Sir Thomas Hannaway knew better than to leave his money in vulnerable places. Early in the Great War he got his fingers into shipping, and took them out, larded with profits, before shipping went to the devil. When the war was over he bought up cotton mills in his native Lancashire, and when the price reached a point of insane inflation Sir Thomas sold out, was over the hills and far away, leaving spinners and weavers and all poor fools who lived merely by working to face the lean gaunt years when Lancashire was for sale.
These, and such like, were his flying piratical ventures. His normal operations were in things that people must have. He never paused to analyze his career. Had he done so, he would have seen that from the beginning he had subconsciously been attracted to that course. Small boys must have white rats. Small householders must buy cabbages and potatoes. People must have clothes on their backs. From these early stages he had gone on to the vast ramifications of Consolidated Public Utilities, and before drawing any new venture within that colossal net Sir Thomas always assured himself that it was concerned with something for which the demand never faltered, be it so humble as a button or so exalted as a ducal domain, ripe for developing as a pleasure park, greyhound racing track and dancing rendezvous. Hamer Shawcross did not know it, but at least one of the great houses of which Lettice Lostwithiel had written in her book – that book which had succeeded beyond her hopes, which the critics said might well become a “little classic” – was now, at Tom’s behest, a stamping-ground for the crowds who rolled up in motor coaches, wearing paper hats; and nightly fireworks dazzled the sky that had been for so long the exclusive canopy of the golden lads and lasses.
All this was fortune, but it was not fame, and Tom had no mind to spend his life in a golden corner. He leapt into the spotlight with the adroitness of which he was a master. It was the year in which his horse Darkie Cheap won the Derby, and as he led the beast in, with all the cameras snapping his rosy beaming face, the great thought sprang to his mind. Inevitably, the question came from the reporter, note-book in hand: “How do you feel, Sir Thomas, on winning this classic event?”
Sir Thomas removed his grey top hat and said reverently: “I am delighted, but no credit is due to me. We must thank this superb animal, this fine jockey, and Almighty God.”
The reporter gasped, and Sir Thomas continued: “For many years it has been my ambition to win this great race, and I have prayed that I might do so. I prayed during the race. God has answered my prayer.”
The praying racehorse owner! God answers an Epsom prayer! Here was meat beyond the usual. But even now Sir Thomas had not done. “I shall express my thanks to God by giving two million pounds to charity!”
There! It was out, and Sir Thomas didn’t know whether to be glad or to damn his folly. It had come over him like an inspiration. He thought of all he had heard about public benefactions, and he could not remember one case of two million pounds being given away in a single fling. More had been given piecemeal, but this gesture of his, he felt, would rock the country.
It did. Sir Thomas sprang to fame overnight. He was besieged by reporters seeking details of his colossal beneficence, and ten thousand charitable institutions, begging societies and widows of clergymen rang him up or wrote asking for an opportunity to heal the sick, redeem the oppressed, or give their sons a last chance in Kenya.
Tom played his publicity well, kept the newspapers guessing for a fortnight; and when he showed his hand it was found that universities and hospitals were the beneficiaries. “Hannaway wings” sprang up about the country, and in common decency a few universities placed caps on Tom’s head, and tricked him out in fancy gowns, and permitted him to call himself, if he wanted to do so, Doctor Hannaway.
It gave him a cachet he felt he had lacked. He had bought it all, cash down over the counter, and so far from being abashed by that, he derived a satisfaction from it. When he opened his new house in Eaton Square, he was able to invite people he had never hoped to meet. Lostwithiel wasn’t there. Tom would have liked him to come, and Lostwithiel himself was in a difficulty, because he was Chancellor of a university that had pocketed close on a quarter of a million of Tom’s money. He accepted the invitation on behalf of himself and Lady Lostwithiel, but on the day of the housewarming he said: “You go, m’dear. Tell the feller I’ve got a cold.”
Tom had not hired footmen for the night. He had footmen of his own; and Hamer Shawcross heard one of them bellowing his name as he reached the head of the staircase. A vast mirror was behind Tom and his Polly as they stood there receiving their guests, and Hamer saw himself looking down upon them, overtopping hugely the fat waddling little woman, who had grown with the passing of the years absurdly like Victoria Regina in her last phase, and the rosy robin, puff-chested and big-footed, that was Sir Thomas Hannaway. He saw himself, the dark red flower, the jewel of the Order he loved to wear shining under the white butterfly of his bow, the white hair that he wore now affectedly long, the whole impressive broadside of a superb and famous dominating personality. He saw the chattering crowd away beyond Tom and Polly; he felt the surge of more and more people coming up the stair behind him; and he wondered, as he bent low over Polly’s pudgy hand, with the rings cutting into the flesh and the diamonds sparkling like decorations on a little pudding, and as he murmured: “How do, Hannaway? Hope you’ll have many happy years here” – he wondered why on earth he hadn’t stayed at home. There were so few evenings when he could do as he pleased; it would have been agreeable to spend an hour with Ann’s charming old edition of Marcus Aurelius: a wise bird who’d got all this stuff and nonsense properly weighed up for what it was.
There was no need, he reflected, as he passed on, for this footman to be shouting his name to Tom Hannaway. Didn’t they know one another well enough? Tom, there on the landing, had given him a swift vulgar wink, as if to say: “A long way, this, from the dew on the lettuces. Remember?”
He remembered: that little shop in an Ancoats back street, the book propped open on an orange-crate up-ended, that parson’s daughter – what the devil was the girl’s name? – Wilding? Wilberforce? – who had taught him to pronounce the verbs. J’ai, tu as, il a. What a game it had been! What a fight! And now it was all over. He realized with a swift intuition that it was all over. No more splendid fights, no more struggles, no more conquests. He was clogged with all the fame he could hold, as Tom Hannaway was clogged with golden guineas. From the old bone-yard in Ancoats they had set out together, and this was as far as they would come.
