CHRISTMAS AND THE CHRISTMAS number of the Guardian came a few weeks later, and George Boswell summarizing the local events of the year in a special article, then wrote as follows:—
…In November Browdley suffered its worst floods within living memory, while in the same month the death, under suspicious circumstances, of Mr. John Channing, of Stoneclough, recalled the Channing Mill crash of a generation ago—an event notable in the history of our town both on account of the number of its victims and the sensational criminal trial that followed it…
When George handed this to Will Spivey, his sub-editor, printer, proofreader, ad salesman, and general all-purposes assistant, the latter scrutinized it, grunted, then carefully blue-penciled the word “suspicious.”
“You can’t say that, George.”
“Why not? Isn’t it true?”
“Have ye never heard ‘the greater the truth the greater the libel’?”
“Libel? Who’s libeling who?”
“The verdict at the inquest was ‘accidental death.’ ”
“Aye, and everybody knows why—because old Whiteside was coroner and made ’em believe what the girl said…As if anyone sober or in his right mind would be taking walks in the clough at night during the worst storm for years—”
“I know, George. And there’s some say he wasn’t sober and there’s others say he wasn’t in his right mind and I’ve even heard it whispered that—”
“Nay—I’m not saying or whispering anything, because I simply don’t know and I refuse to believe gossip. I’m just content with the word ‘suspicious.’”
“No good, George. The jury found it was accidental—you can’t contradict ’em. Change to ‘tragic’ and you’ll be safe.”
George reluctantly made the substitution. It was his first year as editor and he did not want trouble. Already he had discovered that the written word had more pitfalls than the spoken, and that the Guardian was a rather sickly infant whose survival could only be contrived from week to week by the most delicate nursing.
“There you are then,” he muttered, handing back the corrected copy. “And if I’m safe, that’s more than Channing’s ever was….”
Ever since he could remember, the Channing name had been part of his life. He had known that his father worked at “Channing’s” before he had any idea what Channing’s was, and when he was old enough to associate the word with the humming three-storied soot-blackened cotton mill at the end of the street, it had taken shape in his mind as something fixed, universal, and eternal. As a child the rows of windows had seemed endless to him as he walked under their sills, and it became an exciting dream to think that as he grew up he would presently be tall enough to see through them. When that time did come he found there was nothing to see—just the faint suggestion of moving wheels behind the wired and murky glass, with the humming louder when he put his ears to it. He had grown up to feel that work at Channing’s was in the natural order of events, like play along the canal bank and chapel on Sundays. Indeed, it was the shrill Channing’s “buzzer” that marked Time, and the Channing’s brick wall that marked Space, in his own small boy’s world.
Even after the death of his parents, when he had gone to live with his uncle in another part of the town, Channing’s merely acquired an extra attribute, for Uncle Joe called it “safe.” George soon learned that it paid his uncle, who did not work there, just as regularly as it had paid his father, who had worked; though why this should be, he could not imagine. It was, however, of importance because his uncle had promised to send him to Browdley Grammar School and pay the fees out of “the Channing’s money.” Then suddenly disaster struck. Even to an intelligent schoolboy it was all rather incomprehensible, for the mill still stood, not a brick disturbed, not a cadence lost from the call of its early morning and late afternoon siren; and yet, in a way that undoubtedly hurried Uncle Joe to his grave, Channing’s proved no longer “safe.”
So George, because of this, had left an elementary school when he was thirteen, and had taken various jobs that gave him nothing but a series of pointless and not always pleasant experiences, and then had come the war, with more pointless and not always pleasant experiences—in France and elsewhere. During this time, however, his dissatisfactions had acquired a pattern, and the pattern had acquired a trend; so that on seeing Browdley again, war-injured but recovering, at the age of thirty-one, he had known what he wanted to do and had begun right away to do it. At a Council by-election he won a victory that surprised even himself, while about the same time he took over the almost bankrupt Guardian.
And after several months the Guardian was still almost bankrupt. For one reason, it had no monopoly (the Browdley Advertiser, one of a chain of local papers, enjoyed a far bigger circulation), and Browdley folk remained obstinately fixed in their reading habits even when an increasing number of them favored George’s political opinions. He would have been badly off indeed but for the small printing establishment (two hand-presses with three employees), which not only put out the regular weekly edition but also received official printing jobs from the Browdley municipality. And here, of course, lay an obvious opening for George’s political opponents, some of whom whispered “graft” whenever the Council (George scrupulously absenting himself from the vote) decided to hand him another contract. That they did so at all, however, testified to his rising popularity as well as to the fact that the enmities he made were rarely bitter or lasting. The truth was, as an enemy once remarked, it was damned hard to hate George, and whispers of graft did not stick very well because, graft or no graft, it really was quite obvious that he was not lining his pockets with any considerable success. He lived modestly in the oldish, inconvenient house which, adjoining the printing works, he had acquired when nobody else wanted either; and he often found it as hard to pay his newsprint bills as to collect from some of his customers. He dressed rather shabbily and rode a bicycle except when official business entitled him to the use of a municipal car. The local bank manager and income-tax assessor knew all these and other pertinent details, but as they belonged to the opposition party they were constrained to attack him in reverse: if, they argued, George succeeded so meagerly with his own small business, how could Browdley feel confidence in his capacity to run the town? But humbler citizens were not much influenced by this. Most of them knew George personally and felt that his total lack of prosperity made him all the more human, municipal contracts or not. They liked him, in fact, and a great many fought his battle, and if a few of them fought it bitterly, he would sometimes reward them with a speech that made them think he was secretly as bitter as they were. But in that they were wrong, for George was just fiery, effervescent, genuinely indignant over much that he saw around him, but incurably romantic about what he saw in his own mind. He was also naïve in the way he tackled his opponents—first of all overwhelming them with a sort of Galahad impetuosity, then wondering if perhaps he had been a little unfair, and later—as often as not—making some quixotic gesture of retraction or conciliation.
There was that Council meeting, for instance, in the spring of 1918, at which he first spoke Livia’s name—and with a ring of challenge as he pitched his voice to the public gallery. “I’ve always held,” he began, “that no accident of birth should ever stand in the way of merit (cheers)—in fact it’s one of the few things I’m prepared to be thoroughly consistent about. (Laughter.) Councillor Whaley has just referred to the great injustice done to our fellow citizens many years ago by one whose name has a certain prominence in the history of this town. I think Councillor Whaley put the matter far too mildly in using the word ‘injustice.’ I’d prefer myself to call it the most damnable piece of financial knavery ever perpetrated by a self-acknowledged crook at the expense of thousands of honest hard-working folks. (Loud cheers.) Oh yes, I know the saying De mortuis nil nisi bonum—if I’ve got the pronunciation wrong perhaps some of the gentlemen on the other side who have had the advantage of a better education than mine will correct me (laughter)—at any rate, they’ll agree with me that the Latin words mean that you should speak no evil of the dead…But may I ask this question of Councillor Whaley—suppose the dead reach out from their graves to continue the harm they did during their lives—are we still to keep silent about them? (Loud and prolonged cheers.) Gentlemen…I wouldn’t have referred to such a matter unless the other side had thought fit to mention it first. But since they did, I’ll say this much—that in my opinion our town is still suffering from the effects of the Channing Mill crash and the iniquitous swindle that caused it! Its victims are to be found in every street—nay, almost in every house. Certainly in one of our houses—the workhouse. (Cheers.) What shall we say of any man, living or dead, who can be accounted personally responsible for such a thing? To inherit control of an industrial concern and then behave with such callous dishonesty that working people lose jobs and life savings together, so that hundreds of homes are sacrificed and broken up, so that health is imperiled and countless lives are embittered, so that children have their educations interrupted and old folks are hastened to their graves—if one causes all this havoc, then in God’s name what shall we call him, or the system that gave him such power and opportunity?”
Here the cheers and shouts of the gallery were interrupted by a shabby little man in the back row who yelled out with piercing distinctness: “Don’t matter what you call ’im now, George. The bugger’s dead.” Whereupon cheers dissolved into laughter and George sensing the moment for a change of mood, dropped his voice to a much more prosaic level and continued:—
“Aye…let’s cut the cackle and get down to the business in hand. There’s a war still on, and we must save a bit of our bad language for the Germans. (Laughter.) I was just then tempted—as we all are sometimes—to speak my mind. (Laughter.) I couldn’t help it, and I think those who elected me to this Council didn’t really expect me ever to do anything else. (Cheers and laughter.) And that’s why I’m urging you now, as a man still speaking his mind, not to pay off an old score on an innocent person. To begin with, the score’s too big. And then also, though we’re often told that the sins of the fathers get visited on the children, there isn’t one of us who thinks that’s really a fair thing, or ought to be encouraged…Well, now let me really come to the facts of the matter. We have tonight a subordinate municipal post to fill for which we invited public applications. As I see it—and not as some folks here seem to see it—there’s only one thing we ought to do, and that’s what we always have done—choose the best person for the job and let no other consideration matter. It’s a simple method, and I’m all against changing it.” And then, dropping his voice to a monotone as he consulted a sheet of paper: “I have here the list of applicants for the position of junior library assistant, together with their qualifications. On the basis of these facts, and these alone, I move that the application of Miss Olivia Channing be accepted.” (Cheers and some cries of dissent.)
The foregoing has been worth quoting verbatim, not only because it was one of the events that shaped George’s destiny, but as a sample of his speechmaking in those days. He always said he was no orator, and sincerely believed it, but his opponents, though reluctant to use the complimentary term, were not so sure; at any rate they could call him a rabble-rouser. The speech is typical in its astute and somewhat excessive preliminary agreement with the other side (in this case his own side), putting them in a good humor by stating their case better than they could themselves, so that afterwards George’s real point came as an intended anticlimax. He had often by this means won victories almost by default. The jibe about his fellow members’ superior education was also typical; it was true that many of them had been to better schools, but extremely unlikely that any could remember as much Latin as George had recently learned.
But most typical of all was his quixotic impulse to be fair; it was as if, having called the father a crook, he felt in duty bound to find the daughter a job.
On this occasion victory was anything but by default. His speech failed to silence objectors, and there was further argument, some of it rancorous. But the motion was eventually passed by a narrow margin, with much cross voting; so that in due course Miss Olivia Channing did indeed become junior assistant in the Browdley Public Library at a commencing salary of forty-five shillings a week.
“And a nice problem you’ve handed me,” Dick Jordan remarked, meeting George a few days later in Shawgate. The librarian was one of George’s closest friends and political supporters.
“Why, Dick, isn’t she any good?”
“She does the work all right, but—well, when you remember her father there’s a lot of things you can’t feel sure of.”
“Aye, and one of them’s heredity,” declared George, advancing stoutly to a favorite topic. “Thank goodness it’s not as important as environment, because environment’s something you can change.”
“Not when you’ve already had it. What d’you think her environment was like at Stoneclough—up there with a man who’d done a stretch in prison and drank heavily and was so impossible to live with that…oh well, you’ve heard some of the rumors, I daresay.”
“I’ve heard ’em, but I don’t see why they should make us condemn the girl. Seems to me it’s more a case for sympathy.”
“She’ll not find much of that in Browdley, George. It’s one thing to swing the Council by a speech, but when it comes to changing the minds of ordinary folks who’ve lost their hard cash—”
“But she didn’t steal it—”
“No, but she lived at Stoneclough, and for years that’s been the symbol in this town of being luckier than you deserve. And it’s still the symbol, George, in spite of all the mortgages on the place and no matter what the girl herself had to put up with there…”
George did not meet her till some weeks after she had begun work. He was then studying hard for the final examination that might earn him a university degree, and it was this that occupied his mind when he entered the Reference Department of the library on a sunny April afternoon. But when he left, a couple of hours after, he could only think of the girl who had brought him Volume Four of the Cambridge Modern History.
He always remembered her first words to him as she took his slip of paper, scanned it, then him, then stepped back a pace. “Councillor Boswell?”
And his own first words as he stared at her for the first time: “Aye, that’s me.”
“Then I want to thank you for—for—”
“Oh…so you’re Olivia Channing?”
“Yes, that’s why I want to thank you. It was kind of you to put in a word for me.”
“I didn’t mean it as kindness—just fairness, that’s all. But I’m glad it turned out the way it did. How are you managing?”
“You mean the work? Oh, it’s easy.”
“Like it?”
“Pretty well.”
“Only that?”
She smiled—a curious smile, for which George, who saw it often afterwards, long sought an adjective, and in the end could only use Jordan’s description of the girl—he had said she looked “haunted.”
She said now, with this smile: “People don’t like me, that’s the trouble.”
He smiled back, robustly, cheerfully. “Can’t expect them to, yet awhile. You’ll just have to live things down a bit.”
“Live things down?”
“Aye…If you know what I mean.”
He wondered if, or how much she did, especially as that ended their conversation rather abruptly. She fetched him his book and did not resume it.
After that first meeting he began to feel emotionally the full force of the argument he had stated in abstract terms at the Council meeting—that the child should not suffer for the sins of the father. In this case the sins of the father had been so considerable that the sufferings of the daughter might well be on the same scale unless someone intervened on her behalf; and George, having intervened once, could not help the growth of a feeling of personal responsibility to match his awakening interest. He knew that John Channing had died practically without means, despite the fact that he had lived at Stoneclough from the time of his release from prison until his death; and though the daughter’s need to go out and earn her own living did not stir George to any particular pity (for, after all, that was what most Browdley girls had to do), he was nevertheless concerned that she should be happy in her job, the more so as he had obtained it for her. Not till he met her for the second time did it occur to him to wonder why on earth she had applied for any job at all in a place where there was so much local feeling against her family.
He spoke this thought aloud when (on a bus top where he found himself next to her) she admitted having encountered a good deal of coldness and even a few personal insults at the library.
“Then how about giving it up?” he asked, suddenly seeing things from her angle and becoming indignant about them. “Would you be happier?”
“I need the money,” she said simply.
“Aye, but there’d be other jobs in other places—why not try London, for instance?”
“I’d rather stay here.”
“You mean you like Browdley?”
She shook her head.
“Then why?”
“It’s my home—Stoneclough.”
“Stoneclough? You mean the actual house? It means so much to you? You still live there?”
“Yes, it’s my home.”
“I should have thought you’d have been glad to leave a place that had such—er—unhappy associations.”
She shook her head again.
After an awkward pause George continued: “Well, don’t worry. Most people have short memories.”
“I haven’t.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that…I meant other people—they’ll change their minds about you if you stick it out.”
