Charles and Alice went to Russia. They went as some simple soul of the Middle Ages, knowing nothing of the politics behind the crusades, might have gone to fight in the Holy Land, thinking it was all for Christ and the Cross. Certainly there were politics enough connected with this Russian visit, but they were not politics as Liberals and Tories, or even Labour men, understood them. They were Truth revealed. They were the Word, wherein was salvation.
So at least it seemed to Alice, looking with generous enthusiasm at the experiments of a backward people, exclaiming with delight at infant efforts to achieve the buds of civilization which she had long enjoyed in its flower.
“Worthy and commendable perhaps these efforts are,” Hamer wrote in his diary on the night when Alice and Charles had dined with him in Half Moon Street and poured out the spate of their enthusiasm. “But they are clearly the efforts of a nation which should be led and educated. These young people talk as though all the schools should be put under the direction of the class for backward and defective, if hopefully striving, children. And for myself, I am still full of doubts as to what these children have in mind against the time when they are grown up. Oh, why do not these young Marxists read Marx and Lenin and Engels? I am not convinced that it is necessary to knock down Notre Dame before beginning to build a tin tabernacle.”
He liked the phrase. He had used it to Alice. He couldn’t help admiring the girl for all her antagonism. He knew what was the matter with Alice. Her heart was too sensitive to the sorrows of the world. She saw the ulcer and was convinced that the patient was at the point of death. She was too impatient to work for a cure. Off with the leg, the arm, even the head! He liked as well as admired her. She looked well, sitting there on his right hand, with the parchment-shaded electric table-lamps between them! Her firm energetic body was well set off by a dress of dark red lustreless silk – as darkly red as the carnation at the buttonhole of his dinner-jacket. Charles was wearing flannel bags and an old blue tweed jacket he had had since his Oxford days.
They went into the study to drink their coffee. Charles declined a cigar as though he were making a religious renunciation, and lit an evil briar, chipped round the edges, with an air of applying the sacred fire to an altar. Standing up before the hearth, piercing his own Havana, Hamer noticed that the boy’s finger-nails were dirty and his clothes unbrushed. He wished that Alice, who seemed to influence Charles in everything else, would take his toilet in hand, make him as groomed and shining as she herself always was. He wondered if they were hard up, and whether Alice would jump down his throat if he offered to help them. Charles couldn’t be making much money. Fit for Heroes had perhaps netted him a few lucky thousands, but he had done nothing since and was not likely to do much in the future. As for Alice, she was a prolific journalist, but for the most part her writing was not published in papers that paid well.
He poured out the coffee, then stood up again, looking down on the oddly varied but so well-matched young people, sitting opposite one another on the red couches. He drew appreciatively on his cigar for a moment, then said: “How is it, Alice, that you always manage in these days to look as if you had come into a fortune? Is the Red Pleb paying twenty guineas a thousand words?”
For the first time since he had known her, he saw Alice lose her self-possession. Her ruddy cheeks went a deeper red, then paled a little. “My God!” he thought. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’ve stepped on something there,” and watched her narrowly.
“The Red Pleb isn’t the only paper I write for,” she said, recovering. “There are intelligent weeklies and monthlies, and one or two dailies as well, that are ready to give space to views that are not precisely their own.”
Hamer nodded, glad to let her out. “And Charles must have made a pretty packet out of his book,” he said.
“Yes,” Alice assented eagerly. “And the poor lamb doesn’t waste much on himself. And don’t forget that Aunt Lizzie doesn’t take a penny of rent from us. We pay for nothing but our food.”
All the same, thought Hamer, all the same, I’d like to know what you paid for that dress, my pretty proletarian.
“Forgive my question,” he said. “It was due entirely to my admiring your – er – ceremonial uniform.”
He sat down alongside Alice and looked across at Charles. “What about the new book?” he asked.
Charles was not often willing to talk about his writing, but now he confessed that he had abandoned, or put aside for the moment, the novel he had been working on for two years. He had begun a novel about Russia while his impressions were still fresh.
“Might one ask what the title is to be?”
“The Good Red Earth,” said Charles proudly.
Hamer considered this, looking at the glowing end of his cigar. “People might think that was something about Devonshire, in the Phillpotts vein,” he objected.
Charles did not like criticism. He shuffled uneasily on the couch, and said: “Of course, if you can suggest a better title?”
“Why not just Phoenix?” Hamer suggested. “You know, something winged rising from ashes and desolation. It’s simple, and somehow – er – proud. Don’t you think?”
Charles seemed surprised to find his father taking even an academic interest in his work. He made a few quibbling sounds, but Alice broke in eagerly: “Yes, Phoenix is a much better title. You must use that, Charles, unless you think of something better still.”