“Too many pictures in the society papers, Chief,” Jimmy Newboult had complained; and though he had received the rebuke coldly, he knew there was something in it. He blinked as a photographer’s magnesium bulb flashed in his eyes. The royal garden party at Buckingham Palace; Goodwood; the opera; the opening of the Royal Academy show. He enjoyed it all with the aloof relish of a connoisseur. It didn’t bluff him; he knew it all for what it was; but he enjoyed it none the less. Even tonight, this flashy affair of Tom Hannaway’s. After all, he’d known the man a long time. It would have been curmudgeonly to refuse; and there was something amusing in the spectacle of an Ancoats go-getter with a disintegrating society bowing over his boots. When nothing else was left, there was always the superb irony of life.
Leaning over the balustrade, he saw Lady Lostwithiel coming up the stair, a white-gloved hand holding her skirt clear of her twinkling shoes. He heard her name sung out, and what a name Lostwithiel was! The loveliest name in England, he thought, a name like a trumpet, rallying to a forlorn hope.
“Well, my dear!”
He could say that easily now, and she as easily could smile back at him and lay a hand affectionately on his arm. They passed on together, and if here and there a knowing smile was exchanged, an insinuating wink flashed from eye to eye, that did not disturb them. They were happy and comfortable together: they had come from poles apart to a common ground of humanity.
Presently they found Lizzie Lightowler, sitting alone and neglected under a palm tree. She was very old, no more now than a spectator of life, vast and amorphous, and, Hamer felt with a pang, lonely. Now that Alice and Charles were gone, the house in North Street must be a dull place. But who wasn’t lonely? It was the business of the years to take away bit by bit all that they had given.
The old woman got up tremulously, scattering bag and handkerchief. Hamer recovered them, and gently put her back into her chair. “Well, Liz!” he said. And to Lady Lostwithiel: “You know Mrs. Lightowler? She goes back a long way, don’t you, Liz?”
That was all. They left her nodding and dreaming there, and now her dreams were happy.
“You know,” said Lady Lostwithiel, “she doesn’t really go back much farther than I do myself.”
“Exactly one day.”
He remembered precisely. He had come home from his travels and gone to Bradford to see Arnold. That night he had slept at Lizzie Lightowler’s, and the next day he and Arnold had gone to look at Castle Hereward.
“You were very disdainful that day,” he said. “You shifted my hat from in front of your pony’s feet as though it would soil the brute.”
“I may have looked disdainful,” she laughed, “but I was terrified. I was not used to great hulking men rising out of the ground, lifting up gamekeepers as if they were dolls, and dipping their heads in the mire. Oh, yes! You had me trembling from the first. And that shout you let out: Sic semper tyrannis! That was what the assassin shouted as he shot Lincoln. Fortunately, I’d just been reading about it, or I shouldn’t have known what on earth you meant. They didn’t educate us gels.”
They went in to supper, and in the crush at the door brushed shoulders with Fuentavera. He was quickly swept apart from them, but as he went he turned his head to say: “Ah, dear Lady Lostwithiel, let me be the first to commiserate with you.”
“That man has a genius for smelling out disaster,” she said. “I didn’t think it was known, but Castle Hereward’s in the market.”
Hamer felt as though he had been struck a bitter personal blow. Castle Hereward, the house which had been the incarnation of all he had sworn to destroy; Castle Hereward, where he had been but a few months ago a guest, courted and played up to; Castle Hereward that, in one form or another, had stood with its feet dug into the Yorkshire soil since before the Normans came: Castle Hereward was in the market. If she had said England was in the market, he could hardly have been more shocked.
“But how on earth—?” he began.
She smiled, and seemed little disturbed. “We shan’t starve, you know,” she said. “It’s not so terrible as that. Belgrave Square isn’t so bad, and there’s quite a pleasant dower house that we shall keep at Castle Hereward. That is, if we don’t have to keep the lot, whether we want it or not. It’s not so easy in these days to sell a place like that. There don’t seem to be even rich Americans any more.”
“I can’t believe it!” he protested. “It seems monstrous.”
She laughed outright at his solemn face. “We should have been a bit more patriotic,” she said. “But Lostwithiel got very nervous about the state of England under a Labour government. When you first came in – in 1924 – he began to shift investments to America. Well,” she shrugged, “you know what happened to investments in America.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, but she rallied him gaily. “Why should you be? Under your Labour government unemployment pay is being cut down: the only income of people with a few shillings a week. You’re not going to weep, are you, because Lostwithiel’s dole is cut? I’m not weeping. For all the practical and reasonable purposes of life, this makes no difference to us whatever. Perhaps, even, it relieves us of a burden.”
They had moved to a quiet corner of the room, and he stood there stock-still at her side, gazing before him. Then he pushed the drooping hair back from his forehead and said: “Rich and poor alike, the knife is at our throats. Rich and poor alike, we shall have to make a stand. We are spending more than we earn, and I tremble to think what the consequences of that will be on our credit abroad if it goes on much longer.”
“My dear,” she said, “you know I’m a non-political woman. You must not make speeches to me. But if your little speech means that you think party strife is folly, do, for God’s sake, make it in the proper quarter.”
*
He had not heart for lingering at Tom Hannaway’s jamboree. He went home early, profoundly depressed. It was a late summer night in 1931. London lay under the soft bloomy dark that he had come to love. The trees were full-leafed against the violet shining of the lamps, and, as he glanced through the window of the car, everything looked normal, solid and reassuring. But he knew that all this was only a seeming, a crust of prosperity spread upon chaos.
All his life long he had preached redemption through the Labour Party; and he had now to face the fact that under the government of the party the country was wallowing, like a ship without a rudder, in seas of darkness and disaster. Lady Lostwithiel had had to remind him that, even from the desperately poor, pennies were being retrenched. And he had to face the further fact that what, more than anything else, had moved and disturbed him, was a blow at the citadel which, in his youth, had been for him the lair and covert of evil.
