Two cities had conferred their freedom upon him; he was an LL.D. of one university, Rector of another, D.Litt. of a third. He was a Privy Councillor, His Majesty’s Minister for the Co-ordination of Internal Affairs in the second Labour Government, and he was sixty-five years of age. It was December 20, 1929, his birthday, and he had asked the Earl and Countess of Lostwithiel to dinner. He had also asked Charles and Alice. Unlike the Earl and Countess, they had found some reason to decline, but Lizzie Lightowler would be there, and a foreign ambassador with his wife, and a much-talked-of sculptor with a lovely girl who probably was not his wife. Eight, Hamer thought, looking in at the dining-room was the perfect number for an intimate dinner.
The room had never looked so enchanting. He had been in Half Moon Street for some years now and had acquired some lovely things. The picture by Duncan Grant that he had once asked Lady Lostwithiel to see had three or four companions. He was particularly fond of an oil by L.S. Lowry, a painter not so well known, he felt, as he deserved to be outside Manchester where he lived. This picture showed a steep unlovely street, one whole side of it occupied by a mill wall, and it was full of clogged feet whose clatter you could almost hear and of grey shawls drawn over heads that you knew, without seeing them, were grey with labour. The lives of the poor! One should be reminded of them.
He had found the long refectory table in a Yorkshire farmhouse. Generations of bucolic elbows had brought its surface to the sheen of satin. He looked with satisfaction at the firelight catching its edges, shining in the deep hollows worn in the rungs. It would be a shame to put a cloth on such a table. He walked round it, touching here and there the Jensen silver that had been laid out, re-arranging with a sure touch the flowers that had come round from Shepherd Market. In each of the finger-bowls on the sideboard floated a few petals of syringa. The china waiting for use was a reproduction of the Copenhagen Flora Danica set.
He stood before the fire for a moment, looking on all these things that satisfied in him some deep need for beauty. The wall-lights glowed behind their shades of golden parchment. A hired cook was in the kitchen, for Mrs. Pendleton was not to be trusted with such a dinner as this, and there would be two hired waiters. Old Pendleton would have nothing to do but announce people and look after the coffee and cigars. It was all going to cost Hamer a pretty penny, but he could well afford it. He had discreetly inquired of Lizzie Lightowler concerning the finances of Charles and Alice, and no help from him was needed there. There was a mystery about the business – Lizzie herself did not know where the money was coming from; but it was coming, clearly, in comfortable quantities, so that he had no one to provide for but himself.
He balanced his tall body up and down on his heels, chewing over that reflection and trying to be pleased with it. No chick nor child. Stupid old phrase. But in the quiet house, filled with exquisite inanimate possessions, he was seized now, as he was more and more often seized, with a loneliness, a sense of living in a cosy vacuum, that would have been a little frightening if he had allowed his mind to dwell upon it. Charles, now. Charles saw more of Arnold Ryerson than he did of his own father. Wherever the money was coming from, Alice was spending it freely on Arnold since Pen’s death. Arnold would not leave Cwmdulais, but almost every week-end either he came up to town or the young people went to the Rhondda or to some South Wales coast resort where Arnold joined them. All out of that money that Alice mysteriously commanded.
When Arnold came to town, he did not see Hamer. There seemed to be a conspiracy to keep them apart. But from one thought he drew satisfaction. Lizzie Lightowler, his informant in family matters, told him that Arnold had insisted on the red carnation being left on Pen’s pall. Solitary, it had jolted through the night to the Rhondda. Hidden beneath masses of flowers, it had lain upon her grave, and tied to its broken stem was a card, written in Arnold’s hand: “From Hamer.”
The well-conducted, deep-carpeted house was so quiet that he heard the faint silvery chime of the clock in his study telling the quarter-hour, relentlessly marking the march of this new year of his life, eating already into the hours of this anniversary of the day when, sixty-five years ago, he had been born in circumstances of what ignominy who knew?
His restless heels had come to a stand. He remained for a moment, tall and brooding, teased by the unresolved enigma of his life, a little resentful, a little proud; then, shaking himself, he went upstairs to bath and change. Full fig. He adjusted to perfection the white butterfly tie, put the carnation into his buttonhole. His studs and cuff-links were of square-cut onyx, unadorned. He preferred them to any metal or jewellery. He went down to wait.
*
Ramsay MacDonald, a widower like himself, ambitious like himself, as interested but not so deeply instructed as himself in cultural matters, had been there once or twice to dinner, and they had enjoyed the opportunity to forget “the Party,” the eternal playing up to a crowd, and to talk about books and pictures, to exchange an occasional appreciative anecdote about a peeress. They were much the same type of man: they got on well together. MacDonald was struck one night with the amusing idea that had entered Hamer’s own head. Looking at the red couches by the study fire, he said: “What do you do here, Hamer: practise sitting in the Lords?”
Hamer laughed it off; but MacDonald said: “It may come to that, you know. The Liberals had to pack their men into the Lords, and we may have to do it, too. I don’t think Philip Snowden would mind. What about you?”
Hamer drew himself up to his great height and said jocularly: “Look at me. I was made for ermine.”
The subject fizzled out on a half-facetious note.
There has been these little dinners with one friend, or two or three, but this was the first time he had “entertained” in a grand way. But he was easy in his mind, waiting there for Lizzie, who would be with him to receive the guests. He had chosen his company well. The sculptor was a witty talker who was anxious to sculp his head, and the girl with him was desirable for her startling decorative value. Hamer liked the company of handsome women. The ambassador was a sardonic fellow with no illusions. His conversation was salted and astringent. Hamer welcomed his abhorrence of sentiment and humbug. Believing that Europe was hastening to the devil, he would say so with always some new mordant twist, opening the way for endless talk and speculation. His wife was a dowdy nonentity. Lostwithiel, who was once accredited to her country, could look after her.