(And yet as he said this he was aware of another phenomenon that became familiar to him later—the ease with which, to her or in her presence, he said things he did not really mean, or that his own judgment did not support. For instance, it simply was not true that Browdley people had short memories—on the contrary, though the Channing crash had taken place a generation before, it was still remembered with bitterness, and the fact that the girl had had unpleasant experiences at the library proved it.)
She said: “Please don’t think I’m complaining about the job. It was you who asked me what it was like, otherwise I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Well, I’m glad it doesn’t bother you much. If it does, let me know.”
(But that also was absurd. What could he do, even if she did let him know? Any other job in Browdley would have the same drawbacks, and outside Browdley he had no influence to find her a job at all.)
She said, smiling: “Thanks. It’s very kind of you…I’m afraid this is my stop…Good night.”
It was at the corner where the lane to Stoneclough left the main road. He suddenly realized that and detained her for a few seconds with an astonished: “But—but—are you going home now? How do you get there from here?”
“I walk.”
“But it’s three miles.”
“I don’t mind. I love walking…Good night.”
After she had gone and the bus had restarted he began to think it over. Six miles a day on foot oughtn’t to have shocked him (he was a good walker himself and had often, when he was her age, walked to and from jobs to save bus fares), but it was strange to realize that till then he had never wondered how or where the girl did live, travel to her work, and so on. So she was still at Stoneclough?…Too bad there were no other houses in that direction, or he might have asked the Transport Committee, of which he was a member, to start a new bus route.
He met her several times again on that same trip and each time he found himself more interested. Up to a point they seemed to get along excellently; she was quick-minded and charmingly friendly, and when she spoke it was with a sort of grave ardor that made even chatter sound significant; yet beyond that a shadow seemed to fall between them. After thinking it over with some deliberation he decided what the shadow was; it must be the fact (doubtless known to her) that he had publicly attacked her father and family. He was prepared for some inevitable mention of this sooner or later, and planned to be completely frank and outspoken. “Now please,” he would say, “let’s not waste time over that. I said what I meant and I still mean it. But I don’t expect you to see things my way—after all, he was your father, whatever else he was.”
But she never gave him the cue. One day, however, he met Dick Jordan in the street again and heard the story of a rather odd incident that had taken place at the library.
“Iwas in my office, George, when I heard a bit of a row going on at the counter, so I went out to see what it was, and there was old Horncastle calling the girl names and shouting about her father having ruined him. You know Bob Horncastle?”
Yes, George knew him. He was a gnarled industrial veteran who had lost both job and money in the Channing crash and had lived ever since on the verge of penury, his embitterment becoming a shade nearer lunacy each year. Browdley knew all about him. His was a hard case, but no harder than some others.
“The girl was standing there, George, pale and not saying a word and with that haunted look I told you about, while the old chap poured out a stream of abuse. When he saw me approaching he stopped, and then the girl said very quietly—‘I’m sorry, Mr. Horncastle.’ She had to get his name from the library card she was holding, and the way she did that—the way she looked down, I mean, and then looked up again and spoke his name…well, it was just like a play, especially when she went on—‘But why don’t you scribble it in the margins of the book, as all the other people do?’ Then she just walked off and left him to me to calm down. Of course there wasn’t much I could say—he’s too old, for one thing, and the way he was carrying on I was afraid he was going to have a heart attack. Finally I got him to go, and then I went back to my office and nearly had a heart attack myself. That kind of thing upsets me.”
George was troubled. “I must admit I didn’t think folks would take it out of the girl so much. And from what you say, Dick, it wasn’t her fault—she gave no provocation.”
“The bare fact of her being there was provocation enough to Horncastle…But there’s a sequel. After he’d gone I was curious about the girl’s remark about people scribbling in the margins of the book…What book? There’s only one it could have been, and that’s the detailed report of Channing’s trial, so I thought I’d look to see if it was on the shelves. It was, and sure enough, the margins were messed up with penciled comments—including just about the foulest language I ever heard of—and in different handwritings too. Looked as if a good many Browdley readers had had a go at expressing their opinions…Of course it was our own negligence not to have spotted it earlier—we’re supposed to go through all the books at the annual stocktaking and rub out anything of that sort, but apparently this book had been overlooked. So I put it aside and thought I’d do the job myself as soon as I had the time. But then another queer thing happened. Later in the afternoon the girl came to my office and asked where the book was. Seems rather as if she kept an eye on it and had already noticed it was gone—for of course she could check to see it hadn’t been lent out. I told her I’d taken it and that I intended to have the objectionable remarks removed, and then she said—and again I thought of somebody in a play—she said: ‘Oh please don’t on my account.’ I gave her a bit of a sharp answer—I said—‘It’s not on your account at all, young lady, it’s simply a library rule.’ And that ended the matter…But I must say, she’s a queer customer. You’d have thought she’d be glad I was going to do it. Frankly, I can’t make her out.”
George nodded thoughtfully. “Aye, she’s a problem, I can see that. Maybe I made a mistake in getting her the job, but it’s done now and can’t be undone. If I were you, though, I’d try to find her some kind of work where she doesn’t have to meet folks so much…Isn’t there something?”
“She might tackle the indexing. Yes, that’s not a bad idea, George. I daresay she’s smart enough.”
“Attractive-looking too, don’t you think?”
Jordan gave George a shrewd glance. “Can’t say. Maybe I’m no judge, or maybe she’s just not my style. She attracts attention, if that’s what you mean, but whether it’s by her looks or a sort of personality, or something else, I can’t be sure. I know I wouldn’t want her in my office.”
“She’d give you more heart attacks, is that it?” said George, laughing.
The librarian joined in the joke, as boisterously as a man may who actually does have a weak heart as well as a nagging wife.
So it was arranged that the girl should tackle the indexing, and George wondered how it had worked out when next he met her, for she certainly seemed happier and greeted him with a smile whose warmth he felt, for the first time, was somehow intimate and personal. They chatted—on the bus top as usual—without mentioning anything important till she said, apropos of nothing in particular: “Aren’t you soon taking a university degree?”
“Aye, if I can pass the exam, and that’s a pretty big ‘if.’ Who told you?”
“I heard someone saying something about it at the library. You see, you ask for so many books.” She added: “Such difficult books too…and yet…” And then she hesitated.
“And yet what?”
“Those ‘ayes’ of yours.”
“My eyes?”
“I mean the ‘ayes’ you say instead of ‘yes.’ ”
He flushed, and for a moment fought down a humorless impulse to be offended. Then he laughed. “Aye,” he answered, with slow deliberation. “I daresay I could drop them if I disliked them enough. But I don’t. And if anybody else does…well, let ’em.” And then he suddenly gave himself the cue that he had waited for in vain from her. “Maybe you feel about your dad like that. You just don’t care what other people think—because it’s what you yourself feel that matters. I don’t blame you. I’ve done my share in attacking your family in this town—you probably know about that—and I’m not going to make any apologies or take back a single word. But I can’t see why that should come between you and me, and for my part it doesn’t have to.”
He paused to give her a chance to say something, but she said nothing, so he went on: “Well, thank goodness that’s off my chest. I’ve been looking for the chance to say it, because if you and I are going to get to know each other well there has to be some sort of understanding about how we both feel about ancient history. Aye, ancient history, that’s what it is.” He was relieved to have found the phrase until he saw her face, turned to him with a look so uninterpretable that it might have been slight amusement or slight horror, but mixed, in either case, with a preponderance of simple curiosity. She seemed to be waiting to hear what he would say next, and that, of course, put him off so that he stopped talking altogether. Just then the bus reached the corner of the Stoneclough lane, surprising them both, and as she sprang down the steps with a quick smile and a good-night he had an overmastering urge to follow her, if only not to leave the conversation poised for days, perhaps, at such an impossible angle. So he ran after her and overtook her a little way along the lane. “I don’t need to study tonight,” he said breathlessly (she knew that he spent most of his evenings with the difficult library books). “I can walk part of the way with you—that is, if you don’t mind…”
“Why, of course not. I don’t mind at all. But on one condition.”
“Yes?”
“Let’s not mention my father again… please.”
“All right.”
“Ever again? You promise?”
“Why, certainly—if that’s what you wish, but I assure you I do understand how you feel—”
“No, no, you don’t—you can’t…but you’ve promised, remember that. From now on. From this minute on.” And over the strained emphasis of her words there came, like a veil slowly drawn, that curious “haunted” smile.
So he walked with her, puzzled and somewhat discomfited at first, as he changed the subject to Browdley and its affairs. He did so because, after his promise, that seemed the easiest way to keep it; and sure enough, he was soon at ease amidst the torrent of his own plans and ambitions, both personal and for the town. She made few comments and when they said good-bye at the gates of Stoneclough he could not forbear the somewhat chastened afterthought: “I hope that didn’t bore you. Or weren’t you listening?”
She answered, smiling again, but this time differently: “Well, not all the time. But I don’t have to, do I? Can’t I like you without liking the new gas works?”
“Aye,” he said, smiling back as he gave her arm a farewell squeeze. “But I can like you and still like the new gas works. Why not?”
But could he? That was to some extent, both then and afterwards, the question.
He soon realized that he loved her—probably on the way home after that first walk to Stoneclough. And immediately, of course, she became the object of a crusade, for in those days that was the pattern of all George’s emotions, his passion for education, his eagerness to tear down the slums of Browdley (already he had a scheme), his secret ambition to become the town’s Member of Parliament—all were for the ultimate benefit of others as well as to satisfy personal desire. And soon, eclipsing everything else in intensity, came his desire to marry Livia—that is to say, to rescue her. To rescue her from Stoneclough, from the thraldom of ancient history; and now, additionally, to rescue her from a situation he had himself got her into, where she was at the mercy of casual insults from strangers as well as of her own morbid preoccupation with a book about her father’s trial. All this, as George had to admit, totaled up to a rather substantial piece of rescue work, but he had the urge to do it, and his Galahad mood rose as always to put desire into action. It did not take more than a few weeks to bring that desire to fever point, especially when the chance of prompt action was denied. For she refused his first proposal of marriage. She seemed genuinely bewildered, as if it were the last thing she had ever expected. She liked him, she admitted—oh yes, she liked him a great deal; but as for marrying—well, she thought she was far too young, and anyhow, she didn’t think she would ever want to marry anybody. And she was quite happy where and how she was—at Stoneclough. In fact, to bring the matter to its apparently crucial issue, she couldn’t and wouldn’t leave Stoneclough.
George took his “no” for an answer exactly as he had begun to do on the Council whenever he brought up his housing scheme—that is to say, he seemed to accept it good-humoredly and as final while all the time he was planning how he could best bring the matter up again. Besides which, in this case, he was in love. He had supposed he had been in love before, on several occasions, but the difference in what he felt for Livia convinced him that this was love; because why else should he begin to neglect his Council work—not much, not even in a way that could be noticed by anyone else, but enough to give him qualms of conscience only to be stifled by reflecting that as soon as he had won her he would make up for lost time. He gave himself the same consolation over similar neglect of his examination studies. After all, even in battles, the first must come first. He had confidence that he would win her eventually, not only because he had confidence about most things in those days, but because—as he saw it—there was no considerable rival in the field—only Stoneclough, and he felt himself more than a match for bricks and mortar, however darkly consecrated. How could she long hesitate between the past and the future, especially as there were moments when he felt so sure of her—physical moments when she seemed to withdraw into a world of her own sensations that offered neither criticism nor restraint, in contrast to her usual behavior, which was to make of most contacts a struggle for mastery? He was a clumsy lover, and ruefully aware of it; as he said once, when she emerged from her private world to laugh at him: “Aye, I’m a bit better on committees…”
The fact that she would never say, in words, that she loved him mattered less after she had said, both doubtfully and hopefully, in reply to his fifth or sixth proposal: “I might marry you, George, some day. If I ever marry anyone at all…”
He never passed beyond the gates of Stoneclough; she never invited him, and he never suggested it. She told him little about herself, and the promise he had given not to mention her father set limits to his personal questions about other matters, though not to his curiosity. He wondered, for instance, why old Richard Felsby, her father’s former partner, had not helped her financially, for Richard had dissolved partnership and sold out his interest in the firm before the crash, so that he was still rich and could well have afforded some gesture of generosity. But when once George spoke Richard Felsby’s name he knew he had in some way trespassed on forbidden territory. “I don’t see him,” was all she said, “and I don’t want to. I never want to see him.”
She said little, either, about her life at Stoneclough, except to reiterate, whenever he brought up the matter, that she would rather live there than anywhere else, despite the inconvenience of the three-mile walk. He gathered that there was some old woman, a kind of housekeeper, living there also, and that the two of them shared cooking and other domestic jobs; but she gave him few details and he did not care to probe. Most of his time with her was spent along the Stoneclough road, walking evening after evening during that long fine summer; but as the days shortened and the bad weather came, they sometimes met in the library at midday, when she had an hour off and they could talk in one of the book-lined alcoves of the Reference Department. They spoke then in whispers, because of the “Silence” notice on the wall; and there was piquancy in that, because as Chairman of the Municipal Library Subcommittee he had a sort of responsibility for seeing that library rules were enforced.
One lunch hour she greeted him in such a distraught way that he knew immediately something was wrong. Soon she told him, and even in face of her distress his heart leapt with every word of the revelation. By the time she had finished he knew that fate had played into his hands, so he proposed again, with all his quiet triumph hidden behind a veil of sympathy. For George could not avoid a technique of persuasion that made his last thrust in battle—the winning one—always the kindest. And by sheer coincidence, in that odd way in which at important moments of life the eye is apt to be caught by incongruous things, he noticed while he was talking that just above her hair, and glinting in the same shaft of sunshine, lay an imposing edition of Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. He couldn’t help smiling and thinking it a good omen.
The news that had so distressed her was that the bank had foreclosed the mortgage on Stoneclough, so that she would have had to leave the house in any event. George tried to feel that this did not detract from his triumph, but merely contributed to it. He assured her that she would find it more fun living in a small house than in a great barracks of a place like Stoneclough. “I’d like to know what the bank thinks it can do with it… ”
She made no comment, but asked after a pause: “Do you like dogs?”
“Aye, I like ’em all right. Used to have one when I lived with my Uncle Joe—a big black retriever.”
“My dog’s small—and white. His name’s Becky.”
He suddenly realized what she was driving at. “You mean you want to bring your dog to live with us? Why, of course…And I like any dog, for that matter.”
They were married a few weeks later at Browdley Registry Office, with only a few friends of George’s in attendance. She was nineteen, and the fact that he was getting on for twice that age was only one of the reasons why the affair caused a local sensation.
Councillor Whaley, a seventy-year-old confirmed bachelor and one of those political opponents whom George had converted into a staunch personal friend, took him aside after the ceremony to say: “Well, George, she’s smart enough, and ye’ve got her, so God bless ye both…I doubt if it’ll help ye, though, when ye come up for re-election.”