“Perhaps Red Phoenix,” Charles slowly conceded.
“Have the brute red if you must,” Hamer laughed. “I was thinking of spirit, not pigment.”
He poured out more coffee, and turned to Alice. “Well, we’ve been in office now for seven months. What do you think of us? Have we done anything at all to earn your favour? How much longer do you think we can hold out against the combined hosts of the Liberals and Tories?”
“Go and sit over there by Charles,” Alice said, “where I can look at you, and you can look at me.”
He got up good-naturedly and crossed to the other couch.
“I want to talk to you straight, Hamer Shawcross. The more I see of you the more I like you.”
Hamer waved his cigar airily. “The way of all flesh, my dear,” he said.
“You’re a great man,” Alice went on. “You’ve achieved great things. I give you that. I know how great they are because I’ve seen plenty of people start from nothing and stop short because they haven’t got that little extra flip that men call genius. Old Lizzie Lightowler the other day was carried off her feet when she saw you in fancy dress for the first time. She said it was a ‘bloody miracle.’ So it was, in a way.”
“That was the day Pen came here to tea,” Charles unnecessarily amplified.
“Yes,” said Alice. “She had you in a corner, Father.”
Hamer’s heart gave a little jump. Father! She had never called him that before. He wondered what this attractive vivacious creature was getting at.
“You couldn’t get out of it,” Alice went on. “You knew you couldn’t, and I admired your honesty in admitting that you could do nothing for those poor men my father works among.”
“I admitted,” said Hamer, “that we couldn’t do everything at once.”
“You admitted that you were in a dead-end: the same dead-end as the Liberals and Tories. And that’s what makes you and your party so damned dangerous. We know where we are with the Liberals and Tories. But there are thousands of misguided working men who think you’re different. But you’re not. You’re for tinkering and patching. You’re the chief danger. So now, when you ask me how much longer do I think you can hold out, I say: Not a moment longer than I can help. I want to see the Tories back, so that we can have a visible enemy.”
Thank you, Alice,” said Hamer gravely. “Like you, I prefer to know my enemies – politically speaking at the moment. But when you say not a moment longer than you can help, are you speaking personally? Have you fabricated some weapon to blow us sky-high?”
Alice did not answer the question directly. “I give you another three months at the outside,” she said.
*
The Government was out within the three months that Alice predicted.
“The Red Letter settled us,” says the Shawcross diary. “We had gone to the country on another matter. Almost on the eve of the poll this mine exploded under our feet and blew us sky-high. Much has been written, and much will be written, about this celebrated epistle, but the facts are simple. We were forced to go to the country at the moment when the Russian Treaties were on our hands. MacDonald had no more love for Communism than I had; but when has it been a rule of politics that statesmen must love the nations with whom they negotiate? ‘Agree with thine adversary quickly whiles thou art in the way with him.’ That was what MacDonald and I felt, and certainly the Russian Treaties did not bind this poor nation like sickles on a war chariot, as Edward Grey’s continental understanding had done.
“Well, there it was. We should have had a hard fight in any case against the hysteria and loathing that the name of Russia called up in millions of minds. An unclouded atmosphere was necessary for the explanation of our intentions. Then came the letter, filling the air with darkness. The letter was published in the newspapers on the Saturday before the poll. It was signed by Zinoviev, the President of the Third (Communist) International, and it was addressed to the Communists of Britain. It suggested that MacDonald had been pushed into the Treaties by Communist pressure, and that much more push must be applied. It advocated revolutionary instead of political action, with insurrection in the Army and Navy.
“There was much else that I need not go into. This was enough. We were beaten, though our votes increased by over a million. The Tory votes soared far beyond our figures. I managed to hold on in St. Swithin’s.
“Now the country is full of questions. Was the letter a fake, the dirtiest political dodge ever engineered? I have respect for historical method, and dislike conclusions founded on guesswork. Therefore I shall merely suggest an explanation of this affair without insisting that it is the correct one.
“The letter, of course, would have done us no harm if it had not found its way to the Foreign Office, and to the newspapers. How did it do that? It was ‘in the air,’ floating about for some time before it was published. I myself saw a copy of it. I called at once at North Street. Mrs. Lightowler and my daughter-in-law were out. Only my son Charles was at home. I asked him where Alice was, and he said that she had gone to Fleet Street. She might be away the whole afternoon. She had left a telephone number in case she was urgently wanted. He gave me this number, and when later I discovered from it what newspaper Alice was visiting, a suspicion that had already entered my mind began to sharpen. I remembered what she had said to me at dinner a few months earlier: ‘You will not be in a moment longer than I can help. I want a visible enemy.”
