Give Us This Day (48 page)
But there was another more subtle consolation that was harder to understand and evaluate, and it had to do with his frozen memory of the sounds and scents of the countryside where he had spent his boyhood. These were now intensified to a degree where he could isolate and savour each of them, identifying the smell of autumn and the stir of spring, and this awareness of images brought to him out of the past: violet mist in the Bray valley on a still October afternoon; rain blurring the escarpment behind Tryst, ripening fruit in the cages and orchards south of the house; rows of leather-bound books in his father’s library; the steady surge and recoil of winter breakers on the seashore; the rush of hounds breaking covert when the huntsman sounded “Gone Away,” all kinds of things that had once never impinged on him when he had eyes to see them but were now like old friends helping him along the way.
Yet for all this placid acceptance of his limitations there remained the emptiness of his future, and it was not until he sensed, through his fingertips, the flacidity of Toller’s wasted legs, that he saw, as it were, a glimmer of light in the surrounding darkness, identifying it there and then into hope of a kind so far denied him. Energy surged back into him then, of the kind that had launched him at such speed down the embattled valley among the remnants of Montmorency’s shattered column, and something told him that here, at last, was the elusive secret of regeneration, the use of his own bones and flesh to restore the crippled bodies of other poor devils whose youth and vigour had been taken from them out on the veldt.
He went to Sybil on the last day of the old year, saying briefly, “Write to Udale. And look for that house in Hampshire. I’ll work at Netley for as long as he needs me, as long as there are men there who can be helped, even slightly.”
“There’ll always be someone to help, dearest,” she said, gladly, and kissed him, but impatiently, for she did not want to waste a moment in setting the seal upon the victory.
* * *
She came to Adam with the news in early February, a week or two after Hugo had joined the Netley staff, with full details of his vocation and their impending move to Hampshire. “As chirrupy as a sparrow,” as he afterwards told Henrietta, making no attempt to conceal his own satisfaction. Henrietta heard him out and then had a private session with Sybil, plying her with innumerable questions concerning Hugo and their new base southwest of the Gosport road and overlooking Southampton Water. When Sybil, with her usual air of setting out on a royal progress, had bustled about her business, Henrietta withdrew to her sewing-room, wondering about her and what strange alchemy had been at work to fuse a woman of that kind with that great son of hers, the splendid young man she recalled so vividly in the days before they shot away his sight. It was a case, she thought, that paralleled Hugo’s own pursuit of trophies, for that was how Lady Sybil Uskdale must have thought of him when they met and married. But now, instinct told her, it was different. Something strange and secret had developed between them, that had nothing much to do with Hugo’s fame and popularity, but was concerned with a compulsion on the part of that rather overpowering woman to make amends for the wrong she had done him by dragging him off to that terrible war. But there was something else, she sensed, behind Sybil’s assessment of him whenever she discussed the boy, or even looked at him, and this was a hint Henrietta could interpret without much fear that she was jumping to a conclusion. Lady Sybil had found in Hugo the kind of fulfilment that she, as wife and mother, had found in Adam all those years ago, and Hugo’s blindness, cutting him off from diversions, and making him entirely dependent on her, had proved a kind of boon to both of them, adding something essential to a relationship that had been little more than an arrangement when it began. She thought,
I never did understand the woman before. I suppose I was always a little scared of her. But I’m not any more, for she’s really no different from any of us when it comes down to essentials…
And then, whooping like one of those Red Indians in Buffalo Bill’s Travelling Circus, Adam hurried into the house, calling for her at the top of his voice, flinging open the sewing-room door and brandishing a telegram that he must have taken from the boy she saw pushing his bicycle up the drive.
“It’s from Giles!” he bellowed. “He’s in with a thumping majority! Over two thousand, by God!” She thought, taking the telegram from him and reading it carefully,
They’re such a whirlwind tribe and he’s no different from any of them, for he keeps pace with them somehow and that’s more than I can do these days.
But she said, trying hard to match his enthusiasm, “How wonderful for him. I
do
hope he likes it when he gets there,” and that, for some reason that she did not understand, made him laugh, a fact that underlined somehow the sad but undeniable fact that she was getting left behind with stay-at-homes like Stella and Denzil, in the family’s advance into new and frightening worlds.
It was no wonder, really, for things were changing at such a pace for her and for everyone else who could remember older, more tranquil times, when the social frontiers were fixed and nothing (if you excepted the new railway engines) moved faster than a horse. She remembered that Adam, in one of his jocular moods, had called these changes “another spin of the whirligig” and they did not appear to distress him at all, even though he was twelve years older than her. Perhaps this was because his newspapers prepared him for them, or perhaps, even without newspapers, he had the temperament to adapt to change. For her part, she found it increasingly difficult, what with daughters finding new and improbable husbands, George rushing about the country on all those horseless carriages, Alex talking about all these frightful new weapons men were using in battles, and with Giles becoming a Member of Parliament, Hugo becoming a sort of doctor, and every one of them caught up in some cause or invention that hadn’t concerned anyone but people like the Royals and Messrs. Disraeli and Gladstone when she was their age. She was sixty-six now, and a grandmother a dozen times over.