“And d’you think that worries me?” George retorted, with jovial indignation. “Would you have me marry for votes?”
Tom Whaley chuckled. “I’ll ask ye ten years hence if ye’d vote for marriage—that’s the real question.” George then laughed back as he clapped the old man on the shoulder and reflected privately that Tom Whaley mightn’t be alive ten years hence, and how lucky he himself was, by contrast, to have so much time ahead, and to have it all with Livia. For he was still young enough to think of what he wanted to do as a lifework, the more so as the world looked as if it would give him a chance to do it.
George, ever ready to be optimistic, was particularly so on that day of his marriage.
So were millions of others all over the earth—for it was the month of November, 1918.
The honeymoon, at Bournemouth, was a happy one, and by the time it was over George knew a great many things—a few of them disconcerting—about Livia, but one thing about himself that seemed to matter and was simple enough, after all—he loved her. He loved her more, even, than he had thought he would, or could, love any woman. When he woke in the mornings and saw her still sleeping at his side he had a feeling of tenderness that partly disappeared as soon as she wakened, but somehow left a fragrance that lasted through the day, making him tolerant where he might have been unyielding, amused where he might have been antagonized. For she was, he soon discovered, a person with a very definite will of her own. He thought she was in some ways more like an animal than any human being he had ever met; but she was like a real animal, he qualified, not just a human animal. There was intense physicality about her, but it was unaware of itself and never gross; on the other hand, she had a quality of fastidiousness that human beings rarely have, but animals often. He could only modestly wonder how he had ever been so confident of winning her, because now that he had done so she seemed to him so much more desirable that it was almost as if he had to keep on winning, or else, in some incomprehensible way, to risk losing. And when he returned to Browdley that was still the case. He had hoped, after marriage, to concentrate more than ever on his Council work and on study for the university examination—to make up for such splendidly lost time with a vengeance; yet to his slight dismay there came no relief at all from a nagging preoccupation that he could not grapple with, much less analyze. He found it actually harder to concentrate on the Cambridge Modern History, harder to generate that mixture of indignation and practical energy that had just barely begun to move the mountains of opposition to everything he wanted to do as town Councillor. It was as if the fires with which she consumed him were now seeking to consume other fires.
For instance, her sudden change of attitude in regard to Browdley, and her naïve question, within a few weeks of their return: “George, I’ve been thinking—couldn’t you do your sort of work somewhere else?”
“Somewhere else? You mean move into a better part of the town?”
“No, I mean move altogether. Out of Browdley.”
He was too astonished to say much at first. “Well, I don’t know…” And then he smiled. “That’s just what I suggested to you once, and you said you’d rather stay here.”
“I said I’d rather stay at Stoneclough. But I haven’t got Stoneclough now.”
“Well, I’ve still got the Guardian and my Council position. Wouldn’t be so easy for me to give all that up.”
“You think it would be hard to find a newspaper or a council job in some other town?”
“Aye, that’s true too. But what I said is just what I meant. It wouldn’t be easy for me to give up Browdley.”
She was not the sort of woman to say, “Not even to please me?”—and although he did not think it was in her mind, he knew it was rather uncomfortably in his own.
“It’s probably silly of me, George, even to ask you.”
“No, I wouldn’t call it silly—it’s just not practical. Of course I can understand how you feel about the place, but surely it’s easier to put up with now than it used to be when you worked at the library?”
“Oh, it isn’t a question of that. I can put up with anything. I did, didn’t I? It’s just that—somehow—I don’t think Browdley will bring us any luck.”
“Oh, come now—superstitions—”
“I know—I can’t argue it out. It’s just a feeling I have.”
He laughed with relief, for the unreasonable in those days did not seem to him much of an adversary. “All right, maybe you won’t have to have it long, because I’ve a bit of news to tell you…”
He told her then what he had known for several days—that the Parliamentary Member for Browdley was expected to retire on account of age within a few months. When this happened there would be a by-election and George would be a possible candidate; if he won, he would be obliged to live in London during Parliamentary sessions, so Livia would enjoy frequent escapes from Browdley that way.
She was much happier at the thought of this, and soon also for another reason—she was going to have a baby.
The Member for Browdley duly applied for the Chiltern Hundreds; the writ for the by-election was issued; George was selected as his party’s candidate, and the campaign opened in the summer of the following year. George’s opponent was a rich local manufacturer who had made a fortune during the war and declined to entertain the notion that this was in any way less than his deserts. His party’s majority at the coupon election just after the Armistice had been large, but already there were signs of a change in the national mood, especially in the industrial areas, and it was generally agreed that George had a chance if he would put up a fight for it. And there certainly seemed no one likelier or better able to do so.
When George looked back on his life from later years, it was this period—those few weeks and months—that shone conspicuously, because upon Livia, always unpredictable, pregnancy seemed to confer such deep contentment. George then realized the power she had over him, for immediately he felt freed for effort just when effort was most needed. Never did he work harder than during that election campaign; every morning, after a few necessary jobs in the newspaper office, he would leave for a whole day of canvassing, meetings at street corners and factory gates, culminating in some “monster rally” in the evening that would send him home tired but still exhilarated, long after midnight. Usually Livia would then have a meal awaiting him, which he would gulp down avidly while he told her of the manifold triumphs of the day. In her own way she seemed to share his enthusiasm, if only on account of what could happen after his victory, for it was already planned that they would rent a house in some inner London suburb—Chelsea, perhaps—where she could live with her baby while George made a name for himself in Parliament. Who could set limits to such a future? Well, the electorate of Browdley could; and that, of course, sent him out in the morning to work harder than ever, with Livia still in bed and himself strangely refreshed after no more than a few hours of snatched sleep. He had never been so happy, had never felt so physically enriched, or so alert mentally. Things that had seemed a little wrong between him and Livia just after their marriage had worked themselves right—or something had happened, anyway; perhaps it was just that they had needed time to get properly used to each other.
One thing, naturally, had to be postponed for a while—his studies for the university degree. But of course he could pursue them just as easily—nay, more so—in London later on. And it would be an added pride to put B.A. after his name when he could already put M.P.
Gradually during those busy weeks Browdley’s long rows of drab four-roomed houses took on splashes of color from election cards in most of the windows—George’s colors were yellow, his opponent’s blue. The latter’s slogan was “Put Wetherall In and Keep Higher Taxes Out.” George, however, struck a less mercenary note. “A Vote for Boswell Is a Vote for Your Children’s Future,” proclaimed his cards, banners, and posters.
(George would remember that one day.)
But he really meant it. He told the voters of Browdley exactly what he intended to do if they should choose him to represent them; he mixed the dream and the business in a way that was something rather new to the town, and could be both praised and attacked as such. He had plans, not merely promises, for slum clearance, education, medical insurance, and relief of unemployment; and (to redress the balance, as it were) he had visions, not merely opinions, about international trade, India, the League of Nations, currency, and world peace. He was eager, cheerful, spontaneous, sincere, and a little naïve. He battled his opponent trenchantly, yet with rough-spun humor that took away most of the sting; it was another of George’s special techniques, and he had already become rather expert at it. “I don’t like to hear Mr. Wetherall attacked because he made a lot of money during the war,” he would say. “Let’s be fair to the man—he couldn’t help it. (Laughter.) It wasn’t his brains that did it. (Laughter.) He didn’t even have to try to do it. (More laughter.) The money just came rolling in, because we hadn’t got the laws or the taxes to stop it. So don’t blame poor Mr. Wetherall. Blame the laws and the tax system of this country that enabled one man to become half a millionaire while others had to fight in the trenches for a shilling a day. And let’s get things changed so that it can’t happen again. (Cheers.) But of course you mustn’t expect Mr. Wetherall to vote for any such change. After all, why should he? (Laughter.)…” And so on. Political prophets tipped George as the winner, but whether or not, Browdley had certainly never enjoyed a more bracing political contest.
Election day dawned unseasonably windy and wet, which was his first item of bad luck, for the other side had more cars to take voters to and from the polling stations. He left his house for the central committee rooms at an early hour and was kept busy all day with routine matters; meanwhile, as the rain increased, his spirit sank a little. His agent, Jim Saunders, was already giving him revised last-minute opinions that it would be “a damned near thing.”
Polling closed at eight o’clock, and an hour later the count began in the Town Hall. George paced up and down amongst the green-baize-covered trestle tables, keeping his eyes on the mounting piles of ballot papers; his opponent was absent, preferring to spend the anxious hours more convivially in a hotel room across the street. The atmosphere in the Town Hall became tenser as it also grew thicker with tobacco smoke and the smell of wet mackintoshes.
Towards midnight most of the ballot boxes had been brought in from outlying districts and half the count was over, with George leading by a narrow margin. Watching the proceedings, he found it hard to realize that his fate lay in those slips of paper—his own fate and Livia’s. And then, whimsically, he thought of his election slogan—“A Vote for Boswell Is a Vote for Your Children’s Future.” It was a vote for his children’s future, anyhow, he reflected.
By midnight he knew what his fate was, for the last few ballot boxes, drawn from the suburban fringe where mostly professional and retired people lived, had contained a heavy preponderance of votes for Wetherall. The final figures were not even close enough to justify a recount; George had lost the election by a hundred and forty-eight.
As in a trance he received the impact of the news and went through the ritual prescribed for defeated candidates on such occasions. He stepped out on the balcony to make a short speech to his supporters, congratulated and shook hands with the victor, seconded a vote of thanks to the returning officer; it was all over by one o’clock in the morning, and the rain had not stopped.
As he was leaving the Town Hall Jim Saunders handed him a throw-away leaflet printed in the opposition colors that had been given eleventh-hour circulation throughout the town.
George scanned it over and shrugged more indifferently than he felt. “Poor stuff, Jim. And not even true. I’ll bet it’s not libelous, though.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that. But there’s a good many voters it may have influenced.”
It was an artfully worded suggestion that George had secured a municipal appointment for his wife—concealing the all-important fact that he had not even met her till after she took the job.
“It’s the sort of thing that swings voters,” Saunders went on. “Shouldn’t wonder if you’d have been in but for this.”
“I doubt it, Jim…” And all the way home George kept telling himself that he doubted it.
Not till he turned the corner of Market Street and saw the familiar printing office (now plastered, and how ironically, with adjurations to “Vote for Boswell”) did he contemplate the really worst penalty of failure, and that was having to tell Livia. He wondered if she would already have heard.
When he entered the house he waited to hear her voice, but only Becky came up to him rather forlornly; and then he saw a note on the table. It told him she had had to call the doctor early that evening and had been sent to the hospital.
An hour later he sat at her bedside, realizing that for a new and far happier reason this was one of the memorable days of his life. His child was born—prematurely, but thrivingly—a boy. And as he looked first at his son, and then at Livia, a great tenderness enveloped him, so that he took her hand and could not find words for anything in his heart or mind.
“I didn’t want you to come earlier,” she said weakly. “I wouldn’t let them tell you because I knew you’d be busy…
Is it over yet?”
“Why…don’t you know?” He realized afterwards that he had doubtless been left the job of breaking the bad news gently, but it seemed so trivial then that he answered outright and almost casually: “Aye, it’s all over. I lost. By a hundred and forty-eight.”
“You lost?” He was still so happy that the look of disappointment on her face startled him, especially when she added: “No luck, George. I said so, didn’t I?”
“Luck? Why, isn’t this luck?” And he pointed to the child.
Of course his own personal disappointment returned, though he knew he would not have felt it so keenly but for hers. She had, and always had, that curious capacity to weight or lift his mood with her own, to give him peace or no-peace at will. In his own mind the loss of the election need not have been tragic; after all, he was still young, and there would be other chances—possibly within a short time. But she made it seem tragic by the way she regarded it, and he, as if in defense of Browdley against this attitude, plunged anew into work for the town.
Foremost was his plan to stir some civic spirit among the richer citizens. There were no millionaires, but a few who were well off, and one was Richard Felsby, partner of Livia’s father and grandfather in the days when the firm had been Channing and Felsby. George had never been able to understand what exactly the trouble was between Livia and the old man, perhaps a family feud of some kind, certainly no concern of his own; and since Richard was over eighty, ailing, a bachelor, and the owner of some land on Browdley’s outskirts that would make a fine municipal park if given to the town, George called on him one evening—quite prepared to be kicked out unceremoniously, but unwilling to neglect even a hundred-to-one chance.
Richard Felsby, dressing-gowned, nightcapped, and from a bedroom armchair, astonished him by saying, during their first minute of conversation: “Let’s not waste time, Boswell…When ye married Livia, ye married a problem, and it’s not a bit of use comin’ to me about it.”
“But—” George protested, and then let the old man have his say, since the saying might be of interest.
“And neither of ye need think ye’re going to get a penny o’ my money, because I’m leavin’ it all to Sarah.”
George did not even know who Sarah was, and perhaps his look showed it, for Richard went on: “Sarah looked after Livia and her mother and father and grandmother and grandfather for the best part of sixty years…and where’d ye think she’d be now but for me?…Why, in the workhouse. That’s all Livia cared. I know the woman’s stone-deaf and cranky and no beauty either, but she deserved better than to be left stranded when Livia ran off to marry you.”
“I never knew that,” George gasped.
“Aye, and I don’t suppose ye know a good many other things. But it’s the truth, and ye can tell her so. Sarah gets my money, and if ye’ve come to talk me into anything else it’s not a bit of use.”
George then felt that his simplest disclaimer was to tell the old man frankly what he had come for, and now it was the latter’s turn to be astonished. It had clearly never occurred to him that he owed anything to the town, and George’s suggestion that he did so aroused a host of vaguely associated antagonisms—to mollycoddling and spoon-feeding and high taxes and socialist agitators and what not. But the odd thing was that as the interview proceeded, Richard Felsby found himself rather liking George personally. (He was not the first to fall under that spell, or the last either.) And when George rose to go, he grunted: “It’s all a pack of nonsense, Boswell. This boom that’s on now isn’t going to last, and when it’s over Browdley’ll need jobs, not parks.”
“So you won’t let go any of that land, Mr. Felsby?”
“Not a yard, except at a fair price…But ye can stay and have a drink, if ye like.”
“Thanks, but I don’t drink.”
“Just as well, because the drink ye’d have got here is tea…I’ve often caught chaps that way. To my mind it’s a misuse of the word that it should only apply to alcohol…So ye’re a teetotaler, eh?”
George nodded.
“Teetotal family?”
“Not all of ’em. My Uncle Joe drank plenty.”
“The black sheep?”
“Maybe, but I liked him better than some of the white ones.”