“I took tea with Charles and led the conversation to his visit to Russia. Had he called on any of the political chiefs? No; he had spent his time looking round factories and crèches and culture parks. Alice had seen a lot of people, though. She did more conferring than sightseeing. Had she seen anything of a chap called Zinoviev? Charles scratched his head. For all his Communism, he was not well up in Communists. Then he got it. Yes! that was the fellow! Zinoviev! Alice had a long pow-wow with him one day while Charles was examining a super concrete-mixer.
“I have no more facts than these. Alice is a convinced and resolute Communist, not a follower of fashion in Charles’s shilly-shally way. She is a woman of original and inventive mind, intellectually capable of devising this plot for giving her party a ‘visible enemy.’ She had predicted to me the date of our downfall. She had been in close consultation with the alleged author of the letter. At the critical moment of the whole matter she was engaged in some secret negotiations in Fleet Street.
“I leave it at that. Whether hers or another’s was the hand that struck us down, down we are, and we pass on to Mr. Baldwin the sorrows and distractions of this England.”
*
Sir Thomas Hannaway came back on the Tory wave as Coalition-Conservative member for one of the seats in his native Manchester. For the first time he and Hamer Shawcross were simultaneously members of the House of Commons. Jimmy Newboult lost his seat, which was a serious matter for him, for he lost with it £400 a year. It was at this time that he became a member of Hamer’s household. There was room and to spare in the Half Moon Street house, and Jimmy was given a bed-sitting-room in which he did secretarial work for his Chief. Chief was the name Jimmy had himself invented, and if it hadn’t been for the Chief he would now have been in Queer Street. As it was, he had food to eat, a roof over his head, three pounds a week to spend, and plenty of work to do. It tided him over the next five years, till 1929, when his party’s triumph took him back into the House, and the beloved Chief entered the second Labour Cabinet, this time in the immensely more important office of Minister for the Co-ordination of Internal Affairs.
During those years when he lived so near to him, Jimmy Newboult was often surprised, sometimes staggered, and once or twice a little hurt by the frankness with which Hamer expressed himself. There was a day when he asked in his naïvely eager way: “What do you think the main qualification for success in a politician, Chief?” and without seeming even to consider his words Hamer answered: “Why, just this, Jimmy. While appearing to have nothing but his country’s interest at heart, he must be an expert at appealing to panic, passion and prejudice. When these do not exist, he must know how to create them at the right moment.”
“I should resent it if anyone suggested that you had conducted your life on those lines, Chief,” said Jimmy, taken aback.
“Then you would be wrong,” Hamer answered. “What threw us out last time? The Red Letter panic. What will take us in next time? The panic, which we shall carefully foster, in the public mind at the state of things at home and abroad. The international situation going from bad to worse. At home, appalling unemployment, the general strike last year, these marching miners now in London. All these things are symptoms of a terrible disease, and it will be our business to throw the patient into a panic, to persuade him that he’s going to die unless he takes our medicine.”
“And so he will,” said Jimmy stoutly. “Don’t you think we’ve got the cure?”
“I think,” said Hamer, “we know the right road, and if we could persuade people to walk along it far enough and for long enough we might get somewhere. But frankly, Jimmy, I don’t believe we can.”
“Chief!”
“Do you know what I’m coming to believe, Jimmy?”
Jimmy shook his red head.
“That the world’s going to the devil, literally and with increasing momentum, and that you and I can do precious little about it.”
Jimmy looked up, amazed, and was comforted to see that the Chief’s face was serene and smiling. “You always were a one for your joke,” he said. “You gave me quite a start.”
*
These marching miners now in London.
The words that Alice had spoken in Cwmdulais long ago had borne fruit. London would not go to the Rhondda; London would not look at the Rhondda; and so the Rhondda came to London. The little dark men, the men from the beginning of things, civilization’s troglodytes who had hewn and sweated in the darkness to spread light and warmth and power in the land above: they flowed down now out of their valleys, on to the English plain, and they presented themselves at the gates of civilization. They surged through London, singing their hymns and songs, talking their lilting musical speech. What will you do about us, London? Home of the Mother of Parliaments, hub of the Empire on which the sun never sets, behold thy children who ask for no more than this: work where the sun never rises; work in the dust and heat, work where the water drips, work on our naked backs and bellies, squeezing through crack and fissure, work with the risk we will gladly take of sudden death from flame and flash, falling roof, rushing water and crawling gas, work that gives us these little bending bodies, these pocks of powder, and that sends us home day after day and night after night carrying our filth to our bathless houses: work! Will you hear us put our case? We have come a long way to do it.
