It seemed a very strange thing to the Viscount Shawcross to be up at half-past five on a dull May morning. But a great many strange things had been happening of late. A King had died, and another King had reigned for a little while and then put by the crown, and £1,400,000,000 were to be spent on armaments by Great Britain, and another King had taken up the crown his brother had laid down, and this morning, May 13, 1937, would see his coronation.
It wasn’t a nice morning for a man getting on for seventy-three to be up at half-past five. Hamer pulled aside the curtain and looked Half Moon Street in its unpleasant face: cold, raw, misty. If so much as a gleam of colour came through before the day was out the papers would talk about royal weather. But it wasn’t: not a bit of it.
He turned from the window and went into the bathroom. When he came back, Pendleton was reverently laying out upon the bed the Viscount’s robe of red velvet and ermine. The coronet reposed on the tumbled pillow.
“Have I got to wear these things to breakfast?” Hamer grumbled.
“I think it would be advisable, my lord. There will not be much time afterwards.”
With Pendleton’s assistance Hamer arrayed himself, tucked the coronet under his arm, and went downstairs. The fire was lit and the lights were on. It was a cold and miserable six o’clock.
At half-past six Pendleton came in with a linen bag, fastened at the neck with a draw-string. “Mrs. Pendleton thought, sir, you could conceal this by pinning it inside your robe. Coffee and sandwiches, sir.”
Hamer pulled the string and peeped into the bag at the thermos flask and the parcel of sandwiches. He roared with laughter. It tickled his humour to be going to a coronation like a boy to a picnic with his packet of sandwiches. He would sit amid the splendour of Westminster’s crumbling stone, amid the tiaras and coronets, gold sticks, tabards, the aigrettes springing from jewelled turbans, the admirals and the generals, the Lord High Chancellor and the coped ecclesiastics, under the very shadow of the throne itself, and he would feel Mrs. Pendleton’s good hot coffee warming his heart.
Pendleton produced a safety-pin and pinned the bag in place. “Thank Mrs. Pendleton,” said Hamer. “Tell her it’s a splendid idea.”
“She has been making inquiries, my lord. It will be generally done. Some of the peeresses will carry their sandwiches in their coronets.”
Chesser came with the car at seven o’clock. Hamer drove to the Abbey through the streets lavish with crowned poles, fluttering with pennons and bunting, embellished with enthusiastic mottoes, thronged with thousands who had been up all night, astir with troops and soldiers marching to their posts. In the grey grudging light the old Abbey did not know itself, with bits and pieces stuck on here and there for the purposes of this day’s ceremony.
Nor was there much of the Abbey to be seen within. The whole place was transformed into a splendid theatre for the playing out of the timeless ritual. A man carrying a scarlet stick preceded Hamer up the nave. Normally, when he had walked here, it was through an emptiness of grey echoing stone, with the names of the illustrious dead on the floor beneath his feet, their monuments, epitaphs and effigies crowding the walls on either hand. Now, walking behind the scarlet stick, with the coronet under his arm, with the hem of the robe whispering on the ground behind him, his footsteps made no sound, for carpet deadened them, hiding the stone lids of the tombs; and to right and left, reaching up from this narrow muffled lane in which he walked to the very roof, rose tier upon tier of receding seats, concealing the monuments, cloaking the dusty imitations of mortality, with thousands in gorgeous uniforms and with drapings of rich sombre colour.
The floor of the Abbey was of blue and gold: blue in the nave, and elsewhere a rich mat golden carpet on which the light of the hanging lamps fell flat and even. The blue and golden floor stretched along the nave, and forward into the sanctuary, with branches to right and left into the transepts north and south: a huge cross of blue and gold: that was what everybody was looking down upon from the piled seats crowding close upon every point of its body and arms. At the junction of body and arms the day’s play would be enacted; and there, edging the steps up to the two thrones, the gold was touched with crimson.
The scarlet stick bowed the Viscount Shawcross to his seat in the north transept. There was little that Hamer could see now. The nave was hidden from him, and so was most of the sanctuary. He could see little but the cleared sweep at the intersection of the arms of the cross, and beyond that the south transept piled with the crimson and ermine of the peeresses, as this side was with peers.
These two thrones on which the King and Queen would sit while ecclesiastics and ministers wove the complicated dance of ritual about them faced inward to the sanctuary, and just within the sanctuary itself stood the coronation chair on which the King alone might sit. Amid all the glitter and glamour of the occasion, amid the blue and silver, the gold and crimson, of the splendid fabrics that cloaked the Abbey’s cold stone, the chair, it seemed to Hamer, had an incredible and poignant austerity and loneliness. He had, before now, seen it close at hand, and knew it for what it was: an old wooden chair with a high pointed back, casually scratched and scrawled upon by the generations like the lid of a desk at school, an old chair such as you might find standing in some farmhouse ingle-nook. But there it was, as it had stood when Edward the First was crowned upon it, when armies fought with arrows, and Marco Polo was wandering in China, and Kublai Khan was organizing Tartar hordes. Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, Hanoverians: such sanctity as immemorial succession might give, they had imparted to this old chair. It stood there, very lonely, the oldest thing in the Abbey, save the Stone beneath it whose history and antiquity none rightly knew.
The building was filled with the rustle of the eight thousand souls who crowded it: men and women from the five continents of the riven world, assembled here for a moment, he reflected, in the amity of a great ceremonial moment, but divided perhaps even more deeply, he thought, than when the chair came new and glistening from the hands of the village carpenter who made it. Behind this brave new face of the Abbey, engraved upon marble, chiselled in stone, related in elegy, epitaph and superscription, was the epitome of this empire’s history: the whole glittering and precarious edifice built up of service and sacrifice, violence, cunning and chicane, valour and endurance, with greed and subterfuge following their footsteps, the dreams of poets and of tale-tellers, the certitudes of science, the promises of religion and the schemings of statecraft. Such, too, was in the rough, the history of every state here represented: for it was the history of restless man himself, deaf for the most part to such intimations as came now with the suspiration of this great uneasy gathering, filling the ancient church with the sound of an autumn forest, of leaves about to fall.
It was all too ornate, high-wrought and over-jewelled for him to remember it in sequence. His memory, afterwards, was of a medley of emotional and æsthetic appeals: a fanfare of trumpets sounding suddenly outside the doors, the sharp, clean, classic notes piercing through the romantic jangling of bells; the surge of organ music that seemed to creep into every crack and crevice of the ancient abbey and rumble there; the slow crescendo of a procession through the standing thousands: swords and crosses, copes and tabards, gold, silver, feathers, jewels, bowed backs and pious hands of priests stiffly encrusted with vestments; orbs, crowns and sceptres and all wherein do lie the dread and fear of kings; the chanting of shrill-voiced boys; the strutting of little pages, scarlet as robins, with their toy swords stuck out behind them like tails.
