Pen Ryerson came out of the house in Horeb Terrace and turned her sightless face up to the sky. Grey clouds hung low over the valley, and the wind had a knifey edge. Pen’s face was as grey as the clouds, as sharp-edged as the wind. She was not one of those whose blind eyes retain the illusion of sight. You had only to look at the perished balls to know that she was blind; and this seemed to intensify eyery other feature of her face. You could almost see her listening: her head had a way of turning to this side and that to permit her ears to catch every whisper of sound. Her nostrils were sharpened, pinched in, as if with incessant sniffing of the breeze. The blindness did not dim the alertness of her look. She seemed on the strain to use to the full the senses that were left to her.
Now, with her face upturned to the sky, she listened to the wind and sniffed the air, and could picture as clearly as though she saw it the landscape of Cwmdulais: the pithead machinery with its wheels not turning; the empty sidings down on the railway; the rows of squat cottages with grey slate roofs and the grey clouds pressing down close upon them. She could imagine the wind blowing all in one direction the smoke that curled out of the chimneys, smoke from coal that the men got by burrowing into the hillsides and making lucky strikes. And she could picture the men themselves: sitting by the fire, lounging at the corners, queueing up at the Labour Exchange that had no labour to exchange, with their hands getting soft and their minds getting bitter and their feet getting cold. It was all there, clear as daylight in Pen’s mind. She turned back into the house and shouted: “I’ll go and meet ’em now. It’s going to snow.”
Arnold came to the window of the “den” they shared, the window of the front room. It gave straight on to the street. There was only a pane of glass between him and Pen. He always came and stood there when she was setting out on some errand, all his love aching to be her eyes, her hands, her feet. But he knew that she did not want him with her. It was a point of pride, and he was careful, now that she had lost so much, to leave her her pride.
She had set about in her own way to master her darkness. She was wearing a cloak and hood of thick red woollen material. In the summertime she wore a similar cloak and hood of a lighter make. The red cloak, as she had intended, became known up and down the Rhondda Valley. “That’s Pen Ryerson.” You couldn’t mistake her. Everyone gave her room, and, if she needed it, gave her help. She carried a stout white-painted stick with a bicycle-bell fastened to the crook of the handle. When she wanted to cross a road she did not wait for someone to take her arm. She held out the stick in the direction she intended to go, rang the bell, and went, keeping the stick horizontally forward till she was across.
So she went now, a striking figure, with one hand clutching the cloak about her, the other holding the stick that tap-tapped along the pavement’s edge. There was hardly a soul in the desolate streets: the Rhondda seemed as cold and hopeless as the Russian steppes, and presently the snow that Pen had predicted began to fall. At the corner by the grim forbidding tabernacle Horeb, immense and ugly as sin with the white silent snow falling around it, Pen waited a moment, holding out her stick, then rang her bell and crossed. Down the hill. she went, where her feet were like eyes, knowing every furrow and joint in the stony way. She felt with her hands to see that the levelcrossing gates were open, and Gwilym Roberts signalman leaned out of his box into the wuthering snow to shout, “All right, Pen. Go ahead.”
She crossed to the station, where the icy wind was cutting along the platform, carrying the snow with it in a horizontal drive, and she sought the waiting-room for shelter. There was no fire in it; it was as cold as the grave; and Thomas Hughes porter put his head in and said: “Come an’ wait in our room, Pen gel. There’s a bit of fire there. God knows we want something to warm our backsides in the Rhondda these days.”
So she went into the porters’ room and stood there with the fire thawing the snow off her red cloak till the rumble of the train from Cardiff was heard. Then she went out on to the platform again, cocking her head sideways to listen to the opening and banging of doors. There was not much of it; few people seemed to make Cwmdulais an objective, but soon Pen’s ear caught what it was listening for: the quick eager run of Alice’s feet and the slower awkward advance of Charles slightly dragging his wooden leg. It was not a wooden leg such as old Richard Richards, Ap Rhondda’s father, used to wear when he was alive – an honest-to-God peg-leg – but a new-fangled, up-to-date, utterly scientific contraption, which Charles cursed daily none the less.
They had got out from a compartment at the end of the train, and Alice’s run took her right ahead of Charles, so that he looked on from a distance, coming slowly up, as Alice’s black bobbed head bent over Pen’s red-hooded sightless face, and the two women clung together, kissing.
The spectacle moved him deeply. As he approached, Pen disengaged herself from Alice’s arms and turned up her face for him to kiss, too. He did so, simply and without embarrassment. “Mother!” he said.