In Piccadilly he stopped the car so that he might walk the rest of the way home. He put back his shoulders and drew the air gratefully into his lungs. He thought of the days when he and Tom Hannaway would run a mile before breakfast. Tom looked now as if a hundred yards sprint would make him drop down dead. Well, Tom had got what he wanted out of life. Have I? Have I? he asked himself. And he knew that he had. Clear of all evasion and self-deceiving, he knew that what he had wanted was nothing more than the fame that now was his; and he knew, also, that if the mighty upheaval which he sensed approaching should offer him the alternatives of going down into oblivion or riding the storm under the victors’ banners, he would be found confront-ing the comrades of a lifetime, throwing all the resources of his heart and mind into destroying the building which he and they together, brick by brick and painful course by course, had raised from nothing to be the pedestal from which he now must leap.
*
He turned into Half Moon Street, pondering Lettice Lostwithiel’s remark: “For God’s sake, make it in the proper quarter,” when he saw Arnold Ryerson coming, on the other side of the road, from the direction of his house. Arnold was walking head down, sunk in thought, and he started when Hamer, crossing the street swiftly, accosted him: “Well, Arnold!”
They stood confronted for a moment, ill-assorted: Arnold, wearing an old alpaca jacket against the summer warmth and with a cap on his head, shortish, stout and uneasy; Hamer tall and debonair, his light open overcoat showing the splendour of his raiment. Then their hands met, and for a long time remained warmly clasped.
“I hope you’ve got an hour to spare, Arnold,” Hamer said. “Come along home with me.”
Arnold swung round, and they walked up the road together. “I’ve just come from your place,” Arnold said. “I’m in London on a bit of business, and I find it weary, now Alice is gone. Old Lizzie Lightowler is out, too. I went round there.”
“Shame on you,” Hamer laughed. “Am I always to be your last option?”
“Well—” said Arnold; and Hamer read a world of meaning into the grudging monosyllable. He put Arnold into the study while he went upstairs. He came back, having shed his coat and the jewel of the Order, wearing a black silk dressing-gown. “I’ve just been visiting an old friend of yours, Arnold – Tom Hannaway.”
Arnold, with a match at his pipe, grunted: “Him! D’you know what I think, Hamer? A chap that can give away two millions without feeling it ought not to be honoured: he ought to be impeached.”
Hamer laughed. “Poor Tom! I wonder what he’d say if he knew that you despised him and I pitied him?”
“I don’t care what he’d say,” said Arnold. “There’s too much else to think about. What the hell is going to happen to this country, Hamer? You ought to know. Down in the Rhondda they’re desperate, going Bolshie hand-over-fist. I reckon any Communist candidate down there today could rake in ten thousand votes. That’s something to make you think, lad. If that sort of thing goes on, it may do more to break down the Labour Party than anything the Liberals and Tories have ever done between ’em.”
“The Labour Party will break down, anyway,” said Hamer. “The Labour Party, Arnold, is finished. At least for a long time to come. It may have a resurrection, but I don’t imagine that you and I are going to live to see it.”
Arnold looked at him, dumfounded. “No Labour Party! Then what in hell are we going to live for, Hamer – you and I? Why, good God, lad, we made it. It’s been the breath of our beings.”
It was a cry from the heart. There would be many such. Hamer had no illusions on that score. This old friend was a touchstone of the millions like him: the men who had fought without heeding the wounds, laboured without counting the cost. In Arnold’s anguished face he saw prefigured all the pain and sorrow, the bitterness and disillusion, that would soon be let loose.
“The party will not be killed,” he explained carefully. “All I am saying is that we cannot expect it to survive in its present strength. We made a force of it, Arnold, a tremendous force. Well, it will remain a living thing, a thing that will continue to demand all we can give it, but as an individual force it will go, as the Liberal Party will go. There is enormous virtue in the Labour Party, and that virtue must for the time being forget its own private demands and merge itself into the general effort of the country. You ask me what is going to happen to the country. Well, that is going to happen. Isn’t that something to stir the heart? Isn’t it a great thing to be able to say that this force, which you and I, and Pen and Ann, helped to create—”
Arnold broke in brusquely: “For God’s sake! You needn’t go on. Don’t practise out election speeches on me. Before I’d sign myself ‘National Labour,’ or whatever fancy name you invent, I’d cut my throat. And I’d think that a better action than to cut the throat of my life-long principles.”
This was deadlock. Looking at Arnold’s worn heavy face, tired with the work and lined with the sorrows of a lifetime, and acutely disturbed by what he had just heard, Hamer knew better than to go on. And he knew that through Arnold’s lips he had listened to the answer that most of his colleagues in the Government, most of the men and women in the Party, would make when his scheme was propounded. There were some he felt he could count on. He was pretty sure that Ramsay MacDonald would go his way; probably Philip Snowden, possibly one or two others. But Arnold Ryerson had answered uncompromisingly for most of them: “I’d rather cut my throat.”
A heavy silence fell between them. Suddenly, they were worlds apart. This quietly gorgeous room, this elegant little clock that tinkled through the warm summer air the news that it was eleven o’clock, the deep carpets and the splendid curtains, seemed active agents, the summary of all that had grown bit by bit into the chasm that could not be leaped, the gulf that separated the two who long ago had walked so closely side by side.
It was Arnold who broke the silence. His pipe had gone cold. He got up and knocked out the dottle against the bars of the empty grate. Then he turned to Hamer, sitting there on one of the red couches. “Well, lad,” he said, and Hamer was keenly moved to hear the old familiar appellation. “Well, lad, there’s not overmuch time left for either of us. I’m hard on seventy, and you’re not all that younger. I suppose I’ve got set in my ways. I’m an old dog and can’t learn new tricks. Alice’d like me to go Bolshie, and you’d like me to go summat pretty near Tory. Well” – and with him, as it had done with Pen in moments of stress, the old Northern accent came out: O Gordon! O Birley! and tough, tackling, Mrs. Ryerson!”Ah’m not saying there’s virtue in bein’ an old stick-in-t’muck, but that’s how Ah’m made. Such wits as God gave men made me believe t’Labour Party were t’reight party for me. If the earth were crumblin’ Ah’d still think as our Party were best to stop t’rot. Maybe tha’s been converted, lad. But, wi’ me, Ah wouldn’t be a convert. Ah’d be a renegade. An’ if Ah were that, Ah couldn’t think on Pen again.’”