She let Adam talk himself out about the election and what it might mean with the Liberals and their allies holding a majority of three hundred and fifty-four over the Conservatives and Unionists, and presently excused herself, going upstairs to try on a green silk dress she had bought for Christmas but had not worn because it was delayed in the Christmas post and hadn’t arrived until nearly everybody had dispersed. She held it against her and studied herself in the mirror, a stocky, well-set-up woman who had aged, though she herself said it, very gracefully, for she had never run too fat and her hair still showed no more than a trace of grey. Her complexion was still good, too, and in her eyes was a sparkle that had been there ever since Adam Swann had ridden over the brow of the heath and carried her off, and which would last, she hoped, as long as he was about to share her memories. The reflection in the mirror comforted her somewhat. They might all be much cleverer than she was, and more in tune with the times, but she doubted whether they would look forty-eight when it came to be their turn to be sixty-six and even now none of her daughters-in-law, not even that fashionable Lady Sybil, could hold a candle to her when it came to
style.
She laid the dress aside and moved over to the tall window, looking down across the new vista Adam had conjured out of the paddocks and seeing, at its northern extremity, the larch coppice bordering the road. It had a bearing on the new family M.P., she thought with a smile. It was there he had emerged from a wayward frolic on her part and Adam’s, so long ago as 1865, and today it had the ability, somehow, to laugh back at her across a mile of parkland, as though its treetops were saying, “They know all manner of things you don’t, Henrietta, but most of it isn’t as important as lessons you learned here, and in the weeks that followed that roll in the hay on a summer day so long ago.”
Three
The Servile War
H
enrietta’s awareness of the changes and stresses of the new century could not be dismissed as the prejudices of a woman without education, who had spent most of her life deep in the Kentish countryside. It was real enough, this terrible quickening of tempo, to anyone who recalled more spacious times, and it was not necessary to be an avid newspaper reader like Adam Swann to see reflected, in the strivings and discontents of the Western world, the threat to the entire social order. Thrust, turbulence, and challenge were everywhere, and the rallying cries of storming parties assaulting strongholds of privilege and custom were heard in every city from Lisbon to Moscow, and loudly enough in places like Leeds and Birmingham to cause countrymen to enquire of one another what devilry was afoot in those wildernesses of brick that had tempted so many of their sons and daughters to forsake a traditional way of life in search of advancement and adventure.
It had begun right here in England, Adam could have told them, and no more than a couple of generations ago, when Stephenson’s railroads quartered the nation, giving him his own opportunity to make a fortune. But now, far sooner than even he had judged, the children of the machines had spread south, west, and east, preaching their brassy gospel as far as the American prairies, calling to the sod-breakers pursuing centuries-old furrows to make haste to the fair where the pickings were rich and a man’s life was not regulated by the seasons and the yield of the amount of soil he shifted by weight of muscle.
No one under forty, least of all a Swann, could be unaware of what was happening in the big world, and for the most part they were more than equal to the challenges offered. Only here and there, in isolated pockets like Dewponds Farm, were fences raised against further encroachments, and even here, by the spring of 1906, desertion had begun with the migration of the two Fawcett boys, Martin and John, to George’s machine shops in the north.
Elsewhere the challenges were met head-on, sometimes fearfully but more often cheerfully, as in the case of George Swann, already accepted in the city as one of the boldest riders in the field. Yet even George, geared to change and welcoming every short cut that presented itself, sometimes ran out of breath and would pause to make sure of his path ahead. No longer did he see himself as a pioneer, cutting his way through unmapped territory, as in the days when he had driven singlehanded from Stockport to London Bridge with a load of rice aboard his temperamental waggon. Many others were out there, tinkering, experimenting, disputing this and that with backers and public authorities, and it was no longer necessary to preach his private gospel that the horse-drawn waggon would soon be as outdated as a muzzle-loader on the army’s artillery range on Salisbury Plain.