The snow had thickened while Pen waited for the train, and the daylight had declined. It was nearly four o’clock. As they left the station and turned to the right on to the level-crossing the wind came at them with a cold snarly howl and a drive of snow. It made them stagger and plastered them white all down one side. “You shouldn’t be out in this, my dear, You should be sitting by the fireside, warm and comfortable,” Alice wanted to cry; but she said nothing. Like Arnold, she had learned to respect Pen’s pride. But she took her arm: that was permitted – but only to Alice: and they breasted the steep hill, going with muffled heavy steps. Then they were past Horeb, walking along the terrace, and Charles stopped for a moment to look down into the valley, a pit of darkness filled with the swirl of the snow and made intolerably desolate by the little ineffective pricks of light that looked as though at any moment they would be swamped, overwhelmed, submerged, blown out for ever, like hope abandoned.
“God!” he said. “And when I was a school-kid I thought a weekend visit had shown me the Rhondda! How much did you say, Alice, the Marquis of Mool was getting out of the coal trade?”
“A hundred and fifteen thousand pounds a year,” said Alice with grim deliberation.
“God!” Charles repeated. “That’s one thing they didn’t tell me when I was a kid.”
Pen stood between them, leaning on her white stick, her blind face turned towards the valley, “Ah, well,” she said, “I sometimes think the Almighty himself has got summat to learn about what we’re puttin’ up with down here. But come on now. Arnie’ll be waiting with a cup o’ tea.”
*
When he had seen Pen go tapping her way down the bitter street, Arnold tidied up the papers on his desk and went into the kitchen. So much of his life was spent between these two rooms, especially now that Pen was blind. He looked after their simple cooking. That was one thing she must not be permitted to do. At first, she had insisted on trying, and he had lived in terror of coming home and finding her burned to death. Now she left it to him. He would not have changed these rooms for any others. In this kitchen – Nell had scrubbed Ianto’s back while he and Pen, raw youngsters, had sat in the parlour. Here he had met old Richard Richards, now dead, and the babies Dai and Pryce: Dai the doctor, Pryce who was a bit of dust, for ever England, blowing in the sand of Suvla beach. They were all gone now except Dai: Richard and Ianto and Pryce: he had seen those three generations pass: and Nell, who had wept so much over Ap Rhondda’s poems, had married again and gone to Patagonia. She had forgotten the poems. When she was gone, a lot of old rubbish was found turned out of boxes and drawers and left pell-mell on the bedroom floor. Arnold discovered the poems there: Ap Rhondda’s heartbreaks about the songster over the valley and Hugh Price Hughes drawing the coal-tubs where sun and birdsong never came: the Master of Anguish. Arnold felt as if he were picking up a living thing, and he had a clear vision of Ianto walking down Horeb Terrace with his food-basket and tea-tin, pausing to look back and point to the sky, that last time they had seen him. He took the poems and locked them in his desk, renewing their short lease from oblivion.
The poor little house was full of these memories, and they were with him now as he filled the kettle at the kitchen sink, lit the gas, and put the black-and-red check cloth on the table. He proudly took down from the dresser the tea-service of “cottage pottery,” decorated with a bold design of flowers and foliage, that Alice had bought. If most of the memories in this house came to a dead-end, his thoughts of the little Alice, the punctual cheerful scholar, flowed happily forward. Her presence was all about him: in this china and tablecloth, in the typewriter Pen used, knocking out with blind uncanny accuracy the letters and notes which he dictated. The typewriter was one of Alice’s grandest ideas; it helped Pen to overcome her feeling of uselessness. All these things, and many others, Alice had bought, and Arnold knew that she could well afford them. There had always been between him and Alice a particular depth of intimacy which even Pen had not shared. Neither Charles nor Pen knew what Alice had confided to him: that she was the author of the detective novels of Gabrielle Minto. Arnold knew little enough about detective novels or any other sort of novels, but he soon discovered that Gabrielle Minto wore a halo. Even reviewers who damned the school to which she belonged admitted that she alone might have redeemed it, because of her good writing, her true psychology, her scrupulously accurate detail. Dons and deans, bishops and Cabinet ministers, all freely acknowledged themselves to be readers of Gabrielle Minto, little knowing that this celebrated person was Alice Ryerson who at the general election of 1923 had stood as a Communist candidate and polled twenty-nine votes out of an electorate of 260433.