These things he remembered, and the endless, dazing piling up of ritual on ritual, ceremony on ceremony, the presenting, the anointing, the crowning, the nation’s symbolic man sitting there at last in the old wooden chair while a bald priest twiddled the crown in his hands to get it the right way round. And when the crown was on, the lights increased their power, shining down strongly on the golden floor, scintillating in red and green and yellow sparks as they caught the jewels of the crown. From without, the boom of distant guns was heard announcing to the people that another king had been crowned in the chair; and, within, Hamer with all the other peers put on his coronet and joined in the shout “God Save the King.”
Hours by now had passed since he followed the scarlet stick to his seat: hours of sitting and speculating, hours of splendid colour and sound and movement; and he was weary and restless, stuffed and sated with the gorgeous occasion. He dozed and nodded; the buzz of a sonorous priestly voice became a lullaby; he started awake again when the voice droned off into silence, thinking: I’m getting too old for this sort of thing. I wish I was home.”
In the transept opposite there was a white flash of peeresses’s arms, raised in unison to put on their coronets. So the Queen had been crowned. Splendid, he thought; now we’re getting on. He was very hungry. He felt Mrs. Pendleton’s bag pinned inside his robe and smiled.
It was not till half-past two that he was able to take the bag out. Then it was all over. Then the vast crowd remaining in the Abbey became once more a collection of individuals with human needs. The peeresses in the transept opposite were munching from paper bags; conversations had broken out everywhere. A peer whom Hamer did not know, who had been sitting morosely on his right all through the long hours, turned to him suddenly and said: “By God, Shawcross, I’m starving. What’ve you got there?” Hamer gave him a sandwich, and they shared amicably, swig for swig, from the tin cup of the thermos flask.
He was a burly, red-faced chap, this peer; and now in his loud commanding voice he hailed a scarlet stick: “Here! I’ve been here too long. Where’s the place?”
“This way, my lord,” said scarlet stick gravely, and Hamer followed the peer with relief.
When they returned to their places, Hamer’s neighbour said: “They ought to be calling us out soon. It’s gone three o’clock. I shall go soon, call or no call.”
There was no call. All the Abbey was divided into lettered blocks, and it had been arranged that a loud-speaker should call the occupants of the blocks, letter by letter, telling them by which exit to leave. Simultaneously, telephone calls would apprise the chauffeurs in the car park which bore the same letter. The cars would proceed to the door named; cars and car-owners would smoothly meet.
But all broke down, and what Hamer remembered most clearly of the day was its disastrous ending. There was no call for him, and at four o’clock he found himself in a jam of people intent on getting home somehow. They had been up since dawn; they were tired and hungry. They were in a narrow passage leading out of the Abbey, wigged judges and robed peers, generals and admirals, with their womenfolk, all pressed and jostled together, all aware that it was raining furiously. A stream of cars rolled up unendingly to the door and a voice shouted down the passage, calling for the cars’ owners. But all was in confusion. Thousands of chauffeurs, who had waited hours to be called, had tired of waiting and had come to any door they fancied, seeking their employers. None of the employers seemed to be in this jam in which Hamer found himself, and the cars by hundreds rolled away empty.
Someone desperately suggested: “Let anyone use anyone’s car, and then let the cars come back. That’ll clear the place.”
Hamer was tickled by this far-sighted Communist idea; but did not wait to see whether it was adopted. He elbowed his way to the door and, tucking the hem of his robe under his arm and jamming his coronet on his head, he stepped out boldly into the deluge.
Westminster was awash. The gutters ran with the downpour, and the pavements were white with the shattered raindrops. He was not alone. Peeresses ran with their robes pulled up, their slim ankles soaked with rain. Scarlet and ermine, fur and feather, walked disconsolately beneath the weeping sky, scanning the procession of rain-glistening cars that crawled by without cease, bonnet to tail-lamp, all empty.
It was so complete, so glittering a fiasco, that Hamer, catching a countess’s distracted eye, as he strode along with the rain dripping from his coronet down his nose, laughed aloud. The spectacle of all the serried pomp within the Abbey reduced by a touch of nature to this common necessitous level was almost perfect in its symbolism. And there was symbolism, too, he thought, in the sumptuous cars on the one hand and the people who could not use them on the other, need cut off from its satisfaction by a superb piece of over-reaching organization.
He pushed his coronet jauntily to the side of his head and strode along, down Millwall, over Lambeth Bridge, for somewhere in that direction, he knew, his car should be. And for every yard of his walk the constant stream of cars flowed past him towards the Abbey, and soaked disconsolates stood piteously scanning the faces of the chauffeurs, stern with the integrity of men who knew their own masters.
At last he found Chesser, a ripple on the endless stream. He threw his coronet into the car, and climbed after it with his scarlet and ermine soaking round him like an old bath-robe. Chesser dodged out of the stream, made some clever cuts, and had him home by five. Hamer strode into the house shouting for Pendleton. “Turn on a hot bath. Light the fire in my bedroom. Bring me some hot soup and toast to bed. And if anyone wants me say I’m engaged with Marcus Aurelius.”
“Marcus—?”
“Aurelius.”
“Very good, my lord.”
*
This was better. This was very nice indeed. For the first time in his life a public event had exhausted him. It was good to be in bed with some warm food inside him, the warm blankets over him, the fire whispering in the grate, and the subdued light above the bed shining on the pages of his beloved book. Ann’s book. And, before her, goodness knows whose. “Printed for Richard Sare, at Grays-Inn Gate in Holborn. MDCCI.” Seventeen hundred and one. He leaned back against the propped-up pillows, with the brown leather book in his long hands, and on his nose the horn-rimmed spectacles that he used now for reading and writing. For nearly two hundred and fifty years this old volume had been knocking about the world. It was a long stretch of history. Steele and Addison were writing and Marlborough was fighting when somebody first picked up this book. North America was a dutiful colony of the British Crown. The French Revolution was undreamed of and Napoleon was unborn. His mind ranged over the long passage of time, a quarter of a millennium: political revolutions, industrial revolutions, revolutions in thought and custom. But was mankind, for all the sound and fury of its strife, for all the ingenuity of its mechanical contriving, any nearer to the thing which, in his youth, he had imagined the few flying years of his own life would see: the loftier race that Addington Symonds had sung about, men inarmed as comrades free, the pulse of one fraternity? He thought of Germany and of Spain, of the ominous writing on Britain’s wall: £1,400,000,000 for arms. No, no. The priest might lay the unction thick on such a ceremony as he had seen today; but mankind’s ceremonies were still played out upon a cross.