And Downing Street forgot the Bantams’ Battalions, made up of little men like these, shouldering their packs, singing their ironical songs, jesting in the very article of death; and Downing Street said: “No. We cannot receive your deputation. Your conduct is utterly unconstitutional. Go away, please. We are very busy considering the problem of unemployment.”
*
Charles and Alice Shawcross, Arnold and Pen Ryerson, marched with the Cwmdulais contingent. It was cold November weather when the 275 set out. Pen wore her red hood and cloak. The miners carried their safety lamps. It was good copy for the press-men: a fancy-dress parade, a carnival, with little Red Riding Hood for the star turn. Alice Ryerson, the now thrice-defeated Communist candidate, was a good mark, too. This notorious woman who seemed able to spend as much on her campaigns as any other candidate, who could forfeit her deposit with indifference, was only a journalist. Where did she get her money from? It was Red, every cent of it.
Fine fun the correspondents of the London Tory papers had, marching day by day with the singing, patient column. Here is Charles Shawcross, son of Hamer Shawcross, still the oracle of a little clique, though, since the lucky hit of Fit for Heroes, all his books have flopped. And who is this Arnold Ryerson, the husband of little Red Riding Hood, the father of the Little Red Candidate? Isn’t he the man who went to jail for inciting miners to riot?
In London Hamer read the papers and ground his teeth with rage. He thought of Pen’s blind eyes – blinded in the country’s service – and of Charles’s leg, a bit of England left overseas, and of Alice with her fierce, honest, sorrowful heart. He thought especially of Arnold. He could see Arnold, getting too old and heavy for that sort of thing, plodding with his arm through blind Pen’s doggedly along the wet November roads, under the ragged clouds in the chill showers: Arnold whose life from boyhood had been sublimely sacrificial and unmindful of self. He remembered Ann saying long ago that Arnold was the sort of man whose very defeat would have the quality of victory, and surely, he thought, it would be for men like Arnold, rather than for those who went down to death amid the splendours of obsequies, tombs and epitaphs, that all the trumpets would sound upon the other side.
*
“Chief,” said Jimmy Newboult, when the marchers were within a day or so of London, “you ought to go and meet ’em. It would be an enormous leg up for ’em. Ramsay Mac ought to do it. You both ought to do it. You both ought to march into town at the head of ’em, and lead a deputation to the Prime Minister.”
Jimmy paused, and looked for a moment wistfully at the Chief, standing tall and elegant in a favourite pose, his back to the fire, a red couch on either hand. And a red carnation at his buttonhole. It was delivered regularly every day now from a florist’s in Shepherd Market.
The Chief was sunk in thought and did not answer. “There was a time when you’d have done it. There was a time when you’d have gone to the Rhondda and marched every yard of the way. And I’d have been with you. I’d have carried the sword for you. That would have been like old times: the four of us – you and me, and Pen and Arnold.”
Hamer looked at him sadly: the faithful old hound making a last bid for puppy-tricks. Still he did not speak. He looked over Jimmy’s head at the sabre in its case, but he was not seeing it. He was seeing the marching men, and the fog that was falling upon London, and Pen tapping her way forward with her white stick, the fleece of her cloak dewed like an old reddled ewe’s in a winter field. And he was thinking of Arnold’s letter in his pocket, asking him to do just this thing that Jimmy Newboult was asking him to do.
“Chief, for God’s sake,” said Jimmy, alarmed at Hamer’s strange absent look, “you’re not going back on us? You’re not going back on all we stood for—”
“No, Jimmy,” Hamer said, “there’s no going back. We must go forwards, not backwards. We stand for the things we always stood for, Jimmy, you and I; but now we see that different times demand different methods. When the bird is nearly in the hand, go carefully. Don’t shout and bluster. And the bird is coming our way again, Jimmy. Mark my words. That’s what we’re after. Give us office, with power, and then something can be done. In the meantime, we mustn’t scare the bird.”
“So you think my idea’s a bad one?”
“I think it’s inopportune.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Jimmy; but for the first time Hamer wondered whether, in his heart, Jimmy did not think him wrong.
*
My dear Hamer: As you see, I am writing this en route. We expect to enter the outskirts of London in a day or two. It has been a long and tiring march, and I should like something to happen to cheer the men at the end of it. Nothing would do this so much as the presence of some first-rate Labour leaders to meet us. After all, Hamer, we are Labour. If we are not, the word means nothing. Then what is wrong with some leaders of the Party coming to meet us? I write against my will, because we have all felt that it should not be necessary to make this appeal. We have hoped day after day to receive a message saying that we would be met. It has not come, and the men, who felt overlooked and neglected in the Rhondda, feel even more so now that they are in strange places, meeting few friends.
