Fame is the spur, p.48
Fame is the Spur, page 48
“Well, we haven’t settled Charles’s future,” Ann said lightly.
“There’s time enough,” he answered, and took up his pen with the gesture which she had learned to consider a dismissal.
It was all nothing much, but it left them a little touchy with one another for some days.
*
Charles was asleep. There was no need to worry about him. Ellen, nodding with sleepiness, had sat up long enough to take Hamer in her arms and kiss him. It was years since she had done that, and he was embarrassed, but she was not. It would never cease, for her, to be a natural gesture. She said nothing. Since the telephone message had come at nine o’clock saying that he was elected she had said not a word. In their big comfortable room Ann read and Ellen knitted. They understood one another perfectly, especially since the coming of Charles. Now and then Ellen would allow her hands to fall into her lap, and would sit for five minutes staring at the fire. Ann did not break in on her cogitations. She could guess they were little more than a vague wonder, a difficult acceptance of an incredible fact, a pride that would disdain to utter itself. After a while, the old hands would take up the knitting again and go patiently on. Ellen felt much happier about Hamer and his incomprehensible doings since she had met Keir Hardie. Hardie had sat here, in this very room, and she had given him a cup of tea. “Well, Mother,” he said – and what a smile he gave her! – “thank you for the tea, and thank you for your son. You’ve given us a good boy.” He didn’t talk a lot of old politics like some who came there. He talked about his own mother, and their little cottage in Ayrshire. “A good place, Ayrshire,” he said. “That’s where Bobbie Burns came from.” He recited a bit of Bobbie Burns’s poetry, and the old lady was delighted, because this was perhaps the only poetry she would ever have recognized. It was a homely tag that Gordon had been accustomed to recite.
So she sat there nodding over her knitting, and thinking of “Mr. Hardie,” and wondering what Gordon and Birley Artingstall would have said if they had lived to see Hamer write “M.P.” after his name instead of “Rev.” before it, which was what they had both wished. And then he had come in, so tall, so much a man these days, glowing with his long walk, and she just kissed him and went off to bed.
When they were alone, he took Ann in his arms. She looked up at him with her eyes shining. “Well, my dear,” she said, “it’s been a long time. But now you’re on the other side of those doors we looked at in London.”
“How’s Charles?” he said. ‘I’d better go up and see him.”
“I shouldn’t if I were you. He’s asleep.”
“I won’t disturb him. I can step as quiet as a cat.”
They went upstairs together, and as they passed Ellen’s door, which had been left slightly ajar, they had a swift glimpse of the old lady, kneeling by the side of her bed, with her hands joined as simply as a child’s and her long nightgown falling in stiff folds about her. They were both queerly moved. “I had no idea she did that,” Hamer whispered, inside Charles’s room.
“I don’t think she does as a rule,” Ann said. “This is a special occasion, I fancy she’s commending someone and his work very particularly to God’s favour. She never talks to me about you, you know. If she believed in saints, I think she’d be asking Gordon Stansfield to intercede for you with the Almighty.”
Her voice quivered and broke, and, by the dim light of the dip burning steadily with its little light painted sharply against its own halo on Charles’s table, he saw a tear slide from her eyelids and trickle down her face. “You don’t know, my dear,” she said, “how proud she is of you. Me too.”
She stood in the all but darkness with the feeble light concentrated in her glad troubled eyes. He suddenly felt humbled. “It’s no great thing,” he said, “that I have done. What I shall do now – that’s what matters.”
He put his arm round her waist, and they stepped the few paces together to the bed. They stood and looked down upon Charles.
The child was fair, like Ann, like old Birley Artingstall, and Birley’s Viking mother. His face was flushed, and blue veins were pathetically clear upon the alabaster of his thin neck. Charles’s hair had never been cut. It clouded his face and curled in tendrils upon his forehead. Hamer gently put a finger inside one of the tendrils and smiled to see the close coil stretch and then spring back when he took his finger away. Suddenly out of that crowded, jumbled, incongruous memory of his there sprang a thought. “I wonder whether the Old Warrior ever did that to the girl Emma who used to stand on his foot and then get on tiptoe to be kissed? I wonder whether he ever did it to the very curl that is in my box downstairs – the curl that the sabre sliced away?”