“Ye did?…Sit down, lad, and what about a cup?” George accepted, and then had a chance to verify that Sarah was indeed as had been described. Meanwhile Richard Felsby, who had enjoyed no such congenial human contact since the death of his best friend, Dr. Whiteside, made the most of the occasion and became almost garrulous. He admitted that he wasn’t a big “giver” (George had known this already), but when he did give, he said he liked to suit his own ideas—as when, for instance, he had offered an annual prize to the Browdley Grammar School for the boy who achieved “the best all-around lack of distinction.” “It was the prize I’d have won myself when I was there,” he chuckled asthmatically, “but they wouldn’t even let me offer it.” It appeared, too, that sometimes he amused himself by sending checks for small sums to people momentarily headlined in the news—the farmer who refused to let a fashionable Hunt cross his fields, the postman’s wife with her second set of triplets, and so on. “I reckon ye think I’m a queer sort of chap,” he added, after these confessions.
“Aye,” answered George, unconsciously giving his voice a riper Browdley burr to match the other’s. “Ye’re queer enough. And I suppose ye think I’m queer for wanting Browdley to have a park?”
“Oh, to blazes with the park—are we on that again?…I hear ye’ve got a baby.”
George nodded. “A boy.”
“Let’s hope it takes after you, then. Because I’ll tell ye this, Boswell, the Channings are queerer than you and me combined…Must ye go?”
“Getting late,” said George, with a smile.
“Drop in again some time.”
“Aye…but I won’t promise not to mention that park.”
George did not tell Livia about his visit, because he felt it would not please her, however well he could justify it. And a few weeks later he visited Richard again, partly in case there was any change of mind about the park, but chiefly because he was passing the house and was touched by a sudden vision of the old man’s loneliness in that upstairs room with no one to talk to but a deaf servant. A moment later, having acted on impulse, he was touched again by the evident warmth of Richard’s welcome.
“Sit down, lad, and make yourself at home…See this?” And he waved, of all things, a check he had been busy writing. “I’m givin’ it away for charity…Doesn’t it make your mouth water?”
George laughed, while Richard went on to explain that he was sending it to a man he did not know, but whose name and address had appeared in that morning’s paper—some fellow who had grown a hollyhock taller than his house. “Mebbe ye’ll drop it in the post for me when ye go, Boswell. He’ll get a nice surprise when he opens my letter tomorrow…Well, what are ye starin’ at me for? D’ye think I’m daft? Or don’t ye like hollyhocks taller than houses?”
“I like ’em all right,” answered George, “and houses too. I’ll count it as one of your better benefactions. Why didn’t ye make it a bit more, though? What’s a pound from you?”
Whereat Richard enjoyed the best laugh he had had in years, for despite his reputation for being tight with money, no one had dared to hint it to his face until George, in sheer naïveté, stumbled into doing so. But it made such an instant hit that George was never quite sure afterwards whether he kept it up out of candor or to give the old man more fun.
For he formed quite a habit of dropping in to see Felsby, whose house was not far from the Town Hall. The visits did not have to be long ones, and George enjoyed their brevity as much as the outspokenness of what was said on both sides.
“The trouble with you, George, is that ye think too much of yourself. I always thought ye did, ever since ye got on the Council. I’ve sacked hundreds of better men than you for a tenth of the things ye’ve said to me tonight.”
“Aye,” retorted George. “And ye’d sack me too, if I was an employee of yours. But I’m not. My father was, though, for the best part of a lifetime. Or the worse part, whichever way ye look at it.”
That sort of thing…
(George reflected afterwards that the old man must like it, or he would get offended; but then it occurred to him that he would have got offended already if he had thought that George really meant what he said, but he doubtless supposed he didn’t. Yet George did, in a way, and knowing this found himself up against a familiar dilemma: that to say what you mean without ever offending people is usually to say what you mean without making them believe you mean what you say—and what was the use of that? Well, maybe some use, sometimes. For, as a victim expressed his side of it once: “George tells you what a bastard you are, and you laugh, and then after he’s gone you suddenly say to yourself—‘Of course, George was only joking—it’s a good job he doesn’t really know I am a bit of a bastard!’ ”)
Richard was frank enough also. He once said: “George, I’m sorry for ye, married to a Channing. Her father was no good, and her mother wasn’t much better, and the life she lived up at Stoneclough that last year before he died—well, it was no Sunday School picnic, believe me.”
It was impossible to resent this, in its context, yet George felt impelled to answer defensively: “Oh, Livia’s all right”—before curiosity made him add: “She had a bad time, you mean?”
Richard Felsby said impressively: “There’s only one man who could have told you—and that’s Dr. Whiteside, and he’s dead. He never told me, for that matter—but I knew how he felt, because I remember what he said when he got news of her father’s death—‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘for everybody’s sake.’ …Well, well—maybe that’s more than I should have passed on. But I’ll tell ye this, George—the Channing blood’s had a streak of moonshine in it lately. That’s what made me leave the firm. I found I was getting too sensible for it.”
“You’re not as sensible as you think,” retorted George, allowing the conversation to become bantering again. He guessed it would be good policy not to press his inquiries at this stage, especially as the old man would doubtless return to the subject at a later meeting and tell all he knew. George had had enough experience of wheedling information to know that an air of not too much concern is the best wheedler. And besides, he must keep in mind the other object of his wheedling. So he added, still banteringly: “If ye were sensible ye’d give me that land for a park. Think of the taxes ye’d save.”
At which the old man shook and spluttered with merriment to a degree that quite possibly imposed a strain on his heart.
Suddenly it all came to an end.
Livia found out about the more or less regular visits and flew into the kind of tantrum that George had certainly not anticipated; if he had, he would doubtless not have called on Felsby in the first place. He had been prepared for her coolness over the association, but he was amazed to discover how profoundly the whole thing must matter to her. “Oh George,” she cried as if she had discovered him in some mortal sin, “how could you do it? I hate him—I don’t want to have anything to do with him. You knew that. And to think that secretly—all the time—so that I only got to hear of it by accident—”
Perhaps because he did feel a little guilty in that one respect, he was more than usually ready to defend himself. “Nay, let’s keep a sense of proportion, Livia. No harm’s been done to anyone just because I’ve had a few chats with an old man—even if you do count him an enemy for some reason I’ve never been told about. Besides, I went to him chiefly on business—I wanted him to give the town a park.”
“Oh George, what does a park matter?”
“Just what he said.”
“The main thing is, you must never, never go there again.”
George stared at her, for the first time in his life, with a look of disenchantment.
“I couldn’t promise that, Livia.”
“What?” And she was facing him, the issue suddenly alive between them.
“I’m sorry, Livia. I don’t like to upset you, but I’ve got to think of the town’s interests. If you know what I mean.”
“Oh yes, I know. I didn’t know—but that’s unimportant. It makes no difference.”
(She knew what? What was it she hadn’t known? What was unimportant? What made no difference? He was by now accustomed to the mental gymnastics that her talk often demanded; she spoke in a sort of verbal shorthand, so that one had to grab at the meaning as it flashed by, and even then not be sure of getting it. Basically, he felt it to be a species of natural arrogance; she used the dotted line of her own immediate thoughts and expected others to follow her without that advantage.)
He said again: “I’m sorry.” But in his look there was still the absence of any surrender.
She returned that look for an instant, then quietly went out of the room.
Yet left alone, he had no sense of victory—only a feeling of emptiness that made him wonder if the issue had been worth facing at all.
Would he, despite the stand he had taken, visit Richard Felsby again?
The next morning, after a troubled night of thinking the matter over, he was still unsure, and to the end of his life he did not know what he would have done eventually; for on the evening of that next day Richard Felsby died peacefully in his sleep.
A few weeks later George happened to meet Ferguson, the lawyer who was settling the estate. “Too bad, George,” he commented. “You nearly pulled it off.”
“Pulled what off?”
“You nearly got that park.” Then Ferguson explained in confidence that a few days before he died Felsby had talked about leaving some land as a gift to the town, but on one condition—“and this’ll make you sit up, George—on condition that it’s called The Channing Memorial Park! You’d have had a fine job persuading Browdley to that—some of them have enough to remember the name Channing by, without a park…Perhaps it’s just as well he didn’t have time to give me definite instructions.”
“Aye,” said George, “it’d have put me in a tight corner.” But then he began to laugh. “And that’s just where he wanted me, the old devil…”
Ferguson went on: “As matters stand, his housekeeper gets the lot, and she’s made a will leaving everything to a training college for Methodist ministers…So there goes the last of the Channing and Felsby fortunes, George—and you can add that to your lecture on ‘Browdley Past and Present’!”
The child was called Martin (Livia’s choice) and took after George, in appearance at least, enough to have given the old man a measure of sardonic satisfaction. During the first year of his life Martin grinned far oftener than he cried, almost as if he knew he had been born on the day his father only narrowly missed becoming a Member of Parliament; and when George grinned back, it was as if to say: Don’t worry, I’ll manage it next time. But political affairs are incalculable, and as events developed, it began to seem highly unlikely that any next time would come soon.
This revived Livia’s plea that George should pack up and leave Browdley. He tried to avoid serious argument on the issue, yet it was clear his attitude had not changed, and there grew a hard core of deadlock between them, always liable to jar nerves and send off sparks if any subordinate differences occurred. They did occur, as in all married lives; nevertheless, by and large, Councillor and Mrs. Boswell could have been called a fairly happy couple—except on those few occasions when they could have been called Councillor and Mrs. Boswell. For Livia’s dislike of the town made her scorn the slightest official recognition of her existence. After a few experiments, she declined to attend civic functions so persistently that George ceased to ask her, and in the end she was not even invited. This must have helped rather than hindered him, for Livia was still unpopular in Browdley, especially when the world-wide postwar depression brought sudden distress to the town. It was easy to choose a local name as a scapegoat—easier than to figure what the whole thing was about. And who could figure what the whole thing was about, anyway?
George evidently thought he could, for on a certain day in July, 1920, he wrote the following in one of his Guardian editorials:—
The signing by Germany of the protocol containing the disarmament terms of the Allies marks another landmark on the long road towards world recovery. There are some who profess to be concerned about the future of thousands of workers in the arms industry if production is cut down to a minimum; but to that naïve misgiving every economist and social worker has a ready answer. For the real wealth of the world consists, not merely in things created by hand or brain, but in things so created THAT ARE WORTH CREATING. For this reason we may regard yesterday’s event as a step not only towards PEACE, but because of that, towards PROSPERITY.
George himself needed a step towards prosperity as much as anyone, for his paper was losing both circulation and advertising revenue, and he found himself suddenly on the edge of a precipice which a financially shrewder man would have foreseen. Everything then happened at once, as it usually does: people to whom he owed money (the bank, the newsprint company, the income-tax authorities) demanded payment; those who owed George money, and there were hundreds of them, made excuses for further delay. In this crisis Livia stepped into the breach and proved herself, to George’s utter astonishment, a thoroughly capable business woman. The first thing she did was to produce some sort of order in the printing office, where Will Spivey’s slackness had held sway for years. By making Will’s life a misery she pared expenses to a minimum and increased the margin of profit on whatever small printing orders came in. Then she began a campaign to secure at least part payment of what was owing, while at the same time she made contact with creditors and persuaded most of them to have patience. Altogether it was an excellent job of reorganization, carried out so expeditiously that George made the mistake of supposing that she enjoyed doing it.
“The fact is, I’m not cut out for business,” he admitted, after congratulating her on having saved the Guardian from bankruptcy.
“And do you think I am? Do you think I like asking Browdley people for favors? Do you really think I’m doing this for your sake or my sake or for your old Guardian?”
There was another thing that she did. It so happened that Councillor Whaley carried influence at the bank where the Guardian had an overdraft, and with this in mind Livia readily agreed to something she had long balked at, and that was simply to have Councillor Whaley to tea. She had always said she knew Whaley disliked her and she had no desire to meet him, and George had always urged that Whaley was his friend and that she ought at least to give him the chance to change his mind about her. Her sudden surrender on the matter brought joy to George that was unmarred by the slightest suspicion of an ulterior motive, and when the day came and Tom Whaley arrived (for a “high tea,” according to Browdley fashion), George was sheerly delighted by the result. It was almost ludicrous to see a cynical old chap like Tom falling so obviously under her spell, yet no wonder, for George thought he had never seen her in such a fascinating humor—warm, gay, sympathetic. Tom—it was his weakness as well as George’s—liked to talk, and Livia not only listened, but gave him continual openings, making his chatter seem at times even brilliant (which it never was); and as George looked on, quietly satisfied that all was going so well, he could not help adoring her with such intensity that he wondered what exactly caused the feeling in him. Would it have been the same had there been some fractional mathematical difference in the angle of her nose and forehead? His experience of women before Livia had been limited, but enough to know or think he knew what sex attraction was; yet now, honestly though he tried, he could neither confirm nor deny that what he felt for Livia had anything to do with sex. It puzzled him enormously and quite happily as he sat there, staring at her face across the crumpets and cold ham.
When, having stayed much longer than they had expected, Whaley put on his overcoat to go, he seized a chance to whisper to George at the street door: “George—she’s a winner—whether she wins elections for ye or not!” He was in a mellow, sentimental, patriarchal mood—so utterly had Livia bewitched him.
A moment later George, still beaming from the effect of his friend’s remark, found Livia on her knees on the hearth-rug, warming her hands at the fire. Her face was turned away from him as he approached; he began cheerfully: “Ah that’s been a grand time! You should have heard what Tom thinks about you—he just told me—”
All at once he stopped, because she had turned round, and the look on her face was as startling as her first words, “Oh George, what a bore! Such a silly old man! How can you possibly endure him? That awful, high-pitched voice, and the way he talks, talks, talks—”
George gasped incredulously: “You mean you don’t like him? You don’t like Tom Whaley?”
“What is there to like?”
“But—but—he’s a good fellow—he’s against me on the Council, I know that—but he’s really all right, Tom is—”
“George, he’s dull and he’s pompous and he loves the sound of his own voice. And he will go on explaining the same thing over and over again. I thought I should have screamed while he was telling me the difference between the Local Government Board and the Ministry of Health—”
“He’s one of my best friends, anyhow.”
“Oh, George, I’m sorry…maybe I was in the wrong mood.”
“You didn’t seem to be.”
“Couldn’t you see I was pretending?”
No; he hadn’t seen it. He said, anxious to ease matters: “Well, if you were, I appreciate that much. It was nice of you to give such a good impression.”
