of this money. On Hawley’s death she inherited another £20,000. Her will was in one sentence: “I bequeath all I die possessed of to my dear husband, John Hamer Shawcross.” He read the date on this will with inexpressible emotion. It was the date of the day after their marriage. Sitting in the lounge of his comfortable hotel, with the music of a dance-band in his ears and the heat of the summer oppressing him, he could recall every shade and detail of that morning. There was heavy snow on the ground at Baildon and they plunged through it from the shack to take their breakfast at the old Malt Shovel inn. They had intended to bring up the furniture for Moorland Cottage, but the snowdrifts were too deep, and he had gone back to the hut and begun to write Tyler, Ball and Company. He had sent her off to her Aunt Lizzie’s in Bradford. She was sad to go, and all her thought had been of him. She wanted to pour out upon him, whom as yet she knew so little, all that she had. And so she had written this. He looked at the faded ink, the signatures of the two witnesses: Lizzie Lightowler and old Marsden, who had been in his grave long since. “My dear husband.” He thought of the many times he had vexed her, and of the bitter years when they had run so far apart. But she had let it stand. “My dear husband.” Always, always. More than ever, he did not want to return to England. He wanted to travel and forget.
*
He was away for nearly four years. It was a different journey this time. He travelled as far east as Japan, as far west as California. Wherever he went doors were open. He talked with politicians of every breed and brand, with scientists and teachers and journalists, with artists, writers, dockers and workers in the mines and fields. His pocket was full of journalistic contracts. For the serial rights of World Survey an American syndicate paid him a sum that many good writers do not make in a lifetime. He came back a richer man than he set out: richer in money, in knowledge, in contacts with the great figures of the modern world. Now, even more than when his first odyssey ended, he could say: “I know what I’m talking about.” It was during this journey that he wrote his memoir of Ann. Throughout the last of these four wander-years he had the company of Jimmy Newboult. Colonel James Newboult was as poor as a church mouse. Outside his own country, he knew nothing except what the landscape looked like between two hedges of barbed wire in France. In that year there was a great deal which he wouldn’t have chosen for himself: all these theatres and concerts and visits to picture galleries; these week-ends with people who, Jimmy felt sure, could teach him nothing about “the working-class angle,” which was all he thought mattered; and when, taking his courage in both hands, he asked Hamer what he was getting out of it, Hamer laughed and said what he had said so long ago to Arnold Ryerson: “Sweetness and light, Jimmy, sweetness and light.” He added: “Those are not things that have greatly distinguished British Foreign Secretaries. I wonder what effect it might have had on the mind of Lord North if he had sat in American drawing-rooms and knew what the Americans were painting and writing and singing?”
Jimmy scratched his blazing head. “You get the craziest notions, Chief,” he said. “And ’00 the ’ell was Lord North?”
“The man whose birthday all good Americans should observe as Founder’s Day,” said Hamer. “He gave America away with a packet of tea.”
“Ah, the Boston Tea Party!” cried Jimmy. A cliché always cleared his mind.
But if Jimmy was sometimes perplexed, he was always sensitive to his good fortune, and when he had seen the great ports of the American seaboard, and gone down into the Southern States, and crossed the desert to California, and gone up into Canada, and so home along the St. Lawrence and across the Atlantic to Liverpool, he was filled with a new devotion to the man who was still, to him, the crusader, the liberator, the youth with the blazing sword – Youth itself with its blazing sword – consumed with a passion to burn out the tares from England’s green and pleasant land.
From Liverpool they did not go straight to London. They arrived in June 1923, and a name in the Liverpool Echo, which Hamer was reading as they took lunch at an hotel, changed his plans. “Jimmy,” he said, “I don’t think I ever told you that the first time I appeared in St. Swithin’s – that time when Arnold Ryerson was the candidate – they tried to bribe me out of it?”
Jimmy shook his head. “That’s nothing new. They tried it on Keir Hardie in Mid-Lanark.”
“The gentleman who came to me,” said Hamer, “was Tom Hannaway, now Sir Thomas, who holds the seat. I am reminded of it by seeing his name here. Sir Thomas has a horse running in the Derby today. He calls the beast St. Swithin’s. If it’s beaten I shall regard it as an omen – a bad omen for Sir Thomas, and I shall go straight through to Bradford and have a meeting, June or no June, and tell people why Sir Thomas is going out at the next election. It’s time I made a speech in England again.”
St. Swithin’s was beaten that afternoon, and Hamer rang through to the secretary of the St. Swithin’s Divisional Labour Party. He held his meeting the next Saturday night. The years had done their work, as the years will. He had been content to take them for his allies and leave it all to them. Now he stepped in and pointed the moral of what they had destroyed, constructed and subverted. There were no shouts of “Traitor!” There were few cheers. He did not play for them. He played for gravity, for warning. Five years of peace – and where was the flow of gold that was to be tapped out of Germany’s anæmic veins? Five years of peace – and where were the jobs that were to put butter on their bread? Five years of peace – and who, in a world restless, troubled, feverish, would dare to say that in five more years peace – even such a moulting, poverty-stricken peace as they had – would still be with them?
“I come back to you after four years of journeying through the earth. I have been out like Noah’s dove scanning the face of the waters. Now I come back, and ah! my friends, I do not come back with an olive-branch. The waters are not abated. Look where I will, they are high with menace. Our ark is still adrift; the rain of misfortune still pelts. You know that. You are soaked to the skin. Four and a half years of Coalition government, and the chill drops still fall: strikes, unemployment, less coming into your pockets, more going out of them, and over it all the thickening cloud of international distrust. Are the nations nearer to one another than they were in November, 1918? Ask your member. You will find him somewhere on the road between Epsom and Ascot. You will find him in a green paddock, wearing a grey top-hat, with a carnation in his buttonhole and spats on his feet. Go to him, and ask him what he has been doing during the last few years to learn of the chill winds that are rising throughout the world and that are about to fall on you with blizzard force. I have not come to you with comfortable doctrine. I have come to warn you, my friends, to look out for squally weather and to say to you: Choose your pilot well. I have seen the world. I know what I am talking about. Well, then. There will be an election soon. I shall come here, and this time I shall stay here.”
This was the man who, that January morning in the following year, walked out of his house in Half Moon Street: Hamer Shawcross, P.C., M.P., His Majesty’s Minister of Ways and Means.