Arnold felt that Charles at least should be let into the secret, but Alice would not agree to this. “Not on your life, Daddy! It’s nice for Charles when people say: ‘You know Alice Ryerson is the wife of Charles Shawcross who wrote Fit for Heroes.’ It wouldn’t be so nice if they began to say: ‘You know Charles Shawcross is the husband of Gabrielle Minto.’ Charles needs all the pride he can have.”
Alice was very careful of the pride of those she loved.
Arnold heard the train come in, and put the tea into the pot. He made up the fire, smoothed out the red-and-blue Indian rug that Alice had bought to replace the old rag mat. He looked round him, well content. He had cut two plates of bread, and there was a good currant-cake, butter, and a small pot of fish-paste. This, in the firewarmed kitchen, seemed to him all that anyone could want. If only everyone in the Rhondda could be certain of so much! Ah! the Rhondda! The thought of his people overwhelmed him. His face saddened, and he drew the red serge curtains against the black snow-dancing night as Pen’s brisk knock sounded at the door.
*
Arnold poured out the tea. “Whenever you’re home, Alice,” he said, “I want to start meals with grace. You know, Charles, we always did that in Broadbent Street when I called to have tea with your father. Gordon Stansfield, his stepfather, always said grace. You would have liked that man. He was one of the best men I ever knew.”
“I don’t like thanking God for what I’ve got when there are so many who’ve got nothing at all,” said Pen. “I can’t believe I’m all that of a God’s favourite, Spread some fish-paste on my butter, Alice. No, it wouldn’t seem right. ‘Thank Thee, God, for this fish-paste, but why hasn’t Mrs. Morgan got any at all, and why has Lord Muck got caviare?’ You’d start summat if you began that road.”
“I hope we’ll soon start summat any way,” said Alice. “We don’t want to ask the Almighty those questions. We just want to ask our own common sense. However, that’s enough of that. You hate us Communists, don’t you, Daddy? That’s one thing Charles and I have in common: both our fathers hate our political ideas like poison.”
She was kneeling on the hearth, toasting the bread at the fire and handing it to Charles, who spread the butter and fish-paste on it. Arnold did not answer her, and she went on: “Ah, well, Daddy, don’t think I’m blaming you. No doubt when I’m fifty there’ll be plenty of young things to call me a Tory. After all, you did bust out of the Liberal Party, and so did Hamer Shawcross. We give you that.”
“Thank you, my dear,” Arnold said gravely.
She got up, gave the last piece of toast to Charles, and ruffled Arnold’s scanty hair. “But don’t be too proud about it,” she said. “There’s a difference. The line of advance had stopped with Liberalism, and you carried it forward. But it was the same line. Don’t forget that. We go off on a new line: that’s the difference. You still believe that politics can put all this right, don’t you?” She waved her hand towards the window, comprehending all the desolation and misery of the workless coalfields.
“I’m as sure of that as I’m sure that I sit in this chair,” said Arnold stoutly.
“And I’m as sure that it can’t,” said Alice. “When you were a boy, you met Friedrich Engels. I’ve often heard you say so.”
How long ago it seemed! When you were a boy! When Shawcross was working in Tom Hannaway’s greengrocery shop, sprinkling the dew on the lettuces, and the pair of them used to go down to Suddaby’s cellar, looking for book bargains. He remembers well enough the day he had met Engels there. Old Suddaby had told him it was a day he must never forget. Now, when he thought of Alice, when he pondered on some of her activities at which he only half-guessed, he knew that Suddaby was right: he would never forget that he had met Engels.
“Yes,” he said, “I remember him very clearly, sitting by the fire in the old book-shop I used to go to in Manchester. He was a bearded man, very melancholy, with little to say.”
Alice laughed. “He had plenty to say. And what it all boiled down to was simply this: that political action was no good. He believed that the fight between the rich and the poor would have to shift to another ground. And that is the ground I stand on.”
Arnold sighed. “That is a matter for you to settle, my dear,” he said. “I know you took high honours in history, and no doubt you have satisfied yourself that revolutions have proved themselves in the past to be successful in filling the bellies of the poor. I have reached no such fortunate conclusion from my limited reading.”
When Arnold’s usually blunt speech took this rather rotund turn Pen recognized it for a danger signal. “That’ll do now, Alice,” she said. “We’ve always had politics enough in this house, and when you and Charles are home we can give ’em a miss.”
“All right,” said Alice. “I’ve brought Father a nice safe book that’ll cause no trouble to anyone: Gabrielle Minto’s latest novel.”
“Well, I’m damned!” said Charles. “What you see in that woman! You buy every book she writes.”