Lostwithiel was the dubious member of the party. Hamer was without self-deceit where Lostwithiel was concerned. The man tolerated without liking him. It was Lady Lostwithiel who seemed not only willing but almost anxious to cultivate him. “She wants to cut your claws, Chief. That’s the long and short of it,” Jimmy Newboult dared to say one day; and in his heart Hamer was prepared to admit that perhaps in the beginning that had been part of her intention. But now, he believed, she had some personal feeling for him; and he didn’t care who knew that he liked her. She had retained her beauty, she had deepened her humanity; her voice had lovely tones. He wouldn’t have minded, he sometimes extravagantly thought, if the tones of Lettice Lostwithiel’s voice told off his passing like the silvery bell on his study clock. Notes were frequent between them: about books and pictures, affairs in countries that both knew intimately, about this and that. He had not destroyed one of her notes. They helped a little with the half-regretful feeling that he was made for ermine.
Lostwithiel was another matter. The years had changed the ineffective youth of St. Swithin’s into a small, dry, formidable man, profoundly versed in all the chicane and trickery of government. If to meet these Labour chaps helped, if it would do anything to keep them quiet and docile, then so far Lettice had better have her head. That was his view, and Hamer knew it.
*
He led Lady Lostwithiel into the dining-room. She sat at his right hand, the ambassador’s wife at his left. Beyond the ambassadress sat Lostwithiel, who screwed a glass into his eye, gave a searching sardonic glance at a Labour interior, then, as it were with a startled jerk of the eyebrows, caused the glass to drop abruptly.
“Didn’t Keir Hardie toast his own bannocks, Shawcross?” he asked loudly.
“He did,” said Hamer suavely. “Would you call that a virtue?”
“In a way – yes.”
“Well,” Hamer smiled, “it’s open, I suppose, to anyone of us to practise it?”
The ambassador, the Count of Fuentavera, stroked his small silvery pointed beard, and said across the table to Lostwithiel: “It’s a virtue I commend especially to you, and to myself. We shall all be toasting our own bannocks soon – if we have any bannocks to toast, and any fire to toast them at.”
Lostwithiel laughed harshly. “Your ears, my dear Fuentavera,” he said, screwing in his eyeglass to look critically at his soup, “are tonedeaf to everything but disaster. If a hen cackles you think the foxes are rampant. If a twig snaps you imagine the forest is coming down.”
“My dear Lostwithiel,” said the count, “you will pardon my telling you that the English are the most obtuse people in the world, and you, my dear sir, as I have told you many times, are the most obtuse of the English. Is it a hen cackling in the United States at this moment? Half Wall Street would be glad of bannocks to toast. Is it a twig snapping in Austria? Or here in your own country, with your millions of unemployed, with your National Insurance Fund as bankrupt as Wall Street itself? These things are the beginning. Let me tell you that in five years from this time—”
They were happily away on their hobby-horses, and Hamer turned with contentment to Lady Lostwithiel.
“I’m going to be a nuisance to you,” she said. “I expect a lot of your friends ask you to read their books?”
“As a matter of fact, no. I’m not a man of letters, you know,” he said, believing that firmly. “I’ve written a lot in my time, but it’s all been propaganda stuff. Why should people want my opinion about books?”
“Oh, anyone’s opinion goes nowadays,” she laughed. “I saw a publisher’s advertisement on Sunday, giving a comedian’s view of a very serious novel. So why not a Cabinet minister’s?”
A Cabinet minister’s! He liked to hear her say that. There were times, even now when his name flared at him from every newspaper in the land every day, when he couldn’t open his mouth in public without seeing a dozen reporters taking out their note-books at a table in front of him: even yet there were times when he could not get over this fact of being a Cabinet minister. With his anxious attention everywhere: watching critically the silent dexterous waiters, noting that Lizzie and Sanderson the sculptor were getting on well together, taking in appreciatively the beautiful bare shoulders of Sanderson’s girl as she drooped back on to her chair a slip of a fur cape: with all these preoccupations of a host and connoisseur, he found a space within his mind to marvel that he had called this elegant and successful little occasion into being: he, Hamer Shawcross, Privy Councillor.
“You are too modest,” Lettice Lostwithiel was saying, “though, of course, this is the only matter on which you have any modesty at all. You are as vain as Lucifer, and look it.”
“Lucifer wasn’t vain,” he corrected. “He was proud.”
“Have it how you like,” she said. “But I do want you to read a little book I’ve written. You remember old Buck?”
Did he remember old Buck! The waiter’s black sleeve came across his shoulder, and he watched the rosy wine rising in the glass. So rosy, so tinged with reminiscent sentiment, was the thought of old Buck now – a strange, ogreish, legendary creature out of a tale read in youth, a tale that had caused a shudder but now was powerless to affright. He raised the glass to his lips and sipped the wine. “Yes,” he said. “What a man! They don’t breed ’em now.”
“He was obsessed,” said Lettice, “with the idea that all he stood for couldn’t last. It was on his mind the night he died. I wrapped him up before he went out for that idiotic drive, and he talked about it then. He said he hoped I’d have a son. We’d need men, he said. Well, I didn’t have a son.”