Arnold paused, his voice caught on a tremble at Pen’s name. He cleared his throat and went on: “Pen were all reight. They starved her an’ drowned her an’ blinded her, but she were Pen all t’time. They couldn’t take an inch off the height of her. And, with apologies to you, lad, when it comes to a question like this, Ah’d rather follow Pen than follow thee. An’ Ah know what road Pen’d take now. So that’s my road, too.”
He held out his large, fleshy, blunt-nailed hand, the hand that had knocked together Hamer’s first bookcases, that had rummaged with his for twopenny bargains in Suddaby’s basement. “So Ah reckon it’s good-bye, lad.”
Hamer got up. They stood confronted for a moment, their hands, clasped. They were both in the grip of a deep emotion. Hamer said: “Arnold, I’d like to tell you something that Ann once said about you. She said that for a man like you even defeat would have the quality of victory.”
“Ann were a good lass,” said Arnold simply. “An’ Ah’ll tell you summat as Pen said: ‘Tha’s never beaten so long as tha goes on fightin’.’”
He picked up the cap he had thrown on a table, and moved towards the door. They did not speak again till they stood at the front gate. Then once more their hands met and Hamer said: “Well, good night, Arnold.”
Arnold said; “Good-bye.”
Hamer stood at the gate, watching the heavy ageing figure move slowly away. He hoped that Arnold would turn, wave, shout something; but Arnold plodded on towards Piccadilly without once looking back.
As soon as Arnold was out of sight Hamer went back to his study and called Pendleton. “Bring me some coffee, and go to bed.” He sat down at once at his desk, lit a pipe, and began to write: “Some immediate considerations that call for the formation of a National Government.” Early in the morning he hurried round to 10 Downing Street. Two months later, it was all over.
*
It was all over with a completeness, a finality, that numbed even the mind which, more than any other, had set the thing in motion. He had once said to Jimmy Newboult that the successful politician must appeal to passion, panic and prejudice; and never had this been done as it was done now. Never before had he fought so strange a fight as this, speaking from Tory platforms decorated with the Union Jack, supported by the Party he had spent life in opposing, bitterly denounced by the comrades of half a century, who in blind confusion, baffled, puzzled, strove in the dark waters into which Shawcross and MacDonald had thrown them.
And even as they strove there, knowing that they were doomed, they must listen to the clamour of denouncing voices, telling them that it was they who had mutinied, they who had scuttled the ship, they who had betrayed the country. That was the poignant, the almost bestial, element of the whole matter: those who knew they must sink, and those few leaders who had opportunely leapt to the safety of the grand new “National” ship, shook their fists at one another, abused and spat on one another: this band of brothers, these co-builders of the Party of comradeship.
At all costs, be National. That was the advice of Hamer Shawcross, making his last urgent campaign up and down the country. If you are asked to choose between a National Tory and one of your old comrades, a man who has given you all he ever had to give, then vote for the Tory if that Labour man refuses to call himself National Labour. Such virtue in a name!
Shawcross was too great a man now to be allowed to fight quietly in his own corner. His reputation was powerful: he must be used to the last ounce of energy. He who remembered the small beginnings: the soap-box and the street corners, the sparse meetings in little parish halls: now assisted in the splendidly theatrical obsequies of the end. Night after night found him in the roar and turmoil of crowded meetings: the shuddering organ – “Land of Hope and Glory,” the tempestuous thousands, dimly seen through the haze of their smoking; the rostrum trimmed in red, white and blue; the microphone, the great trumpets of the amplifiers hanging in the blue smoke like metal lilies in a tropical haze.
Ah, my friends! It’s all glory and little hope now; but I remember the time when it was all hope, and glory seemed far away. You didn’t shout then, for us or against us. You left us to do the donkey work, to sweat our souls out: me and Ann, Pen and Arnold, all the pioneers, all the comrades who cut through the undergrowth, and made the road, and built the blockhouses. You cheering, emotional, excited fools. You rallied to us at last, but even then not enough of you. You didn’t give us the numbers or the passion that we wanted. And so here we are tonight to hand over our swords to the conquerors.
So he might have spoken, as the crowds roared when he walked on to the platform: tall, stern, tired-looking, not giving them a smile, the famous man with the crimson flower on his coat. But he did not speak like that. For the last time the sword of Peterloo gave him matter for oratory. He told of its inheritance and of its influence in his life. “I was born a Labour man, my friends, before the Labour Party was born, I have lived a Labour man, and I shall die a Labour man. Would I use my sword to kill the thing I love because I, as much as any man, made it? Would I choke the tree round which I have twined the branch of my power and the tendrils of my affection – even of my love – all the days of my life? God forbid!
“What then am I doing? Let me tell you, my friends. There are three houses on the edge of a forest. In each live people with their own concerns, with their own views of how their common affairs should be conducted, ready it may be to oppose one another tooth and nail in this matter or in that, Their interests are not identical, for in the Tory house live the enclosers of much land thereabouts. They have proved in the past a rather rapacious family, and the people in the Labour house have scores to settle with them.
“But the moment to settle scores is not when the forest is on fire. Bend your ears, my friends, to the winds of the world, and you hear the dread crackle of the flames, you hear the crash of forest giants that might have been expected to stand for ever. Thrones and parliaments, currencies and customs, the ancient loyalties and allegiances of common men, are melting in a fiery flux. The world is in the grip of a dissolution the like of which has not been paralleled since Rome herself dissolved. The smell of the smoke is drifting our way; the reek of danger is in our nostrils. Is this the moment for parish pettiness, the moment to do anything but rush out of doors and man the engines, fighting side by side with anyone – let him call himself by what name he may – who will range himself with us in the hope that we may even yet be not too late.