And, looking at the child, unstained as yet by the world’s soiling touch, he thought of all the soil and staining of the world, of all the wrongs inflicted and endured, of all his own high resolves for the world’s betterment, and the bustle, the business and the fuss that more and more obscured and hindered him. Suddenly, without premeditation, he did what his mother had done. At the side of the child’s bed he sank to his knees and buried his head in the bedclothes. He could feel Charles’s dainty feet beneath his forehead.
Ann did not kneel down. She stole from the room. When Hamer got up and found himself alone with the child, he did not know to whom he had prayed or whether he had prayed. But he felt stronger than when he had knelt down, clearer in his vision of the sort of world he wanted Charles to inherit.
*
He went down. Ann said nothing of what had happened upstairs. She came in from the kitchen with a teapot and two cups, and she put a log on the fire.
“This looks like a session,” said Hamer. “It’s past midnight.”
“I know. But I think we’re both too excited to want to hurry to bed. After all, in any man’s life there’s only one first day as an M.P. You should be thankful I’ve made you a hot cup of tea. If you’d married Pen Muff, it would have been cold tea out of a bottle.”
“Why on earth should I marry Pen Muff?”
“Any man could do worse than that. I’ve been speaking to her tonight.”
“Speaking to her?”
“On the telephone. Arnold rang up to know if you were in.”
“An expensive call for poor old Arnold.”
Ann poured out the tea and handed him a cup. “Not so much poor old Arnold,” she said. “You always speak of Arnold as if he were one of the world’s failures.”
“I imagine he’ll aways manage to be on the losing side.”
“He’s on the same side as you, isn’t he?”
Hamer sipped his tea, laid it down, and began to fill his pipe, considering this poser. “What I mean,” he said, “is that Arnold has that strange genius which can make a failure even of victory.”
“I’m not so sure that you’re right,” she answered. “I can see Arnold making a victory of failure.”
There was a silence of infinitesimal estrangement between them as Hamer struck a match and drew the flame into the tobacco. “Anyway,” said Ann, “you’ll have a chance to form a personal opinion. He’s coming up to Bradford.”
“After all these years? Whatever for?”
“Mrs. Muff is dangerously ill. He and Pen have been called to what looks like being a funeral.”
“I’m sorry,” he said lamely. “I like Arnold. Don’t make any mistake about that.”
“And another thing. I rang up Aunt Lizzie as soon as I heard you were in. Naturally, she’s off her head with joy. She says that when you are up in town, North Street must be your home.”
“For the time being, that will be excellent.”
“Meaning?”
“Why, that we must have a house of our own in town as soon as we can manage it.”
*
Hamer took up with the tongs a fine lump of coal and dropped it upon the fire. It smouldered for a while, then began to send out whistling balloons of gas, and finally, at a touch of the poker, fell into three pieces that blazed, duskily shining on the curtains and the red turkey carpet, the long rows of books, and the four people sitting in the comfortable leather chairs: Pen and Arnold, Hamer and Ann. It seemed natural to name Pen first of that couple, Hamer of the other. Hamer and Arnold were smoking their pipes; Pen sat doing nothing. Ann was fussing over a small tea-table that had been brought in to Hamer’s room after dinner. Ellen had gone early to bed. There was no light but the firelight in the room.
They were all tired and overwrought. Hamer had sat with Pen and Arnold in the solitary four-wheeler that went slowly behind Mrs. Muff’s hearse along the road to Nab Wood cemetery. It was a dreary day – a day of Bradford fog: cold and penetrating. Pen had never got on with her mother; to Arnold she had been little more than the woman who hired him a room; Hamer had scarcely even met her. There was something hurried and perfunctory about the way in which the poor woman was committed to the ground amid the swirling vapours and the dripping trees. And it was this very sense of the sadness of the woman’s end, alone and unfriended, which they had done and could do nothing to mitigate, that set all their nerves on edge, and gave them, in place of the assuagement of tears, a dour wish that all might speedily be over, ending what could not be mended.