She sighed, and Hamer knew well enough what the sigh was for. Surely... Surely... He had always distrusted that word. You could be sure of nothing. All he had hoped for Charles had come to the rather pathetic end of the unsuccessful writer in papers with high ideals and low circulations. As for Lostwithiel’s daughter: he remembered old Buck announcing her birth, telling the burgesses of St. Swithin’s that she would be ripe to represent them when Liskeard had moved into the Lords. Well, she had proved ripe for other things than that: over-ripe, rotten-ripe, in those few crazy years after the war when barricades of morality, usage, tradition, spectacularly crashed. Drugs, drink: there was the crude truth. Her movements into and out of discreet homes in the country, which “cured” her for a month or two, were known and talked about. She was a beautiful girl whose photograph looked well in the viler newspapers. That was the worst of it. “Back again, after a vacation in the country, to add colour to the lives of London’s brighter young people.” It was heartbreaking. Hamer knew that the great house on which he and Arnold had looked down so long ago, watching Lettice Melland jog over the humpbacked bridge on her barrel-bellied pony: he knew that that great house rested now on sand. They had looked on it as the incarnation of the might against which they must pit themselves, Goliath with all his brazen breastplates defiant before their puny slings; and time had done what they had been unable to do. Their pebbles had not been needed. This dry, tough, able and, he felt, unscrupulous man, sitting a few paces away, was the deadend of the Lostwithiels. Buck had been an only child, and so was this Lostwithiel. It was a strange family that had run to only children, and this time the child was a daughter, and bad stock.
All this was behind the sigh that fell on Hamer’s ear as he sat there fingering the stem of his glass. When you got old, he reflected, so much could lie behind a gesture, a turn of the head, a lift of the shoulder, a word, a tear. But Lettice Lostwithiel was not one to parade things, and especially this thing. She went on: “I think Buck was right. It’s all going – all that he knew. Half my friends seem to have estates in the market.” She smiled. “You know, you Socialists have won.”
Lostwithiel, who had heard the end of the conversation, turned to say: “Yes, a grand victory, Shawcross. You’ve handed over England’s green and pleasant land to the jerry-builder. That’s the Jerusalem you’ve built. You’ll want that cornland and pasture one of these days. When the next war comes, it’ll be a great help to have ten thousand stockbrokers’ clerks living on an estate like Castle Hereward.”
“The next war, my friend,” said Fuentavera, who could never resist the subject; and they were off again. Hamer turned once more to Lettice: “And your book is about all that?”
“Yes. It’s just the story of my own childhood. I’ve tried to put on record what it was like to be born and brought up in the great houses. It was all rather lovely, you know, in its way. The hunting and shooting, the Christmas parties at places like Trentham, the speech-days at Eton, and the cricket matches and races. All the boys and gels I knew...”
All the boys and gels I knew. That was it. That was the essence of any story, and the story was much the same whether they were chimney-sweepers or golden lads and lasses.
“I’d love to read it,” Hamer said. “Have you found a publisher?”
“No. I don’t know anything about that sort of thing.”
“Leave it to me,” he said confidently.
“Oh, but I couldn’t bother you. With all your work.”
“I’ll deal with it.” He could find time for that!
*
She had brought the typescript with her. They were alone for just a moment when she handed it to him. She thought he looked very happy, and guessed that the evening had been a little triumph for him, a bolster to his esteem. Not his vanity, his pride. She accepted the correction. She noticed again how handsome he was. The years had obliterated a certain raffishness, a swashbuckling quality that had been in the good looks of his youth. His hair now, falling across his forehead, was quite white and lustrous. He pushed it back with a characteristic gesture as he took the parcel and laid it on his writing-table. “You are very good, my dear,” she said. She took his hand in one of hers and patted it in brief affection with the other.
When they were all gone, he sat with his legs up on one of the couches, ready to read. Most of his reading now had to be done after midnight. Old Pendleton came in and suggested anxiously, as he so often did, that it was more than bedtime. “No, no. Off with you and get your beauty sleep,” Hamer said, flashing on his smile. “And thank you. Everything was splendid. Tell Mrs. Pendleton so.”
Everything was splendid. “You are very good, my dear.” An old woman whose life was so far behind her that she had already memorialized it, and an old man whose youth was a dream, whose hates and animosities were dying embers. A touch of affection between the two. That was all. But everything was splendid.
He began to read. He began to discover the young Letty, the girl who existed before he had set eyes on her, the girl who was riding her first pony round the paddock while he was trudging from Broadbent Street to school. Great names resounded through the pages. Half the Cabinet ministers who had governed before the Liberal uprising seemed to have been her uncles, godfathers, or what not. And all these names were woven into a story of grooms, guns and gaiters, the summer meadows, the autumn woods and fields, with the shadow of the great house in the background. It was all like a pretty embroidery on a page of English history. And fundamentally he knew that it was English history, that the stuff historians wrote missed the point, that for each one of us history is neither more nor less than what happens to me. And to “the boys and gels I knew.” Most of those that Lettice had written about were gone. Those that remained were already legends of the prime, lingering on into the present dissolution and decay.
The reflection startled him. He put down the typescript and lay back with his eyes closed. His clock struck three. It was so quiet that he heard the distant boom of Big Ben, repeating the small clear notes that had fallen into the room. Dissolution and decay. Was that what he thought of the world he was living in? Yes, it was. He had lived to see all that Shawcross of Peterloo had fought for nearer to attainment than he had ever believed possible. The dying Liberals had bequeathed an immense achievement in social legislation, and the Labour Party had twice held office. Lettice Lostwithiel had said: “You Socialists have won.” That was nonsense: what remained to be done was immeasurably greater than anything done yet. But, all the same, his cause had prospered, and it had brought him into a world which seemed to him dull, stale, flat and unprofitable, lacking the heroic temper and the individual genius of the world he had known. Perhaps it was simply that he was growing old. Whatever it was, he went slowly up to bed, thinking of the past with regret, of the present with distaste, and of the future with a grey foreboding.