He was very tired: more tired than he cared to admit. He laid down the book, and the spectacles upon it, and closed his eyes. He was dozing off when a knock brought him upright. Pendleton put his head round the door and said in a subdued voice which he kept for the bedroom: “Mr. Charles is here, my lord.”
Instantly Hamer was wide awake. “Here? Mr. Charles?” “Yes, my lord. Downstairs.”
“Then bring him up. Bring him up at once.”
Charles did not wait to be fetched. He came into the room as Pendleton was turning from the door.
“My dear boy, my dear boy!” said Hamer. He stretched out both his hands, and Charles took them. For a long moment they held one another in a close scrutiny, and then Hamer said: “You’re looking well. You’re looking fine, Charles.”
“You’re looking better than ever, Father,” Charles said, and Hamer was pleased. The bed-light was falling full on his long white hair and ruddy healthy face. He was vain, and glad that he could stand his son’s critical inspection.
“I’m as good as most at seventy-three,” he boasted. “But you look magnificent, Charles. You’ve grown up. You’ve filled out. Pull up a chair. Sit down. I think I ought to get up.”
“No, no,” Charles protested. “Pendleton’s been telling me what a barbarous day you’ve had. Please stay where you are. I’ve just been looking at your velvet and ermine drying on a clothes-horse by the kitchen fire. The coronet is on the hob.” He laughed, and Hamer was glad that there was no malice in the laughter.
Charles brought a chair to the bedside. He was brown, tough and wiry. He had grown a moustache, clipped in close military fashion. His blue eyes were harder, mature. He was wearing a grey chalk-striped lounge suit that fitted him perfectly. He looked altogether like a lean young subaltern in mufti. He did not look his forty years.
“What about dinner?” said Hamer. “Ring for Pendleton.”
“I’ve had dinner. It was not easy, believe me, to get dinner in London tonight, but I managed it.”
Hamer eyed him fondly. “You know, Charles, you look as if you do manage things now. Well, what about a drink?”
“No, sir, thank you. I never touch it.”
“Neither did I till that villainous Lizzie Lightowler got me into the way of it. And damn it, I’ll have one now. You’ll join me in a cigar?”
“I’d love to. Let me get your drink. What do you have?”
“Pendleton will show you. It’s a harmless brew.”
Charles went out, and Hamer lay back again. Well, men were fools, inquisitive and acquisitive monkeys, the constant enemies of their own peace. But there were still the old loyalties. There was still the peace of the individual heart; there were still lovely moments. A moment such as this, when a man could say: This my son was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found.
Charles came in with the toddy on a tray and the box of cigars. “Pendleton says I am to remind his lordship that he has a nearly empty stomach.”
“His lordship has been a pretty safe custodian of his own stomach for a good many years now,” said Hamer. “Well, here’s health. Have one of these. D’you know where they came from?”
Charles shook his head.
“Old Liz. She used to like me to go and sit with her and have a smoke. She laid them in specially for me. I don’t think I smoked one a week with her, and there were five hundred found after she died. The old dear must have expected to be immortal.”
They smoked in silence for a while; then Hamer said: “Well, what are your plans? Have you got a long leave? Are you going out to join Alice, or is she coming over here, or what? She ought to give up that Russian job now for good. And you could get fixed up here in your firm’s London office. I should think something could be arranged,” he said, thinking of Sir Thomas Hannaway. “It would be very nice, you know, my boy, if we could all be together again. There aren’t many of us left now.” He blew out a spiral of smoke and considered it attentively. “Precious few. Precious few.”
Charles did not reply for a long time. Then he said: “That would be very nice, Father. In many ways, I’d like that as much as you would, and perhaps some day it will be possible. But it isn’t possible now.”
“What – you’re going back?”
“No. Alice and I have both resigned our jobs. She’s travelling home now. We’re going to Spain together.”
Neither spoke for a moment. Hamer finished his toddy, and put down the glass with a steady hand. But his heart was not steady. He felt as though an uncovenanted blessing had appeared suddenly within his reach, and then been snatched away. It was Charles who at last broke the uneasy silence. He said: “There doesn’t seem to be anything else for it, believing as we do – Alice and I.”
“What exactly do you believe?” Hamer asked. “About the contest in Spain, I mean – a country that has always been seething with political unrest, whoever happened at a particular moment to be in power. You and Alice will go out, of course, because you are Communists, Supposing your side wins: what do you think the outcome will be?”
“I can’t say what Alice would answer to that. As for me, I don’t know and I don’t care, except that here is clearly a case of right against wrong, and if I have helped the right to win, I am ready to let it settle its own fashion of exploiting the victory. What is your view?”
“Simply this: when somebody wins, and whoever that may be, the common people – the people in whose name both sides are fighting – will say ‘Thank God that’s over,’ and, a good deal poorer and sadder, they’ll settle down till another saviour comes along to ruin them. If I could be sure of having one prayer answered I would pray for this: that for fifty years, throughout the whole world, politicians of all breeds would leave the people alone. We might then have a better world. We couldn’t have a worse one.”
Charles got up and began to walk restlessly about the room. Hamer watched him for a while, thinking he did not now look so assured and confident as he did a few moments ago. “I believe, Charles,” he said, “that there are too many damned reformers in the world, too many people who are certain they know what life’s all about, and are prepared to tear the world to pieces just to show how nicely they can put it together again. Do you ever read this fellow?”
He took up the book from the bed and handed it to Charles. “It was your mother’s favourite book at the end,” he said.
Charles turned over the pages and handed it back to his father. “No,” he said. “I’ve never read him.”
“There’s a passage here,” said Hamer, “that seems to me to have some common sense. ‘I would not have you expect Plato’s Commonwealth: that draught is too fine, and your mortals will ne’er rise up to it. As the world goes, a moderate reformation is a great point, and therefore rest contented. If we can but govern people’s hands, we must let their hearts and their heads go free. To cure them of all their folly and ill principles is impracticable.’”
He laid down the book, took off his spectacles, and looked fondly at his son. “If someone had read that to me when I was your age, Charles, I know what I’d have said; and you can say it to me now if you like.”
Charles looked relieved, and smiled again. “I must confess, Father,” he said, “that I still find it a bit difficult to follow a man who once demanded the Millennium and now says he’ll make do with Pleasant Sunday Afternoons.”
“Go on demanding the Millennium, my boy,” said Hamer. “God help us when we cease to do that. But don’t expect to get it, and, above all things, don’t try to shove it down other people’s throats. If the Millennium pays a penny in the pound, you’ll be lucky. Now, tell me what you’ve been doing, and what you’re going to do. How long have I got you for?”
