How Dear Is Life Page 6

  In this thought, Hetty needlessly hurt herself: for Mrs. Ward was, and had been, actively engaged in creating rest rooms and play rooms for children among the poor. It was the methods of the militant suffragettes (who went to the root of the matter, rather than a branch) to which the famous novelist objected.

  Hetty took Aunt Marian’s arm; Aunt Marian took her hand, and squeezed it.

  The coffin, drawn by black horses, and covered with a purple pall on which three laurel leaves were resting, followed behind the band now playing the beautiful uplifting passage of resurrection. But what was happening? She was startled to hear people in the crowd shouting out in anger. With relief she saw that the procession was accompanied by policemen walking on either side. The crowd booed when the banner was carried past.

  FIGHT ON AND GOD WILL GIVE THE VICTORY

  Then she saw Dora. She was dressed in white, like the others. Some carried posies of purple irises and red peonies, and bunches of white violets for woman’s purity. She gave, without thinking, a little wave of her hand; then she was glad she had not attracted Dora’s attention. Dora looked straight ahead. There followed a banner of the Woman’s Social and Political Union, with the purple, green and white colours.

  The booing was very loud. As Dora passed, she inclined her head slightly, but did not smile. She had seen them! Perhaps Dora considered it advisable not to recognise anyone at that juncture.

  On the other hand, she thought, perhaps Dora was a little hurt by what she had written in her letter, begging her to give up the hopeless struggle, which Dickie had said was directed by mad women who in the old days would have been burned at the stake as witches. Windows of London houses had been smashed by stones covered with paper; empty mansions burned down; vitriol poured into pillar-boxes, destroying hundreds of letters; Cabinet Ministers had been assaulted; dynamite bombs placed in public buildings. Property to the value of over half a million pounds had been destroyed.

  She held Aunt Marian’s arm tightly. How calm, how self-possessed Aunt Marian always was! What a splendid character! How glad she was to be beside her. Oh dear, more angry shouting!

  “What about the King’s jockey? Three cheers for ’im, boys!”

  Mingled cheers and boos arose. Mounted policemen were now pressing their chargers against the edge of the crowd.

  “Smash up the coffin! What right has the likes o’ ’er for Christian burial?”

  A ragged man was trying to pull a policeman off his horse. An inspector, in blue pill-box hat and tight jacket, trotted up. A terrible harsh noise from the crowd arose.

  She began to feel terror. Her children, her children! What would happen to them, who would look after them, and Dickie, if the crowd got out of hand, and anything happened to her? She felt she could not breathe. Her high collar, with its whalebone stiffeners that constricted breathing, her high straw hat covered with artificial flowers and tilted downwards from her piled hair, the sleeves of her blouse fastened at the wrist, her heavy dragging skirt, her boots so hot round the ankles—she thought that if she did not have air she would faint. She tried to tell Aunt Marian that she must get away.

  Marian Turney held her up when she fainted. With the help of policemen clearing a way, she was carried into the Park; and after recovery, and a long wait on a seat, with Aunt Marian’s arm round her shoulders, in the shade of a tall tree with a vista of mown grass before her, she was saying that she felt much better, and perhaps it would be wiser to return home, when she saw a white figure coming towards her—a Dora whose face shocked her, it was so sallow, so lined, so dreadfully thin.

  “Hetty, my dear friend! How very dear of you to have come! And how are you, dearest Aunt Marian? You must tell me all your news. How is Dickie, and Phillip, and Mavis, and little Doris? Why, you look pale, Hetty, are you feeling unwell, dear?”

  “Oh, it is nothing really, Dora. Very foolishly, I fainted earlier on.”

  “Hetty, my dear dear girl——” Dora sat beside her, took her hand. “You are too sensitive, you should not have come.”

  Pigeons were cooing in the trees, and flying down to the grass, to strut and feed, to pursue and be pursued. Young ladies, habited and riding side-saddle, followed by grooms, cantered sedately down Rotten Row. It was the height of the season. Children followed, in basket-seats strapped to Shetland ponies, accompanied by nurses in uniforms of grey bonnets and capes, while under-grooms, or stable boys in livery, held the bridles. Carriages passed, open landaus and victorias wherein sun-shaded dowagers taking the air of the London season and beautiful prim women in wide hats sat and bowed to their friends in passing. Among the equipages was the yellow landau of Lord and Lady Lonsdale, which Dora recognised.