“You’re just a high-brow,” Alice chaffed him. “You with your four years’ work on one little book. You shouldn’t despise poor Gabrielle. She does a useful job in the world.”
“I’d like to know what it is,” said Charles.
“Well, she gives the dear old dons of Oxford and Cambridge, and all the stuffy old canons lurking round the cathedrals of Britain, a chance to read what they really want to read. Most of them stopped thinking thirty – forty – years ago. Since then their minds have just gone round and round in circles. They’re sick to death of the antiquated stuff they once learned and now teach. They like to get down cosily at night to a shocker or a thriller, with the latest publication of some learned society ready at hand to take up as they stuff the thriller under a cushion when an undergraduate comes in. But now, with Gabrielle, they needn’t do that. They’ve conspired to make her an intellectual fashion. She actually had a passage from Sophocles, in the original Greek, opposite the title of one of her books, and occasionally she slips in a Latin tag. She knows her stuff. She’s got all the old boys on toast. She’s saved their hoary souls from deceitfulness and pretence. She’s the toast of the senior common-rooms, and her seven-and-sixpenny editions can count on a sale of thirty thousand copies. D’you call this nothing?”
“Fit for Heroes sold thirty-five thousand,” said Charles haughtily. “So it did,” said Alice. “You do it every year, my lad, and then you can start to run down Gabrielle.”
She and Charles washed up, and Pen said: “Let’s go and sit in the front room.”
“No, no,” said Alice. “This is the most comfortable room in the house. I like an evening by the kitchen fire.”
They humoured her, and Arnold carried in the old wicker chairs from the front room. He and Charles put on their pipes and Alice produced Gabrielle Minto’s new novel, “This one interested me very much,” she said, “because it’s set in a mining valley. The cage starts for the pit-head with its load of tubs, and there are four witnesses to prove that it contained nothing but tubs. Propped among them when it comes up is the body of the under-manager. As usual, Gabrielle’s detail is absolutely right. I can’t find a flaw in it.”
She read a few chapters aloud, and when she had done even Charles admitted: “Well, she can write. I never said she couldn’t write...”
It snowed, off and on, during the three days of their visit to the Rhondda. It was awkward weather for the crippled Charles to get about in. For the most part, he remained in the kitchen, helping Arnold with the cooking, doing the washing up, and, between times, writing at Pen’s old desk in the front room. “I can write anywhere,” he would boast; and so he could, but, wherever he wrote, the work was snail-paced.
As the snow continued to fall, the wind dropped; and a great deal of Charles’s time was spent standing at the front window, which gave an upper-circle view of the white stage set in the valley, For hours he would stand there ruminating on the few trains that filled the cold wet atmosphere with their low-hanging steam; on the relentless snow that fell dumbly upon the smoking roofs; on the grey silence, the suspended animation, through which the winding machines rose up like gaunt unanswered prayers. This once green valley; this valley which, after it had ceased to be green, had been pulsing, vibrating with the labour that scourged and scarified it; now neither green nor vibrant, but lying in the silence and rigidity of death under the falling snow. Then he would go back to his chair, and stretch his awkward leg straight out under the desk, and write a little more, with all this for the grey background of his mood.
When Pen’s white stick hammered on the door, he would hasten to open it, to greet her and Alice, letting life into the deathly chill of his meditations. Alice, with her dark pugnacious face whipped by the cold, with her sloe eyes shining and her black bobbed hair looking electric with energy: he longed to take her there and then to the cold little back bedroom with its window giving upon the white acclivity of the mountain, and amid all this winter death to lie on her warm breasts and feel the flood of her abundant life flowing into him, renewing him. The wounded side of his face would twitch with the urgency of his need, and over Pen’s blind head he would jerk his own head demandingly towards the stairs. Sometimes Alice’s love responded to his mood, and she would nod and run up the stairs. Charles climbed slowly on his wooden leg, and almost before he was there she would be waiting for him, and he would forget the snow, and death, and the manifold miseries that nested in his heart like black crows in a ragged tree.