I ask you, Hamer, to come and meet us. We have known one another for half a century. Have I asked you for anything before? I do not think so. I am not asking now for myself. I cannot imagine anything that would cheer up this November weather so much as the sight of your face. If you could induce Ramsay M. to come with you, so much the better. But at all events, come yourself for the sake of all that we hold in common and of memories which, I hope and believe, are not without affection.
A lot of the men have worn out their boots. Pen asks to be remembered to you. She has stood the journey well enough so far as her spirits go, but I can see that she is very tired. I shall not be sorry to get her under a roof. Ever yours, Arnold Ryerson.
*
My dear Arnold: How unnecessary your letter would have been, how I should have hastened to meet you and your men, had I thought there was the slightest hope of my presence achieving anything useful. Ah, my friend, we have been in tight corners together. We have fought side by side. You know, therefore, that I should have thought no effort too arduous, no labour too great, if it could have served your interest.
For the sake of the old times of which you remind me, and because of present affection, too, I must say frankly that I think this march on London is ill-advised. Your miners are not medieval beggars that they need to show their sores at the street corners. There are doctors about. There is the Party. And within reasonable time the Party will once more form a government. Then will be the moment when any aid I can offer will be effective, not merely spectacular.
Think of the position, my friend. You know that concerned with your march are elements which the Labour Party cannot countenance, elements frankly Communistic. If I, or any other leader of the Party, marched into London associated with those people, we should be giving to our political enemies a handle which they would use against us at the very moment when we might hope to be of help to you. Remember what Communism did for us at the last election.
You must believe, then, that I am acting in what I think your own best interest when I refrain from meeting you. I am acting, in short, as a friend – I hope you will come to see, a wise and experienced one.
My thoughts have been much with you during this trying time. In spirit, I have marched by your side every step of the weary way. I am distressed to learn that Pen has found the journey tiring, and though you are too self-sacrificing to speak of yourself, I can well imagine that it has been no easy time for you. Will you, then, while you remain in town, make my house your home? – you and Pen. I should be more than delighted. You will be comfortable here, well looked after, and able to rest at the end of an enterprise which I can deeply admire though I cannot share. Ring me up and let me know that you are going to give me this pleasure. If I am not in, Jimmy Newboult will take a message and make all arrangements. Ever your friend, Hamer.
*
My dear Hamer: I write this on the eve of entering town. I am naturally sorry that you cannot see your way to help us, and of course, if you think the way you say, you must act accordingly.
Pen and I thank you for the offer of hospitality. We had already been asked by Charles and Alice to use their rooms at Mrs. Lightowler’s, but we think we ought to stay with the men. We have led them all this way, and they might misunderstand if we now went into comfortable quarters. They are all staying out at Bethnal Green. I am not sure where that is, but at any rate I shall go with them. Pen too. Yours sincerely, Arnold Ryerson.
P.S. If you have any old boots that you have grown out of, perhaps Jimmy Newboult could make arrangements to send them to Bethnal Green. No doubt he could discover where we are staying.
Hamer read the postscript several times, with knitted brows. He had never known Arnold Ryerson guilty, or even capable, of irony. He decided that he had read more into it than was warranted.
*
It was a week of rain and fog and misery. From their quarters in Bethnal Green the miners marched into the city. They sang their hymns and songs, they held open-air meetings, they passed through Downing Street and Whitehall. They showed their sores at the street corners. In Trafalgar Square they drew a crowd six thousand strong. A pipers’ band marched them in. They were a good turn, and they won a rain of pennies. They sang their everlasting hymn-tunes to the crowd surging round the stony-faced lions; and as the dusk of the November night deepened, they lit their miners’ lamps that glowed through the murk at the foot of the column whereon, hidden in darkness, Nelson went on expecting every man to do his duty.
For the first few days, wherever they went Pen went with them. They liked her to go with them. She was valiant, and had won their affection. She was picturesque, and helped their show. Her hood and cloak, her white stick and her bicycle-bell, all built up into something that had character and idiosyncrasy, the power to attract attention and sympathy. But bit by bit she wilted; her spirit fell away; and Arnold was aware that though she still marched with the processions, hummed the Welsh hymns whose words she had never mastered, her faith in the enterprise was gone.
She was a tireless walker. Blind though she was, she would not use the buses, or the taxis that the miners now and then offered out of the meagre sums they collected. Lizzie Lightowler wanted to place her car entirely at Pen’s service, but she wouldn’t have that, either. “Nay, lass,” she said, “Ah’ve walked all my days, an’ Ah guess Ah’ll go on walking till Ah’m carried.”
She herself knew that her mind had lost its grip on this business. So many things suggested not the matter in hand but some happening of the past. This offer of Lizzie’s for example. As they walked away from her house, Pen’s arm tucked within Arnold’s, she squeezed his arm to her side and said: “D’you remember, lad, when tha wanted me to ride in state, coachman art’ all?”