*
Perhaps he was growing old. He was beginning to like his comfort. He could work as hard as ever. He could read till three in the morning and be up at half-past seven, and feel none the worse. But he would have hated to get up if Pendleton had not brought his morning tea. From a hard day’s work in Whitehall and the House of Commons he could go on, fresh as paint, to speak after a dinner, but he wouldn’t have liked the bother of putting his studs in his shirt. At the recent election he had worked in St. Swithin’s with furious energy and had found time, too, to go and speak for Jimmy Newboult and other candidates. But he had taken Pendleton with him, to look after his creature comforts. “Remember Pen Muff wi’ the cold tea for Arnold?” Jimmy asked with a grin. He slapped Hamer on the shoulder: a gesture few of Labour’s rank and file would have used in those days. “Yon chap Pendleton’s your cold-tea bearer. You used to have a sword-bearer; now you want a cup-bearer, a blanket-carrier, a foot-warmer.”
Jimmy spoke jocularly, but Hamer was not misled. Jimmy was not his man in the full and dedicated sense that he once had been. He was prepared to criticize. He was on the look-out for sun-spots. He had gone to Pen’s funeral at Cwmdulais. He had followed her body up the winding road on which Ap Rhondda and Richard Richards and Evan Hughes had preceded her. He had left the house in Half Moon Street soon afterwards, and had never been quite the same since. Now Hamer had made him his Parliamentary private secretary. He loved the job and did it well. They were closer together again, and Jimmy said “Chief” with the old devoted intonation. But Hamer sensed the jealousy in his heart: the jealousy of a lover who fears, after many years, the straying of the beloved.
And so, as Hamer stood at the window looking into Half Moon Street on the morning after his dinner party, he thought of Jimmy. He wondered what Jimmy would say of this car, now sliding to a standstill outside the house. It was not the most expensive car in the world, but it was a nice-looking thing, and a liveried chauffeur sat at the wheel. He had brought it round from the garage in a nearby mews. Over the garage was a small flat where the chauffeur lived. He was a good-looking boy. He couldn’t be more than twenty-five – one of those public school men who could not find a footing in this queer modern world. Jimmy would hate his accent.
Well, Jimmy could think what he pleased. Perhaps I’m getting old, Hamer thought again. Anyway, this was another of those comforts that he liked because, he persuaded himself, they allowed him to get through so much more work. This very morning, for example: he could nip round to his literary agent’s office with Lady Lostwithiel’s typescript and still be in Whitehall no later than usual. He would miss his brief morning walk across the Green Park, but in this life you can’t have everything.
“The car, sir,” said Pendleton.
*
The olive-green car stopped. Chesser – Stinker to old Wykehamists – leapt down from his seat, glad to be doing his first day’s work, and opened the door. Stinker Chesser’s grandfather had been a Cabinet minister under Salisbury. His sister was now a manikin, and his mother lived at en pension rates in Harrogate. Stinker stood bolt upright holding the handle of the door, his face as grave as a carved marble of Apollo. Hamer came out bent double, stood upright, and said: “It’s a lovely morning. You are permitted to smile.” He himself smiled as he knew well how to, and Stinker obediently lighted up, with crinkles round his deep blue eyes. He preferred to smile, if only this damned world would let him. He had been haunted by the fear that this Labour chap might make him feel a worm, take it out of him. He looked at the tall figure disappearing into the office, and began to whistle. It was a lovely morning, now he had the heart to notice it. He took out a duster and rubbed a spot of dirt from the car.
It did not take Hamer more than ten minutes to convey to his agent his own enthusiasm for Lady Lostwithiel’s book and to suggest who should publish it. Then, eager to justify his car by being at Whitehall on time, he went briskly out of the office and ran down the stairs. There was a sharp turn half-way down, and it was there that he collided with Alice. She was coming up slowly and quietly. He heard nothing, and was on top of her, spilling the papers she carried, before he could check himself.
“Oh, I’m sorry, most terribly sorry.”
Then he recognized her. “My dear, I hope I did no damage.”
“None at all.” She seemed dour and cross, and bent to pick up the scattered papers.
“No. Let me do that. I’m sixty-five, but I can still touch my toes.”
He gathered up the newspapers and a book which had fallen open among them. It was the sort of book which few people see: a proof copy, in paper covers. He saw printed across the top of the open page the title: “Fall to Your Prayers, Old Man,” and here and there in the margin, written in Alice’s bold thick unmistakable hand and in the green ink she always used, were one or two corrections. Hamer looked up at Alice in surprise. “Hallo!” he said. “You turned author?”
He couldn’t make out what was the matter with her. She was leaning against the angle of the stairs looking pale and distressed. She was not at all her usual self-possessed woman. He closed the book and handed it to her, and then his eye fell again on the title printed across the paper cover and on the author’s name, Gabrielle Minto. For a moment this perplexed him, then he gave a surprised “Oh!” of complete realization. “Oh!” he said. “So that’s it! I thought you looked a bit off your stroke, my dear. Are you terribly annoyed at being found out?”
She continued to lean against the wall, as though glad of its support. “It’s not that,” she said. “Charles has left me.”
*
Lizzie had gone for a walk. Alice was in Fleet Street. Charles was alone in the rooms they occupied on the first floor in North Street. He was so untidy that he might almost have been called ragged. The cuffs of his tweed jacket were whiskered and his flannel trousers were spotted with grease. He wore no tie. His shirt was open at the collar. His finger-nails were dirty and his face was not properly shaved. There had been a time when all this might have been written off as the affectation of a picturesque rebellious boy. But Charles was a boy no longer. He was thirty-two. He looked, and was, a careless, slipshod, unsuccessful man, angry with a world which had failed to see in him the character he imagined himself to be.