*
What Alice did with her time Arnold did not fully know. He knew that she was renewing innumerable acquaintances, calling on all sorts and conditions of people, making for her journalistic purposes an inquiry as thorough as only she could make it into the slow death of the Rhondda. But there was much else: she was spending time with people whom he distrusted, and what schemes they were hatching he could only guess. There was a barrier here, cutting short the confidence between them. He had been at one time inclined to think her Communism a girl’s generous impulse, a fancy of youth that facts would dissipate. But her standing as a candidate against an immensity of odium had made him change his mind. No; Alice was running true to character. He had never known her to take up a thing lightly. He remembered the day when she won her first trifling scholarship, and he stroked her black hair and said: “There’s a fine little scholar now! Wherever will you end!” And Alice said firmly: “In Oxford University.” He and Pen had laughed, and Alice did not even bother to reply to their laughter. She went on with her work. So it had always been with her; and whatever she might now conceive to be her work, she would go on with it.
It was on the last evening of their stay that Arnold said: “Well, there’s one thing: we have got a Labour government now. Once they get into their stride things should begin to improve.”
“Why should they?” Alice demanded. “The most your friends will do is patch up the old tyre. What we want is a new car, a new road, and a new driver. For myself, I doubt whether they’ll even do the patching up. I’ll take a bet with any of you that unemployment won’t fall under this Government.”
Pen surprisingly said: “I’d like to see your father, Charles. I’d like to ask him point-blank what the Government’s going to do for us, and I’d like to tell him how much there is to do in this part of the world. We’re forgotten. We’re off the map. They’ve allowed a curtain to come down, shutting us out, because they’re ashamed for the world to see us.”
“Why don’t you make the world see you?” Alice asked. “London won’t come to the Rhondda. You can bet your boots on that. Let the Rhondda go to London. Walk there. Show yourselves in Whitehall and Downing Street and Piccadilly. Go to the House of Commons. There you are. There’s a programme. There’s something to do. It’s better than sitting here till the snow covers you.”
“Well,” said Pen, “it may come to that. And if it does, I shall march with the rest. But in the meantime, I want to see Hamer Shawcross. I’ve got every sort of right. I worked alongside him when he was nobody—”
“He was never that,” Arnold put in in his grave, just way.
“Well,” said Pen, “when nobody thought he was anybody, and I worked alongside Ann, and one of these days he and I may have the same grandchildren.”
“No!”
The word burst from Charles with an explosive force that startled Pen and Arnold. Pen could not see that Charles’s face had gone white and that his lips were trembling. Charles dreaded the thought that a child might absorb from himself some of Alice’s ministering love.
“No,” said Alice. “No grandchildren, my dear. Charles and I are the only children you two and Hamer Shawcross and Ann produced, so the decision is absolutely with us. And we’ll bring no children into the world because the world is not worthy.”
“It’s a coward’s decision,” said Pen stoutly. “Why, God love us, Alice, the world has been pretty tough on me. And if anyone said to me: ‘D’you want it all over again, Pen Muff, just in the way you’ve had it, blindness and all?’ why, I’d say: ‘Aye, and again after that, as often as you like.’ It’s not a perfect world for children that matters, or that you’ll ever get: it’s children to work for a perfect world. No, no, Alice, believe me, there’s going to be no harps and wings here below. By heck there’s not. But when we stop working for ’em, God help us.”
“That’s your view, Mother,” said Alice, as Charles sat looking at her, white and tense, “but it’s not mine.”
No more was said. Arnold had got up. He stood at the window with all the weight of his years on his sagging shoulders. He looked down at the valley where his life’s work lay dead, and at the snow falling quietly upon its grave.
*
“Is that you, Father?”
Charles! It was the first time Charles had rung him up since he had lived in Half Moon Street. He had felt hurt about it. Let Charles go his own political way. No one could complain about that. But the boy, on the few occasions when they met, went beyond this. He left a feeling of personal resentment. This was easier to understand in the first bitterness of his return, so badly hurt, from the war. Hamer had never forgotten – felt he never could forget – that day at the hospital when Charles broke out against him, almost openly charged him with breach of faith. But though he could not forget it, it did not weigh with him. And it was more than five years ago. Now Charles was happily married. He was, in his own circle, looked up to as a successful man. The world had not been so hard on him as his little essays and stories in the precious weeklies would make one suppose. He could have gone back to finish his course at Oxford, but he wouldn’t have that. He said he would feel a fool among all the green youngsters. It seemed to Hamer that he lost no opportunity to nurture his quarrel with humanity.
“Well, my dear boy,” said Hamer, “how are you? What are you doing? Are we to have another book?”
He was proud of Charles’s book. He had no illusions about it. It was a hit of the moment, and only of its moment. It lacked a fundamental understanding of the perpetual pathos of life, and so it was a grumble rather than a tragedy. But all the same, Hamer was proud of it. Charles was an author, and he had great respect for authors, for artists of any kind. Despite all the books to his name, he never thought of himself as a man of letters, though, in that line alone, Charles would never catch him up.