“Ah, my old friends, my old comrades of many a well-fought fight, my heart bleeds and breaks that in this present fight we are not still one in mind and hand. But dawn follows the night, be it still or fiery; and in the calm that will come after this hot roaring we shall find that a long tomorrow stretches before us, with all our old familiar tasks lying ready to hand. I at least shall take them up again, and even now I anticipate with confidence history’s verdict: that the man who helped to save his country was thereby strengthened to the task of saving his Party.”
But he knew that the Party would not be saved; that in his time at any rate it would not recover from the savage wounding blows that he and a few of his colleagues were dealing it; and when, on the morning of October 29, he sat with the newspapers before him at the breakfast table, there was one headline to which his eyes were drawn again and again: “The Cyclone Passes.” “We write,” said the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, “as after the passing of a cyclone, and there is little to record save the survival here and there of a few fragments of the English political scene.”
To all intents and purposes, the Liberal and Labour Parties were destroyed. The Government might as well sit with no Opposition at all. It counted 551 members against 57. Of the 551, 470 were Tories, but they bore the blessed tag of National Conservatives, and so Hamer Shawcross, who had come through safely in St. Swithin’s, could sit down happily with them, for he, too, carried the blessed tag of National Labour.
The man who had loosed the cyclone did not eat. He threw the papers suddenly to the floor, drank a cup of coffee, and went into his study. He stood with his back to the fire, still as a statue, looking down the long perspective of the years, seeing the men and women who had worked with him, admired him; loved him – some of them; made him what he was; and he thought of them torn by this cyclone that had passed, prone like dishevelled corn-stooks that have been ravaged by a gale. He knew that most of them would never be erect again. Their political lives were finished.
Well, so was his own. He had known that, all through the fight. He had gone, when it opened, to St. Swithin’s. St. Swithin’s was dear to his heart. He said so, and this was one of the things he meant. There were not many politicians who, all through their careers, had represented but one constituency, who could go back, as he now went back, an old man, to open the last fight on the scene of the first.
It was dear to his heart, but he was glad that the call to a wider field made it unnecessary to linger there. Too many ghosts for his comfort walked the streets of St. Swithin’s. “This for me, my friends, is holy ground. My dear wife and my dear comrades here supported me and guided me when many of you who face me tonight were in your cradles, like the party we then were nursing and nourishing.”
He meant that, too. The ground of St. Swithin’s was as full of memories as if each paving-stone were the lid of a tomb, inscribed to some dead occasion of his youth. And, knowing that this was the last of all the occasions, he was anxious to get it over, to quit the spot where at every turn he was outfaced by the most disquieting ghost of all: the fiery boy who had believed in perfectability, in a loftier race, the light of knowledge, the flame of freedom, Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.
The rigid figure before the fireplace stirred and sighed. He walked to his desk and took up his pen. “Dear Ramsay: My congratulations on your stirring personal victory in Seaham, and on the stirring victory throughout the country as a whole. While the fight was in progress I did not wish to trouble you with a matter which is the reason for this present letter. When you are called upon to form your new Cabinet, do not consider me eligible for any office. Perhaps there will be other ways – perhaps there will be some other sphere – in which I can serve the Party and the country; but I have made up my mind not to accept office again.”
He felt as though, by the mere writing of the letter, he had slipped the arduous harness of a lifetime. Perhaps there will be some other sphere... He went back to the fire, and stood pondering between the familiar comfortable red couches.
*
Pendleton tapped on the door. “Are you able to see Mr. Newboult, sir?”
“Bring him in.”
Another of the ghosts of St. Swithin’s. The pale, thin, ageing ghost of a red-headed young fanatic, kneeling in a room in Bradford. “Now I am your man.”
“Well, Jimmy—”
Jimmy’s eyes were tired. He had fought and lost. He was one of the multitude for whom Arnold Ryerson had spoken: “I’d rather cut my throat.” His long sandy jaws were twitching with emotion. He kept his fists clenched and his arms straight down his sides, ignoring the hand that Hamer held out as he advanced to meet him at the door. Hamer took the stiff obstinate arm and led Jimmy to a couch. “Sit down,” he said. “It’s very early. Have you had breakfast? Shall I get you something?”
Jimmy did not sit down, and he shook his head.
“Not even some coffee?”
Jimmy did not even bother to shake his head. He stood, so clearly fighting back tears that Hamer turned away his face. “At least, put on your pipe, Jimmy,” he said.
Jimmy did not light his pipe. It was evidently all he could do merely to stand there, struggling with his feelings. His pale eyes were misty with pain. His fair aggressive eyebrows jutted out in perplexity and dismay. At last he said: “Why did you do it? If it had to be done, why did you do it?”
“If it had to be done, Jimmy,” Hamer said gently, “why should I not do it? It was necessary.”
“And necessity knows no law,” Jimmy bitterly replied, clinging to a cliché to the last.
“Necessity is law,” said Hamer. “There is no other law.”
That was too much for Jimmy Newboult. “Christ Almighty!” he suddenly burst out. “You stand there uttering clever sayings when England from top to bottom is littered with the men and women you have slain! Yes, slain! Aren’t they dead when all they stood for is dead? Does a man go on living when his hope is blown out, and his faith is betrayed, and every principle he ever worked for is trodden in the mud by the very boots he would have blacked, the very feet he would have kissed? Why, by Christ, man, there was a time when I worshipped you, and up to the last I admired and respected you. I’d have run to the ends of the earth at your bidding. And now the sight of you makes me sick. I wouldn’t want an honest man to see me in your company.”
“I’m sorry, Jimmy.”
“Sorry! What have you got to be sorry about? You’ve won, haven’t you? You’ve got what you wanted. And now there’s no end to what you can have. The enemy pays high for traitors.”