Angry; especially at this moment, with Alice. He looked round the room, and everything in it screamed at him: Alice, Alice, Alice! The desk he wrote at, the beautiful simple modern furniture, the carpet on the floor, the pictures on the wall: Alice had bought them all.
He stood at the window, pushed aside Alice’s curtains impatiently, and looked down into the street, gnawing his nails already bitten to the quick: looked down at the bright affected little doors of red and green and yellow, the brass knockers, the painted railings, all trying their damnedest, in a toy-shop fashion, to seem cheerful and happy under the grey sky into which the chimney-stacks cut their shapes with uncompromising realism.
He was beginning to loathe it all. He was beginning to see it as an Ibsenesque doll’s house in which a woman had shut him up. He walked away from the window, turning the thought over in his mind. An amusing inversion: there might be a play in it. He had never tried a play. But the thought soon faded out of his mind, dissolving in his general misery like the pale blue smoke of the chimneys dissolving against the grey of the London sky.
Even the harping, carping, cavilling articles that he supplied to some of the weeklies were beginning to be turned down. “Look here, old man” – this was Rossiter of Intelligentsia – the disgruntled old sweat attitude is played out. The next war’s too near for us to keep on the sympathetic stop for the sorrows of the last war’s victims.”
That was bad enough, but for Alice to back it up: that was too much! “There’s something in it, my dear,” she said. “I don’t think anything worth while was ever created out of mere resentment.”
“But damn it all, Alice!” he burst out. “Don’t you resent the world you’re living in? Don’t you think ninety people in a hundred are treated like hog-wash for fat swine. Don’t you want to bring it all down with a crash?”
She looked at his pale thin weary face – the face of this man so utterly dependent on her – and her heart was wrung with compassion. “Yes,” she said, “you’re quite right about all that; but there is also this: I enjoy every minute of my life.” She reached across the table and laid a hand on his. “I wish you could do that, Charles. When you’ve got a long, long journey in front of you, what’s the sense of storing up your joy till you get to the end of it? You may never get there. So try to get some fun out of the road.”
He pulled away his hand impatiently and stood up. “My God! Quite a little philosopher!” he said with a sour grin.
She was hurt by that. “It was a philosophy good enough for my mother,” she said. “Her life was no easier than yours, but she enjoyed the fight. Even when she was blind, up to the very end, she was happy.”
“Well, I’m not,” said Charles. “I’m sick of my spoon-fed bloody existence.” He got up, strode to the window, and stood, hands in pocket, glowering down into the street.
Alice looked sorrowfully at the bowed head, the narrow shoulders, silhouetted against the pale diaphanous net of the curtain. She could feel the tears behind her eyelids, but she would not let them fall. She knew well enough what was the matter with Charles. His love had turned to bitterness because it could not pour out the gifts of its own generosity. He would have been happy had he been able to do for her all that she had done for him. She was oppressed with a sense of crisis as she watched the defeated figure slouched brokenly against the pearly-grey light. Suddenly he turned round and demanded in a high excited voice: “And where does the money come from? That’s what I’d like to know? I know what one gets paid for your sort of journalism, and it doesn’t buy all this.” He waved his hand round the room. “You’re seeing a damned sight more than I like of Pappenheimer. The place stinks of his hair-oil.”
She felt as though he had stabbed her. She understood the desperation and despair that had led him to make a suggestion so horrible. But all the same she wondered if she could ever forgive him. She stared at him stonily, saying nothing. He came round the table and seized her wrist in his cold bony clutch. She had never seen him look so wolfish and ravening. “He’s rich, isn’t he?” he demanded. “He can give you everything. Some bloody Communist, Mr. Pappenheimer! I don’t like him. I don’t want to see him about the place any more – understand that? When I come in, I don’t want to smell the trace of him. It makes me retch. He’s – unsavoury.”
She could not be angry. She could only be overwhelmed by the desolation that was in her heart. She could only be numbed by sorrow that life had brought Charles to this. She got up and shook him off easily but kindly. She walked into the next room and took from her desk a little book in which she had kept a record of all the financial and other concerns of Gabrielle Minto. Then she put on her hat and coat. When she went back, he was standing again at the window. She put the book on the table and said: “Charles, I have to go out. I’d like you to examine this while I’m away.”
He did not turn round, but when she was in the street he craned his neck hungrily to catch a glimpse of the trim little figure walking along the pavement.
*
Alice’s bookkeeping, like everything else about her, was clear and straightforward. It did not take Charles five minutes to discover all that she wanted him to know. Since their marriage she had written eight novels. None of them was out of print. Even the first was still selling freely in cheap editions on the bookstalls. “Peter Paul Perkins,” the most successful of them, had sold nearly 100,000 copies in its most expensive edition. One way and another, she had never made less than between £2,000 and £3,000 a year since she began to write; in some years more.
Charles put down the book and sat with his head in his hands, his temples throbbing, his hollow cheeks twitching with a tic. He couldn’t understand her. She was not only rich: she was famous. It wasn’t the sort of fame he would have liked for himself. Some carping jealous reserve wouldn’t allow him to admit that. But he did admit, sitting there twisting his nervous fingers into his hair, that he himself had desired above all things to be a famous man. Some fatal indecision, some native deficiency, had defeated him. And Alice all this time might have enjoyed the popular applause, the public acclaim, that he himself had savoured: savoured for a flashing hour to which, as to a bright oasis, he looked back with increasing gall and bitterness as he journeyed deeper and deeper into arid deserts of impotence and nonentity.