“Only a few days, I’m afraid. Alice is going straight through to Cwmdulais to see her father. He hasn’t been well for a long time. Then, when I hear from her, I shall join her in Cardiff. I believe we sail from there. We are going on a cargo boat.”
Hamer lay back on the pillow, and Charles ran on. Once launched, he had plenty to say. Hamer was glad to hear the voice which for so long had not spoken to him at all, and for so long before that had spoken only in tones of estrangement. But of all the things that Charles said, only two remained in his mind after his son had wished him good night and put out the light: Charles was staying for but a few days and Arnold was ill. Arnold would be seventy-five. If Arnold went, no one but Tom Hannaway would be left, and somehow Tom Hannaway didn’t count. There would be no tie at all with those days that seemed at once incredibly remote and so near that he felt he could reach out his hand and put it confidingly into the hand of Gordon Stansfield. He passed to sleep through a turmoil of vague confused thought in which he hardly knew whether he was on the pallet bed in Broadbent Street with the Old Warrior’s sabre on the wall, or in Half Moon Street with the coronet on the hob.
*
Down in the valley the spring was covering the scarred earth with green hopeful things, and workless men sat at their doors soaking themselves in the benign weather. The King who had resigned the crown had been among them, his young-old face puckered and creased at sight of this ghastly fragment of his Kingdom. He had been their prince: the Prince of Wales. While yet a child he had been presented to the Principality in a gorgeous ceremony at Carnarvon. And now he was their King. They had always liked him. They believed that he understood common men, and felt with them, and suffered with them. They would give him simple gifts when he came among them. And now he had come and walked through their streets with that hurrying nervous stride of his, and he had sat in their kitchens and looked about with his quick, shy glance, and he had gone away, exclaiming: “Something shall be done.”
And through the valleys there was hope again; the years behind did not seem so desolate, nor the years before so empty. But now he was gone. He had laid aside the crown, and his word of hope fell flat in the valley like a singing bird shot in flight. Nothing was done.
So the old men sat by their doors: they could at least absorb God’s unrationed sunshine: and the young men played ping-pong in the charitable institutes, and scrounged Woodbine cigarettes, and went at night to have three-penny-worth of Marlene or Myrna.
And in the front bedroom up at Horeb Terrace, where the ironic sunshine fell through the window all day long, Arnold Ryerson sat up in bed, the bed he had shared with Pen that night long ago when they had come down from the north and sat shyly in the parlour, listening to Ap Rhondda singing in the kitchen as Nell scrubbed his back. Nothing seemed changed in the little house: there was still no bathroom; there was still no gas up here on the bedroom floor; but it was not the same house to Arnold: it was a place enriched with living and suffering, with birth and death. Almost as much as his body, it was his earthly tabernacle.
His body had let him down at last: the tabernacle was in dissolution. He had never given it much thought. It had become gross and heavy, and now had suddenly fallen away, slack, flaccid. He sat with the pillows piled behind his head and shoulders, and the face that looked down into the valley was ashen-grey and shrunk. The big purposeful hands had gone white, blue-veined. The eyes were large and brooding. From time to time he muttered to himself: “Ah’m tired.” “Ah can’t be bothered.” But he was not speaking to any one in particular, or about anything in particular. His mind was rambling, already half-absent from the cumbering flesh.
Dai Richards came quietly into the room: Pen’s nephew, Ianro’s son: Dr. David Richards, with the long string of degrees after his name, with the Rolls Royce car and the Rolls Royce manner, the physician that all Cardiff was running after. But it’s no good to run after David Richards when you’re as far gone as Arnold is, and Dai knew it.
Dai rubbed his hands together in his hearty O-Death-where-is-thy-sting manner. “Well, Uncle, it’s a grand day for the journey. Look at that sunshine! Healing in his wings!”
Arnold did not turn his head. He gazed dully through the open window. “Ah’m not going. Ah can’t be bothered,” he said.
Dai, rather portly, superbly dressed, with a thin gold chain across his stomach, looked down at the shrunken husk of the old fighter. “No one’s going to bother you,” he said. “You’ll travel like a prince. Think of the most comfortable journey you ever had, and then you can bet your boots this will be easier. Well, I’ll be back soon.”
He went out, the fairy godfather who was going to conjure up the pumpkin coach; and in the darkness deepening through the recesses of Arnold’s mind there stirred a train of thought that Dai’s sprightly words had called into being. The most comfortable journey you ever had... That night driving home from Bingley with Ann... The tall shapes of the beech trees wavered like sombre banners against the darkness of his mind; the clippety-clop of the horse’s hoofs, the jingle of brassy decoration on the harness, sounded faint, far-off, like something heard and not heard as ears strain in the night. Ann, Pen, Hamer... they were the three great names that had been trumpets to his ears, lamps to his feet; and now they came back, but only as a dying echo, a just-seen glimmer over the edge of extinction.
The glimmer strengthened, and suddenly with the clarity of a picture seen in a small mirror his mind focused round the moment when he had shaken hands with Hamer Shawcross and said goodbye. He saw again the tall handsome man, felt again the surge of mingled admiration, love and regret which, in their latter years, had always filled him in that presence. “Defeat which would have the quality of victory.” So, Hamer said, Ann had summed the matter up. Well, it was defeat all right. His cloudy mind, which for weeks had been brooding over the valley, had no doubt about that; but by heck! – as Pen would have said – by heck! it needn’t be a craven end. He struggled up and shouted powerfully: “Dai! Dai!” and when David Richards came running, he said simply: “Ah’m ready to go, lad. Ah want to go.”
Dai did not understand that the small avowal was a victory.
*
Do you remember the day, Arnold – it was a hot summer day and there was a war on – when you heard that Pen was hurt, and you and Hamer Shawcross waited in this house for the taxi to come? And the colliers were standing outside the house to say: Good luck, boyo. Bring back good news.
It’s your turn now, Arnold, and Dai Richards and Alice are waiting for the big cream-coloured ambulance with the balloon tyres that Dai is having sent up from Cardiff. He’s a good-hearted man, is Dai, though perhaps a bit bumptious, and he can’t leave you here any longer. There was a time, Arnold, when Pen talked to you about Dai: a time when you and she were boy and girl in Thursley Road and Dai was a baby-in-arms in this very house in Cwmdulais. You could laugh then at the thought that Dai could mean anything to you, one way or the other, and now here you are, a log, a hulk, and Dai must make the decisions.
Give him the thanks that are his due. The rooms in his private nursing home cost ten guineas a week, and he’s going to give you one for nothing, and take you there on balloon tyres. The big cream-coloured ambulance is even now climbing the hill to Horeb: the hill that you will not climb again. And that won’t matter much to you now, because it’s all over: old Richard Richards is gone, and Ianto is gone, and Pen is gone; and when you are gone, too, Alice will not come back here any more. She will bang the door and walk down the hill to the station, and perhaps in this little old house someone else will start a new story. But your story is finished. There is no more room in the Rhondda for you or the job you tried to do.