The underground railways, stuck with the slightly derisive name of “Tube,” had been a wonder of the age about the time he negotiated his first contract with a shifty Cypriot tea merchant at Hay’s Wharf. Now, as if in answer to his fleet of petrol-driven vans, the City of London Authorities had opened the Bakerloo Line and tubes were accepted as a natural means of cross-city travel. A company, conceited enough to call itself “Vanguard,” was running motor omnibuses in competition with the horse-drawn public transport that had proved such a bane to Swann waggoners in Cheapside and Ludgate Hill, although he noted, with a spark of malice, that their vehicles were fitted with iron-bound wheels, and maintained an average speed over a stage only a little above that of the old horse-buses. A few taxicabs had appeared on the streets, not only here in the capital but also in places as far north as Liverpool. Three-horse fire-engines, for so long the darlings of every city urchin, were in retreat, and some fire-brigades were going over to petrol, advertising their increased speed by clanging bells with a note that struck Cockneys as more insistent than those of their predecessors. There was even an experimental motor exhibition out at Islington that George attended, hoping to pick up a few tips but leaving with a conviction that he was still ahead of most of them. And, on top of that, in 1906, a few sportsmen who persisted in regarding the internal-combustion engine as a rich man’s toy, began holding racing rallies at Brooklands and over winding, hilly courses in the Isle of Man.
It was not only in George’s chosen field that progress (Adam, perched on his knoll overlooking his quiet acres, was already beginning to suspect that word) was apparent. Those who looked up from the traditional task of net-mending on a hundred quaysides could see Cunard’s floating island, the
Mauretania
, at her trials. With a stupendous displacement of 30,700 tons, and a capability of twenty-six knots, she did for sea travel what a hundred and one George Swanns had been attempting on behalf of road transport. A year or so later she crossed the Atlantic in well under five days. And even overhead, in the hitherto untroubled skies, competitors in balloon races could be spotted over Britain, their occasional appearance causing city urchins to pause in their collection of horse manure (a traditional pursuit enlivened, of late, by the noting down of the names of new motors honking their way among the traffic) and whistle their four-note, rhetorical version of the question, “Seen the
air
-ship?”
So much for transport, to which so many other changes were hitched, but in wider fields, here and abroad, innovators were hard at work, some of them hellbent on subjecting the social systems of democracies and autocracies to terrible strains.
Making his first hesitant appearance in the Mother of Parliaments in February 1906, Giles was soon aware that the pressures that had contributed to his victory in a Welsh valley were even more apparent on the Continent. Russia, still deep in a feudal sleep, was stirring after the lost war with Japan, and blood spattered the pavements of Petrograd when the Tsar’s Cossacks, shepherds of a once passive flock, tried in vain to stem the tide of revolution that ended, to the delight of radicals all over the world, in the Tsar’s summoning of the Duma to approve what optimists were already calling “The Russian Magna Carta.”
Nearer home, old and tried foreign policies were being jettisoned and replaced by new, to the confusion and alarm of men whose grandfathers had fought Napoleon for twenty-three years with one short break. That break had come when King Edward, he whom men were beginning to call “Peacemaker,” having succeeded, against all odds, in charming the Parisians and cementing the Entente Cordiale, an alliance designed to apply a brake to the upsurge of Germany after Bismarck unified a knapsack of petty kingdoms into a single, aggressive nation.
Adam, reading of this in his morning perusal of
The Times
, did not put much faith in the cordiality of the entente, and this was not because his father had left two fingers on the field of Waterloo. It was because, as a lifelong pragmatist, he had no confidence in the ability of the French to wage a sustained war against anyone, with or without allies. They were like some of the tribes he had fought in his youth, bold enough in attack, but lacking the stamina for a protracted campaign. Any war against a resurgent Germany, he reasoned, would call for more than bugle calls, drum rolls, baggy red trousers, and the gospel of élan, preached by paunched French generals at every military academy in die land. He would have preferred an alliance (if there
had
to be an alliance) with Germany, whose faith in lance and sabre had been superseded by the breech-loading rifle as long ago as 1866, and he suspected that his view was shared by a majority of his countrymen. But then, as ever, he would demonstrate his impatience with all foreigners by turning to pages of his newspaper devoted to home-based events, noting that at last the new docks serving the Manchester Ship Canal had been opened by the Peacemaker and his handsome consort, who was said to abominate the Prussians for the way they had served her homeland a generation ago. He noted also that advances in communications were being made across a very wide field and that Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company was now in constant use by the shipping insurers in the city, and this in a day when the telephone linking his depots along the network was still regarded, by all but people like George and his disciple Edward, as a novelty.
Even nature herself seemed restless in that period, a mere twelve months or so marking the middle of the first decade of the new century. In Chile an earthquake accounted for thousands of lives, and within a year San Francisco was in ruins from the same agency. He thought, turning the pages and scanning headlines,
I often told myself, in the old days, that I had caught the flood tide of an era, but I hadn’t. Just the ripples of a tidal wave that will change the face of the world before I’ve been in the churchyard a dozen years.
But then he congratulated himself on being young in the old century, for the options of an individual had been wide open then and not, as now, narrowed by consortiums and industrial groupings of one kind or another.