He couldn’t understand her. And then he understood her with a sudden searing clarity that brought him to his feet with a curse. God damn her. She pitied him! She was hiding her light under a bushel lest it put him in eclipse. All his self-pity, all his resentment against a world which held him cheap, blazed and danced around him. He loathed the very clothes he wore, rags though they were. Alice’s money had bought them. He had a small pension for the loss of his leg; he earned a guinea here and a guinea there. That was all. And the guineas were becoming fewer. His last novel, the one after Phœnix, had not found a publisher, and he had never tried another. A failure was fatal for him.
And what confronted him now was not a failure. It was Failure’s very self, in all its grinning immensity and finality. Pitied! Pitied by Alice, as he had been, he swiftly persuaded himself, pitied by everybody: his father, Lizzie Lightowler, Pen, Arnold. He thought of the old woman Ellen, his grandmother. His vision of her was tinged with the sentimental rosy clouds of distance. She hadn’t pitied him. Hers, he said, was the only breast on which he had happily lain.
To spare his feelings, so that he should never have to come to her for money, Alice paid all she earned into an account opened in their joint names. He had only to go and draw what he wanted. But his pride made him keep such calls on the account down to a miserly sum. That was why he wore his clothes to rags. She understood that, and never urged him to buy new clothes.
Now he took out his cheque-book. “Pay self £50.” It wasn’t much. A cheap price for getting rid of a grave liability, he reflected bitterly. He put on the overcoat and hat which he did not often wear, went out into the grey street, and limped slowly away.
A week later he had not returned, and it was with all the weariness and anxiety of that week in her face that Alice met Hamer on the stairway and said: “Charles has left me.”
*
“Come with me to The Hut,” Hamer said.
He and Alice had eaten dinner together in Half Moon Street. Usually, she was self-reliant; there was almost a defiance about her; but, leaning against the angle of the stairway, she seemed, for the first time in his knowledge, shaken and indeterminate. “You must come and have some dinner with me,” he said. “You’re looking like death, girl.”
“I’m feeling like death,” she admitted.
“You ought to have let me know about this long ago,” Hamer protested. “Why hasn’t Lizzie rung me up? You’d better ask her to come along with you tonight.”
“Please,” said Alice. “D’you mind if I come alone?”
“God bless me! Mind? Why, I shall be delighted. I didn’t know that you’d want to dine alone with a shady character like me: that’s all.”
“Don’t think me horrid and ungrateful,” she said. “Lizzie’s done a lot for me and Charles, but I’d welcome a chance to get away from her.”
“Lizzie’s done a lot for everybody,” he said. “She did a lot for me, and she did even more for your father. But I know what you mean. Poor Lizzie! Very well, then. I’ll send the car for you soon after seven.”
For the first time she smiled. “I like you,” she said. “You’re old, and yet you’re like a child. Charles is so childish, and yet so old. However, don’t bother about your new toy. I’ll walk. I’d rather walk.”
She began to go on up the stairs. Hamer called her: “Alice! If you want this Minto business kept secret, you can rely on me. But I’m glad I know. I’m very proud of you. And not only for writing the books. You’re a grand woman.”
He was late at Whitehall, and before sitting down to his desk he stood before the fire thinking that he had been lucky in knowing his share of grand women: Ellen, Ann, Pen Muff, Lettice Melland, and Alice Ryerson. Lizzie? She was a good old stick, but her excessive busy-ness had never hidden a woolly streak in her. She was cake, not good crusty bread. Poor Lizzie!
When Alice came to dinner she looked better than she had done in the morning. He was glad to see that she had taken pains with her appearance. When he was alone he often had dinner in his study, at a little table close up to the fire, and he did this now, so that Alice should feel cosy and at home. After they had eaten, he said: “Now, my dear, tell me what you’ve been doing today.”
“Well, first of all, I went round to Fleet Street to blow the gaff on myself.”
She produced an evening newspaper. There was her photograph – very attractive, too, Hamer thought – and the identity of Gabrielle Minto at last revealed.
“It will be amusing to see what effect that has on my sales,” she said. “The books are harmless, but seeing that they come from a notorious Communist candidate, the old ladies may turn sniffy. However, it doesn’t matter, for I don’t suppose I’ll write any more of them. I’m going to Moscow.”
“Moscow!”
“Yes, as a correspondent.”
“Ah, Pappenheimer’s job!”
“That’s it. I wish Charles had been as good a guesser as you are.” Her face saddened. “I’ve known Pappenheimer a long time. He showed me everything and introduced me to everybody when I was in Moscow with Charles. He always called when he was over here on holiday. Now that he’s resigned the job out there, he’s been seeing me nearly every day, trying to persuade me to take it on. I didn’t want it, so long as Charles had his little bits of work to keep him busy here in London.”
“You’d have liked it, though?”
“I’d have jumped at it. To live in Moscow!”
“What a damned fool the boy is!” Hamer exploded.
“No, no!” she protested. “He’s a child, but not a fool. It’s I have been the fool. There must have been some way... I must have gone wrong somewhere...”
She looked up at him in a sad perplexity, as if out of his wisdom he might find the word to tell how she had lost her way. He shook his head. “I can’t help you, my dear. You know, he left me, too. Did we both fail him, or did he fail us both?”
“The world failed him,” she said. “It was never a good enough place for the likes of Charles.”
“Don’t blame the world too much,” he advised her. “When I was young, I was as ready as you are to blame everything on to ‘the world.’ It’s such an easy target till you come to shoot at it. Then you find, to your perplexity, that it isn’t there to be shot at. I’m going to preach to you. I’m old enough to be your father-confessor.”
She gave him a smile. “I am beginning to think,” she said, “that there are few people whose sermons I’d rather listen to. So preach away.”