The miners are at the door again, as they were when you waited here with Hamer Shawcross. They see the two big male nurses carry you down, wrapped in blankets, on a stretcher; they see the stretcher slide into the handsome ambulance, but you now know nothing about this. The sombre banners that were moving in your dark mind have melted into the blackness of oblivion. You do not see Alice watching the doors of the ambulance close upon you, as you yourself not so long ago watched the doors closing upon the coffin of old Lizzie Lightowler. Mors Janua Vitae. Well, it may be so, Arnold. It may be that somewhere Pen is waiting with a golden trumpet, and if she is, by heck, she’ll blow a blast, because she won’t be disappointed in you. Perhaps, in that place, they’ll give her back her eyes; and if they don’t, she’ll want no better guide than you to the city that stands four-square: as four-square as you are yourself, Arnold.
*
The sun sloped to the west, and the shadows of the old men sitting at the doors lengthened, and the shadows of the tall, idle winding-machinery lengthened, and the synthetic stars blossomed on the bosom of the Super Cinema de Luxe. They were pale in the dying light, but they strengthened as the shadows lengthened, and at last they were fiery, dominant, a glamorous halo against which the black silent bulk of Horeb stood out like a grim abandoned citadel.
Alice had gone back into the house as soon as the ambulance was out of sight. The house where she was born. She could have walked blindfold through every inch of it, as she had taught Pen to do. But after tonight she would walk through it no more. Dai Richards had said that Arnold would never come back, so now she was going through the house, assembling the few personal things she wanted to keep, destroying papers, documents, this and that. She must leave the house anonymous; then those could come in to whom she had arranged to give the furniture. They would strip it bare, and then her home would be that pathetic thing an empty house.
All through the afternoon the smoke floated out of the chimneys as she burned in the kitchen, the front room, upstairs and down. There was an old exercise-book in Arnold’s desk, the leaves written upon in brown faded ink, the language Welsh. Though born in the valley, she had never learned Welsh, and she did not know, as she tore up the pages and dropped them a few at a time upon the clogging flames, that there went Ap Rhondda’s immortality, following his mortal bones to dissolution.
When nothing more was to be done, she cleaned the kitchen fireplace of its crackling refuse, laid a clear fire, and put on water to boil. Then she pulled out the old tin bath that Pen had washed her in as a baby, and that Pen and Arnold had bathed in, too, and she undressed herself and bathed. She dressed in clean clothes and made herself up carefully. The evening now was come. She began to prepare their supper.
It was not an easy day for Alice: a father going, a lover-husband returning. A lover, no doubt. No doubt at all about that. It was excess of plagued love rather than its lack that had driven Charles away. That was the hope and faith by which she had lived. Sometimes of late she had laughed at herself, called herself an old woman – too old for love. But the sweet warmth of her body told her that this was not so.
It was a long time since she and Charles had eaten in this kitchen. She remembered the occasion well enough. She and Charles had declared that they would have no children, and Pen had flared up, calling that a coward’s choice. It was no good trying to choose a world for our children, Pen had said: we must let them do as we had had to do: take the world as it was. No harps and wings here below, but we must work for them all the same.
She stood at the window, looking out at the scarred slope of the mountain running steeply up to the sky that was greenish, luminous, with one bright star palpitating upon its forehead; and she thought of her mother, and of Pen’s unquenchable gusto for life. Love of life. That was a better word. If someone had offered it to her over again, just as it had been, blindness and all – so she had said that night – she would jump at the offer.
Well, you can’t do that, Pen. But you live in me. And I told you that night that you’d die in me, too. It seemed an easy boast then, a gallant emancipated gesture, but now you are gone, and soon Arnold will be gone, too; and, considering where Charles and I are going to, we may be gone as well. Even now, it may be too late.
She went upstairs and laid and lit a fire in the little back bedroom that she and Charles would occupy that night. While the fire drew up, she stood silhouetted against the window, with the dark mountain beyond her and the star above her head, shining like mercy over the abyss.
She did not go to the station to meet Charles. She was as shy as a maiden when she allowed her thoughts to dwell upon him: this new Charles whose photograph she had seen, a confident lean-faced sunburnt man: a stranger, almost, so far as the flesh went: and yet Charles, her lover. She could not bear to meet him where strangers’ eyes might see them.
She remembered how, the last time they had been here together, he would hurry to the door at her knock and over the blind head of Pen make signs of love to her. And now here was his knock, and she was hurrying down the flagged oil-clothed passage, and there were no years at all between. There was nothing but Alice and Charles and their love. And these three were one thing, heightened in her mind by the thought of the bloodshot threshold on which their lives now stood.
For a moment they did not speak. He had dropped his bag to the ground, pushed to the door, and taken her in his arms. There was no light in the passage. They stood in the darkness, close in a long embrace. When they did speak, their words seemed foolish and pointless. She inquired about his journey, apologized for not meeting him. He asked about Arnold’s departure, brought her greetings from his father.
“Now go and wash yourself,” she said, “and I’ll put the supper on the table.”
She was anxious to escape into commonplace words and commonplace actions. It gave her time to think, to re-establish her emotions; and when supper was over, and they had washed up together and sat one on either side of the kitchen fire, she was glad to hear Charles say: “You know, something like this is what I’ve been longing for. Just to be sitting down, with you, at peace. When you come to think of it, it’s the thing I never did. I was always in and out and up and about, torturing my guts over impossibilities. If I’d had a lot more of this, I’d never have cleared out.”
“You weren’t ready for it,” Alice smiled; and she thought how long it took most people to be ready for wisdom. He hadn’t called her my love, or my dear, or my darling. But he had said: Just to be sitting down, with you, at peace. And they were at peace. She had feared at times, prefiguring this meeting with Charles, lest its emotional content should overwhelm her. But they had slipped together as simply and completely and with as little fuss as two raindrops meeting on a window-pane.
Charles lit his pipe, and Alice made coffee, brightened up the fire, and turned out the gas. They sat in the dancing light of the flames, and Charles said: “You needn’t have put the light out, you know. You’re still good to look at without benefit of a romantic glow. You’re no different, to me at any rate, from what you were the first time I saw you. D’you remember when that was?”
Yes; she remembered the tall, fair schoolboy, coming up out of the mine, proudly displaying his dirty overalls, and imagining he knew a lot about the Rhondda. Do you remember? Do you remember? Soon they were unlocking the chests where all their common memories were stored: Cwmdulais and Oxford and North Street.