He stood trembling whitely for a moment, his fists clenching and unclenching; and then suddenly he sat down, almost collapsed, upon the couch and buried his face in his hands. His shoulders heaved. “There’s nothing left,” he said in a stifled voice. “The beauty and the glory – they are gone.”
The beauty and the glory. Hamer had never expected to hear such words from Jimmy Newboult. They moved him as he had not thought anything could move him now. This was Jimmy’s youth breaking up through the crust the years had laid upon him. This was not the shabby man, trembling 0n the couch: this was the boy in his pride, bearing the sword, announcing the liberator.
Hamer looked down for a moment at the broken figure, abandoned there amid the shards of hope; then he laid his hand lightly on Jimmy’s shoulder. At the touch, Jimmy winced like a galled horse and leapt to his feet. “Don’t do that!” he shouted. “You touched me on the shoulder once, and I’d have followed you to kingdom come. And now, by Christ, I find I was following a bloody Judas. You’re a traitor to the men and women who made you. They won’t even want to tell you that. They’ll shun you like poison. So I’m doing it for them. You’ve sold us all. You’ve betrayed us.”
Jimmy’s voice had risen to a harsh excited pitch. He stopped, and stood there shaking; then said in flat tones: “That’s all.” He kept his pale eyes lowered. He did not look at Hamer again, but turned mechanically and went out of the room. Hamer remained with his chin sunk upon his chest, his hands gripping one another behind his back. “That’s all.” Well, he thought grimly, it was enough. He wondered what Jimmy really knew about the state of the world, on what basis of evidence he, and those for whom he spoke, imagined that the Labour Party had any effective medicine for the convulsive fits and burning fevers that were shaking mankind to the depths. For himself, he had no illusions that a Government calling itself National would be in much better case. His profound knowledge of foreign affairs was like a delicate finger on the pulse of the world, and he didn’t like the tremulous message he received. He was aware of a vast Tory jubilation up and down the country. Well, that was a buzzing of gnats that would die out when the cold winds blew. He looked into the future, and he was sure they would blow. Let the gnats dance and ululate! They would soon change their tune and their measure. The fact was, he told himself frankly, that he had lost faith in anything that could be done by those who called themselves statesmen, to whatever party they might be attached. He asked himself bitterly whether statesmen might not be the true pests and cancers of human society. They had controlled the affairs of the world for centuries, and the affairs of the world seemed to him now beyond any control at all, He could not think of any matter of statecraft that was not conducted with more complication, less honour and simplicity, than would go to such a matter between a few private human beings. It looked as though the time was coming when mankind would have to devise sharper and more stringent means of controlling those who conducted its business.
He raised his head and glanced across the room at the portrait of Ann by Axel Horst. “Love one another and leave one another alone,” Ann had said. Was that, too, a dream, like all the rest? Where now, my friend, are our dreams?
He sealed the letter to MacDonald and struck his bell sharply. “Take this to the post at once,” he said to Pendleton.
*
Now a man could rest a little. Now a man could look about him, and think, and read, and not be always worried by the thought: So much to do! True, there was still St. Swithin’s to be represented in the House, but after such years as he had lived that was a little thing, and even that would not be there to worry him much longer. He felt like a man taking a holiday in an Indian summer. There were days when he did not go to the House at all, but gave himself up to the joys of such gorgeous freedom as he had not for years experienced. He would linger late over breakfast, spend the morning reading and writing in his study, and get Chesser to run him to some inn in the Chilterns for lunch. Then he would walk his eight or ten miles in the crisp winter weather, rejoicing to find his body still supple and responsive. The car would pick him up at some prearranged spot, and he would be home in time to bath and change, eat his dinner and go to theatre or opera. And, also, he had time now to feel lonely, and therefore he saw more of Lizzie Lightowler than he had done for a long time. The old lady was no companion for country walks, but they ate many a meal together, and for her sake he endured much in the theatres. She had a great taste for light farces, and would sit throughout a whole play with her loose amorphous body shaking with silent laughter. It was a tribulation to her, this body. All the faculties within it remained keen and bright, but they were like blades in gelatine. Hamer always took her home after the theatre, and sometimes went in for a bite and a chat in the house that was so closely knit up with Ann and Charles and the old days of hope and striving. It was from this house he had gone out to see Keir Hardie drive up to the Commons in a wagonette; it was to this house he had come as the young member for St. Swithin’s. And now, although St. Swithin’s did not know it, he knew that in a few weeks he would be done with St. Swithin’s for good.
Lizzie liked to fuss him. She had always had someone to fuss till Alice went away, and now she wrapped herself round Hamer. She liked to see him sitting by her fireside smoking one of the good cigars she kept for him, and drinking a glass of the weak toddy that she concocted with whisky, hot water, lemon and sugar.
So they sat one night when that December of 1931 was half-way through. They had dined at a restaurant and then gone to a cheerful play, and when they came out the snow was falling. North Street, so quietly tucked away in the midst of the city’s turmoil, seemed an enchanted place, with the flakes falling quietly through the golden haloes of the lamps. The church roof at the end of the street was a cold even white under the grey of the sky. The roadway was dumb with the snow.
“You go home to bed,” Hamer said to Chesser. “I’ll come along in a taxi.”
Ten minutes later he was cosy beside Lizzie’s fire, with the cigar lit and the toddy in his hand. On the other side of the fireplace she sat stirring the tea in her pot. She liked some “body” in it, she said. Her skirts were drawn back to let the warmth get at her stout old legs. Hamer contemplated her with the warm affection in which there was always a tincture of amusement. The old warhorse! Out to grass at last. He wondered lazily how old she was. She was the youngest, he knew, of a family of sisters – at least ten years younger than Ann’s mother. Lillian was about twenty-six when Ann was born, so that made Lizzie sixteen years or so older than Ann. If Ann were alive, she would be sixty-seven, for she was a year older than he was. And that put Lizzie well on into the eighties.