“Well, the older I get, the less I believe that a change in what we like to call ‘the world’ will have any effect on the things that belong to our peace. An old German said to me, about the time my wife died: ‘There’s no peace except the peace in a man’s heart.’ I believe that that is true. When we politicians talk about changing the world, we mean no more than bringing in a few of our own fashions to replace certain fashions that we dislike. To ninety-nine people in a hundred it means nothing whatever. Both we and the people we have replaced might just as well have never existed so far as the essential things of most lives are concerned. By essential things I mean such things as have been between you and Charles. You say the world was not good enough for him. You think that if you had had a Communist government here in Britain you would have changed the world. I don’t believe it would have made two-pennyworth of difference to Charles. He would still have had a loose-ended mind, incapable of coming to conclusions, and that’s the root of your trouble. He has shot off now because he received a final blow: the blow of discovering that through all these years you were his superior in a sphere wherein he thought you couldn’t touch him. These are the things that make the bed-rock conflicts of life: not whether women shall vote or Parliaments dissolve. No government that ever will be can do more than maintain a clear framework within which the essential acts of private life may go on. The more a government confines itself to that, and keeps out of the way of the lives of the people, the better government it is; and that is why I think your dream of turning everything upside down and setting the world by the ears is more than wicked: it is useless. It’s no good to sit down excusing our deficiencies while waiting for a world that’s worthy of us. Let us be worthy of a better world, and then, by that very fact, the better world is with us and within us. Even a politician should realize that the more virtue we have the fewer treaties we shall need.”
Alice smoked her cigarette in silence for a while, then said: “Very persuasive. But what does it all come to but laisser-faire? I’m surprised you don’t adopt Lord Melbourne’s motto: ‘Why not leave it alone?’”
“There are things that must not be left alone. All I ask you to believe is that in this life you must not expect certain consequences to follow mathematically from certain actions. Assuredly not reformation from revolution.”
“We seem to be a long way from me and Charles.”
“That is what I am emphasizing. You think that a different sort of world would have made Charles a different sort of man. I am pointing out that I don’t believe it. It has taken me a lifetime to find out that the sort of people I want to see prospering are to be found in every party and every walk of life, and that neither the party nor the walk of life has anything to do with the qualities I find admirable in them.”
“It only means,” she smiled, “that you’ve dawdled into the lazy tolerance of old age.”
“I hope so.”
“I’d like to hear you utter these sentiments on a Labour platform.”
“You never will. I’m a politician to the marrow.”
She looked at him with narrowed eyes, her blunt intelligent face sharpened by the scrutiny, as he stood before her, back to the fire. “I’m going to make a prophecy,” she said. “You know as well as I do that this country can’t go on as it’s going on at present. You Labour people are having your second shot at pulling it out of the mess. You’re not succeeding, and you will not succeed. Again, you know that as well as I do. The poor are becoming poorer. The unemployed are so many that they could destroy you by their very numbers if they took it into their heads. Something will have to be done about it, and within a very few years. I know what it will be. It will be the old patriotic act: sink your party differences, rally as one man to save the Empire. The Liberals and Tories will be only too ready to rush into that breach. What about Labour? I will tell you, and this is my prophecy. Labour will be smashed to pieces, like a barrel smashed by the waves against a rock. The Labour Party has come in your time. You saw its beginnings; you helped to make its beginnings – few men more so. And you will help to make its end. That also is my prophecy. You do not believe any more in the thing you made. You are going to destroy it, and before you are many years older thousands of men and women will be cursing your name.”
He was shocked. In his time he had heard many hard things said about him and to him, and he had gone his way with a smile. But now he did not smile. Her words disturbed him profoundly. He stood looking down at her with a frown, not answering for a long time. Then he said simply: “I’m sorry that you think that of me.”
“What else can I think?” she demanded. “It screams out of every word you’ve just uttered, out of every action you’ve taken for years past. Look at that sword!” She pointed to the elegant cabinet containing the sabre of Peterloo. “My father has often talked to me about it. He’s told me how you once literally confronted tyranny with that sword in your hand and threatened to cut it down. Look at it now. Does it please you?”
“It’s done its work.”
“No, no! If you feel that, give the sword to me.”
“And what will you do with it?” he smiled. “Whirl it round your head as you walk through the Moscow streets?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do with it,” said Alice. “I’ll return it to you if in five years’ time my prophecy is not fulfilled. The empty case should help you. It will remind you how shocked you were, how unthinkable my suggestion was. Is that a bargain?”
“Yes.”
“The first day you opened your mouth in a Labour meeting you carried that sword and called yourself Shawcross of Peterloo. I don’t care tuppence about the prosperity of the Labour Party, but I do care about men like you and my father remembering the dreams of their youth.”
“What do you know about my dreams?” he asked. “You know only my words. My words have been for others. Am I not allowed a dream for myself?”
She dismissed the whole thing with a laugh. “Ah, well,” she said, “so long as you don’t dream that the moon is made of green cheese and the earth of beautiful Tories.”
*
Chesser drove her home, and she took the sabre with her. She had promised to travel with Hamer the next day to Baildon. The House was up for the Christmas recess. She would spend a week with him, then pay a farewell visit to Arnold before returning to London to complete her arrangements for travelling to Moscow.
Alice had never before been in Bradford, and for her it was a week of pilgrimage. From Pen and Arnold, from Charles and from Lizzie Lightowler she had heard so much of the place that her mind was full of things she wanted to do and see. Harner was delighted to use this means of keeping her mind off her loss. “I had never before realized that Bradford was a shrine,” he laughed, as they stood looking at the ugly old house in Thursley Road where Pen had been born and Arnold had lodged; at Lizzie’s old home in Ackroyd Park; at The Hut itself, near the site of Arnold’s shack.
