The Phoenix Generation Page 17

  “Fellow Britons——”

  At once renewed din made inaudible what the speaker was saying. It was clear that organised groups, each over a hundred men, were occupying strategic points in the arena, and the galleries above. Birkin stood still while spot-lights moved on these points, and grey-shirted stewards moved in upon one or other of the groups. Chairs were lifted, brought down on their heads, dodged. Comrades in other parts of the arena moved in to help comrades. More chairs were used, stewards were carried out, with bloody faces; comrades were pushed, shoved, and knocked down. While the members of one scattered group were being put out of the doors, fights were being continued elsewhere.

  “Birkin! We—want—Birkin” broke out in chants about the building. As soon as order was achieved in one place, by the use of fists and wrestling holds followed by expulsion from the hall, disorder started elsewhere. This went on for the first half-hour, Birkin seldom being able to speak for more than twenty seconds. It continued for an hour and then another hour. Phillip wandered about, as he had done on the battlefield, watching events on his own. Rooms prepared for casualties were being filled as soon as bandaged, bloody-headed men were led away. The St. John’s Ambulance volunteers were working continuously. One girl wearing a grey shirt was slashed from cheek to shoulder muscle by a razor. Motor cars outside were used as dressing stations, where broken noses, fingers and cheeks torn by barbed wire wrapped round chairlegs were patched and bandaged. One young Greyshirt lay deathly white on the floor; a great contusion on his forehead, his hair spikey with coagulated blood. Phillip moved down the hall. While he had been away Birkin had been speaking from the platform; to stop when his words, despite amplification by loudspeaker, could not be heard above the din. People were standing up everywhere to see the fighting. One woman near Phillip stood up and shouted something at a steward who was dragging a smaller man along the gangway by his hair. She was told to shut up by another steward. Her companion then stood up and shouted something at this steward, who went to him and was hit first in the stomach then on the shin. While on the ground the steward was kicked in the stomach when he rolled over. Phillip put his arm round the neck of the kicker and held him until two other Greyshirts came up.

  “Don’t hurt him,” he said.

  “You’re telling us, guv’nor!”

  The man was punched on the nose, he fell on one leg and held his face while blood streamed between his fingers.

  “Damn you!” shouted Phillip. “We who wore army ‘grey backs’ in the war didn’t do that to German prisoners!”

  Upstairs, from the galleries surrounding the arena, another kind of guerilla fighting was going on. Two men with anti-Birkin pamphlets were climbing up the curved lacework metal rafters of the glass roof, followed by four Greyshirts. Up they went, hand over hand, slowly, looking down for toe-grips on transverse metal struts. The two leading figures were apparently making for the ridge of the roof more than a hundred feet above the arena. It was hard-going, because they were hanging all the time by their arms, it being impossible to get on top of the curved girder, since it bore the purlins of the roof. There was comparative silence as thousands of faces stared upwards, the uplookers dreading a fall by any of the six men clinging there.

  Birkin’s voice, powerful, controlled, and ironic was now audible.

  “Now you can see for yourself what happens at our meetings. You can see how we try to break up our own meetings. You can see how we attempt to stop free speech, to prevent Britons from speaking for Britain, to tell you how Britons can create a greater Britain. You can see how we arrange sideshows to help keep you in your seats, such as the human spiders we train to crawl about over our heads, as a diversion. But enough of irony and sarcasm. Who are these people who come here to prevent the truth being clearly and simply told to you? I will tell you who are our hidden opponents. Funds for the buying of tickets have been traced to Jewish sources, and many of you have seen Jewish faces among our opponents today. We are not against Jews because they are Jews. We know many Jews are men of high achievement, and loyal to this country, and fought brilliantly and bravely in the Great War for their adopted country. We are not against Jews for being Jews, far from it. Our Empire is composed of many races, castes, colours, and creeds, and one of the main reasons for this meeting today is to try to bring our fellow countrymen to realise that, as things are going now, this Empire of ours, won by our forefathers, is not only being neglected, but destroyed by the forces of International Usury, called High Finance, which cares nothing for the people of this country or the Empire. Money cares only for Money, which can be made in this country and then put out abroad to undercut our factories and industries by employing cheap sweated foreign labour and so to undercut and destroy the home industries——”

  At this point shouts of Leave him alone! Stop it! Look out, mate! arose urgently from the arena. Looking up, Phillip saw that one of the leading men had pushed his legs to the knees into a criss-cross of metal ties. By the way he was clinging, head bent, arms thrust through similar ties, he was dead tired.