“D’you remember the day when old Lizzie first saw my father wearing his ceremonial uniform? A bloody miracle! A bloody miracle!”
Alice laughed, and then sighed. “I don’t think I’m quite such a prig now as I was then,” she said. “I’m still with all my soul after the things I want and believe in, but I don’t think I could ever again be so sniffy about what other people believe in. Poor old Liz! Your father was her hero. She found it hard to see spots on him.”
Charles got up and knocked out his pipe. “It may be a confession of approaching senility,” he said with a smile, “but I myself don’t see so many as I used to. In fact, during the last few days I’ve come to the conclusion that I have a rather remarkable sire.”
“He’s as God made him,” said Alice, “and perhaps he’s not so bad at that. Anyway, he’s the last of them: Pen and Ann, Arnold and Hamer. Take them by and large, we needn’t blush for those who made us.”
She remained for a while sunk in reverie, then started up suddenly. “Let’s go to bed,” she said.
*
Charles had left most of his luggage in Cardiff, and Alice had sent hers there during the last week or so. They left the house in the morning carrying only a small handbag each. They had got up while the light was still grey. They had little to say to one another, filled as they were with a sense of last things. Charles boiled the kettle on a fire of sticks. Alice laid the table, and when they had eaten she washed up the few things and put them on the dresser. She would never come back to this house: it was almost an act of piety to leave all in order, spotless. She went upstairs, folded the bedclothes, and left them on the bed, neatly piled. Then she walked through the rooms of the house, looking round her for the last time. It did not take her two minutes. “I can remember the time, my love,” she said to Charles, “when this place seemed full of distance, mysterious recesses, and when I was in bed in the dark, Father and Mother seemed miles away. Well, there it is: four little boxes with a ladder going between the pairs.”
She had always seemed to Charles the embodiment of the practical, the efficient, the unemotional. It moved him now to see that she herself was moved, and he knew that she was saying good-bye not to the four little boxes but to the spirits that her mind would for ever conceive as haunting these humble walls: the fierce, life-loving restless spirit of Pen, the sober resolute spirit of Arnold, and the young ghost of her own childhood, looking out of these windows upon the valley and the hills and the beckoning illimitable world beyond the hills.
“I’ll go on,” he said. “You catch me up,” and he stepped out into the morning, leaving her to her farewells.
He had not got half-way to Horeb when he heard the door bang and the eager following of her footsteps. He turned to wait for her, and saw her wiping her eyes and blowing her nose. They went together down the hill to the station.
There was a holy quiet about the moment in which they looked their last at Cwmdulais. It was not yet seven o’clock. There was no roar and rattle of work; no smoke or steam was to be seen anywhere in the valley, and there was no one about the streets. The sunshine of May was falling silvery, without heat, and even the posts of the railway signals had a fresh and virginal look, as though they should be wreathed with garlands. Blackbirds and thrushes were pouring out wild songs. Only the men and women, sleeping in all the little sleeping houses, were unawakened by the miracle of May. The writhing old hawthorn that grew on the station platform was a dome of scented snow.
Charles and Alice stood under the old tree, waiting for the train, breathing the clear incense of the morning and of the blossom. When the locomotive swung slowly round the bend, Alice said suddenly and urgently: “Kiss me now. Kiss me under this old tree. We’ll never kiss again in Cwmdulais.”
Charles kissed her, and when the train had started Alice leaned out of the window, thinking of a little pig-tailed girl leaning out in just this way thirty years ago, watching the old tree fade from sight and hearing behind her the chant of all her school-fellows bound for Cardiff:
Kiss a man under the old may tree,
And you’ve kissed the father of your first baby.
Such rubbish! Such rubbish! she thought, and Charles saw, when she withdrew her head and sat down at his side, that her eyes again were dewy with unshed tears.
*
All the arrangements had been left in Alice’s hands. Charles moved through the day like an automaton, with nothing to do but follow. He knew that they were to go to Valencia. There they would meet other English men and women who had offered their arms and their lives to the government of Spain. He was a good air-pilot, lacking the verve and dash of José Esquierra, but cool enough, and efficient. Here was the service in which his false leg would be no hindrance. Alice did not know what she would do. The circumstances must decide. She was a capable nurse, a good cook, and she could drive a lorry. With these talents, she would find something.
They lunched with Idris Howells. “It’s all influence, you see,” Alice laughed. “Idris wouldn’t refuse me a thing, would you, Idris?” Now that Cwmdulais was behind them and there were things to do, she had recovered her spirits and her practicality.
Charles found himself shaking hands with a short, tough, bearded man in a blue suit and a bowler hat. He might have been any age up to sixty, but it appeared he was just as old as Alice herself. They had gone to an infants’ school together at Cwmdulais, and Idris had stayed in Cwmdulais long enough to have much the same political views as Alice. Clearly, he was one of her great admirers. The Communist candidate and the author of Gabrielle Minto’s novels were alike wonderful in his eyes. Idris had been apprenticed early to the sea, and was now master of the Mary Marriner, loaded with a miscellaneous cargo for Valencia, and ready to sail that night from one of the Cardiff docks. She would go out on the tide just before midnight.
They parted from Idris Howells after lunch, and spent a strange wandering day, a day of sunshine and cool airs, visiting the places that Alice wanted to see again, and wanted Charles to see with her: the school she had attended, the parks she had played in, the noble group of white municipal buildings with domes and towers reaching into the blue sky and the spring green of the trees about them rush-ing into ecstatic life. They sat there for a long time: it was the loveliest place in all the city to sit.
When the light was going, they got up and went to a café in Duke Street, and after they had eaten they went to a cinema, winding up the inconsequent day with the wildest of all inconsequence. At a quarter to ten Alice said: “Come now,” and Charles’s heart gave a leap, for he knew that with those words the inconsequence was ended, and that, as they stumbled over the feet of embracing lovers, they were leaving that somnolent and stifling air for the harsh wind of reality.
It seemed prosaic to be meeting Idris Howells by appointment on the corner of St. Mary Street. There he was: dark, reserved, uncommunicative as he had been at lunch, but emanating nevertheless a sense of loyalty, a sense of a man who would be staunch and dependable at need. Prosaic to be climbing on to the electric tram, to hear the ting of the ticket-punch as though they were passengers bound 0n some pennyworth of unromantic travel, not mixed with concerns of life and death.
Once they had left the tram, the moment heightened for Charles, who was in a quarter he had not visited before. From a quiet, almost deserted, road they ducked under a low dark arch. They came upon the leaden gleam of stagnant dock water. They stepped over hawsers and stumbled on railway lines. They heard the quiet conspiratorial plash of water, caught the minute glow of a cigarette, as someone dimly seen paddled himself ashore in a dinghy. Against the dark sky the darker mass of the coal shutes stood out, and here and there an arc lamp burned down with a violence of light that made the surrounding shadows as black as a midnight forest.