He remembered well enough. There in the November chill of London, with yellow fog billowing by in visible waves, with the street-lamps wearing wan haloes and the buses crawling by, blind, bewildered, half-seen monsters in this forest of a city that he hated, he remembered the summer night at Bingley when Ann Artingstall appeared at his meeting, and, with the air of a princess announcing that a pumpkin had become a coach, said that there was a victoria waiting at the door. The recollection of the moment was still for him an enchantment. All his youth seemed focused at that point. Now, thinking back to it with an intolerable nostalgia, it appeared that even as he sat in the carriage, bowling through the warm summer dusk, unable to exchange a word with the girl at his side, with the Cottingley beech-boles silver-grey under the immense droop of their sleeping branches, he must have known that his mind was in pursuit of a bright illusion, that this exquisite moment was poised between his hopes and dreams and desires and the humdrum way of hard struggle and small achievement that the fates had written down for him.
“Aye, luv,” he said with a rueful smile, “Ah remember well enough.”
“Eh, but Ah were mad!” said Pen with a little laugh. “Ah smashed t’tea bottle wi’ a great wallop on t’pavin’ stones. Ah could’ve killed Ann that neet. T’devil were in me. Poor Ann.”
Poor Ann! It provided for Arnold the last touch the moment needed, the last reminder that desire and dream, toil and failure alike with toil and honour, are fugitive ripples, restlessly resolving back into the underlying flow of time. Poor Ann, the bright girl with the lustrous hair, the girl who had shared his tea in the Ancoats kitchen, who had at so many points illuminated his own dull dragging way, was dead long since and lying far from the memory of all that, living, she had seemed to charge with her life.
They walked on in silence for a while, Arnold observing what Pen could not see: the strange transformation of London wrought by this foggy weather. Naphtha flares were lit in the middle of the roads, insubstantial silvery bursts of flame, like a succession of little false dawns breaking through the mephitic night. Policemen carried their lighted lanterns, trying to guide the traffic into some sort of order, and the whole yellow-surging world within vision was a chaos peopled by ghosts that loomed for a moment and floated away, and by ruddy eyes that crawled out of the darkness, glowed transiently and were suddenly put out.
“Pen, lass,” Arnold said at last, “we’d better take a taxi. We’ll be late for the march this afternoon.”
“Ah’m not gain’ to march,” Pen said.
Somehow, he had been expecting that. “You’re tired,” he said. “You’ve done too much.”
“Ah, Ah’m tired,” Pen agreed. “An Ah’m tired of bein’ part of a circus. That’s what we are, lad. We’re a music-hall turn. We’ve done what we could, an’ it’s come to nowt. Well, Ah’m not on exhibition any more.” She was silent for a moment, then burst out in sudden passion: “Let the God-damn fools spit on us if they want to. They’ve got their Bank of England stuffed wi’ brass, and enough shows an’ faldelals to dress a forest of monkeys. But by heck, that’s not enough. They’ll live to regret the day they let the workers get soft and stale in their bodies an’ bitter in their hearts. They’ll want us some day, an’ I hope to God we’ll have the guts to say: ‘Go on wantin’. Dig the bloody coal yourselves wi’ your Gold Sticks and White Wands and Black Rods. We’ve ’ad enough.’”
She had stopped dead in her tracks. Her words rang out like a challenge through the pall that hung mourning over the metropolis.
Then she began to cry, clinging to Arnold there in the thick evil-smelling darkness, and his heart was melted to see the tears welling out of the sightless sockets. She cried loudly, with deep distress of soul, and he put his arms about her and comforted her, saying: “Hush, lass, hush. Us’ll go on fightin’. Never fear. Never fear.”
“It’s your work,” she sobbed. “All you’ve lived for, all you’ve sweated your guts for. I can’t see, Arnie, I can’t see, but I can feel the darkness all about me, an’ I can smell it. It smells evil. All your work, lad – it’s ended in a darkness smelling of evil.”
They were standing under a plane tree, its blotched peeling winter trunk wet and grimy, and drops of congealed fog fell upon them from the bare branches whose spectral lace vanished in a chill infinity. Pen leaned back against the trunk, and Arnold wrapped his arms about her and kissed her as though they were young lovers glad of the dark.
“I shall fight on, Pen,” he said. “Win or lose, I shall fight on. It were thee taught me to do that. Years ago, Pen, tha said to me: ‘Ah don’t want thee because tha’rt a winner. Ah want thee, win or lose, so long as tha’ll fight.’ Remember that, Pen? Remember that?”