They did not go back to the desolate house in Thursley Road. At Shipley, Hamer dismissed the funeral cab and hired another – as decrepit and mouldy-smelling, but at all events untainted by the dolour of the day’s doings. In this he took Pen and Arnold to The Hut, where they were to stay for the night in Charles’s room. Charles’s cot had been moved alongside his parents’ bed.
At Baildon the air was clean and heartening, but bitterly cold; and there now they all were, relaxed before the fire, watching the crimson flame spurt through the blue woolly smoke.
“Best Welsh steam coal,” said Hamer. “They produce good stuff in your part of the country, Arnold.”
Pen’s face, more pinched and wan than usual because of the experiences of the day, seemed to draw into a tight knot of anger. “Yes,” she said, “it’s good stuff is coal, when you’ve got nothing to do but warm your backside by it. But sometimes I never want to see a lump of the stuff again. If I were a miner, I wouldn’t strike, I’d just walk out of the damn-awful valleys and let anyone who wanted coal go an’ get it. How’d you like to do that? This is a nice room you’ve got here, a grand room for a Labour leader. The firelight’s fine and romantic. How would tha like it,” she demanded, falling in her excitement into the dialect, “if tha had to go down into t’pit and crawl on thi belly with a sweaty shirt stickin’ to thi back every time tha wanted a scuttleful? Go an’ ask ’em things like that in the House of Commons.”
She lay back in her chair and glowered at the fire as if it were her enemy. Nobody answered her. There was silence save for the fluttering of the flames and the noise Ann made trying to cover embarrassment with the tinkle of tea-cups. It sounded as joyful as if castanets had clicked in the fog over Mrs. Muff’s open grave.
“Tha’s overwrought, lass,” Arnold at last said gruffly.
“’Appen that’s so,” Pen admitted; and added reluctantly: “Ah’m sorry.”
The admission cleared the air a little, and Hamer went to the tea-table, took a cup from Ann, and gave it to Pen. Then he gave one to Arnold, whose appearance, now that they met after the lapse of almost a decade, startled him. He wondered whether he himself looked so changed to Arnold. Arnold had put on weight and gravity. He had the look of a man who took no exercise and spent long hours stewing in an office over matters that puzzled and perplexed him. And that, indeed, was what he did, now that he was one of the leading trade union officials in the Rhondda Valley. His face had become pouchy. There were bags under his eyes; his side whiskers were greying, and the hair was falling back from his forehead. The large hands resting on his knees seemed to express, more than anything else about him, a tenacity and resolution, and also, somehow, an immense pathetic puzzlement that there should be need of so much effort to bring about changes that seemed to him so manifestly necessary.
He laid his great paw on Pen’s fragile hand, and said: “I’ll tell you, Hamer, what’s the matter with this lass. She’s a bit disappointed because we’ve seen nothing of you in the Rhondda.”
“My dear Arnold, my dear Pen,” Hamer excused himself, “I’ve been up to the eyes. Nursing St. Swithin’s, travelling about the country, fitting in my writing – it doesn’t leave much time for calls.”
“Oh, I don’t mean in a social way,” Arnold explained, “though I dare say we could have given you a cup of tea and a bed to sleep in at Horeb Terrace. I mean, there’s plenty to do in Rhondda, and a bit of help from a man like you would go a long way, It’s not easy, Hamer, to see a great man in someone you went to school with, and played with in the streets, but perhaps I’m a bit clearer-sighted than some. I know what you are: you’re one of the big men of the party; you’re going to be bigger; and we could do with a bit of you in the Rhondda.”
His face went graver as he added: “We can do with a lot of you in the immediate future. We’re going to have a rough time. I’ve done my best, and I can’t make our men see reason much longer. If I’m not mistaken, there’s going to be violence at Cwmdulais before many days are over.”
Hamer got up and stood on the hearthrug, looking down at the other three. “Why shouldn’t there be violence?” he demanded. “There ought to be violence. There must be violence.”
Now he was not a comfortable host, entertaining friends at his fireside. His eyes flashed; he was the storm-raiser who had stumped the country for years past, found always where men needed to be spurred to hot action.