  “Just think of the contrast, Hetty. I suppose that splendid English family receives one hundred thousand a year in royalties from coal alone. Yet how many realise the other side? Do you know, two million, eight hundred thousand people, no less, sleep out, homeless, in our cities every night of the year—in darkest England? Lord Lonsdale is a worthy man, a great sportsman, a landlord of the best type; it is the dark forces of the System which are to blame. It cannot go on much longer. A crisis is very near, all the signs point to it. There is violence everywhere, at home and abroad—gun-running in Ulster—Labour violence, violence at the docks—violence in the House of Commons. Violence in our Movement, yes, yes, you deplore it, I know; but a cauterising violence, Hetty, to cure the proud flesh from becoming gangrenous, and killing the body. Women must save the children, which are England’s future. Either there must be a better future, or no future at all. It is we women who must help, in the direction of the new earth which is to be, a nation based on truth; but if we do not come to power now, all will be lost. Our violence is deliberate, Hetty, to prevent great catastrophe, perhaps the final catastrophe of the West. It is the same in Germany, another nation possessed by the hubris of industrial power, for the sake of money. In the end such men say, ‘We are the nation’. Such men are uncertain of their true strength, Hetty; their ‘national’ violence is of their true nature thwarted, and too often darkened for ever, in the gehenna of the little helpless child’s mind, in its very soul, shut up as in a dark cupboard, suffering nightmares which are but writhings of a soul in darkness to find the light—to find the truth—to be saved from fear by love. This, my dear friend, is the only reply I can make to your most kind letter.”

  Dora’s face quivered as she sought Hetty’s hand. Aunt Marian sat between them, a protecting arm given to each.

  “The truth will prevail, the truth will prevail,” she said stalwartly.

  “If only all English people, in the more comfortable classes, could but sec what I have seen, what I see daily, hourly, what I know is waiting to leap forth from the maimed minds of children, now grown-up, everywhere, in all classes—but most of all in the poverty classes, since they are most numerous—O, we are doing the Lord’s work, we are, we are.”

  After this confession, uttered in a voice that was so sweetly reasonable that Hetty wondered how anyone could ever gainsay what her dear friend ever said, Dora looked up, and blinking away her tears, saw those in the eyes of her friend, and bending down her head, kissed the hand she held between her own. Then she touched with her lips the reticulated cheek of the old woman beside her.

  “And now,” she said, with a smile, meeting Hetty’s smile, “before I forget—I am not always a wild and wilful woman, you know!—about my little cottage in Lynmouth—how well I remember our wonderful holiday together when my god-son was only three months old!—well, Hetty, my dear, it is for you or Phillip or Dickie to visit and stay in so long as you like, and at any time any of you care to go there. Just send me a line at any time, with a few days’ notice if possible, so that I can be sure of having the place ready for you.”

  “Thank you, Dora dear, thank you very much, it is most kind of you I am sure,” said Hetty, still unhappy that her letter had caused a restraint between them, despite Dora’s gracious manner.

  Hardly had s
he spoken when two brown-moustached men in straw-yards, jackets and trousers of dark material, and big black boots, got out of a taxicab which had stopped on the drive opposite the seat, and walked to the seat.

  “Are you Theodora Maddison? I have a warrant for your arrest under the Prisoners Temporary Discharge for Ill-health Act, Section 1, subsection 12a. Now then, no trouble, miss, be reasonable, and come along quietly.”

  Hetty and her Aunt Marian were left on the seat.