“Aye, Ah remember that, Arnie. But the years are so long, lad, an’ so many of them are bitter. Ah were a young thing then, an’ now Ah’m nobbut a blind old woman far from ’ome. Ah’ve not got so much as a decent pair of eyes to weep with.”
They clung to one another, and Arnold was near to tears himself. “Let’s not go back to Bethnal Green,” he said. “Let’s find some place handy, an’ have a bit o’ food where it’s light an’ warm.”
“Aye,” she said simply. “Let’s do that, old luv. Let ’em look after themselves for once, an’ let’s be alone together.”
They were not alone in the busy popular restaurant that Arnold found, heavy with the steam of human bodies, noisy with talk, strident with profuse light shouting defiance to the enveloping gloom. But at least they were away for a moment from their cares. Arnold led Pen tenderly in and out of the crowded tables topped coldly with white marble, and presently they sat down, not facing one another but side by side, their bodies touching, as though they needed the warm reassurance of this physical contact. Arnold looked at the bulky silver watch he had carried ever since the days he was Lizzie Lightowler’s secretary. Lizzie had given it to him. It had belonged to her husband. He saw that it was five minutes past one. They went out again at twenty-five minutes to two. Arnold was never to forget that half-hour. Nothing notable happened in it, except that, in relaxation from unusual stress, they felt warm, closer together than they had been for a long time. He remembered the shelves of long, coloured glasses containing virulent-looking drinks, the clatter of cups and saucers and the tinkle of cutlery on the table-tops, the smell of food: tea and fish, buns and steaks, chipped potatoes and fried eggs and mashed potatoes, a lavish blending of all the meals of the day. He remembered the endless coming and going, the shrill clash of a hundred conversations, the whole noisy glitter amid which Pen sat patiently, hardly speaking, in her red hood and cloak, “alone,” as she had said, with him. He remembered the door swinging open now and then, letting in a clammy blast and a sight of a subaqueous world in which the shadows of men swam through a grey tenuous element, as though he and Pen and the others were imprisoned in a bright glass bubble sunk to the bed of a sea that was rolling sluggishly over the earth.
He remembered it all because this was the last half-hour he was to spend with Pen, with whom he had spent so many hours and years, and so much of life that was beyond the computation of time.
They went out: a shabby, more-than-middle-aged man, a blind sharp-faced groping woman who would have attracted no attention but for her outlandish dress, and they stood for a moment irresolute on the pavement’s edge, drowned in the silence and mystery of the fog. Then they heard, piercing with a heart-breaking poignancy the cold oblivion of the afternoon, the sound with which they were now so familiar, the sound they had first heard when they walked side by side behind the coffin of Ap Rhondda winding its way with so many others, amid the silver sorrow of the trumpets, to the hillside cemetery: the sound of Welsh voices singing the dirges that had the power to cleave to the very marrow of grief. Always moving, the hymn now, sung in this alien place, coming out of throats unseen in the darkness, was heavy with exile and longing. Arnold felt Pen’s arm clutch with a sudden convulsion closer upon his own. “It’s the boys!” she cried. “Come on! Ah’m not tired now, Arnie. We’ll march after all. We’ll stick wi’ ’em to the end.”
She broke from him, and he held out a hand to detain her, saying: “Steady, lass, steady. It’s black as pitch.” But in Pen’s world of darkness, darkness was one, summer’s noon and winter’s midnight. She thrust out her stick, rang her bell, and fairly ran. He clutched at her cloak, but she was beyond his reach. She was beyond his reach for ever. He was not aware of the car that had stopped. It was lit inside with a rich golden glow, a little rolling world of luxury that had brushed her out of existence. He was aware only of the red cloak, spread upon her like a pall where she lay face-downwards, and of marching feet coming nearer, the hymn-tune dying suddenly out in a consternation of Welsh voices. They all seemed to be crying with his own heart: “Pen! Pen! It’s Pen!”
But it wasn’t Pen any more. It was the husk of unregarded valour, the clay of a little lamp whose flame had never wavered but was blown out suddenly by a casual wind.
*
Jimmy Newboult brought the news to Half Moon Street. “Pen! God A’mighty, Chief, I remember ’er when she was a slip of a thing ’elping Arnold in St. Swithin’s. She goes back a long way, Chief. She goes back to the beginnings. Christ! I can’t believe it. Poor Pen!”
Poor Ann! Poor Pen! Poor humanity that must bow the neck and take the blow at last, with much or little done.
“Go away, Jimmy. Go away, there’s a good chap.”