“Oh, I’m working – slowly,” Charles said. “But I’ve been busy.”
That was typical of Charles’s attitude. He liked to pretend that his writing was something he turned to casually now and then in the intervals of being “busy” with large and undefined affairs. “I’ve been down to the Rhondda with Alice,” he said. “We’ve been making a survey of conditions down here. We brought Pen back with us, and Arnold sends his love. I wondered if you’d care to see Pen.”
“By all means, my dear boy. I shall be out this afternoon, but I’ll be back here at tea-time. Could you come at half-past four and bring Pen and Alice with you? – and Lizzie, too, if you like. It’s a long time since we all met. I’d like that.”
“Very well, Father. At half-past four. Good-bye.”
It was a lovely afternoon, clear and frosty, and Pen said she’d like to walk. So they set off at half-past three, Pen wearing her red cloak and hood and carrying her white stick. But now she had to give up her independence. This wasn’t Cwmdulais that she knew inch by inch. She took Lizzie’s arm. Alice and Charles walked behind the other two. Lizzie chose the route, along the Bird Cage Walk, past the front of Buckingham Palace, and down the Mall. At St. James’s Palace a little crowd was gathered, and Lizzie, who had been acting as eyes for Pen, telling her of all they passed, explained: “There’s a levee on, Pen. The people are just coming away. D’you mind if we stand and gape for a moment? I’ll tell you the names of all the bigwigs who come out.”
Charles and Alice would not have been attracted to a levee. They would have gone straight on, Alice with a fierce conviction, Charles following her with his nose obediently in the air. But they stayed for Lizzie’s sake. “There’s nothing much left for me now but standing and staring,” Lizzie used to say, “and to be frank, I like it. If you two don’t, run along.”
So now they stood and stared, and Lizzie, who had an encyclopædic knowledge of personalities, named the admirals and generals and prelates who came hurrying out in their fine feathers, leapt into cars, and were borne away.
Now she whispered excitedly: “Here’s Ramsay Mac, and” – hardly able to control her emotion – “Hamer’s with him.”
Pen, Charles and Alice all stiffened. Lizzie alone allowed herself to be uplifted by sheer delight. “Where are they? Where are they?” poor Pen demanded; but Alice and Charles said nothing. They stood as if frozen to stone, looking at the two men.
They were two men worth looking at: the two handsomest public figures in Great Britain at that time. Each carried the cocked-hat of his ceremonial dress under his arm. Hamer was a little taller than his chief. The intelligence of both the faces, each topped with grizzled hair, was remarkable. They stood for a moment talking with animation, the crowd looking on from a little distance. Then two cars pulled up. MacDonald got into one which drove off towards Downing Street; Shawcross, bending double, his hand on the hilt of his sword, into the other which turned into Piccadilly.
The silence lasted for a little while; then Alice said bitterly: “And that is Labour in office!”
Lizzie turned on her, with a face still radiant. “That is a bloody miracle!” she declared, carried away by her emotion. “That is Hamer Shawcross, of Broadbent Street. And if that means nothing to you, it does to me. I’ve seen it all happen, and I tell you it’s a miracle – a bloody miracle.”
The old lady’s indecorous enthusiasm broke Alice’s grim humour down into laughter. “Come on,” she said, “or you’ll be getting run in. Your hat’s askew. You look like yourself in your Suffragette days when you didn’t love him so much.”
“Love him or hate him,” Lizzie declared, “I admire him. You’ve been looking at something that doesn’t happen once or twice in a generation.”
“Thank God for that,” said Alice. “And that goes for the pair of ’em. Come on. I hope his tea’s as gorgeous as his trousers.”
*
It couldn’t be done. Hamer had hoped to be back from St. James’s in time to change before tea, but the clock in the taxi said 4.20 as he got out and ran up to his front door. He didn’t mind wearing these clothes. They had caused a scandal in the party. They seemed, to many, a betrayal. Labour was in office, but what of that? Keir Hardie had driven up to the House in a wagonette, wearing a cloth cap, acclaimed on a plebeian cornet. Why shouldn’t Labour members continue to be humble? Why shouldn’t Mr. MacDonald smoke a clay pipe and why shouldn’t Mr. Shawcross wear a cloth cap? Even a dinner jacket was suspect; full-fig evening dress was impious; ceremonial uniform, with swords and cocked hats, was almost blasphemy. These matters had been seriously and hotly debated. To many simple souls, these ceremonial swords were traitorously plunged into the breast of Labour.