The Mary Marriner was lying at a dock wall under the long darkness of a warehouse. A light or two was burning aboard her, but she had an abandoned lifeless look. A few spectres flitted about her deck; at the head of the gangway a man loomed to life out of the shadows and said “Good evening, sir,” to Idris Howells. Idris nodded without speaking, and Charles and Alice followed at his heels along the deck. He took them to a small cabin with two berths, one above the other, a wash-basin let into the wall, a small chest of drawers, a screwed-down swivel-chair, and nothing else. “This’ll do, I suppose,” he said. “There’s your things. I had them all collected this afternoon. Keep out of the way now till we’re at sea. I must go.” He went, shutting the door behind him. He sounded brusque and impatient; but Charles and Alice, sitting side by side on the lower berth, knew the shy solicitude behind his words.
As for them, for a long time they had no words at all. They sat still, looking about them by the light of the raw bulb, caged in wire, burning over their heads. A sense of inevitability held them both mute. Here they were, in this unremarkable ship. For this, Alice had come from the East and Charles from the West, travelling across half the world. For this: to meet here in this little cabin, stuffy with new white sickening paint, the cramped vehicle of their adventure towards an horizon which, in the imaginations of both, blazed with the fires of truth consuming the dark pretensions of a lie. It seemed an endless time since Alice had banged the front door and run along Horeb Terrace to overtake Charles: endless as time must be that marks the fateful division between the intention and the act.
“I feel very tired,” said Alice. “I think I’ll lie down. Switch out the light.”
She lay upon the lower bunk and Charles spread a blanket over her. In the darkness he stood at one of the open portholes, gazing at the obscurity of the warehouse wall: unanswering and enigmatic as his fate: mere blackness on which blacker shadows moved from time to time, and in which voices occasionally spoke so low that they seemed to be revealing secrets not intended for his ears.
Suddenly he was overwhelmed with loneliness and premonition. He turned towards the bunk, whispering urgently: “Alice! Alice!”
“Yes, my love,” she said. “Come and lie down now. I can make room for you here.”
She understood his doubt and his need. With her arm about him, they lay squeezed together on the bunk, and they slept uneasily. They were more emotionally exhausted than they had known, and they were not aware when the Mary Marriner throbbed to life, slid out of the dock, and pointed her nose westward into the grey water of the Bristol Channel.
*
Alice always remembered that it was a lovely voyage. Heaven at least granted her that. Years of separation, but only days of love renewed. But they were days to treasure in memory for ever. Not a moment of them but was lovely, from their waking up to the first light of morning on the dancing sea, to the last moment of all, which also was in the morning, virginal and lovely.
They might have been going on a honeymoon too long delayed. Charles, indeed, said so, standing right aft that first morning, looking over the stern of the Mary Marriner at the glister of sunrise on the wake. A hopeful morning of May, fresh and sane, with the men going about their simple tasks as God and common sense intended men to do. And soon, said Charles, this would be all over. The task they had put their hands to would be completed, and then, with no home in Cwmdulais, no home in North Street, they would begin as he wished they had begun long ago, with a home and long years yet before them.
So Charles spoke in the keen fresh morning, with the wind playing through his hair and whipping with its salt sting Alice’s eager face. He stood with his arm about her, all the doubts and premonitions of the night blown away like darkness when a shutter is opened on the sun.
Only once again did Charles see England: a far-off cloudy glimpse of the country about Land’s End, a white house or two, a glint of green fields, the last lonely outposts looking westward across the Atlantic. He was young and happy, and Alice knew that he had no real understanding of the hazards before him. He had fought in a great war, with half the world embattled, and his mind conceived the affair in Spain as a parochial brawl that would soon be over.
She did not utter what was in her heart, but accepted his mood, and she was to be glad that she did so. Only once did a moment of darkness deepen over the serenity of those days. He was in the cabin, and she had come down to find a scarf, for the evening was cool. She lifted the scarf out of a trunk, and Charles saw, before she could prevent his seeing, that it was wrapped round a revolver.
“Hallo!” he cried. “What on earth is that for?”
Alice tried to pass the matter off with a laugh. “Well, if we get short of food I can shoot pigeons,” she said.
Charles had taken up the revolver and was examining it expertly. “A useful thing,” he said. “I’d like to have this myself. I don’t imagine either of us will want it, but I’m more likely to do so than you are.”
“No – please – let me have it,” said Alice.
“You bloodthirsty Bolshie,” Charles bantered, slipping the revolver into his pocket. “I don’t believe you know a thing about revolvers. You’re not to be trusted with it. You’d be a public danger.”
“Charles!” said Alice, so sharply that he looked at her in surprise, to see that her face was white. “I could hardly miss with the barrel at my own head,” she said, and then threw herself on the bunk, trembling.
He knelt at her side, his arms about her, instantly filled with contrition. “My darling,” he said. “My darling.”
“Oh, Charles!” she sobbed. “You’re still such a child. I don’t think you know the world you’re living in. It’s a filthy world, full of filthy things. Things that men had grown out of have come sneaking back – dirty beastly things like torture. Torture is again a part of the technique of governments and armies. I could stand most things, Charles, but that I could not stand. Give me the revolver.”
He gave it to her, and ran out on to the deck, feeling sick.
*
Even the Bay of Biscay was kind to them. They met none of its traditional evil weather. Day followed placid day, with the little Mary Marriner chugging happily through temperate seas. They ate their meals with Idris Howells, the first officer and the chief engineer. For the rest, they lazed in the sun all day, went to bed early, and got up late. They passed Gibraltar and steamed north, with Spain’s eastern coast on their port, and the sunny Mediterranean Sea dividing with hardly a ripple before their bows.
They were leaning over the starboard rail that night, facing the full moon rising out of the sea, when Idris Howells, who had been pacing the deck, stopped behind them. “Well,” he said, “we’ll have you there tomorrow. I reckon we should make Valencia about noon.”
They swung round from the rail. “Thank you, Idris,” Alice said. “You’ve been a good friend.”
Idris took the pipe out of his bearded jaws and looked thoughtfully at the glowing tobacco. “Well, Alice gel,” he said, “I dunno that there’s anything to thank me for. You’ve got to find that out yet, haven’t you?”
She put her hand impulsively on his. “Idris, don’t let that worry you,” she begged him. “Whatever happens – you understand, whatever happens – we wanted most dearly to come, and you must have no regrets.”
“All right, gel,” he said gruffly. And, resuming his quiet pacing, he added over his shoulder: “Not that we’re there yet, mind you.”
