It was very dark out on the moor, and the wind was rushing there with shrieks and howls. It sounded as though the world were about to founder in chaos.
The clock with the silvery chime struck nine. It was up here now at The Hut. London didn’t see much of the Viscount Shawcross, and though he still kept the house in Half Moon Street, he had taken his most treasured possessions north. Axel Horst’s picture of Ann was over the mantelpiece, and, striking what a stranger might have thought an incongruous note, there stood in a place of honour a fretwork model of the House of Commons, with Big Ben in the tower, all complete. Old Pendleton was dead; his wife had gone to end her days with some young relatives; and the clock was found when their rooms were being rearranged for Chesser.
And now here Chesser was, with the nightly glass of hot toddy. He placed the tray on the table alongside Hamer’s chair: a table which already contained a box of cigars, Marcus Aurelius, The Observer and The Sunday Times. The papers were of that day’s date: Sunday, December 3, 1939.
The old man got up from his chair while Chesser was mending the fire. He was thinner; his hair, long and fine, had the glister of white silk. He stooped a little, with his hand in the small of his back. “It is a great satisfaction to note from the papers, Chesser,” he said, “that Japan deplores the Russian invasion of Finland. A Japanese newspaper thinks it an inexcusable crime, and in the next column I see it is reported that two Chinese cities have been heavily bombed by Japanese airmen. You know, Chesser, the most extraordinary thing about this world that you are living in and that I am dying in is that nations are not aware of the wickedness of their own hearts. They really do believe that a ghastly crime committed by someone else is a permissible national gesture when committed by them.”
“Yes, my lord, I suppose that is so,” said Chesser. He got up from the hearth, pierced a cigar, gave it to Hamer, and held him a light. He was used to these little speeches. For weeks on end he was the old man’s only audience.
There was not so much power and resonance now in the famous voice. It had gone thin and silvery, like his hair, like the chimes of the clock.
“Things are being done today, Chesser, by the governments of great nations that their ancestors of two hundred, three hundred, years ago would have thought beyond the barbarous reach of cannibals. You think you’ve got the laugh of me, young man, because you’re stepping on to the scene and I’m sliding off. But, by God, I don’t envy you. No, Chesser, I don’t envy you.”
He let himself down carefully among his cushions and stretched his long legs towards the fire.
“That’s better. I get stiff – just a bit stiff, you know, Chesser, sitting here.”
“Is there anything I can get you, sir, before I go?”
“Yes. You can get me that big book over there. The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature, they call it. Though it seems to me a matter of common sense that the Bible was designed to be read as the Bible. You read the Bible, Chesser, and Marcus Aurelius, with an occasional dip into Shakespeare, and you won’t hurt.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“And I shall be sleeping in the hut tonight.”
“But, sir, it’s a terrible night! Hark at the wind!”
“You do as I tell you. You can light the stove.”
“I don’t really think—”
“I know very well what you think. You think you can do as you like. You know I’m very fond of you. You know I’m dependent on you. And so you try to annoy me. Well, I won’t have it, you understand? You do as you’re told, my boy.”
“Very good, my lord. I’ll wait up to see you’re all right.”
“I don’t want you to wait up. I can still get to bed without help, thank God.”
“I’d feel easier in my mind, sir—”
“Very well, very well.”
He smiled when Chesser was gone. He liked the fellow, and he liked being fussed. It was lonely without Alice, and he hoped she wouldn’t be long away. She wouldn’t. No, she wouldn’t. He knew that – not with young Gordon here in the house.
It was extraordinary, he reflected, how the coming of another generation blew on the sparks of dying hope. Because of that child, not yet two years old, sleeping up there where Charles used to sleep, the world seemed worth saving. Letty Lostwithiel had driven over that afternoon from the bailiff’s house she lived in at Castle Hereward. Like him, she did not trouble London much nowadays. The child’s nurse had said it was too wild and blowy to take him out on the moor, and they had gone up and looked at him lying in his cot: this child of Alice and Charles, grandson of Pen and Arnold, as well as of himself and Ann, this child who carried the Christian name of Gordon Stansfield. So much seemed to meet and to be embodied in this bit of flesh.