  “Usury, or International Finance, has credit organisations which cart round hired toughs in vans to cause uproar at our meetings. Why do these people, not of British stock, want to break up our meetings? Why do they want us to stop telling our fellow-countrymen the truth: that if the standard of living in this country is to be raised—if our unemployed are to be found work—if the Great Estate of Empire—one-fifth of the world—is to become truly great, our people educated after work has been found for them, and our vast resources of Empire opened up—then first the entire racket of the international financial system, largely controlled by Jewish banks, will have to be revealed for what it is, not only obsolete and inefficient, but unable, by its very nature of always seeking the greatest profit, to serve the will of the people awakened to a better life, to a state of welfare and service, to a Greater Britain where class prejudice based on money shall give way to a classless nation, where great talent and achievement in the service of our people alone shall receive great reward——”

  The climbing Greyshirt, puffing with the clumsiness of his jackboots and heavy tunic belted by leather, and his voluminous riding breeches, was now very near the man above him. This exhausted individual was seen to thrust his head between the two V-struts to ease the ache of his arms.

  “Our party has declared war on every kind of anti-social activity, from the jugglings of international finance on Bourse and Exchange down to the organisations of vice trades in the great cities. In so far as the Jew is identified with any of these activities, so far but no further need he fear the advent of our party to power. The Jew who conducts himself as a decent citizen—obeying the laws of the Corporate State—paying in accordance with the high-wage system required by every employer—conforming to price regulations, and putting the interests of Britain above those of international finance, will not in any way be molested. Jews or Gentiles who refuse to observe these requirements will be treated exactly as other enemies of the people will be treated, absolutely without racial discrimination.”

  Two nimbler Greyshirts were now almost up to the man clinging near the ridge of the roof. Suddenly a shower of pamphlets descended from the humped-up figure. Laughter rippled in the arena below.

  “We have fought because we were challenged and because Britain was threatened. The Jew himself has created anti-Semitism, created it as he has always done through the ages, by letting people see him and his methods. Why, do you think, Edward the First banished the Jews from England, by Act of Parliament in the thirteenth century, the Commons playing a prominent part? Why did the King of France follow suit, and other rulers of Christian Europe? So grave did the situation for the Jews in Europe become, that the Sanhedrin in Constantinople was appealed to. The reply, in November fourteen eighty-nine, advised the Jews to adopt the tactics of the Trojan Horse: to make their sons Christian priests, lawyers and doctors, and so work to destroy the Christian heresy from within. And so on down the ages. But
we are not against Jews who have served our country in the last war, or Jews who serve it well now. But we British will tolerate neither Jews nor Gentiles who put their own interests before Britain’s interests as a whole. No! We do not persecute Jews, but we shall not tolerate persecution by those Jews who are our own opponents out to destroy us. It was when they came out into the open, when they marched recently to Hyde Park and tried to drag this country into war with Germany, when fear made them less cunning, when they revealed what they were to the British people. That is when anti-Semitism was born. But now these war-mongers have found a force, a power, and a spirit in Britain resurgent which money cannot buy. And thus we march forward to a victory which is inevitable, not by small illegalities or petty violence unworthy of a great movement, but with an appeal to the whole of the British people, by disciplined methods characteristic of a mighty nation, to give to our party power by verdict of an electorate which knows we shall use that power in the British way to challenge and break forever in Britain the power of International Money.”