Jimmy went, leaving the Chief gazing into the fire, his head on the arm draped along the mantelpiece. “Best Welsh steam coal.” He remembered the altercation with Pen in his study at Baildon, and the visit to the Rhondda that had followed. He saw her clambering the wall of the colliery yard, silhouetted against the light that flared within, as it were storming an aerie barricade. She had always been like that: an impetuous flyer toward her objectives. Even her blindness had not stopped her. But she was stopped now. Somewhere in the miscellaneous junk of memory were a few lines that he had written when looking out from The Hut upon a rigid winter landscape. They stirred now.
How little snow on Baildon Hill
Makes all the flowers and grasses still.
How still the dreams within the head
One second after we are dead.
How still the dreams! “Where now, my friend, are our dreams?” Old Horst had said that a week or two before Ann died. Ann and Pen. He had heard from Arnold how they had rushed together into their first fight, laying about them in a rainy Bradford street when a pack of factory girls had gone for Arnold. Well, it was all over for both of them. Oblivion without laurels.
He did not go out. He remained in his study, hoping that Arnold would ring him up. It became an obsession with him. He would feel a pardon in Arnold’s telling him of Pen’s death. But what was there to pardon? He had always acted in the clear light of reason. But he wished Arnold would ring up. If not Arnold, then Alice or Charles. But there was no message from any of them. It was not till after dinner that Lizzie Lightowler came to see him. The old woman was limp with lamentation. For once in her life, she was not only verbose but almost incoherent. He gathered that Arnold had said: “Tell Hamer”; but Charles and Alice had looked stony. “I’ll tell him nothing,” Alice had broken out at last. “He should have been with us. He should have been here to know for himself. We want men who know, not men who need to be told.” And, in an atmosphere of misery, no more was said. It was left at that.
*
Old Pendleton helped him into his thick fleece overcoat. He turned up the astrakhan collar and pulled the brim of his black felt hat down over his eyes. In the street the abominable weather showed no sign of breaking. From his side of Piccadilly he could not see the railings of the Green Park. He got into a taxicab and was taken at a crawl toward the streets about Paddington. He got out and waited, and had not long to wait.
They were not singing as they came two by two, their tread slow and muffled, their lighted miners’ lamps pricking the yellow obscurity. The hearse came first. Two horses drew it, breathing smokily in the chill street. This was Pen – all that was left of Pen – lying there with the red hood and cloak draped over the coffin. An unlighted miner’s lamp stood upon the coffin, symbol of her swift extinction, symbol of the lightless years through which she had battled valiantly.
Crowds of sightseers stood bare-headed on the pavements, listening to the hobnailed boots shuffling through the gloom, looking at the swaying points of light that emphasized but did not dispel the darkness. Arnold walked behind the hearse, his shoulders bowed, his hat in his hand, his thin hair dewed with vapour. Behind him Charles walked in his old tweeds, wearing no hat or overcoat, looking starved and fanatical, with Alice on his right hand and Lizzie Lightowler on his left. Behind these came the miners, two by two, the lamps swinging in their right hands. There was no sound from the rubber tyres of the hearse. There was no sound at all but the sound of the mourning feet.
Hamer walked on the pavement, level with the hearse. He was not bowed like Arnold. He walked with his shoulders square, his head up, his eyes staring with angry defiance before him. But they fell on nothing but the wreathing fog, the phantasms and insubstantialities that appeared and beckoned and melted and were gone.
The station was cavernous, resonant, cold, choked with the confluence of engine-steam and evil vapour. The hearse came to a standstill, and Arnold, Charles, Alice and Lizzie stood, too. The miners marched on, broke their double line, and in a single file stood with heads bowed, lamps hanging in front of them in joined hands, along the platform before the waiting train. Standing thus, at length they began to sing. The lovely harmonious voices lifted to the hidden roof, sending their aspiration up to a heaven that had never seemed so far removed. It was the hymn they could not resist, the hymn they sang in joy and sorrow, “Jesu, Lover of My Soul,” to Parry’s incomparable tune. And as they sang, Hamer, standing behind them, saw the red-palled coffin corning down the platform on the shoulders of four little bowed men, with Arnold and the others crunching slowly behind it. When it was abreast of him, he turned down the collar of his overcoat, took out the dark carnation that was in the buttonhole, and broke through the miners’ line. “Hide me, 0 my Saviour, hide,” they were singing as, hatless, he dropped the red flower on the red pall, his eyes so blinded with tears that the long box and the people with it went by in a moving blur, and he did not know whether they saw him or not.
Only when the singing had stopped, and the four living and one dead were aboard the train, and the engine gave a great deep shuddering cough and began to move, did he come to himself. Then he ran forward, searching the windows of the compartments and crying “Arnold! Arnold!” But the train slid by, and he did not see the face he sought, and presently the gloom swallowed all up and left him lonely and desolate, as though he had witnessed the burial of his youth.