Not till long afterwards did he guess why she had done so, but Whaley’s visit undoubtedly led to a second social occasion, far less pleasant, that showed how much further she was prepared to go. It began by her asking George if he would meet some friends of hers, Mr. and Mrs. Wallington by name, for dinner one evening in Mulcaster. It seemed she had picked up a chance acquaintance with Mrs. Wallington in a Mulcaster dress shop, and George, who thought it odd that he should be dragged into it, demurred at first, but on being reminded of how hospitably she had behaved towards Tom Whaley consented on one condition—that he himself should be the host. “Then if I don’t like ’em I don’t have to invite ’em back,” he explained, with sturdy if not too flattering independence.
So in due course Livia took him to a Mulcaster restaurant where the appointment had been arranged. There he was presented, not only to the couple, but to an extra man, and also to the revelation that all of them seemed to know Livia far better than he had anticipated. Although he was usually able to get on well with strangers from the outset, he felt curiously ill-at-ease that evening, and as it progressed he became less and less happy for a variety of reasons, one of which was quite humiliating—he didn’t think he would have enough money to pay the bill, especially as they were all ordering expensive drinks. But apart from that, he found none of his previous pleasure in witnessing Livia’s social success; it was one thing to introduce her to a friend of his own and watch the magic begin to operate, but to see the fait accompli in the shape of already established friendships with strangers was another matter. He did not think it was jealousy that he felt, but rather a sense of annoyance that, after sneering at Whaley, she should show her preference for men like those two. For they were both of the blustery, aggressive type, especially the one who was not the husband and had not been invited. His name was Mangin, and from certain boastful references George gathered that he had lately made a good deal of money in the advertising business. There was a cold swagger about him that met more than its match in Livia’s repartee, but George himself could not come to terms with it, and was made even less comfortable by his wife’s peculiar ability to do so.
As the dinner went on and more drinks fed the bluster, he fell into a glum silence that became equally a torture to maintain or to try to break. He was relieved when Mangin made a move to leave, mentioning a train he must catch; but then came the problem of the bill; why on earth had Livia chosen such a swank establishment, and would such a place be satisfied with his personal check? He was trying rather clumsily to signal the waiter and learn the worst when Mangin shouted: “What the deuce are you bothering about, Boswell? Everything’s taken care of at source—don’t you know me yet? Anyhow, your wife does—that’s the main thing…” Whereupon, with a lordly gesture amidst ensuing laughter, he intercepted the waiter whom George had summoned and ostentatiously tipped him a pound note, then adding to George: “By the way, Boswell, I’d like a word with you if you can spare a moment.”
George could say nothing; to argue without enough in his pocket to pay the bill would have been even more humiliating. In his confusion he somehow found himself leaving the table and being piloted by Mangin into the restaurant lobby.
“So you’re a newspaper man, Boswell?”
George nodded, still inclined to be speechless.
“Know much about advertising?”
“Advertising?…Er…Well, I take in advertising, naturally.”
“Ever written ads?”
“Oh yes, my customers often ask me to help them—”
“I mean big stuff—campaign advertising—things like patent medicines—”
“No, I can’t say I—”
Mangin threw a half-crown into the plate on the cloakroom counter and began putting on his overcoat.
“Well, I’ll tell you what…You don’t seem to have had any experience, but I’ll give you a chance…start at six pounds a week for the first three months and we’ll see what happens…But you’ll have to learn, Boswell, and learn plenty if you want to stay in the game.”
“But—but—” George was slowly recovering his voice. “But I don’t understand—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m offering you a job, that’s all. In my London office.”
“But I don’t want a job. I’ve got a job already—”
“You mean that newspaper—in—what’s the name of the place—in—”
“Aye, in Browdley. I’m owner and editor of the Browdley Guardian.”
“But I thought you wanted to give it up! Wasn’t that the idea…to try somewhere else?”
George suddenly flushed. “There must have been a mistake.”
“Mistake, eh? Looks like it…” Mangin smirked as he signaled the doorman for a taxi. “Better have that out with Livia…I’ve got to rush for my train…G’bye.”
George did not go back to the table immediately; he calmed himself first, then discovered (as he had hoped) that the rest of the party was breaking up. He murmured his good-byes, and could not find words to address Livia during the first few hundred yards of their walk together along the pavement from the restaurant. Eventually she broke the silence herself. “Don’t be so angry, George, just because Mr. Mangin paid for the dinner. You know you only asked the other two—and then all those drinks…they wouldn’t have felt free to have what they wanted if they’d thought you were paying for everything.”
“Why not? How do they know what I earn? I’m not poor just because I can’t afford to buy champagne cocktails.”
“That’s it, George, you can’t afford them and Mr. Mangin can—and besides that, you don’t drink yourself—that’s another thing.”
He said, half to himself: “Seems to me there’s a more important matter than the one we’re discussing.”
She answered eagerly: “I hope so. I don’t know what Mr. Mangin said to you outside. I was afraid you hadn’t given him much of an impression of how clever you are—because you are clever, George—I know you are—in your own way.”
“Thanks,” he retorted. “And perhaps you’ll tell me why in God’s name you should care what impression I make on a man like that?”
“Only because he might find you some work. I thought it was a stroke of luck when I met somebody who knew him—he’s very influential in the newspaper world, so Mrs. Wallington told me. And it would get us out of Browdley—that is, if he did say he could find you something.”
George gritted his teeth and replied: “Aye, he said he could. He offered me six pounds a week in his London office—provided I learned enough.”
“Oh, but George, that’s—that’s wonderful! You don’t make nearly so much out of the Guardian—not lately, anyhow.”
“Livia…” He stopped suddenly in the street and faced her. “Do you really mean you’d have me give up my own paper and all the work I do on the Council—just to have a job under a man like that? And what a job—writing patent-medicine ads…Livia, would you really have me do that?”
He knew what her answer would have been but for the look on his face, which made her temporize: “Maybe it isn’t exactly the life you’d choose. But I don’t choose the life I have, either…And why keep on saying ‘a man like that’? They can’t all be men like you.”
He began walking again. “Livia, let’s not quarrel. You did a silly thing, but I daresay you meant well. You asked this man to find me a job—you made yourself agreeable to him—you were pretending just as you were with Tom Whaley, weren’t you?” His eagerness to think so fanned a warmth between them. “I believe you really thought you were doing the best for me.”
“No…I was thinking about Martin more than you. That was the real reason.”
Then she told him the bare economic facts of his own household (which he had hardly guessed, so preoccupied had he been with the bare economic facts of the whole town)—the fact, for instance, that sometimes lately she hadn’t been able to afford the kind of food and clothing the child most needed, and had had to make do with the second-best. Though this was a condition common all over Browdley, and formed the subject matter of countless speeches he made, he was nevertheless shocked to find it so close to his own personal affairs—not because he thought he ought to have been exempt from what afflicted others, but simply because it had never occurred to him. And once it did, of course, why, of course, something must be done about it. But what could be done? persisted Livia, coolly stemming his indignation. It was no use her asking for more money because she knew, and none better, that the Guardian didn’t make it; she knew also there were no more business economies possible. Nor were there domestic ones; she herself did all the housework, and some of the office work too, now that she knew how careless Will Spivey was. As she very calmly explained: it had become her honest opinion after George’s electoral defeat that it would be a wise thing to leave Browdley, even apart from her own desire to do so.
“But—my Council work, Livia—”
“Where’s it getting you?”
“I don’t know, but I’ve not been defeated in that…yet. I don’t have all my own way—after all, who does?—but I am on the Council, pretty safely on too, judging by my last majority. And the job’s worth doing. I know you’re not interested in it—I don’t ask you to be, but do believe me when I say this—it’s worth doing…Livia, don’t hinder me in it—even if you can’t help me…And as for the extra things you need for Martin, you shall have them. Of course you shall—I had no idea you were doing without…I’d rather go without everything myself—”
“But you can’t, George. You don’t drink or smoke—there’s nothing you could give up…except Browdley. That’s your hobby, or your luxury—whatever you’d rather call it. And I don’t say you’re not entitled to it—you personally, that is—everyone has his own tastes. But what sort of a place is it for a child to grow up in?”
But that only gave him his own private cue for optimism, as she would have known if she had attended more of his meetings. For he answered, beginning quietly but with rising confidence as he proceeded: “Not such a bad place as it used to be…and I’ll make it better. You wait. You don’t know all the plans I have. And they’re not just dreams—they’re practical. I don’t tell you much—because I know you don’t want to hear about it—I wish you did…but never mind that. Mark my words, though. I’ll do things with this town. I’ll get the slums off the map. I’ll build schools…and a new hospital…I’ll…well, laugh at me if you like—I don’t care.”
She did not laugh, but she smiled as she took his arm. “I wouldn’t care either, but for Martin. You’d do anything for Browdley—I’d do anything for him.”
“So would I too—I just don’t see any conflict between them. Don’t you think I’m as devoted to the kid as you are?”
He was; but nevertheless in his heart he looked forward to the time when Martin would be a little older—old enough for the friendly father-and-son relationship to develop, old enough also to start the kind of education on which George set so much store. Whereas for Livia every tomorrow seemed a future far enough ahead and complete in itself; it was almost as if she hoarded the days of babyhood, unwilling to lose the separate richness of each one.
She was wrong, though, in saying there was nothing he could give up. There was, and he gave it up. She never knew, because she had never known anything about it at all. The fact was, after his electoral defeat George had gone back to his earlier ambition, the university degree. The long interval he had let pass meant digging over a good deal of old as well as new ground, but he tackled the job, as he did all his chosen jobs, with enthusiasm. Most of the necessary time he put in late at nights, in the room which he had now begun to call his “study”; and without actually telling Livia a direct lie, he allowed her to think he was busy preparing material for the Guardian. As she was generally asleep when he came up to bed she did not know how long he worked; sometimes it was half the night. He had a curious unwillingness to let her know what he still hankered after, partly because he was not sure he would ever succeed in winning it, but chiefly out of a sort of embarrassment; he was sure she would smile as at a grown man caught playing with a toy, for book learning to her was something you had forced on you during youth and then were mercifully released from ever afterwards. She might also (a more valid attitude) feel that if he had such time to spare it would be better spent in trying to sustain his own precarious livelihood. Anyhow, he did not tell her, and having not done so, it was easy to give the whole thing up without a word to anyone in the world. There were the examination fees he would now avoid, and he could also sell some of the expensive textbooks he had had to purchase. He did this and gave her everything thus saved, spreading it over a period so that she needed no explanation.
But the habit of reading in his study at night continued—in fact, the whole habit of study continued, for it was something bigger than a mere competitive examination that had inspired George. The fringe of scholarship he had touched had left him with an admiration for learned men all the more passionate because he almost never met them either in business or in politics; and there came to him a constant vision, the memory of the dome-headed spectacled examining professor who had been so indulgent to him about the Pathetic Fallacy.
Perhaps Martin would grow up into a learned man—which was another reason for not discussing the matter with Livia.
One thing, however, became both an immediate and a practical ambition—that the boy should have a vastly different childhood from his own. Not that his own had been cruel or vicious; merely that, in recollecting it, he was aware of how far it had been from the ideal. Perhaps equally far from the worst that it might have been, in Browdley, for George’s father had always had regular employment in a job that set him among the aristocracy of cotton-mill labor—a spinner’s wage being at that time more than twice that of the lowest-paid. And though Mill Street became a byword later, it was no worse during George’s childhood than nine tenths of Browdley; for the Boswells, like many other families, had lived in a four-roomed bathroomless house more because there were no others available than because they could not have afforded
better. Anyhow, Number 24, in which George was born, had been clean and decently furnished, and its occupants, though overcrowded, were never without enough plain food and strong soap and good winter fuel; they were “respectable chapel folk,” moreover, which meant that their children were nagged at without the use of technical bad language; and if the young Boswells feared their father too much, and their father feared his Heavenly Father, it was doubtless on general principles rather than for any more definite reason.
Even George’s early education, which was poor enough, had had a few passable things in it; indeed, at the old-fashioned prisonlike elementary school he was taught reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic far more thoroughly than were the youngsters in the luxurious modern school that George persuaded the Council to build years later. But there was a drawback to the thoroughness, for the teacher, a Mr. Rimington, was dull-witted enough to think history and geography “easy” subjects, and therefore somewhat to be despised. All George learned of the former was that somebody was a “good” king and somebody else a “bad” one, plus a few scraps of information such as that Henry the Second never smiled again and that Oliver Cromwell had a wart on his nose; while geography consisted largely of memorizing “what belongs to England,” and of copying maps—an occupation which Mr. Rimington approved of because it took so long and kept the class quiet. He was also dull-witted enough to think that a boy who turned over a page during a reading lesson without waiting for the order to do so was guilty of a serious breach of discipline. George had been punished for this once or twice, after which he hated and feared Mr. Rimington and formed a self-protective habit of concentrating his attention and disengaging his intelligence whenever he crossed the school threshold. Not till years afterwards when, as Chairman of the Browdley Education Committee, he had the task of choosing applicants for teaching posts, did he realize that Mr. Rimington had made himself thus terrifying because when he first became a teacher the rougher products of Browdley homes had terrified him.
And now, as the father of the product of another Browdley home, George turned over in his mind his own childhood memories, not without a certain nostalgia, but with a resolute determination that Martin’s early life should contain happier ones. He remembered the crowded house in Mill Street, his mother’s continual nagging (behind which he had failed to diagnose the harassed affection that was really there), his father’s doomful voice at home and from the pulpit; the canal bank where he sneaked off to play when his father was at work and his mother was ill (the only time of real freedom he enjoyed); the elementary school round the corner and Mr. Rimington’s classroom, with its torn maps and dirty walls, the smell of wet clothes and steaming waterpipes in winter, and of sweat in summer; the slabs of dust-laden sunlight into which he so often stared after finishing tasks adjusted to the speed of the stupidest pupil; terrifying Mr. Rimington himself, and the not-quite-so-terrifying headmaster, old “Daddy” Simmons, whose habit, fascinating to all, was to stick his little finger into his ear and waggle furiously; and the paragraph in the tattered reading book that said: “Harrow is one of the great schools of England. Many famous Englishmen went there when they were boys. Some of them carved their names on the school desks, and these names can still be read. You must not carve your name on your school desk, but you can make up your mind to become a famous Englishman when you grow up…”
George’s own ambitions, even if he should ever become both a Member of Parliament and a Bachelor of Arts, had never permitted themselves to soar as far as being “a famous Englishman.” But for Martin…why not? What obstacles were there? Surely not boyhood in Browdley, since winning scholarships was no harder from there than from anywhere else. Perhaps Martin might win such scholarships—not to Harrow (for George, though he could admire some of their products as individuals, was of the opinion that public schools encourage snobbery), but to Oxford—or Cambridge, at least. That faint preference in favor of Oxford was nothing but a recollection of Gladstone’s Double First.