They had tea in Hamer’s study, which was already darkening, with the pines and firs lashing in the blast beyond the windows. “You’re a lucky man, my dear,” Lettice said. “You used to think, didn’t you, that Castle Hereward and the name of Lostwithiel were almost eternal things that even you could hardly blow out of existence. Now you know how frail such things are. It’s worked out like that: I am an end; you are a beginning.”
He hadn’t thought of it like that before, but there it was: England had seen the last of the Earls of Lostwithiel, but upstairs was the second Viscount Shawcross, with a world of sorts in front of him. Not that the title mattered, but the hope of an immortality of the flesh was, irrationally, a comforting thing.
He and Lettice Lostwithiel had not discussed the state of the world. For the last few years the tempo of its Gadarene rush had accelerated, and now here they were at war again, all furnished with Gadarene snouts to put on, and with holes in the ground to run to like foxes. But he and she were so far beyond surprise that they could leave all that aside and be happy in talk of personal trivialities. In their own now restricted circle, they were the only two survivors of an age. It was an age in which no good had seemed impossible, and now they accepted the age in which no evil, no bestiality, no treason or treachery seemed incredible.
This was the age of which Gordon Shawcross, aged one year and nine months, was the heir, and, sitting there after Chesser was gone, Hamer found the age more tolerable in contemplation because Gordon would inherit it. It was the old fallacy of human hope. He knew that well enough. “While there’s life there’s hope,” and that was true not only of each man’s life but of the life of man. He remembered something that Arnold Ryerson had told him long ago: Arnold whose photograph, with Keir Hardie’s and Pen’s and Ann’s and Letty’s and Lizzie’s, stood on the mantelpiece under the Axel Horst portrait: a sort of “Who’s Who in the Life of Hamer Shawcross.”
Arnold had said that one night in Bradford, when he went out – his first venture – to speak to the factory girls, they had rushed on him and Pen under the street-lamp in the rain, and had torn and gashed them, stripping away their clothes and their skin. And Arnold had said despairingly when it was over: “They’re not worth saving,” and to that Pen had answered: “Men and women – they’re all we’ve got to work with. ’Appen they’re all God Almighty’s got to work with, come to that.”
Well, He hadn’t got so far with His work. With whimsical blasphemy, Hamer reflected that if his own life’s work – entered on with such high hopes, with such banners and trumpets – had been a failure – and he admitted it was – he need not feel unduly cast down since God, with all eternity to scheme in, had not been more successful. Never had the idea of God been more widespread. You couldn’t sink a drain, or launch a cruiser, or go into battle without the ever-present priest. It would not be long before Hollywood had its corps of clerks in Holy Orders to bless each film as it first flickered on to the screen. But old Marcus Aurelius had, as usual, got pithily to the root of the matter: “The gods had much rather that mankind should resemble than flatter them.” The flattery of imitation was not yet widespread. We were still at the rudimentary age in which too many priests had little to do save show that God was the Yes-man of the State.
Young Gordon Shawcross was sleeping upstairs, a puny and insufficient cause for hope in all conscience. Yet as each generation was launched from the womb of time, men would go on hoping that it might be the ultimate wave, the final undermining surge to loosen the strong bastions of evil and bring them crashing down.
But they would not come crashing down. Three things were immortal: good and evil and the hope in men’s hearts that evil would be overcome by good. There would always be the battle, with the promise of unachievable victory swaying this way in one generation, and in another generation that way. For himself, he was not sorry that his own part in the everlasting warfare was nearly done. Disillusions and despairs went at last the same way as dreams and desires. One came in the end to an equipoise, to an acceptance of all that life could do or give or take away.
He put down the dead cigar and leaned back, looking at the portrait of Ann, glowing as brightly as on the day when Axel Horst painted it. He was glad that Ann died when she did. It was still possible, then, to believe in faith between man and man, in reason going its slow patient way, building with its small but well-laid bricks.
The picture took his mind back to those days in the sunshine of the Harz mountains. Even then – even then – the premonition of the world’s calvary was present in old Horst’s cry: “Where now are our dreams?”