She poured herself a cup of tea and looked across at him sharply with the eyes that were almost black, and so looked startling under the white mass of her hair. “I still like snow,” she said. “I’m romantic enough for that. It’s a damned nuisance to all concerned, especially if you’ve got leaky boots and an empty belly; but I like it all the same. It snowed the day you and Ann were married. D’you remember that? Yes; the boys were tobogganing down the roadway in Ackroyd Park that night.”
She reached across for the decanter, and poured a little whisky into her tea. “Old Hawley, you know, was a bit tight. When you and Ann went, he wouldn’t come in. He stood in the porch looking at your footsteps in the snow, winding away through the laurel bushes. He kept on saying: ‘Poor li’l footsteps. Poor li’l footsteps. I wonder where they’ll end up, those poor li’l footsteps in the snow?’ I had to take him by the arm and drag him in. ‘I’ll tell you where they’ll end up, old son,’ I said. ‘They’ll end up in the House of Commons. No argument about that.’”
“You were wrong, Liz,” Hamer said. “They’ll end up in the House of Lords.”
One pair of them would, anyway. The other pair had ended long ago in a field with a stream flowing by its edge, and willows by the stream, and fir-covered scented hills rising up over all. There was something to him exquisitely poignant in the thought of Ann’s footsteps starting off on the road of their long adventure through the snow on Lizzie Lightowler’s garden path.
“What’s that?” said Lizzie. “House of Lords? What are you doing: guessing or telling me?”
“I’m telling you,” Hamer answered. “But keep it to yourself. Look out for the New Year honours.”
The old thing got up from her chair and kissed him. “There!” she said. “You’ve gone the whole way. You’ve gone as far as it’s possible to go.”
“That’s exactly how I feel about it myself, Liz, but there’s this: at one time I thought it would be possible to go a long way farther. It was Parnell, wasn’t it, who said no man had the right to fix a boundary to the march of a nation. Well, there’s no need to fix boundaries: they’re there all the time, not only to nations but to all men. Homo sapiens is a circumscribed species, Liz. That’s the chief thing I’ve learned in life. When I was young I thought there were no boundaries to the adventure of the spirit; now I think I was mistaken. Even now, I think perhaps there are no boundaries to the adventure of the brain, but that’s another matter. Television and great air liners, the cinema and all the rest of it are not, to me, more significant than two fleas leaping over one another’s backs. Bunch them all together, and they don’t shift man so far from the tiger as he is shifted by one tear of pity or one sacrifice of love.”
“That’s very far-fetched,” said Lizzie, “but I think I see what you mean.”
Hamer got up. “I have a feeling, my old dear, that before this decade is out a great many people will see what I mean. Well, I must go and look for a taxi.”
Lizzie heaved herself to her feet, finished off her tea at a gulp, and said: “I still keep the rooms, you know, as those two poor young things had them.”
“Alice wouldn’t thank you to call her a poor young thing,” Hamer laughed. “She’s a very self-sufficient young woman.”
“No she’s not. She’s no more self-sufficient than the rest of us. She was as dependent on Charles as Charles was on her. Well, there you are, you see,” she added, throwing open a door on the landing. “That’s their sitting-room: the room you and Ann used to have. They’ve altered it a bit. It’s ready for them when they want it. They’ll come back all right.”
There was something very touching to Hamer in the thought of the old lady in her lonely house, waiting for the return of the young life on which she had always expended herself. He put his arm round her big lax waist, and kissed her. It occurred to him that she had had to make out, in her long life, with very little love. “Look here, Liz,” he said suddenly. “There’s plenty of room in Half Moon Street, you know. Why don’t you come and share with me? Then we could sit up half the night talking and I wouldn’t have to go out into the snow.”
The old black eyes lighted up with pleasure. “My dear, that’s sweet of you. How many people I’ve looked after in my time! And you’re the first who’s offered to look after me. But go on with you now and find your taxi. It’s high time you were in bed. You don’t want an old thing like me about the place.”
“Really, Liz, I’d like it.”
“Well, you can’t have it. No, no. This is the only house I’ve had in London. My roots are down here. Now off you go, and I’ll put a bit of coal on the fire and have a read. I don’t sleep much, you know, nowadays.”
He let himself out. She waited till she heard the front door bang, and hard upon that came deep-throated Big Ben chiming the hour and following that with one sonorous stroke. She had spoken truth: she did not feel a bit like sleep, though her large body was physically tired. She dragged it back to Charle’s and Alice’s sitting-room, and wandered about there heavily, touching this and that. “The dear children,” she murmured. “The dear children. I must be here when they come back.”
*
Liz, who had arranged so much in her time, could not arrange that. As it happened, that night out with Hamer was the last night out they were to have together. She rang him up on the first of January and congratulated him on his viscountcy, then made public. “It’s a terrible thing you’ve done to Alice,” she wheezed into the telephone. “Charles will be the second viscount, and Alice will be a viscountess. She’ll never forgive you.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Hamer laughed back “She’s been in Russia a long time now. That’s a pretty good cure for Bolshevist notions. And what’s the matter with you, Liz? You sound like a leaky bellows.”
“Well, I’m in bed, you know. The doctor’s keeping me here. Bronchitis, or something, I suppose. He doesn’t say much.”
“Now that’s a plague, old dear. I was going to take you out tonight. We ought to celebrate the hop into Debrett.”
“I’m terribly sorry. Get someone else. It’s high time you did: someone nice, and ten years younger than yourself. You ought to have married again long ago. You can’t conceive how thrilling and vital you look.”
“Fie, Liz! I had no idea you were such a wicked old woman.” He could imagine the humorous sparks crackling in her old black eyes. “No, no. It’s you or no one. On an occasion like this I realize I’m a pretty lonely man.”
“Well, come and see me, then, if it’s as bad as that. I feel exceedingly reminiscent. And I don’t have a viscount to talk to every day of my life.”