There came a day when Martin seemed old enough to be taken by his father to the Browdley Town Hall, there to imbibe some vague first impression which George could hardly seek to clarify at such an early age, but which would later, he hoped, inspire the lad to an interest in civics, local government, the history of his country, the parliament of man, and the federation of the world. (After all, there was no limit to the effects of a child’s first impression.) So George held the boy lovingly in his arms in front of the rather bad stained-glass in the main lobby of the Town Hall—stained glass depicting a woman carrying some sheaves of wheat in one hand and what looked like a coffee grinder in the other (“mechanical power,” it was supposed to represent); he hoped Martin would at least notice the bright colors. And in due course the child’s eyes rounded with all the excitement, nay more than the excitement that George had hoped for, but unfortunately those eyes were not on the stained glass at all.
George looked down and saw a large rat scampering across the Town Hall floor.
He was horrified, not only that the child should have seen such a thing, but that such a thing should exist; it argued bad drains or something—he would certainly bring the matter up at the next meeting of the Building Committee.
But Martin was by no means horrified. He knew nothing about rats, but perhaps he thought that what he had seen was some extremely swift and fascinating kind of pussycat (for pussycats were known to him), and with this to wonder about the visit to the Town Hall did indeed enshrine an experience.
Martin loved his father less than his mother and perhaps even than Becky, but George did not mind this, reflecting magnanimously that the balance would be evened up later on. After all, it was a result of the physical contacts of mother and child, the domestic routine, the humble, serio-comic intimacies; and Livia made a perfect mother—unexpectedly so, indeed. It was as if all the nonsense that cropped up so often in her behavior with adults were resolved into complete naturalness between herself and Martin; she never raised her voice to him, or was angry, or even irritated. In an odd way she gave the appearance of being with the boy in his own world, rather than of looking into it from hers; perhaps there was a sense in which she had never grown up herself, or perhaps it was just the animal quality in her that George had noticed before, that extraordinary paradoxical knack of being shameless and fastidious at the same time. When George came upon his wife and child romping together, he sometimes felt that to make them even aware of him was an intrusion, the breaking of a lovely spell, and he would tiptoe away rather than do this; for again he was able to fortify himself by thinking that his own time would come later.
One night, as he sat with a book in his study, the impulse came to write something that might, if anything untimely should happen, be a help to the boy or at least a reminder that a man had once existed who had dreamed things about him and hoped things for him; and in this mood, rare because of its slightly melancholy flavor, George wrote:—
Everything depends on childhood, Martin, and if you ever have children of your own, remember that, just as I, remembering my childhood, intend to make yours good to remember. When I was a boy of seven my parents died and I went to live with an uncle who kept a newspaper and stationery shop in Shawgate, and living in his house gave me, I think, the germ of all my later interest in printed things—perhaps even in politics too, because it so happened that at the time of my arrival there was an election in progress, and Uncle Joe, who was a Liberal (the only thing he had in common with my father), sent me out to distribute hand-bills. All I had to do was to walk about Browdley slipping them under doors and through letter boxes, yet I don’t think the world was or ever could be more wonderful to me than during those few weeks. I kept hearing about some mysterious person called the Candidate, who was opposed in some mysterious way to another person who was called the Other Candidate, and it seemed to me that the great battle of Good and Evil was being fought in the streets of this town, and that I and my uncle were soldiers fighting it. I suppose it was then, before I really knew what things were all about, that I had the first hankering that made me later decide to go on fighting the same sort of battle when I grew up. And if that’s a strange reason for a young man to enter politics, then perhaps it isn’t the real reason, but just the flick of a button in the signal cabin that can send a train to any one of a hundred different places.
But of course all that was years ago—and in another age, because 1914 was really the end of an age. It was not only that things happened differently before then—they happened to people who felt them differently. Take chapel-going, for instance. If you had walked up Mill Street almost any Sunday forty years ago, you would have seen from the notice board outside that William Boswell was to preach there. That man was my father. It would be a cold, raw night, maybe, with mist peeling off the moors, but the folk who wanted to hear him wore hard-wearing stuff; in twos and threes they mustered, till by six o’clock the little gaslit pitch-pine interior was almost full. Punctually on the hour old Jack Slater went to the pedal harmonium (the Methodists of the sect my father belonged to did not believe in pipe organs) and let his fingers wander over the keys according to a style of his own, beginning softly and working up to a great roar, his feet pounding as if he were bicycling uphill to save a life. By this time my father had emerged from the side vestry, Bible in hand, and climbed the steps to the pulpit, where he prayed standing (for the sect did not believe in kneeling or stooping), and announced the opening hymn in the boomingest voice I ever heard. He was a fine-looking man, as you can judge from the photograph in my study; his hands were big and thick-fingered; his hair, black and bushy, crowned a well-shaped head set firmly on broad shoulders. He never drank, smoked, played cards, went to Browdley’s one theater (there were no cinemas in those days), or read a novel or a Sunday newspaper. A life that might have seemed, to an outsider, full of hardships relieved only by boredoms had somehow or other produced in him an air of somber majesty that I could never come to terms with, and I don’t think my mother ever could either. We lived at Number 24, a four-roomed house identical with eleven on one side of it and thirty-two on the other. Parallel with Mill Street stood Jenny Street and Nathaniel Street, composed of houses exactly similar. From the pavement one entered by a single step through the usually unlatched front door; at the back, however, there was an exit through the kitchen into a small paved yard where coal was stored and clothes were hung to dry. I suppose there was no labor-saving device in general use in those days except the Singer sewing machine that, surmounted by a plant pot with or without a plant in it, stood behind the lace curtains in nearly every front window. And there was gaslight downstairs, but not upstairs; and sanitation had but recently progressed in Browdley from the stinking midden to the back-to-back water privy. There were no bathrooms, and baths were taken once a week by heating pans of water over the kitchen fire. I give you all these details because I hope by the time you grow up most of them will be a bit historic—at any rate I hope Mill Street won’t be in existence for you to verify. Mind you, these houses were not slums (as they are today), but typical dwellings of respectable working folk such as my parents were. Respectability even imposed a toll of extra labor, for it was a sort of ritual to wash and scrub the street pavement from the front door to the curb, a task undone by the next passer-by or the next rain shower. When my mother was ill, as she often was during the last years of her life, this necessary tribute to tribal gods was made on her behalf by an obliging neighbor, though I doubt if my mother would have cared much if it hadn’t been. She was a merry little woman with an independent mind uncoupled with any determination to stake out a claim for itself; this made her easy to get on with and rather hopeless to rely on. My father only saw her between six and ten in the evenings (the rest of the time he was either at work or asleep), and during the annual holiday which they took together, always at Blackpool, the strain of trying to seem familiar to a man whose life was so separate from hers made her almost glad when the week was over and she could return to the far more familiar routine of Mill Street. She loved my father well enough, but the emotion of being in love had probably not survived courtship, and by her thirties, with an already numerous family to look after, she had worn her life of household drudgery into an almost comfortable groove. Every morning in the bedroom overlooking the backs of the houses in Nathaniel Street, the alarm clock rang at five-fifteen; without a word my mother would get up, come downstairs in her nightdress, and poke up the kitchen fire that had been banked with small coal overnight. Then she would fill the kettle to make tea, and by the time this was ready my father would be down himself, washing at the kitchen sink and ready to leave as soon as the clock hand approached the half-hour. He was never exactly bad-tempered, but the fact that they were both sleepy made them reluctant to talk; there was, anyhow, nothing much to talk about. A few minutes after he had left the house the whole town resounded with the crescendo of the mill “buzzers,” but by that time my mother was back in the warm bed, content to doze again while the clogged footsteps rang along the pavement outside. To her this pause between my father’s departure for work and the beginning of her own was the pleasantest time of the day—and the only time she was really alone. By eight o’clock she was dressed and downstairs, glancing at the morning paper, making more tea and frying a rasher of bacon for herself. Then came attendance on us children, getting us off to school when we were old enough, and after that a routine of housework and the morning walk along Mill Street to the shop at the corner where nearly everything could be bought, from feeding bottles to fly papers. She would chat there to Mr. and Mrs. Molesworth while they served her; she liked a joke and an exchange of gossip, and often, if the jokes and the gossip were good enough, she would stay talking and laughing until other customers joined in, so that the shop became a sort of neighborhood club for housewives.
Then during afternoons, if the weather were fine, she would put the youngest of us (me, in fact) into a pram and wheel it round a few streets, sometimes as far as the canal bank or the Shawgate shops. Towards four she would be home again, in good time to prepare an evening meal. Then came the second pleasantest interval—the hour in the rocking chair with a cup of tea at her elbow before the children came home from school. While winter dusk crept across the sky, and until the passing of the lamplighter sent a green-yellow glow through the fanlight over the front door, my mother would “save the gas” by poking the fire to a blaze while she rocked and sang. She had a nice voice, small in volume but always true on the pitch, and though most of the tunes she knew were chapel hymns with rather grim words to them, she sang them somehow gaily and with a lilt, breaking off occasionally into a popular song of the moment, something half-remembered from the previous year’s Blackpool holiday, or from summer performances of the Silver Prize Band in Browdley market place.
My earliest recollections, Martin, were of my mother rocking and singing like that. There was a brass rail that ran along the whole length of the mantelshelf, and as I first remember it this rail would shine in the firelight with the shadows darkening all around and my mother’s face growing fainter and fainter as she swung backwards and forwards; till there was only the sound of her singing, the creak of the rocking chair, and the simmer of the kettle on the fire bar…Then, all at once, I would wake up to see the room already gaslit, with my father standing, huge and unsmiling, in the doorway.
I feared my father and loved my mother and that’s about the plain truth of it. On Sundays he locked up all story books, picture books, and even bricks that spelt out words; but while he was at chapel my mother used to unlock them with a key of her own and let me play till just before his return was expected; then she would whisk away the forbidden things with a knowing glance that finally became a sort of joke between us.
That is the home I was born in, Martin—not as happy as it might have been, but not as unhappy either. So I don’t complain of it, but I do want to make yours happier. Which is why I intend soon to begin putting books in your way, because the more freely and vividly you see things while you are young, even if you can’t fully understand them, the more actively they will possess you when you grow up—especially if, in adult life, you have hard battles to fight and bitter disappointments to face. New worlds, Martin, are for the young to explore; later one is glad of a new room, or even of a view from a new window…
He put aside the fragment then, thinking he would add to it on many succeeding nights, but he never did; perhaps the rare mood never recurred.
As the postwar slump deepened and unemployment filled the street corners with lounging, workless men, George encountered new opposition to his Mill Street housing scheme. Many of the cotton mills were closing down completely; some of them went bankrupt as catastrophically as had Channing’s a generation before, but without the criminal taint, though the short-lived boom had been pushed by speculators to limits that were almost criminal.
Among the mills that closed was the one still called Channing’s, though long operated by another firm; now, when George walked down Mill Street, the mill loomed up, symbolically as well as actually, at the dead end of the street. Derelict, like Stoneclough five miles away, it stood for the dead end of what the Channings themselves had stood for. Still physically intact, with machines inside that could spin and weave, nobody would buy it or use it, because nobody wanted what it could do. Yet the illusion that it still had some real value was preserved; it was regularly taxed and insured; the Browdley police kept an eye on it, the fire department was ready to quench the blaze should any lightning or arsonist strike. But neither did, though lightning had once, when George was a boy, struck the Methodist chapel at the other end of the street.
The chapel also stood, a little less forlorn than the mill—derelict, one might say, only six days out of the seven. For Methodism in Browdley, like the cotton trade, was not what it had been. People could not afford to give so much to their chapels, nor were there so many Methodists. George, walking along the street where he was born and which he planned to rebuild for others to be born in, remembered those early days when both mill and chapel had flourished, and when his own father, sharing the week between them in that mystic proportion of six to one, and with his house halfway between, had served a life sentence longer though less stigmatized than that of his boss.
The reason George visited the Mill Street area so often was not a sentimental one. Indeed, it was concerned with drains rather than dreams; for the more graphically he could report to the Council how bad the houses were and what disease traps they had become, the sooner he hoped to get his scheme actually started.
He found a powerful ally in Dr. Swift, Browdley’s medical officer, who had himself issued many warnings. After a long struggle and against the bitter opposition of a few of the town’s old-established doctors, a system of free immunization against diphtheria had been set up, enabling parents to have their children inoculated at a municipal clinic. It was, however, impossible to make this compulsory, and the whole question became impregnated with political and even religious prejudices that George deplored and perhaps at the same time aggravated by his own constant argument that it was not enough to immunize; the causes of epidemics should be tackled, and the chief was bad housing. To which the opposition retorted that George was using the health issue for his own political ends, that Browdley was in no greater danger than other manufacturing towns, and that though the Mill Street area was somewhat less salubrious than the rest, what could be done about it when local tax rates were almost the highest in the country? And since the opposition, fighting on this tax issue, had won seats at recent Council by-elections, George found his slum-clearance project losing rather than gaining ground for the time being.
He often walked with Dr. Swift through the worst of the streets, the medical officer supplying scientific ammunition for George’s continuing struggle on the Council. For George would not give in; there was a point, even though at times it was hard to find, beyond which he would not even waver or compromise. Indeed, his mere mention of Mill Street had begun to send a smile or a sigh across the Council Chamber, so well was the subject now recognized as the bee in George’s bonnet. But he did not mind. “Sooner or later I’ll wear ’em down,” he assured Swift, to which the latter replied grimly: “Better be sooner.”
For it had been a hot summer. Towards the end of September over twenty diphtheria cases appeared in and around Mill Street, mostly among young children, of whom five quickly died.
In such an emergency Dr. Swift was given command almost without restrictions; everything remedial was promptly organized—the quarantining of families, wholesale inoculations, closing of schools, and so on. The Council had adjourned for its four weeks’ annual recess; many Councillors were still on holiday. But George, who had the Guardian to look after and could not afford a holiday, was right on the spot to say “I told you so” to any former opponents he might meet. They were not so much his opponents now. They all agreed, in principle, that something would have to be done about the Mill Street area. And most agreed, in principle, with the Guardian editorial in which George wrote:—
We must learn our lesson from this tragic visitation. Though the epidemic has now (according to the latest assurance of our eminent and indefatigable Medical Officer, Dr. Swift) been checked, we can never again feel secure until preventable disease has been ABOLISHED AT ITS SOURCE. Let those citizens who live in the more fortunate parts of Browdley and whose children have remained unscathed, bear in mind the joint responsibility of us all for what we allow to happen anywhere in our town, and let them do their share, and pay their share, in making Browdley safe for our children’s future.