  A man more nimble had reached the two men clinging there. A third man with a rope arrived to help while cheers for the speaker filled the great hall. The exhausted Communist was lowered safely to the ground.

  *

  Most of the Sunday papers carried the same story: Birkin’s Greyshirts had aimed at suppression of free speech among members of the audience.

  On the following Monday in Parliament honourable member after honourable member arose to protest that Birkin’s ‘thugs’ had ‘deliberately’ turned a peaceful meeting into a riot by unprovoked attacks on respectable, law-abiding citizens. And although these stewards, as Phillip had seen in his area, had used only their fists, they were accused of using knives, coshes, broken bottles and razor blades carried by their opponents as offensive weapons.

  *

  The theme of The Blind Trout was formulating itself. Phillip wrote rapidly.

  In the stricken rivers of Great Britain, first the small invisible forms of life, diatoms and cyclops, deprived of oxygen, cease to exist, with the microscopic vegetable growths on which the underwater nymphs live. Then the nymphs—Olive Dun, Pale Watery, Iron Blue, Grannom, Green Drake—are no more. Trout eggs, laid in autumn in the gravelly shallows, are attacked by fungus disease. Gradually, as more sludge pours into the rivers, a creeping paralysis of death spreads down its bed, once alert with multitudinous life. There comes a period in summer when the heat of the sun takes what little oxygen the water holds in solution from the air: the moment of lifelessness, of asphyxiation, of untruth, suddenly arrives. Older trout, which hitherto have survived, thin and dark, turn on their sides, gape irregularly and drift downstream without poise. Pick one up, and you will see it covered with a grey mucus—the sweat of asphyxiation.

  The so-called coarser fish—carp, roach, tench, rudd—exist sluggishly, but as more oxygen is absorbed by the silt of decay, they, too, die. Last to remain are the eels, but even eels must breathe; and when the water is entirely dead, acid and sour, they are gone. Once a pure English stream, there remains now but an open drain, the divine life once within the living water destroyed by an uncontrolled industrialism.

  Will all our English rivers die, or will the spirit of resurgence, now animating the few, spread until our nation is reborn? There is yet time. There is still hope. And there is faith. For in all those rivers of Great Britain which are pure in spirit the smolt are going down to the sea.

  That to me is a marvellous thing, like the music of Delius, and green corn growing: like swallows nesting in the porch of our farmhouse, and the moon—the nightingale moon—rising over the marshes which lie to the sea; like the Rhine music of Wagner, when the lyric gold of life is safe with the Rhine-Maidens.

  Smolt are little salmon which, born in the headwaters of rivers and their tributaries, and wearing the moorland red-and-black spotted dress of trout for about two years, suddenly become strangely excited, assume a silver sea-coat, and seek the ocean water of ancestral memory.

  No longer than a man’s hand at two years and weighing between two and three ounces, a smolt may return to its native river after two or three months in the sea, weighing four or five pounds, the length of a man’s forearm.

  Or it may remain in the sea two years, and return a forty-pounder.

  For some reason unknown, many of the Wye fish stay two and sometimes three years feeding on herrings of the Greenland shoals, and prawns of the deep submarine ledges of Europe’s end below Ireland; this has made the Wye the most famous salmon river in England.

  I have stared at smolts jumping in a West Country river as they went down with the current, always head to stream in the clear water wimpling over the blue and brown stones at the tail of the pool; or, in the fast runs below, prickling the brown water as they dashed at the frail water-flies dropping their eggs at sunset.

  I have seen hundreds dropping over the weirs of mill-ponds; while the turtle doves from Abyssinia were throbbing in the blackhorns, I have followed them down the valley, ever widening with its steep hillsides of oak, spruce, larch, and rock-set grass, to the broader pastures which end in the marshes and sea-walls of the tide’s head.