Such dreams there had been! Dreams of Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, and extending therefrom to the uttermost coasts. The solidarity of Labour! The old man’s face twisted with a weary smile. What was solid now? All the earth was quagmire because no longer were men’s words their bond. Faith was gone, snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane, and with it hope and charity were gone, too. From the western coasts of Europe, eastward through Russia and the waste places, even unto China and Japan, the world was embattled and the ancient foundations were crumbling. The statesmen with their childish diction talked of the grave deterioration of international relationships; and so grave, indeed, so shocking to all decency and good human feeling was the present state of the world that it was easy to fly for refuge to the belief that God Himself was afflicting mankind. Rather, mankind was afflicting God, afflicting the Godhead in the human soul; for if one thing was so certain as to need no demonstration it was this: that a good or a bad state in human relationships was the consequence of the actions of good men doing good things or of bad men doing bad things, and of nothing else.
In the silence, above the crying of the winter trees around the house, he heard the drone of aeroplanes: deep, resonant, like mighty harpstrings vibrating in the sky. They seemed to him the very voice of a world in which he had lingered too long: the vainglorious voice of Satan’s host sweeping to a new revolt against the majesty and the authority and the peace of God.
He got up a little unsteadily from the chair, and stood listening, supporting himself with his hands on the arm. From upstairs he heard a whimper, rising to a cry, and while the throbbing of the aeroplanes was still there for all to hear, he ceased to hear it, all his being concentrated suddenly on listening to the voice of the child.
*
The child had been born in this house. The house already was becoming an historic place. Here his mother had died; here he himself soon must die; here his son had been born and his grandson.
Alice did not so much as land in Spain. The small crew of the Mary Marriner, all packed into one boat, rowed away as the little ship settled down in the water through which, but lately, she had been ploughing her way. The three dead men went down with her: so swiftly Hamer’s son followed Hamer’s sword to the deep oblivion in which all gestures, romantic or realistic or springing from whatsoever part of the restless spirit of man, are done with for ever.
A British steamer, homeward bound from Valencia, picked them up at noon. Hamer met Alice at a London dock and took her home to Half Moon Street. Soon afterwards, she knew that the child would be born; and then they went to Baildon, and they had rarely been out of it since. Alice had little to say of politics during those years, and little of Charles. She was a quiet ageing woman. She went on writing her novels.
Rarely – very rarely – she mentioned affairs in Russia, with a growing doubt, a deepening apprehension. That morning she had left The Hut to travel by the Sunday train to London in order to keep an appointment early on Monday morning. She said nothing when she read the Sunday papers with their tale of Russia’s blow at Finland. It was not till the car was at the door waiting to take her to the station, and she was saying good-bye to Hamer in the hall, that she exclaimed bitterly: “It is nice of them to be so frank. They have at least left me in no doubt what Charles died for.”
“My dear, my dear!” he said, the old silvery man bending over the grizzled head that he had known so black and smooth; but she would not wait to be comforted. She rushed from the house, the car door banged, and she was gone.
Who sees his dream fulfilled? he wondered, sitting back in his chair when the crying of the child ceased, and the aeroplanes had passed over, and nothing could be heard but the wind lamenting in the loneliness. Perhaps only a fool. Not Ann. Not Pen nor Arnold, not himself nor Alice. Tom Hannaway perhaps.
It was time for bed. He got up and walked out into the hall where Chesser was sitting by the fire reading. Chesser looked at him reproachfully. This business of sleeping in the hut was something he could not understand. It was not the old hut any longer. It had been renovated out of recognition. It was dry and weather proof, electrically lit and warm. But still it answered some need in Hamer’s mind. When Chesser had wrapped him up in an overcoat and muffler and lighted him down the path and seen him comfortably settled and had then gone away, Hamer gave a sigh of relief. Now he was alone, and, with a little imagination, it was the old hut. The deal table and chair and the rough bookshelves were untouched, and this was the old stove, though polished and more safely housed.
If his dreams were dead, here at least he could be near their ghosts. He did not even need to shut his eyes to call them up, for they were within him. They were an indissoluble part of him. They had made so much of him that he was already, he thought with a smile, three parts ghost. What scenes he had haunted! What hopes he had known, what triumphs and what despairs!
Here, in this little room, they were all about him: this little room to which he had come with Ann so long ago. He switched off the light and lay back listening to the wind hectoring hungrily about the world. A little light, he had said to Ann, is enough to love by. O little light! Come to the world! Come to the world that is so full of wind and darkness!
He fell asleep there where he had known his love that night when the snow fell upon the hut pitilessly, relentlessly, like the falling of the years which give so much that in the end they may take all away.
Pinner, Middlesex: September, 1938.
Myler, Cornwall: January, 1940.
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