“I wish you had left it,” she said. “You could have built your house alongside of it, instead of over it.”
“Why,” he teased her, “you’re a sentimentalist, after all. And what a text, if I wanted to give you another sermon. I thought you were all for the clean sweep and the brand new building?”
They were walking in the copse of conifers that had sprung up on the old intake field. A cold blue winter sky was above them. The air had a nip and northern tang.
“You’ve got me there,” Alice said. “I admit the debating-point, but spare me the sermon. Hallo! Here’s quite a little house.”
The path had led them to the corner of the small estate. The little house was at its end. Hamer took her arm and stayed her. From twenty yards away they looked at the little house. “That is it,” he said.
“You kept it, after all?”
He nodded. He was too full of memories to speak. As a rule, he avoided the little house. In these days he did not care to see it. Now his mind rushed back to embrace it as it had been: when it stood in the bleak corner of the field, with none of these trees to hide it, with the blackened stone wall standing between it and the bare noble sweep of the moor; the wall over which he and Arnold had often climbed together; over which he and Ann had come to on their wedding-night, and Jimmy Newboult had clambered the next day with his fantastic wedding-present. That was the day when he had begun to write his first book. So many first things were bound up with this sorry little shack mouldering under the trees at the end of the path: his first parliamentary campaign, his first book, his first night with Ann. Now its roof was matted with a thick brown carpet of needles from the trees, a few of its boards were falling askew, and one of the windowpanes was broken. Even from where they stood, they could see that the woodwork was green and mildewed from the cloistering of the trees and the lack of paint.
“I had almost forgotten it was still there,” he said at last.
Alice seemed to be as moved as he was. “So that was Father’s little place,” she said. “He sometimes talks about it as though it were the loveliest thing.”
Yes, no doubt Arnold, too, had been happy here, because here Arnold too had been young.
“You ought to have it put in order,’ she said.
“No, no!” he answered almost testily. “Leave it as it is. It’ll last my time, and then it won’t matter to anyone. Let us see if we can get in.”
A piece of string was all that secured the door of this shrine. Inside, the place smelt fusty. A gardener had left a few tools propped against the wall: a rake, a spade, a hoe. Festoons of bast were hung on nails among the festoons of cobwebs. A lot of junk had been thrown in and littered the place: old bottles and newspapers and empty cans. The poor furniture had never been shifted. It seemed to Hamer incredible that this draughty hut – so small, it appeared now, that he might by stretching out his arms span it from wall to wall: it seemed incredible that this had ever for a moment been a place of illumination and beauty. The very bed was still there, tumbling to pieces, with a great loose load of hay thrown upon it, and he started in revulsion from the sight of that desecration. This scarred and dirty piece of deal was the table at which he had sat to write his proud defiance of Buck Lostwithiel. This was the chair; those were the shelves on which he had accumulated his books. “Sweetness and light, little one. Sweetness and light.” He stared at the rusty, oozy tins of weed-killer and insecticide that cluttered them now. Once the place had been clean, bracing and defiant, wide open to the light and the wind. Now he could hear the faint scratch of drooping branches on the roof, and feel the crapulous encroachment of mouldering time.
It was unbearable. “Let’s go back,” he said. “Tea will be ready.”
But Alice was fiddling about, lifting this and that, and now she pulled out the table drawer. She picked things from it fastidiously and laid them one by one on the table: pens and pencils, damp papers holding together with blue-grey clots of mildew, and presently a roll of cuttings tied with tape. She pulled out the knot, but the cylinder of paper did not unroll, so long it had been imprisoned there. She flattened it out with her hand, cutting after cutting concerning the career of Hamer Shawcross, old Ellen’s hoard that she had given to the infant Charles. In the middle of the roll was a sheet of foolscap paper, and written in pencil on it was the heading, “My Father, Hamer Shawcross, M.P.”
Alice placed weights to hold the roll open, and in the dark green obscurity they stood side by side looking as it were down a tunnel of years at this pathetic piece of salvage. She did not know, as he knew, what occasion had called it into being. He remembered how he had come home from Bradford, burning with anger against Ann, and had picked up the lamp standing in the hall to light him to their room. She was in tears, and had reached out her white arms to him, and he had taken his night-clothes and left her. He slept in Charles’s room, and in the morning he found the boy writing by candlelight. This paper, that had lain here rotting through the years, was what Charles had written. He remembered his annoyance: he had advised the child to find another hero. Well, Charles had done that.
He was beginning to hate this place. It was a charnel-house where too much of his youth was dissolving into mould. “Let’s get back,” he repeated gruffly. “I didn’t know Charles ever used this place.”
And then Alice was crying on his shoulder, crying as if her heart would break. “Look at his writing,” she sobbed. “It hasn’t changed. He still writes like that. Even in his writing he’s remained a child.”
He put his arms round her and comforted her. “Is it so bad, so bad?” he murmured.
She could not answer. She could only go on crying with convulsive gasps that shook her. At last he led her away to his cosy fire, and tea, and calm reassuring talk. But that night, when the weather changed, and a wind arose to lament in the trees about the house, he could not sleep in the room which he had shared with Ann. His mind raced on and on, living again its memories. How much now of life was memory! And how much of memory would for ever be centred on the rude hut, whose door, he remembered, he had left unfastened, straining, as he lay with hot sleepless eyes, to hear its far-off rattle in the wind. And to all the memories gathered there – of Ann and Arnold, of Jimmy and Tom Hannaway, of love and loyalty and ambition – would always now be added this: of Alice crying in his arms for the child who had strayed from her keeping.