He put down the instrument, smiling. But there was nothing to smile about when he got to North Street that night. Lizzie’s maid said the doctor was with her, and Hamer waited in the warm little sitting-room where, of late, they had had so many homely talks. Presently the doctor came in: a young man, looking very serious and worried. He knew at once who this tall impressive white-haired man was who got up at his entrance, and he had evidently read the day’s newspapers. “Mrs. Lightowler is gravely ill, my lord,” he said.
“Not too ill for me to see her, I hope?”
“I am afraid so. She is in a very high feverish state. I – I’m afraid of pneumonia.”
Hamer was shocked. He looked at the young man before him, and suddenly his mind went back to a night long ago: a stifling summer night when he and Arnold Ryerson, waiting in the Cardiff Infirmary, met Dai Richards. Dai, then, was no older than this young man, but he had that about him which cheered them both. The young Westminster doctor did not look like Dai Richards. Hamer guessed that this was one of his earliest cases, and that he was terribly perturbed at the thought of a patient dying. “Sit down, Doctor,” he said. “I suppose you’re arranging about a nurse to come in tonight?”
“Yes. I shall do that at once. I shall telephone from here.”
“Mrs. Lightowler is a sort of relative of mine, you know. I married her niece. I’m naturally anxious that everything should be done. Would you think me very interfering if I suggested calling in my own doctor?”
The young man’s face lightened. “Frankly, sir, I’d welcome that,” he said.
“Very well. When you’ve telephoned for the nurse, I’ll ring him up: Sir Bassett Milnes.”
The young man looked even more relieved. Clearly, he would be delighted to shelter under the shadow of Sir Bassett Milnes.
Hamer called in the maid-servant, a young thing devoted to Lizzie, but not, he imagined, a person to manage the house now. He told her how ill Lizzie was. “You’re going to have a very busy time, I’m afraid. Cooking for the nurse, and one thing and another. There may have to be a day nurse and a night nurse. I think it would be a good thing if you had some help, don’t you, my dear?”
And the little maid, who would have hated to be told “I’m sending someone round to run this show,” was only too glad to have someone to help her. Hamer rang up his house. “Pendleton, Mrs. Lightowler is very seriously ill. You and Mrs. Pendleton pack your things and get Chesser to bring you along here. Pack a bag for me, too. Leave it on the way at my club, and tell them to have a room for me tonight. I’ll stay there as long as you have to be here.”
Pendleton and his wife arrived within the hour, and soon afterwards Sir Bassett Milnes came, and went with the young doctor into Lizzie’s room. While they were there, the nurse arrived, and then Hamer felt that he had done all he could. The organizing side of his brain switched off, and he sat by the fire, waiting for the doctors and thinking of poor Liz. Twelve hours ago she had been rallying him gaily. Now... He heard the doctors coming out. Sir Bassett Milnes wore his famous beaming smile. You could never read from his face whether he was going to sentence you to death or send you away rejoicing. “Pretty bad, pretty bad,” he said. “Oh, no, you can’t see her. Oh, dear, no. Well, Dr. Musson, we meet here tomorrow at nine-thirty, eh? Good night, Shawcross. Oh, by the way, congratulations.”
“Congratulations?” Hamer asked blankly.
“Good God, man, you haven’t forgotten you’re a peer?”
For a moment he genuinely had. While waiting for them, he had been so far from Debrett. He had been an arrogant unlicked young giant, just arrived in Bradford, just meeting Mrs. Lightowler, so formidable, it seemed to him, so vital, strong and full of purpose. She had given him so much, and he had repaid so little. One was late in realizing such things.
“Oh, thank you, Milnes, thank you,” he said; and the young doctor stood diffidently in the background, envying the great ones of the earth who could look on death and smile, who could wake up and find themselves translated mysteriously from commoner to noble. Hamer ran down the stairs and got into the car as into a refuge. Congratulations! Ann and Pen dead, Lizzie dying, Arnold estranged. Alice miles away in body and spirit, and Charles God knows where. Congratulations!
*
He didn’t see Liz again. He saw the coffin sliding slowly on the rollers towards the big metal door inscribed “Mors Janua Vitae.” He saw the doors open, the coffin disappear, the doors close. His heart was uncomforted. The gaping doors seemed like the maw of death itself, visibly opening and swallowing its prey. His last memory of Ann, he felt, would be tenderer. “Into the breast that gave the rose.” Old Horst had quoted that. Somehow, though all that was Ann would long ago have disintegrated and decayed, he could think of her as lying at peace beside the willows, as he would never be able to think of Liz at peace after this fiery end.
She had been lonely at the last. Only a scattered handful of people attended at the crematorium. As Hamer came out of the church into the bleak January afternoon, he saw ahead of him Arnold Ryerson making off swiftly, as though he did not wish to be overtaken. Hamer had not seen him in the church. He must have come in late, and sat at the back, and gone out quickly.
Hamer let him go, slackening his own pace till Arnold’s black overcoat and bowler hat were swallowed up in the raw mist of a day that was ending without having seen the sun. Hamer could not remember the first time he had seen Arnold Ryerson. The earnest boy, a little older than himself, seemed always to have been there in those earliest years to which his mind could go back: the years of Ellen and Gordon, and the chill grey Ancoats streets, and the happy domestic life behind the red serge curtains, by the fireside, with sausages down to door and window. But if he could not recreate the moment of Arnold’s coming upon the stage, he knew in his bones that he had witnessed his going off. The curtains of mist that had fallen silently behind him would not rise again. And with the going of Arnold it seemed as if so much of himself was gone that for a moment he was tempted to run, and call, and postpone a moment so heavily charged with consequence. But he checked the gesture, recognized the futility of the impulse. He looked around for Chesser, and was glad that Mr. and Mrs. Pendleton would be back in Half Moon Street. It looked like being a filthy night. He would spend it at his own fireside. He felt very lonely, and as the car slid away from the crematorium he thought: “Good-bye, Liz. I shall miss you, old dear.”