“I may not have been in the Rhondda,” he said, “but I’ve watched your struggle there. Ann knows that.” He pulled a tall folio from the bookshelves and flicked over the leaves. “Here is your record. There’s little that happens in the South Wales coalfield that you won’t find here.”
Arnold went and stood at his side, looked at the press cuttings, tables of statistics, manuscript notes, pamphlets, letters, stuck into the book. He noted that it had been taken from a shelf filled with similar books, and running his eye along the spines he read: Railways; Dock Labourers; Steel Industry; Agriculture; the Potteries; and every industry and subdivision of industry in the country. He marvelled at the industry and thoroughness of his friend.
Hamer laid the book on his desk. “You have been out two months. Your union funds are nearly gone. Your men are despairing. Your women and children are hungry. You are asking little, and the companies could pay it without turning a hair. What is left for you but violence? There are two courses open to you, and two only: go back, beaten by the well-fed who do not scruple to use starvation as a weapon, or take such action as will bring the eyes of the country upon Cwmdulais.”
Arnold did not for a time answer him. He stood uneasily on the rug, his heavy body sagging, his pipe sucking emptily in his mouth. Presently, he said: “I hate violence. I believe in human reason.”
The two women had put down their cups and sat looking at the two men, so manifestly fighting now the one to dominate the other.
“Arnold,” said Hamer, “we have known one another for a long time, and God grant that for a long time yet we may be comrades fighting side by side for the same things. But we don’t believe in the same methods. You believe in yeast. ‘A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.’ I don’t believe there’s always time for all that beautiful fermentation. I believe there’s a moment when you have to get your salmon with dynamite, not with a lot of exquisite rod-play. You’ve tried reason. You’ve tried to leaven the lump, and God knows the head of a coal-owner is a lump if ever there was one. You’ve failed. Admit it, man. You’ve failed, haven’t you?”
“There’s no failure except giving up,” said Arnold doggedly, unconsciously repeating what Pen had said to him long ago.
“You’ve given up when your men go back,” Hamer persisted. “You’ve failed then. You go back skinned alive; your funds gone, your men’s fighting spirit gone, and every woman in Cwmdulais up to the eyes in debt to the corner shop. I know. I know the lives of the poor. And you leave the owners chuckling. That’s the way to treat the dogs. If they won’t gnaw on a meatless bone, take the bone away. That brings ’em cringing.”
Arnold shuffled on his feet, knocked the dottle out of his pipe, and said: “I shall never accept the responsibility for violence.”
Hamer handed him a tobacco pouch. “I don’t ask you to,” he said. He reached behind him and took down the sabre from the wall. “All I ask you to do is to allow me to bring this to Cwmdulais. Convene a meeting for me. Will you do that?”
The best Welsh steam coal spluttered and threw out flames that licked the shining surface of the sword. Arnold looked uneasily at Pen. “Do it,” she said.
Arnold said: “Very well,” and sat down beside her.
Hamer stood alone on the hearth with the gleaming weapon in his hand. His face shone.
*
He travelled alone to Cwmdulais. A winter night was closing over the valleys as his train ran through the pitiless desolation. There was just enough light left in the sky to show him tall pithead machinery etched above hill crests, the wheels motionless. On the seat beside him reposed the sabre in its leather scabbard. There were no homeward travelling miners to crowd in upon his solitude. He had the compartment to himself, and his impressionable mind soaked itself in the melancholy emanation of these hills whose very ruin now seemed pointless.
When he alighted at Cwmdulais, a dully smoky lantern or two scarcely permitted him to see the platform. A porter watched the train out, and it was not till it was gone and he had been left standing there alone for some time in the darkness that Pen Ryerson came as though she had been hurrying. “Sorry Arnold couldn’t meet you,” she said. “He’s been busy all day at the union offices.”
With no further words, they went out and climbed uphill through the raw misty darkness. It seemed to Pen now that there had never been a time when she didn’t know that climb, and after a while, when they came to a solid block of a building slabbed upon the darkness, she said, as her sister Nell had said to her so long ago, and as most Cwmdulais folk said to visiting strangers: “That’s Horeb.”