2
The social changes that preoccupied Henrietta were not discriminatory, as they had been a generation ago. Then a change of tempo was the business of men, and the womenfolk, if they were aware of them at all, awaited the guidance of their masters in these matters, providing they deigned to give it. But even the rampart of male dominance was beginning to crumble and Swann women, dotted here and there about the islands, were among the first to appreciate the fact. Among them Helen Clarke, formerly Helen Coles, who had set Dublin tongues wagging by capturing a handsome groom several years her junior.
Most widows, she supposed, conscious of passing years and the looming menace of fading looks, would have married Rory Clarke with their eyes closed and so, probably, would Helen ten years before he led her to the altar in the spring of
1905. But Helen, alone among the Swann girls and almost unique among her contemporaries, had undergone ordeal by fire and the experience had taught her, among other things, to prospect ground over which she had decided to advance.
She did this during the waiting period between the beginning of Rory’s storming courtship and the day when, clad in a gala dress of Irish green (as a widow whose previous husband had been decapitated by brigands she could not, she reasoned, wear white without sacrificing dignity), she threw her wedding bouquet from the carriage and set out for the new home Rory’s father had given them as a wedding present, a handsome, Georgian building, standing in several acres of land near Crumlin, southwest of the city.
She was now, she assumed, beyond the Pale in two senses, having sacrificed Dublin Castle society by embracing the Roman Catholic faith during courtship, but she almost certainly reasoned that Rory Clarke was worth a mass, deep religious conviction never having been a feature of her upbringing at Tryst. There were aspects of Rory Clarke, and even more of Irish political life, that baffled her during the first summer as the wife of a man who seemed to prize her above his pursuit of political laurels and popular acclaim, but one of the many lessons she had learned during her years in primitive surroundings was to look through rather than at local imperfections, counting only such blessings as were within immediate grasp.
They were, as it happened, many and various during those halcyon days of 1906 and 1907, and chief among them was the discovery that Rory’s veneration of her was not, as she had half-suspected, a mere facet of his impulsive, many-sided character. It was rooted in a need to anchor himself to someone sufficiently mature to adjust to his moods and bolster a dignity that he continually placed at risk in his career as professional clown and sustainer of myths; to which could be added, she supposed, incidental roles as conspirator, ballad-maker, and several other walk-on parts in the repertoire of the dedicated Home Ruler.
She had braced herself against a cooling of ardour on his part as soon as Parliament reassembled and he returned to London to do his clamorous stint in the Irish members’ attempt to focus attention on themselves and The Cause, but nothing like this happened. Instead, he insisted that she accompany him back across the sea to his headquarters in Bayswater where, under his active encouragement, she came to preside over a kind of salon, frequented by some of the weirdest people she had ever met, not excluding head-hunting Papuans who were reported to practise cannibalism.
Members of Rory’s set whom she entertained at Crumlin and Bayswater did not go as far as the Papuans in that respect, but there were similarities, for they fed, male and female, upon one another’s vanities and extravagances, each competing for the title of Eccentric of the Season. She met and moved among wild-eyed Fenians who had served long sentences in British gaols, professors of Gaelic mythology, poets, dramatists, songsters, orators with and without official platforms, Barcelona anarchists, Welsh activists, explosives experts, courtesans who had seen the Celtic dawn and been purified by it, men allegedly wanted by the police of several countries, and a handful of comparatively sober politicians with some pretensions to statesmanship.
They had two characteristics in common. Each of them talked incessantly to anyone who would listen, or even pretended to listen, and all of them seemed eager to achieve Celtic martyrdom and, via martyrdom, a few lines in a Celtic ballad. The shortest road to the second seemed to be a resounding act of violence involving assassination or demolition.
It was no wonder, Helen reflected, that Rory sought tranquillity in the few hours he could spare from such a babel, and in these intervals she was strangely touched by his boyish gentleness, and a sensitivity much at odds with the violently extrovert personality he revealed in public.
He was, she discovered, a shy but rewarding lover, so unlike poor Rowley in his response to a little cosseting, so grateful for any active encouragement she gave him when the fearful cacophony had subsided and all the callers had left or had been carted off to bed by the flock of Irish servants they maintained at both houses, every one of them schooled in the handling of stupefied anarchists, poets, and mythmakers. And being five years his senior, and a survivor of a real rather than an imaginary revolution, she had no hesitation in taking the initiative on these occasions, especially after she had discovered that his aggressive masculinity (like so many mantles he donned during his working day and convivial evenings) was light in texture. Unlike most of his guests, he had no head for liquor and sometimes, after she had sent the yawning servants to bed and opened a window or two, she would rouse him from a doze on the chaise longue and guide him upstairs. Once here, like her sister Joanna before her, she would help the master of the house undress and let him sleep it off for an hour or so, after which he would awaken, surprisingly sober and restrained, demanding to know where everybody had gone, what time it was, and whether she should be up here ministering to him instead of presiding as hostess downstairs.