To Hamer, it was all very amusing. He frankly liked the look of himself in these clothes which he carried as if born to them. He intended to have his portrait painted wearing them. But they were a matter indifferent; and because fundamentally, as he told himself, they meant nothing to him, it delighted him to scare and alarm the austere sackcloth-and-ashes members of the party. He would tell them with gravity of silken underclothing which he was obliged to wear beneath the uniform, and how the Gentleman of the King’s Bedchamber had to inspect it personally each Monday morning when it came back from the wash. Ramsay MacDonald’s, he said without a smile, had a Greek key pattern of gold lace round the legs of the pants.
But he didn’t want Charles and Alice to find him in gorgeous raiment that day. It seemed inappropriate for a family tea-party. But there wasn’t time to change, so he went into his study and waited for them.
It was the room he liked best in the house, a room of rich deep colours punctuated startlingly by Axel Horst’s portrait of Ann over the fireplace. Axel had put in the rug behind Ann’s head in vivid Van Gogh slashes of green and white and yellow, and the whole composition had a freshness and gaiety that sparkled amid the dark furniture and the sombre books. Tea was set on a couple of low round tables between two couches of old red leather running out at right angles on either side of the fire.
In physical appearance, Hamer Shawcross did not change much from the man you see there, now in the last moments of his fifties. He stood between the couches with his back to the fire, the tight gold-braided trousers on his long slim legs, the toy sword at his side. He was as straight and clean-built as the sword, broad in the shoulders, carrying with an air of authority the noble head whose grey hair, almost white, hung in a picturesque wing across his brow. The face was full without being fleshy, hale and ruddy in colour, with deep lines running from the straight nose down to the mouth. It was that rare thing: a face which is both intellectual and handsome. The intellect seemed almost literally to flash in the dark eyes whose brows remained black when the hair of his head was white. Here no longer was the battling agitator, the man who was prepared, if it would advance his cause, to play the mountebank in clothes and actions. Here was the statesman, equipped for the part, enjoying the part, as ready to savour its trivial amusements and worldly pomposities as to endure its responsibilities and ardours.
He unbuckled the sword and laid it on one of the couches as he heard the bell ring. Old Pendleton, eager to do everything as it should be done, was at the door, half-way through his formal rigmarole: “Mrs. Lightowler, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Shawcross—” when Hamer was across the floor gathering them all into the room and as it were into the welcoming warmth of his smile.
“Well, Charles, my dear boy, there’s so much I want to show you here. Come in, Alice. Ah, Pen, my dear. Let me take your arm. Your hat’s crooked, Lizzie. Take it off, for goodness’ sake.”
“Charming, charming,” Alice thought. “The Great Irresistible. I wonder what he’ll have to say about the Rhondda.” She picked up the sword which he had laid on the couch. “Don’t let this come between us,” she said. She looked round for somewhere to lay it down, and saw the case containing the sabre of Peterloo. She bent to read the inscription on the little gold plate. “Ha!” she cried. “Your old swashbuckling weapon is a curio now, I see. We’ll lay this on top as an appropriate epilogue to its story.”
Hamer was used to Alice’s ways. She loved to bait him, but he would never fall to her assaults. “You wait, young woman,” he said. “One of these days I’ll present you with a miniature bomber to place as an appropriate epilogue over your sickle and hammer.”
He passed her over with a laugh, and carefully led Pen to a place alongside himself on the couch. “Well, Pen,” he said, “that’s a striking costume. Who are you supposed to represent – Ceridwen?”
“Who’s Ceridwen?” Pen asked.
“Oh, dear! Have you lived all this time in Wales and not heard of Ceridwen? She was a rather distinguished Welsh witch.”
“Oh! I’m afraid I’m nothing so romantic as that,” said Pen. “I’m just an old blind woman. We don’t learn much about fables in the Rhondda nowadays. The facts are too much with us, and they’re too bitter. Do you remember a long time ago when Arnie and I spent a night with you at Baildon?”
Hamer remembered it very well: it was the only night they had ever spent there. He motioned to Lizzie to pour out the tea. “Why, yes, Pen,” he said. “It was when you had come up to bury your mother, and Arnold invited me to go down and talk to the men in the Rhondda.”
“You invited yourself, and I backed you up. Arnie didn’t want you. But let that pass. I remember you produced a great book stuffed with all the facts about the coal trade. I was wondering whether you’d kept it up-to-date.”