The only adverse comment George got about this was from a new Catholic priest, Father Harry Wendover, of St. Patrick’s ,who questioned the phrase “what we allow to happen in our town.” Having been introduced to George at a meeting, he immediately buttonholed him with the query: “Isn’t that a bit arrogant, Mr. Boswell? After all, even if you don’t believe in the hand of God, you might at least recognize that there are limits to what the hand of Man can do.”
George noted the newcomer’s tall gaunt frame and deep-socketed eyes, the strong chin and the cultured accent, and decided that here was a man to be both respected and tackled. Rumor had already informed him that Wendover was something of the proud cleric, so George answered, giving as well as taking measure: “Aye, there are limits, I daresay, but in Browdley we’re still a few thousand miles away from ’em. And as for the hand of God, what makes you think I don’t believe in it?”
Wendover smiled—a rather pleasant smile. “To be frank—just gossip. That’s all a priest has to go by when he comes to a new place and wants to find out who’s who.”
“So they gossip about me, do they?” And immediately George was thinking about Livia and what sort of gossip might still be circulated about her.
“Oh, nothing malicious. In fact, you seem to be extremely popular. But they also say that you’re not a God-fearing man like your father, that you don’t often go to church or chapel, and that you’re on good terms with atheists and agnostics.”
It was all spoken with a twinkle that made it inoffensive and not quite serious, but George would not have been offended in any case. He was already too interested in what promised to be an argument.
“Aye,” he answered, “I’m on good terms with anyone who’ll help me make Browdley better. Romans, Church of England, Methodists, atheists, agnostics—they’re all one to me if they’ll do that.”
“So religion has no place in your better Browdley?”
George appreciated a nicely laid trap, especially when he was in no danger of falling into it. He smiled as he had so often smiled across the Council Chamber or a meeting hall. “Nay—I’d rather ask you if my better Browdley has a place in your religion? Because if it hasn’t you’ll not do so well at St. Patrick’s. I’ve got a lot of supporters there.”
“Is that a threat, Mr. Boswell?”
“No—just a tip. I’ve no hell-fire in my armory. All I can tell folks is that diphtheria comes from bad drains. But of course if they’re more interested in pearly gates that’s their lookout.”
Wendover’s smile broadened. “If I were old-fashioned I’d probably say that God would punish you for blasphemy. But my conception of God isn’t like that. I doubt that He’ll find it necessary to strike down you or one of your family just to prove a point.”
George grunted. He had an idea that Wendover was enjoying the encounter as much as he was, and already he recognized an agile mind. Agile minds were useful, and it might be that Wendover would take the progressive side in many of the town’s controversial issues. George also realized that priests and parsons had to stand on some ground of their own, not merely on what they could share with every liberal-minded thinker, politician, or social worker. All this weighed against his impulse to continue the argument combatively, so he replied: “I assure you I didn’t intend to be blasphemous, and I hope you’re right about God. I don’t think I know enough to agree or disagree with you. So I’m sticking to what I do know something about, and that’s Man. Seems to me Man could give himself a pretty good time on earth if only he went about it the right way, but he just won’t. You’d almost think he didn’t want a good time, the way he carries on.” But that looked like the beginning of another argument, so he shook hands with a final smile and left the priest wondering.
A few days later Wendover wondered afresh when news spread over the town that Councillor Boswell’s baby had been stricken. But being honest he did not exploit the situation. Nor did he actually believe that the hand of God was in it. He just thought it an extraordinary coincidence, which it was, and wrote George a note that merely expressed sympathy and hoped the child would be well again soon. For he liked George.
During those dark days Livia and George hardly spoke, except when she asked him to do this or that; and he obeyed her then, blindly as a child himself.
They hardly spoke because there was simply nothing to say after the one sharp, inevitable, and rather dreadful argument.
When George came home late after a meeting and found Livia sitting up with Martin, who was ill and had a temperature, he was concerned, but not unduly so; and when he guessed that the thought of diphtheria was in her mind, he told her confidently not to worry, since the boy had been immunized. She just looked at him then and shook her head.
Over the small tossing body and whilst waiting for the doctor, they thrashed the matter out.
The fact was that when the free immunization scheme had gone into operation and he had told her to take Martin to the municipal clinic, she simply had not done so. And she had lied to him about it afterwards.
He kept pacing up and down the bedroom, trying to grasp the situation. “So you didn’t do it? Oh, Livia, why didn’t you? How could you not do what I asked about a thing like that? Did you forget and then tell me a lie to cover it?…Oh Livia…Livia…”
She answered: “I didn’t forget George. I went to the clinic once and saw the crowd lined up outside. I didn’t want to take Martin to a place like that.”
His anger mounted. “Why not? For God’s sake what was wrong about it?”
“I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the people there—I mean the other people with their children.”
“Snob!” He shouted the word. “Weren’t they well-dressed enough for you?”
“Most of them were as well-dressed as I could afford to be.”
Yes, he knew that; he had let his anger tempt him into an absurdity as well as a side issue. “Then why—why?” he reiterated. “Why didn’t you have it done?”
“I told you—I didn’t like the place. Some of the children looked dirty, and they had bad colds—”
“And Martin might have caught one! Or a flea perhaps! So to save him from that you let him catch diphtheria—”
She interrupted in a dead-level voice: “I don’t want to quarrel, George. But don’t you remember I asked if it couldn’t be done by a private doctor? And do you remember what you said?”
Yes, he remembered. There had been a wrangle, though a less bitter one, about that also. Couldn’t she realize, he had asked her indignantly, that for months he had been making speeches all over the town in favor of free public immunization? What would it look like if, after all that, he took his own child to a private doctor? Couldn’t she see what a fool and a hypocrite it would make him appear? So Martin must go to the clinic. “Livia, I wouldn’t insist if it meant that the child would be getting anything second-best. But the free immunization’s just as good—just the same, in fact—as anything a private doctor could give. The only difference is in where you take him to get it. Don’t you see we have to set an example to the town in these things? If we don’t use the new facilities ourselves, if we behave as if we thought them not good enough for our own children, how can we expect anyone else to trust them?”
Thus the argument when Martin was six months old. George had thought it ended in his own victory; now, six months later, he realized that the end was neither victory nor defeat, but just postdated disaster.
He cried out, desperately: “I know all that, Livia…And I don’t want to quarrel, either—it’s no good now—it’s too late. But why…whatever you did…why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you take him to a private doctor if you absolutely refused to do what I wanted? Oh, anything—anything rather than this…Or why didn’t you let me do it?…Why didn’t you tell me, anyway? Why did you lie to me?”
He saw her hurt, stung face, and knew she was suffering so profoundly that his accusations made little difference. But she could sting back and make him suffer more, as when she answered with deadly irrelevance: “I did tell you one thing.
I said we ought to leave Browdley.”
“Oh no, that’s not the point—”
“It is and always will be. If we hadn’t stayed here, nothing like this would have happened.”
Even that wasn’t certain, he knew, but he saw the certainty in her eyes, and knew also that she would never believe otherwise, however much he went on arguing.
The arrival of the doctor interrupted them. His visit lasted an hour, and when it ended there was nothing more to argue about, only a dreadful possibility to face.
The local hospital was already overcrowded, so Martin lay in the spare room above the printing office. Livia shared it with him, while George slept on his study couch—so far, that is, as he could sleep at all. Becky, banished from upstairs, curled mournfully under the desk. George had not realized till then the depth of his affection for the child. He was like that with all his affections—they grew, and then lurked, and then sprang to give him pain. He was torn unutterably by remorse at having been so busy those past few months, so busy with the affairs of the town, too busy to look after the physical safety of his own household. He should have made sure that the immunization had taken place, instead of just mentioning the matter to Livia and taking it for granted that she had done it. It was her fault—and yet it was his fault too, for leaving everything of that sort to her. It was the streak of unreasonableness in her cropping up again, and this time tragically—he should have been prepared for it, in all vital matters he should have watched for it. He wished…he wished…and one of the things he did wish now, but dared not wish aloud, was that he had left Browdley. He almost dared not wish it in thought, lest there should pass some spark between his eyes and hers, some spark to set off a conflagration, or—even worse—to indicate a mood which she would take to be surrender. So it had come to that—that he thought of her as an enemy, or of his love for her as an enemy? Which—or both? He puzzled over it, far too modest to think his own emotions unique, but wondering if there were outsiders who would understand them better than he did—novelists, say, or psychoanalysts. Or that fellow Wendover, if ever he got to know him well enough? Though how could a priest…and yet, after all, it was a spiritual matter in some ways. Thus he argued with himself, and as the days passed and Martin did not improve, it occurred to him that the greatest single difference between Livia and himself was that she was too utterly fearless to be reasonable, while he was too reasonable to be utterly fearless. And at a certain level of experience there was simply no compromise, between them.
Just before dawn one morning he dozed off in the chair and dreamed of his own boyhood, a dream he had had recurrently before, though never with such clarity. It was about his Uncle Joe, whom he had gone to live with when he was seven years old, and of whom he had had more fear (on one occasion only) than ever before or since of anything or anyone. What had happened actually, though not always in the dream, was that uncle and nephew had met for the first time at the house in Mill Street, when no one else was there. This was a few months after his father had died, a week after the funeral of his mother, and a few hours after the door had closed on his elder brother Harry, his elder sister Jane, and the furniture removers.
George had been the youngest of a family of six, with a gap so wide between himself and the rest that at the time he was left parentless all the others were grown-up and some of them married. Their bickerings about who should take care of him (each one having a completely plausible alibi) had made them jump at an unexpected offer from their mother’s brother, despite the fact that he and their father had quarreled years before over some point of behavior which (according to the latter) “just shows what a wicked man Joe is.” Nobody ever told George more than that; all Harry would add was an especially sinister: “You’ll find out soon enough, Georgie.” And when the Mill Street household was broken up, Jane and Harry watched the last of the furniture stowed away in the van, then looked at George as if it were somehow disobliging of him to be alive. Finally Jane whispered: “We might as well go now, Harry—George’ll be all right by himself till Uncle Joe comes—he said he’d be along as soon as he closed the shop.”
Which made an excellent excuse to go about their respective affairs and leave a boy of seven alone in an empty house in which both his parents had recently died, there to await (with no lights and dusk approaching) the arrival of a man he had never seen before, and who, from mysterious hints and rumors he had heard, must surely be some kind of monster.
And about nine o’clock this legendary Uncle Joe, having paused longer than he intended at the Liberal Club, came striding along Mill Street to knock at Number 24. George could not, at that moment of panic, decide whether he were more frightened of the darkness or of his uncle; he could only crouch under the stairs until the knock was repeated. Then he decided that the unknown peril was worse and that he would not open the door at all. But in the meantime Uncle Joe had gone round to the back of the house and found a door there unlocked, so that he simply walked in, stumbling and making a great commotion in the dark while he struck matches and called for George.
George saw his face first of all in the light of the quick-spurting flame—not, perhaps, the most reassuring way for anyone bordering on hysteria to encounter a feared stranger. He saw a big reddish face, with bristling mustaches, tufts of hair sticking out of the nose and ears, and eyebrows which, owing to the shadow, seemed to reach across the entire forehead.
The result of all this was that by the time Uncle Joe, groping after a series of wild screams that jumped alarmingly from room to room, finally traced them to the corner of an upstairs cupboard, George had fainted and the old man had used up all his matches.
The only thing he could think of was to carry the boy downstairs in his arms and thence out of the house into the street. They had reached the corner before George came to, where-upon Uncle Joe, panting for breath, gladly set him down on the edge of the curb with a lamppost to lean against. Then, being a man of much kindness but little imagination, he could think of nothing further but to relight his pipe while the boy “got over it,” whatever “it” was.
Presently George looked up from the curb, saw the big man bending over him, and, despite the now less terrifying eye-brows, would have raced away in renewed flight had there been any power left in his legs. But there seemed not to be, so he sat there helpless, resigned to the worst as he heard his captor fumbling around and muttering huskily: “Bugger it! No more matches—wasted ’em all looking for you, young shaver!”
Suddenly then, by a sort of miracle, the heartening message came through—that everything was all right; but only years afterwards was George able to reflect that in that same first kindly breath there had been the two things that had made his father call Uncle Joe a wicked man—namely, a “swear” and the smell of whisky.
All this was what really happened…but in the dream it did not always end like that; sometimes the fear of the stranger’s footsteps in the empty house lasted till the crisis of waking.
And now, years later, while his son lay desperately ill in the room above, George dreamed of this fear again, and was wakened by the doctor’s hand. “Sorry, George…but I think you’d best go up.”
“Is it—is it—bad?”
“Pretty bad…this time.”
George went upstairs, still with the agony of the dream pulsating in his veins; and then, from the bedroom doorway, he saw Livia’s face. There was no fear in it as she glanced not to him, but to the doctor.
The doctor walked over to the bed, stooped for a moment, then looked up and slowly nodded.
One thing was now settled more definitely than ever; George would not leave Browdley, and if she should ever ask him again he would answer from a core of bitterness in his heart. But she did not even mention the matter. She seemed not to care where they lived any more, and if an absence of argument were the only test, then they were at peace during the days that followed. But George knew differently, and he knew that Livia knew also. It was no peace, but an armistice on terms, and one only tolerable so long as both parties fenced off large parts of their lives as individual territory.
They both grieved over Martin, and comforted each other up to the boundary line, but that was fixed, and beyond it lay inflexibility. When, for instance, she said a week or so later: “Tom Whaley telephoned while you were out to say that the Council reconvenes on the seventeenth—” George simply nodded, and went to his study.
She followed him, adding: “He wanted to know if you’d be there.” She waited for him to reply, then said: “I don’t mind you going, George. I don’t mind being left alone in the evenings.”
He answered: “Aye, I shall go.”
“Perhaps you’d better let him know then—”
“Don’t worry—I met him in the street after he telephoned you. I told him I’d be going.”
And there was finality in that.
He went to the meeting and found there an atmosphere not only of warm personal sympathy, but of eagerness to accept him as a prophet; so that he scored, almost without opposition, the biggest personal triumph of his career. The housing scheme he had urged for years went through the first stage of its acceptance that very night; even his bitterest antagonists gave way, while to his friends he became manifestly the leader of a cause no longer lost. There was irony (unknown to any but himself) that at such a moment of easy victory he had never felt grimmer in spirit. When he reached home late that night Livia was in bed, and he would not disturb her, for the news he had did not seem enough excuse; she could read about it if she wished (and there was irony there too) in the pages of the next Guardian. But the excitements of the evening had made him sleepless, so he sat up in his study till daylight, reading and writing and thinking and working out in his mind the terms of the unspoken armistice.