  From western Wye and Irish Shannon, Tay, Coquet and Usk, Hampshire Avon, Scottish Tweed, Devon’s Otter, Taw, Torridge and Tavy—from scores of fresh rivers in Britain, Germany, Sweden, and the eastern seaboard of Canada—the smolts find theirs home in the Atlantic; and from there they return in their season to their native rivers, as salmon, where, if they can escape their enemies during the months of spring and summer, when they do not feed, they will spend themselves for the spirit, or future, of their race; and, thus achieving immortality, will die, and so return to the Atlantic in dissolution; as salts of the sea to the great father.

  Once upon a time before the pollutions of the Industrial Age, there were salmon in all our rivers. Romans saw salmon leaping in the Thames, and named them Salmo Salar—the Sea Leaper.

  One day our children, or maybe their children, will see salmon jumping again in the Pool of London; and watch them rolling up, showing their square tails in play, below the piers of London Bridge.

  One day our children, or their children, will save millions of pounds—the hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of factory waste, sewage sludge, and other valuable chemicals now cast into our rivers, and after treatment, put them on our land, our England—the great mother of our race.

  Anciently the fish was the symbol of regeneration: as baptism is the symbol of the new consciousness of faith, of hope, of clarity. We are aspiring, struggling, learning—just beginning to believe we can build a fine new Britain. We are passing through an age of industrial darkness; but beyond it, I can see salmon leaping again in both the Rhine and its ancient tributary Thames.

  Chapter 7

  THE GARTENFESTE

  Once again it was St. Martin’s Little Summer, and time to plant trees—scores of little trees—in the field above Malandine which Phillip had bought for £100. With Rippingall’s help, he marked out three triangular areas at the corners of the field, to be put out as wind-shields. There were two kinds of pine trees, the quick-growing insignis and the slow austriachus, for the front line defences. And a hundred beech trees, two feet high, with some ash, sycamore, and oaks. These were for the support line. Within their shielding were the reserves, mainly larches of two varieties, Japanese and the English. He imagined doves nesting in these, and perhaps a sparrow-hawk. Behind these three lines hawthorn bushes and silver birch would lighten the interior of the field.

  Rippingall told him the village opinion: no trees would survive the blasts of the salt south-west winds in that high and exposed place. Certainly in the adjoining plantation in a higher field the beeches and firs had died out.

  “I don’t want to hear village opinion.”

  “I agree, sir, I was wrong to listen to ‘the gossip of the servants’ hall’.”

  Phillip told him he remembered when first he had come to Malandine, in the second summ
er after the war. Most of the firs were then leaning from rotted roots, their trunks bored by woodpeckers and old nests of sparrowhawks and magpies in their disverdured tops. Now all but one trunk was gone, cut and removed as firewood by the villagers during the General Strike of 1926. The one fir-tree that remained stood at the narrow end of the plantation, and farthest from the cruel sea-winds.

  The epithet was not sentimental, he declared: the trees had suffered a slow asphyxiation from hard-blown salt upon the leaves by which they breathed. Slowly they died where they stood.

  “Like the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, if I may be so bold as to say so, sir.”

  “Year after year after year their lung-cells have been blighted by Channel gales. A tree’s life is a man’s life, which, Conrad wrote, you may recall, has one basic theme: he was born, he suffered, he died.”

  The Gartenfeste—the Garden Strong-point—was the name Phillip had given to the garden room of his grandfather’s house, where he had lived after the old man had died—an empty house, resonant with his own footfalls as he walked about, during those winter nights after he had left the army, excited by the scenes which arose before him while he was writing his first novel. That had been his true life: the life of the spirit. Now, thirteen years later, he must recapture the mood of that secret and exciting time of the first flowering of his spirit. The semi-ruinous linhay on the hill was to be converted to a studio, with a concrete dugout below. It would be lit by electric light supplied by a car-dynamo driven by a propeller on top of a pole. Here he would live alone, and keep, like Arnold Bennett, to a strict routine, with every morning and part of the night given to his writing.

  “We’ll have to sleep in the tallet over the linhay, Rippingall.”