Alice turned to Charles, and with a little gesture of clenched fists she said: “I feel excited! For the first time since we started, I feel excited. Spain! That is Spain!”
They crossed the deck to the port side and looked over the intervening moon-washed sea at the faint loom of the coast. That is Spain! That is the new Holy Land. Tomorrow there will be another, and another the day after that.
“I wonder what will happen to us?” Charles said with the simple wistfulness of a child. “You know, we’ll have to separate.”
Alice looked towards the land with her dark eyes shining. “Who knows what will happen to us?” she said; and murmured in a low voice:
“It may be that the gulfs will wash us down.
It may be we shall reach the happy isles
And see the great Achilles whom we knew.”
“And who may that be?” Charles asked practically.
“Oh – God, or whatever you like to call it. Whatever it was that thundered into my ears from the time I could think that there was a job for me to do and that I must get on with it, helping to clean up the greedy makeshift mess that halfwits call civilization.” She turned to him laughing. “D’you think that’s too tall an order for a little girl from the Rhondda?”
“Well,” said Charles, like a good boy repeating a lesson, “we must do our best. But, you know, my father—”
Alice laid a hand on his arm. She turned and leaned against the rail, with the white light of the moon falling full on her face. “Yes,” she said. “I know his views. They’re an old man’s views, and as such I can tolerate them and even respect them. But, remember, Charles, there’s an impulsive wisdom of youth as well as a cautious wisdom of age. The views he’s been giving you weren’t his views when he was as young as we are now. Those were the high romantic days when he carried the sabre. I wonder whether he was ever anything but a romantic at heart? I think that would explain him better than anything else.”
She remained pensive for a moment, then said: “There’s no job now for romantics. We, on our side, have got to be as dispassionate as a sanitary squad, cleaning up a dirty mess. And we’ve got to be quick, because it’s spreading, and soon it’ll poison and suffocate every decent thing and instinct. Stay there a moment,” she added, and broke from him and ran to the cabin.
When she came back, Charles saw to his surprise the glint of moonlight on steel. “This is it,” she said. “This is the sabre of Peterloo.”
She stood for a moment looking at the light playing on the curved blade that had known so many vicissitudes: the blade that had slashed the life out of the girl Emma in a Manchester street, that the Old Warrior had maundered over, that Ellen had polished with bathbrick, that Hamer Shawcross had used to carve his way to the notice and the applause of the people, that Jimmy Newboult had worshipped, and that Lady Lostwithiel had embalmed in velvet. Alice stood looking down ironically at its gleaming length as the Mary Marriner sighed and gently rolled through the placid moonlit water off the coast of Spain. “I wondered why I brought it,” she said: “But now I know. The world is face to face with reality. It is time to make an end of romantic gestures.”
She stood away from Charles, whirled the sabre in a shining circle once round her head, then hurled it far out into the radiance of the moonlight. Silently, as if spellbound, they watched the silver splash of its fall, an Excalibur that no hand was lifted to receive.
For a moment neither spoke; then Charles said quietly: “That was the most romantic gesture I have ever seen.”
*
Idris Howells himself came banging at the cabin door early the next morning. He carried two mugs of hot over-sweetened tea, which he put down on the chest of drawers. “Get this into you,” he said, “and then come up on deck. This’ll be your last chance this trip to see the dawn over the Mediterranean.”
They climbed, yawning, out of their bunks, drank the tea, and pulled on dressing-gowns. They pulled overcoats on top of the gowns and went out into the fresh air that seemed to smack their faces, so stuffy the little cabin was, with its still-odious smell of new paint.
The eastern sky was trembling with a pearly suffusion that, as yet, could hardly be called light: a blue-grey-pink of such delicate loveliness that Alice held her breath. The sea was carpeted with a woolly texture of mist, a carpet that swayed and lifted, wove itself into ropy patterns that twisted and dissolved. It reached away infinitely like a smoke of milk.
From the sea-floor to the zenith was a miracle of insubstantial form and colour, and even as they watched, it faded like a cock-crow phantom. The grey and blue drained out of the sky. The pink deepened to red: red banners flung out suddenly like breaking standards, and the forehead of the sun peeped over the rim of the water. The mist rose quickly, hurrying to nothingness like a million ghosts caught out too late, and soon there was only the Mediterranean sun burning down on the blue Mediterranean sea and falling in rays of long level light upon the eastward face of Spain.
“Well,” said Idris, who had remained silently smoking at their side, “that’s God’s idea, gel, of how to start a day. And I wish to God I was in Valencia, because hereabouts are people whose ideas are not so lovely.”
He swung on his heel and walked to the bridge, leaving disenchantment in both their hearts. Charles gave a short ironical laugh. “He does well to remind us that this isn’t a honeymoon,” he said; and Alice: “Yes. It’s grim, isn’t it, when we must tell God Himself that the day of romantic gestures is ended.”
They went to the cabin and dressed, and then they began to pack their things. Charles was kneeling at the task; and Alice, sitting on the edge of the bunk, began to stroke the close crisp curls of his hair. Remaining on his knees, he looked up at her smiling, his blue eyes full of that faith and confidence and surety that he seemed to know most deeply when with her.
“Charles, my love,” she said, “you’re quite sure about this, aren’t you? You wanted to come? You believe in what we’re doing?”
“I believe in you,” he said. “So long as you’re living in Spain I’ll live and fight there happily; and if you die in Spain, then, by God, I feel I should want to soak the place in blood for having robbed me of the chance to redeem all those years when I was a fool.”
She took his head between her hands and pulled it on to her lap, and sat there stroking his hair and gazing before her at the blue emptiness drifting by the porthole.
It was while they sat thus, close together, their bodies touching and their minds resting confidently each in the love of the other, that the torpedo struck the Mary Marriner amidships, below the water line. The little boat stumbled and staggered. Alice pulled Charles to his feet, and they ran out to the deck The morning was as placid as ever, but already they could feel that the deck was at a tilt beneath them. Idris Howells was on the bridge, shouting down the tube to the engine-room. Even as they watched him, clinging to one another, he got his answer. A rumble in the bowels of the Mary Marriner roared swiftly to climax: an explosion that blew a great rent in her from engine-room to daylight. A rush of scalding steam screamed into the air and with it came a shrapnel-burst of flying metal bits. There were two men in the engine-room. Both were killed. So was Charles. When Idris Howells came running down from the bridge which was blown crazily askew, he found Alice squatting on the deck with Charles’s head again on her lap. Her lap was dark with the blood draining from a hole drilled into his temple by a flashing steel bolt. Only a few seconds had passed since the ship was struck. Charles and Alice had not exchanged a word since those last words in the cabin.