  *

  Phillip hoped that by the time his friend Desmond Neville came home for the summer holidays the kestrel would be tame and they could take it on the Hill and fly it; but the bird proved intractable. Whenever he opened its cage, it ran out and squatted on the lawn; soon it attracted spadgers, the sooty little cockney sparrows, always quarrelling and chittering, always scrapping for their rights. The spadgers hopped around it, scolding. The kestrel appeared to shrink into its shoulders. The sparrows hopped nearer. Phillip, like the kestrel, remained absolutely still. Then running sideways with unbelievable speed, the fierce, brown-eyed falcon managed to snatch a spadger before it could fly up with the others. Yet this did not, apparently, warn the others; back they came, sooner rather than later, to mob the kestrel. Again the sudden dash on yellow feet, feathered thighs like little pantaloons moving so swiftly that the broken wing had not appeared even to drag. The snatch, the crushing power of a yellow foot with its black claws of sharpest horn, had to be felt on your forearm, through your jacket sleeve, to be realized. The falcon stood on the spadger, squeezed its life out as it crouched there, all the bird’s life and cockiness turned to an escaping scream of terror as it lay gripped shapeless under black claws.

  One evening the kestrel got through the fence, at the end where the post had rotted, and the boards leaned outwards. Phillip let it go—it would not accept him as a friend. He hoped it would manage to live in the long grass, on mice and birds in the Backfield. But that was its own look out.

  *

  The August sun burned down, the tennis courts on the Hill showed worn patches, the band played on Thursdays to thousands of shrill sparrow-like children come up from the old-time marshes around the great ox-bend and eyot in the Thames, called the Isle of Dogs: an area long since covered with rows and terraces of cottage-like dwellings with tiled roofs darkened by soot, their brick walls saturated with the odours of leather, vinegar, hops, sulphur, and glue: while beyond the dark low clusters, seen under their haze of smoke from the Hill, stood up the red and yellow funnels of liners, the masts and spars of sailing ships which crossed the seas with their cargoes to and from the docks and basins of London river.

  Phillip was to take his holidays in September. Where, he could not decide. Mavis and Cousin Petal, home from the convent in Belgium, sang at the piano the song Phillip had heard on the concert platform of Hayling Island, in those family holidays which now seemed so far away.

  Phillip’s holidays are in Septem-bah!

  He’s been saving up since last Novem-bah!

  Richard had cycled to the Norfolk Broads for his holiday, having taken it in the last fortnight in June, and the first week of July. In early manhood, in the days of butterfly collecting, he had dreamed of visiting that remote and mysterious place, with its fabulous bitterns, harriers, and bearded titmice; great shoals of bream, rudd, pike and tench, brown-sailed wherries and windmills rising above the reeds vibrating with the thousand tongues of the wind ruffling watery solitude; and, most wonderful of all, Large Copper and Swallowtail butterflies, extinct elsewhere in Britain. His collecting days were over; an elderly man went to the Broads, to make real a boyhood dream, from which he returned bronzed and happy; but it was not the West Country.

  “I hope you two will be all right while we are away,” said Hetty, on the eve of her departure with Mavis and Doris to Beau Brickhill, to stay with Aunt Liz and Polly.

  “Rather!” cried Phillip. “Give my love to old Percy!”

  Percy Pickering had left school and gone to work in Uncle Jim’s firm of corn and seed merchants.

  It was rather nice and quiet to be alone in the house. He seldom saw Father. He had his breakfast next door with Aunt Marian, and his supper, when he returned in the evening, with Desmond and Mrs. Neville. Desmond had another three years at school before going to the University, then into his Uncle’s lace business in Nottingham. Of Desmond’s father Phillip knew nothing beyond that he was still alive; he had not the least curiosity, nor did Desmond ever speak of him.

  What was there to do in the evenings, and at week-ends? The nests in his preserves were long since forsaken; a spirit had departed. And Desmond nowadays seemed to have no interest in birds. He cared more for fishing. It was no good going any more to the round-ponds in Whitefoot Lane woods, or the dewponds in the Seven Fields of Shrofften, where once they had caught roach. Old cans and bits of broken carts lay in those little ponds now that the houses were creeping up in long red and yellow rows. The woods themselves were bare, threaded with broad paths where hundreds of strange feet had trodden.

  It was a fashion that year to wear in the buttonhole a little German silver tube, holding water, and flowers—perhaps a rose and maidenhair fern. All the youths on the Hill sported them. Phillip wore a white carnation—for Helena.