“Pen, there’s nothing you can tell me about the Rhondda. No doubt you could fill in a bit of human detail here and there. When I tell you how many people are out of work, you can tell me that the people are Griffith Hughes and John Jones and so forth. You know them and their wives and children, and that makes the problem the more poignant to you. But I know as well as you do what the problem is, how appalling its dimensions are.”
“Well, answer me one plain question,” said Pen. “I told Arnie I’d put it to you, and I’d like to give him your answer. What’s this government going to do about it? He’s got a right to know. He’s given his life to those men and he hasn’t got fat on it. And the men have got a right to know. They voted for your party, most of ’em, and they voted in hope. They’ve heard your candidate say again and again that the Labour Party had a cure for unemployment. Where is it? And what is it? I came to London to ask you.”
Hamer was aware of Alice watching him with malicious amusement and of Lizzie Lightowler covering her embarrassment with hearty eating. “The unemployment you speak of, Pen,” he said, “is a consequence of conditions going back through decade upon decade of history, aggravated by the greatest war the world has known. Think of that on the one side. On the other, think of this. The Labour government has been in office for only two months. It’s a minority government at that. We have 191 members. The Tories and Liberals can muster 424. At any moment they can combine to throw us out.”
Pen interrupted sharply: “If you can’t do anything, what does it matter to us whether you’re in or out? If our bellies are to stay empty, we don’t sing Hallelujah because they’re empty under a Labour government.”
“There are some things we can do,” said Hamer, “and I believe MacDonald will do them in foreign politics. On the strength of what we do, we may hope for more seats next time. We may hope at last for an absolute majority. Only then can we turn to more of the things we would like to do. That, as I see it, is the situation.”
“A lovely situation for the Rhondda,” said Pen bitterly. “It’s practically a life sentence. By heck! What a game politics is!”
“I admit,” said Hamer, “that it’s a matter of getting the most out of the second best. If all things were working for the best – why, there’d be no need of politics at all, Pen. I suppose the very word means not what we want but what is expedient.”
“My God, Father!” Charles broke in. “We began with starving miners and we’ve got on to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary!”
Pen repeated: “‘Getting the most out of the second best!’ Well, well. I can remember the earliest days in St. Swithin’s. This isn’t how you talked then.”
“One lives and learns,” said Hamer sadly and frankly.
“Aye, one does an’ all,” Pen said, falling into her broad accent.
“An’ one thing Ah’ve learned, lad, is not to trouble thee again wi’ our sorrows. We’ll grin an’ bear ’em, an’ when we can’t even grin any more, why, we’ll just bear ’em.”
She groped for her stick and stood up. Alice took her arm. There was nothing more to be said.
When they were gone, and Pendleton had cleared away the trays, Hamer went upstairs and changed. The visit hadn’t gone as he had hoped. He would have liked to show them over the house, talk to them about the things he had gathered there, feel like a man with his relations around him. But they gave him no chance. They seemed to regard him all the time as a target, almost an outlaw. He came back to the study, meditating unhappily, and called Pendleton. “Don’t bother me with dinner. I’ve got too much to do. Bring me in some sandwiches and coffee at eight. And I can’t see anyone or talk to anyone on the telephone unless it’s government business.”
He set out the papers neatly on his desk, filled half-a-dozen pipes, and put them in a bowl ready to hand.
They didn’t understand. They thought a government, even a minority government, was an almighty juggernaut that could plough down the tremendous façades that had been built up through the centuries. Blow the trumpets and down comes Jericho! Ah! if it were as easy as that! The Rhondda! Yes, whatever Pen might say, he knew all about the Rhondda. He had seen the scarecrow poor reaching up their arms to the soup wagon under the bitter stars in Stevenson Square, Manchester, and having seen that, he had seen poverty and hunger wherever they might be. He took up Ann’s copy of Marcus Aurelius, which he kept now always on his desk, and turned to a passage she had marked: “Men and manners are generally much alike. All ages and histories, towns and families, are of the same complexion and full of the same stories. There’s nothing new to be met with, but all things are common, and quickly over.”
Quickly over, Pen, the good things as well as the vile, the lovely as well as the loathsome. Meantime, one did what one could, and acknowledged – yes, it was true – that it could be only a second best.
It was not till midnight that he got up from the desk, yawned, and sat down on one of the red couches by the fire to write in his diary. He smiled to himself tiredly as it struck him for the first time that the couches had the same colour as the seats in the House of Lords. They were very comfortable.