One afternoon he found her with Fred, the messenger boy from the printing works, busily engaged in clearing up the yard behind the office that had always (as far back as anyone could remember) been a dumping ground for old papers, cardboard boxes, tin cans, and so on. It was such a small area, enclosed on two sides by buildings and on the remaining ones by high brick walls, that nobody had ever thought of any other use for it. But now, when she saw his curiosity, she asked if he would mind her turning it into a garden.
“Why, of course not,” he answered, pleased that she should show such an interest. “But I doubt if anything’ll grow there.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
“I’ll give you a hand with it if you like.”
“No, there’s no need. Fred will dig it over, and then I can do all the rest myself.”
“What’ll you plant?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll get you some books about gardening if you like.”
“Oh no, no…I don’t want books.”
And there was just the hint of a barb in that. It was as if she had chosen books as a symbol of his world, just as flowers were to be of hers. The books, too, were increasing all the time; some of them came as review copies addressed to the Guardian by publishers who did not realize how small and unimportant the paper was; many he bought, a few were sent him as chairman of this or that municipal committee. He had no collecting spirit, no special desire to make a show of what he had read. Yet as the books filled up the room, and new shelves had to be rigged till they covered most of the wall space, he could not help a little pride in them to match Livia’s pride (and his own too) in the transformed dumping ground below. And his pride grew definite from the moment that Councillor Whaley, visiting him once while Livia was out, exclaimed: “George, I reckon this must be just about the best library in Browdley—in anyone’s house, I mean. What does your wife think about it?”
“Livia?…Why…why do you ask that?”
“Only because she once worked in a library herself—I thought maybe books were in her line too.”
“No,” George answered. “She likes gardening better.” And he took Tom to the window and pointed down to the rectangle of cleared ground. “She says she’ll plant roses.”
“Why, that’ll be fine.” And then as an afterthought: “Nobody’ll see it, though—except you. Maybe that’s the idea—to give you something to look at.”
George smiled. “I don’t know, Tom. But my idea is that it gives her an interest in life. She needs it—since losing the boy.”
“Naturally. But I’ll tell you what, George, if you don’t mind plain speaking from an old bachelor.” He whispered something in George’s ear about Livia’s youth and having more children. “Aye,” George replied heavily, and changed the subject.
Martin’s death seemed to bring him into immediate friendship with Father Wendover. Neither ever referred to the curious “coincidence” that both must often have recollected; nor did the priest talk much from the standpoint of his profession. He showed, however, considerable interest in George’s family background, and once he said: “You’d have made a fine upstanding atheist, George, if only your father had lived a bit longer.”
“Maybe,” George answered, “but Uncle Joe didn’t continue the training, and the result is I’m no more an atheist today than you are…Not that he was against religion, mind you. He even sent me to Sunday School.”
“Why?”
“To be frank, I think it was because he thought Sunday Schools were a good way of giving kids something to do when they were too dressed up to do anything else.”
“An appalling idea.”
“Oh, I don’t know. He was all right.” George mused for a moment. “It’s odd we should be discussing him, because I dreamed about him the night Martin died…Aye, he was all right. And he liked his Sundays too—in his own way. To my father they were days of gloom and mystery and foreboding, and that was the way he wanted ’em, but to my uncle they were nice comfortable days when you had a late breakfast and took a walk along the canal bank while dinner was cooking and then had a snooze in the afternoon and high tea at five o’clock—and that was the way he wanted ’em.”
“Did he ever go to church?”
“Aye, when he felt like it. It’s true he felt like it less and less as he grew older, but he still counted church as part of a proper Sunday program. He used to say he’d attend regularly if only Aunt Flo were a bit better on her feet, and he’d have liked to put more in the collection plate if only he hadn’t lost so much in cotton investments, and he’d have been proud as punch if I’d had a voice to sing in the choir—but I hadn’t…Altogether what he’d have liked to do was so well-meaning you could hardly call him irreligious, while what he actually did was so little that he interfered with nobody—not even me.”
Wendover, having watched George’s face during all this with a growing conviction that its look of guilelessness was sincere, now slowly smiled. “Is that your portrait of a good man, George?”
“Well, he was good to me,” George answered, simply.
Trade remained sluggish in the town, but the Guardian, mainly because of Livia’s reorganization, began to show a small profit. George was then able to give her more money, but she seemed to care as little about it as about anything else over which he had any control. Yet she did not mope, brood, or look particularly unhappy. Nor did she nag, upbraid, or quarrel. It was merely that she seemed in some peculiar way to have withdrawn into a world of her own, where George was not invited nor could have followed her if he had been.
One evening early in 1921 he came home after a long day out of the town on municipal business, having left in the morning before she was awake. But now, hearing him enter, she came scampering down the stairs, and at the instant of recognition he gasped with the sensation of pain suddenly switched off inside him. Then, as always when he saw her afresh after even a few hours’ absence, recognition dissolved into a curious feeling of never having seen her before, but of experiencing some primitive thrill that the few years of their marriage had neither enhanced nor made stale. Whatever that was to him, it had been from their first moment of meeting and would be till their last; it was something simple that only became complex when he sought to analyze it. Just now he was glad to hold her in a brief hug of welcome and feel that everything was miraculously all right, even if it wasn’t, and nothing needed explaining, even if it did.
He said he was sorry he was late, and she answered brightly: “Oh, that’s all right—the dinner won’t spoil. Lamb stew—can’t you smell it?”
He sniffed hard and joyfully; lamb stew was one of his favorite dishes, and he would relish it all the more from thinking that perhaps she had prepared it to please him.
“Ah,” he gasped.
“And we’ll have it in the kitchen to save time,” she said, evidently reaching an impromptu decision. “Annie—did you hear? We’ll all eat in the kitchen, so hurry up.”
That was like her; the knack of taking short cuts to get what she wanted—the quick plan, or change of plan, generally based on something so elemental that only a child could have avoided the mistake of reading into it more than was there. This eating in the kitchen, for instance, had nothing to do with any feeling on Livia’s part that Annie was an equal (only George could, and did, sometimes think of such a thing); really, it was just that Livia was hungry and, as with all her desires, could not bear to be kept waiting. George was generally amused by this, and often quoted the occasion when, having attended a Council meeting at which he presided, she had left exclaiming: “Oh, George, I’ll never go to one of those affairs again! They drive me silly—all that proposing and seconding and moving the nominations closed and appointing a subcommittee to report to the next meeting…No wonder nothing ever gets done!” But something does get done, had been George’s slightly hurt rejoiner—unspoken, however, because he knew she would then argue that what he called something was not much more than what she called next to nothing…
But now, walking after her into the kitchen, his spirits rose, crowning the physical ease that came over him as he entered the warm small room and sat at the scrubbed table between the gas stove and the meat safe. A curious half-painful happiness clutched at him as he watched her across the table top; she was, he had to admit, as sheerly fascinating to him as ever, with those dark, almost violet-blue eyes that glowed rather than sparkled and gave her whole face a rapt, almost mystic expression; the hair so straw-pale that it could look white against mere gold, the mouth too big for the nose, but the nose so small and perfect that he had sometimes thought that if he were a sculptor he would model it and stick it on a model of someone else’s face—yet he had never found that more matching face, and doubtless never would.
She was talking—most unusually for her—about events of the day, conditions in Europe, and how interesting it must be to visit foreign countries now that the basic comforts of peacetime travel had begun to return.
“Aye,” he agreed. “I’ll bet it’s interesting. I’ve got a book about postwar Europe if you’d like to—”
“Oh, I don’t mean books, George. It isn’t here where you can understand things always—” and she touched her head—“it’s more like this—” and he expected her to touch her heart, but instead she put up her small fist and shook it in his face, laughing meanwhile. “Oh George—you and your books and meetings and speeches.”
He did not mind the mockery he was accustomed to, especially as she seemed so happy over it. She went on chattering till the meal was ended; then, as they left the kitchen for Annie to wash up, he said—and it was the truth: “Livia, that’s the best lamb stew I ever tasted. How about a cup of tea with me in the study before I get down to some work?”
“You’ve got work to do tonight?”
“Aye—just a bit to finish up. The Education Committee meets tomorrow and I’ve got to hammer at them again for that new school.”
She accompanied him to the study and presently Annie brought in tea. He was so happy, sitting there with her, in his own room with the books in it, and with her own garden below the window outside. And suddenly, as if to signalize the height of his content, the vagrant thought came to him that this was the moment, if a man were a smoker, to light up a pipe, or a cigar, or a cigarette. He laughed to himself at the notion, and then had to tell her what he had been laughing at.
“Well, why don’t you?” she asked. “I’ve got some cigarettes.”
“Nay…I was only joking, Livia.”
“But George, if you want to—”
“I don’t want to—it was just that now would be the time if I ever did want to.”
And then he saw her face cloud over as if something in his words had sent her into a new mood. She went to the window, stared out over the dark garden for a moment, then turned round and said very quietly: “Now’s the time for me too. George, I want to leave you.”
“What?”
The happiness so passing, so brief—drained away from mind and body, so that he felt older by years within seconds. “Livia…what? What’s that?”
“I—I must leave you, George.”
“But Livia—why—what on earth—” He was on his feet and crossing the room towards her.
“No, George—don’t—don’t…Or you can if you like—I don’t mind. It isn’t that I’ve changed in how I feel toward you. And there’s nobody else…but I’m not happy, George, since Martin died.”
“Livia—my little Livia—neither am I—you know that—but after all—” And then he could only add: “I thought you did look happy tonight.”
“That’s because I’d made up my mind.”
“To do what?”
“To leave you, George.”
Then she went into further details. It seemed that years before (and he had never known this) she had been to some school in Geneva and had made friends with local people there; she had lately been in correspondence with them and they had asked her to visit them and stay as long as she liked. So she had accepted.
“But…” And even amidst his unhappiness the germ of optimism began to sprout. “But Livia—that’s another matter altogether! You have friends in Geneva, so you want to spend a holiday with them! Well—why not, for heaven’s sake?” And he began to laugh. “My little Livia—what a dramatic way of putting it—that you’re going to leave me! Of course you are—for as long as you like—I daresay you do need a holiday—I’d come with you if I could spare the time—but as you know, I can’t. I don’t mind you going at all—or rather, I don’t mind so much, because although I’ll miss you I’ll be happy knowing you’re having such a good time.”
“I may not have a good time, George.”
“Of course you will, and when you’ve had enough of it you’ll come back to smoky old Browdley like a new woman. I’ll take care of things here while you’re away—I’ll look after Becky—”
“Oh no, I’ll take Becky with me.”
“You will?…All right, if you want. Anything you want…You’re run-down, Livia—a holiday’s just what you need—I’m sure a doctor would say so. And don’t worry about money—I’ll go to the bank tomorrow and see if there’s a bit extra I can find for you…”
“Thank you, George, but I have enough…And now I know you want to work.”
“I did want to, but I don’t know as I’ll do much after this. When—when are you going to go?”
“Tomorrow. I have all the tickets and things and I’m pretty nearly packed.”
“Oh Livia, Livia…” And for a moment the battle was on again between despair and optimism, the latter winning by a hairline in the end. “All right, Livia—all right.”
“Good night, George. Please do your work. Please.” And she ran out of the room.
A little later, when he went up to bed, she was asleep. He smiled gently and with relief as he saw her thus, for he had already schooled and chilled his optimism, and that she could sleep so soon, as calmly as a child, was reassurance to all his hopes; while into his bones, as he watched her quiet breathing through slightly parted lips, there came an ache of pity for her—as if in sleep she told the plain wordless truth, that it was not in his power to make her happy enough. She was so small, so mysterious, and to him a part of something so incurable that he wondered, watching her in the light that came in from a street lamp, what would have happened had he been a shade less eloquent at that Council meeting three years earlier—if, for instance, the voting had been seventeen to fifteen against the motion instead of for it? Why then, so far as he could see, he would never have met Livia at all. And he would have taken that second examination according to plan and have obtained his university degree. And possibly also he would have won the by-election that would have sent him to Parliament as Member for Browdley. And also he would not have known such happiness, or such unhappiness either…
“My little Livia,” he whispered, stooping to touch her forehead with his lips. He knew she would not wake.
The next morning she left. He traveled also as far as Mulcaster, shepherding her and her luggage and her dog during that first stage of the journey, and fending off all sad thoughts by the resolute pretense that it was just a holiday. He was disappointed when a friend and fellow Councillor entered the same compartment at Browdley station; it was hard to concentrate upon a discussion of local political news, but then, later on, he thought it was probably easier than to have made conversation with Livia. She sat cozily, almost demurely, in a corner by the window, staring with quiet interest upon the familiar scenes. The hour-long journey, with stops at every station, built up in George a certain resignation, so that when the train reached the terminus he was well able to take command of the situation when Councillor Ridyard noticed the luggage. “Why, what’s all this?” Ridyard exclaimed, reading the labels. “Geneva? Who’s going to Geneva?”
“My wife,” said George, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “She’s visiting friends there.”
“Well, well! You don’t say! Just for the moment I thought they’d appointed you to the League of Nations, and I was wondering how on earth we’d manage without you on the Housing Committee…”
At which they all three laughed.
Just before George saw her off on the London train, Ridyard’s joke put him in mind of something to say at a time when it is always hardest to think of anything to say to anybody. “Geneva must be pretty interesting these days, Livia. There’s probably a place for the public at the League of Nations meetings—you might find some of them worth looking in at…but of course they do everything in French, don’t they?”
“Do they?” she answered. “But I know French, anyhow.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“I never knew you did. You never told me.”
“I never told you lots of things.”
“Aye, that’s about it…”
And then the train began to move, and there was no more time for anything but the last shouted good-byes.
Two hours later he was back in Browdley, desperately unhappy, fighting again to believe that it was just a holiday. But after a little while to get used to it he established a fairly permanent victory over his misgivings; for she wrote several letters, quite normal ones, reporting what sort of time she was having, where she went, and whom she met. And he, in return, reported upon his doings in Browdley—his continuing struggle to maneuver the housing scheme towards its first stage of accomplishment. When she had been away a couple of months she wrote that she had found a job with a tourist agency, conducting travel parties about Switzerland and Austria, and this, though it seemed to make her near return less likely, reinforced his belief that she was benefiting by the change. After all, it was quite natural not to stay too long as a guest in a friend’s house, and if a temporary job offered itself, was it not sensible to take it? What really cheered him was the knowledge that those tourist-guide jobs were temporary—the season began about May and did not last beyond October. So that when October should come …
But before October came, Lord Winslow came, on that first of September, 1921, to lay the foundation stone of the first unit of the Mill Street Housing Scheme.