  Sometimes, if it looked like rain, the boys went together to the Electric Palace in the High Street to see Nazimova, Mary Pickford, Theda Bara, or a Mack Sennett film, which was always screamingly funny. Once a week they had a sixpenny seat in the dress circle of the first house of the Hippodrome, where strange new music called rag-time was to be heard. A little brown-faced man—“All handsome men are slightly sunburnt,” laughed Phillip, quoting the oft-seen advertisement, to Desmond —came on with a violin and sang wheezily,

  Yiddle, on your fiddle,

  Won’t you please to play some rag-time?

  while his violin went sort of scrittchy scratch and there was not a lot of clapping afterwards. He was one of the first turns, of course. Phillip thought that Uncle Hugh could have done ever so much better, if he had lived. But there he was, in the cemetery beside Grannie: two white tombstones.

  In the evening, in the moonlight, you can hear those darkies singing—

  Harmony floated through the warm summer twilight on the Hill; laughing girls passed; sudden feet running over dusky grass, shouts and more laughter, as youth wrestled and ragged in fun. Cries in the gloaming; the near double-warble of some sweet whistler, feeling grand in a new pair of peg-topped trousers, all the rage among the sort of chaps who ‘warbled’; two-fingered screech of Cranmer leaving for home, a salute for his admired, his beloved Phillip—an attitude of which the recipient was entirely unconscious. Phillip wished he wouldn’t do it, but, of course, didn’t like to tell old Horace.

  *

  The harvest moon rose over the Thames estuary, casting long shadows: and among the shadows, fancy might have seen one of the wraiths of the Hill, the ghost of Hugh Turney swaying in the mist of light between two dark hawthorn patches, and remarking in a whisper of his old ironic self, Keep it going boys—your race is nearly run.

  You have stolen my heart, my heart away—

  The high moon shone on her house, dark and with drawn blinds, and glistened on the little turret that was her bedroom. Standing in the blackness of the hawthorns across the road merging his own darkness with the shadows of the moon, he dreamed of a face there, a smile, of white arms held out to him below, all his spirit like a nightingale singing. It was safe to stand there and dream: for she was with her people in the Isle of Wight. Alas, that his holidays began before they were due to return! Ah, he was glad, for might she not then miss him?

  When the moon shone down upon the Hill, all fancies seemed possible. Ghosts walked, dreams became truth.

  Night by night the moon rose later, to slant in gold upon the singing, the playing, and the fun. Keep it going, boys——

  *

  “Well, old chap—if I might make a suggestion for your holiday next week—you
could join the Cyclists’ Touring Club, you know. They provide one, on request, with a list of suitable lodgings for the night. Why not go awheel down to the West Country? It is a wonderful journey, across the Plain—though I fancy it is too late to hear the quails——”

  “I was wondering, Father—do you think I might pay Uncle John and Willie a visit, at Rookhurst? Of course, I don’t want to be in the way.”

  “Well, you might call at Uncle John’s on the way down, Phillip. Then he might invite you to stay. A postcard to your Cousin Willie, say three days in advance, would be the thing, I think.”

  So with rod and saloon gun strapped to cross-bar of the Swift, Phillip cycled away very early one morning, to cross the Thames by Kingston Bridge; and by way of Staines, Bagshot Common, and Andover, to Salisbury for the night in an eighteen-penny bed-and-breakfast C.T.C.-recommended lodging; then onwards across the Great Plain, in heat radiating from white dust and stubble field of that chalk country where he lingered throughout a summer day, dreaming of the ventriloquial notes of quails; and at owl-light he came to the thatched village of Rookhurst, and the stone house of Willie and Uncle John under the downs.

  Chapter 4

  LAST WINTER OF THE OLD WORLD

  ON THE first day of October the coal fire was lit in the office. The Michaelmas renewals were now coming in. They were connected, in Phillip’s eyes, with a most desirable thing: overtime. This began after five o’clock, and was paid for at the wonderful rate of one shilling and sixpence an hour for a junior of under ten years’ service. He worked out that this was slightly more than thrice the rate of his day work. The Overtime Book was a big black-covered one, and the entries had to be countersigned by E.R.H.—except Mr. Hollis’, Phillip noticed: he counter-signed his own. Mr. Hollis worked alone, too—never when he ordered Phillip to remain. He got half a crown an hour; Downham got two shillings. Downham seldom did any overtime, nor did E. Rob Howlett.