South Riding (18 page)

“I’ve heard nowt about it,” repeated Topper, “and if any one knows owt about roads, it’s me.”

“Indeed? Well—it appears that the county councillors know better. They must have forgotten to consult you.”

“I’m so to speak a civil servant,” grunted Topper. “I work on roads and I know.”

The stranger ignored him. “About time, I suppose, that the other side of the railway line had a chance. After all, the council’s been pouring money like water into the colony. These farmers. They think they own the world, and little wonder. Look at the way the government spoils them.” He was fairly launched into his hobby now—the old cry of the town against the country. The authorities wasted money on subsidising an industry that could not possibly pay, drained marshes, gave grants for sugar-beet, built fold yards, and their money’s worth vanished as soon as it was spent.

“Now a bit spent on Kiplington and you would see it back. There’s not a decent health resort, as you might say, in the South Riding. Not a bad site perhaps, but needs developing.”

“Over-developed,” growled Topper. “When you say developing you mean bathing-belles. I’ve gotta family and I’m a good chapel man. Ask any.”

“Bathing belles? Well, I won’t say a few mightn’t improve it. But what about a skating rink, a good dance palace, and dogs tracks? There’s a deal of money to be made nowadays at the dogs.”

“Made
and
lost,” said Grandpa Sellars, removing his pipe and spitting with great sagacity. “Made
and
lost.”

“Some one has to lose,” said the stranger. “That’s economics. The question is—
who
loses? That’s progress. And I say the farmers have lost enough for us already. But perhaps you’ve never seen dog-racing in these parts?”

The question was meant to be offensive. The stranger was offensive.

Tom winked at George Hicks. He was enjoying himself. It was part of his role as popular landlord to keep offensive, strangers at their distance. He picked up a glass, already polished to perfection, and squinted at it critically.

“That’s right,” he said quietly. “I’ve never seen dog-racing in
these
parts. But I remember a little place in Florida—two years ago it would be—eight dogs, quarter-mile track, I was there when Blue Velvet beat the world’s record for the quarter on a quarter-mile track at 24.38 seconds. Twenty-five thousand people in the grandstand. No. I’ve not seen any dog-racing in
these
parts.”

The traveller stared—trying not to appear deflated.

“Ah. So you’ve been in the States?”

“Haven’t you?”

“Well—not exactly—I mean, not yet,” said the commercial traveller.

The latch clicked again and Bill Heyer, the big one-armed colonist from Cold Harbour, entered.

Tom winked again.

“’Evening, Bill. I owe you a pint, don’t I?”

He didn’t, but he guessed that Bill had dropped in for a packet of Woodbines and would fade out again with equal abruptness unless tempted to stay, and Tom needed him.

“This gennelman here,” continued Tom, pouring beer with an expert hand, “says we ought to start the dogs at Kiplington.”

“Go on.”

“Why not roulette? Why not baccarat? Remember, Le Touquet, Bill?”

“Ah.”

“Those frog places—They’re not so hot. Remember that chink place at Deauville, George?”

Hicks had made one excursion abroad, taking horses to Deauville. Tom made the most of it. Then, having established the sophistication of Hicks and Heyer, he proceeded to enlarge upon his own experience. The commercial traveller, who had prepared to put it across a group of country yokels in a dreary pub at the other end of nowhere, found himself listening to casual mention of New York and Aden, Port Said, Constantinople and Vienna. He was the bumpkin, he who had never journeyed farther than Wembley Stadium for a cup-tie final. These veterans just ran rings round him, and he was not experienced enough to realise that they did it for his benefit.

He picked himself up and pulled himself together, a sadder if not a wiser citizen.

“Well, so long, folks.” He tossed a shilling as though it were a sovereign on to the table. “Got to make Kingsport to-night.”

“Mind you make it strong then,” tittered Grandpa Sellars.

“With the cheese, that’s one and two,” observed Tom coldly.

The traveller flung down two coppers and left, slamming the door. Tom grinned.

“Who’s the little bed-bug?” asked Heyer.

“Blew in on the draught. Look here, Heyer, have you heard anything about this road from Kingsport to Kiplington?”

Heyer shook his head.

“There may be nothing in it. What I don’t like is—where did he pick up this gossip?”

“If it had been owt about roads, I’d have known it,” Topper reaffirmed.

“The point is—we know they’re sore and jealous about the colony.”

Heyer laughed.

“They’d better come and see us. There’s not one of us with a pound in the bank or a well-stocked fold yard. Does Carne know owt?”

“Well,” said Hicks cautiously. “I don’t take much heed of council doings, and he’s no talker. But there was something I know a bit back upset him, because they had a meeting the day I caught that wire,” he indicated his shoulder. “I know he missed a committee, and I know he was fair put out. I heard him telling Captain Gryson. He said, ‘It’s that damned Snaith again. A man that’ud put up wire and never mark it is capable of anything.’”

“That’ll be it. Snaith’s dead set on developing Kiplington and yon parts north of the railway. He’s said before that we’ve had too much of our own way down here. Our own way . . .”

“By God! I’d like him to see my books.”

They jeered, but there was anxiety in their laughter. Tom knew enough already to realise that a big new road and the consequent development of Kiplington would shift regular traffic and, still more, summer visitors, northwards. Heyer knew that he and his fellows in Cold Harbour Colony were singularly at the mercy of the Council. Both men were gamblers. Both had pluck. But they were realists enough to appreciate the precariousness of fortune.

Tom didn’t like it.

His vanity was imperilled. He had seen himself carrying Lily off, making their fortune, proving that it takes a man who has seen the world to be a man of the world. But sometimes, for a second, there opened before him a dark pool of doubt in which he saw reflected not the virile, successful, dashing, volatile ex-soldier, but a reckless fool gulled into investing all his capital in a moribund business in a dying area.

He knew one certain way of reassurance.

He strolled off to seek Lily in the kitchen.

At least to his wife he was still a hero and adventurer. She saw him most satisfactorily, as he wished to see himself. In her calm presence he knew he was Tom Sawdon, the Colonel’s trusted friend, the conquering lover, the popular host of a successful inn.

It happened that Lily had had a good day. She was thinking: Perhaps it’s all nonsense; perhaps I shall grow out of it.

She sat darning stockings and listening to the radio.

“Oh, Tom, do stop and listen a bit,” she pleaded, her charming head on one side, her lips parted. “It’s Elsie and Doris Waters. They are a scream.”

This was how he liked to think of her—enthroned by the fire that he had lit, in the chair he bought her, her cheeks flushed with pleasure, her fair hair only a trifle faded, a blue ribbon round her still pretty throat.

It was not possible that their venture could fail. He had never failed. The external intervention of contrary political interests simply did not enter into a world which had preserved Tom Sawdon through war and peace and brought him safely to haven at Cold Harbour.

Yet he felt the need of action. He was anxious, and all anxiety, all sorrow and disappointment bored him. He must transform circumstances until they gave him cause for pleasure. He must prove the little scut wrong. He would go to Kingsport. He would listen to gossip.

He would know for certain.

“I may have to go to Kingsport to-morrow, Lil. Think you can manage?”

“Why not? Haven’t I managed all those years when you went rattling away to the ends of the earth?”

Ah, that was it. He had left her too often. He had wasted long years of her beauty and serenity.

“Are you afraid Grandpa Sellars will run off with me?”

That gave him an idea.

I know—by God—I’ll buy her a dog. That’ll be company for her.

He was restless, and knew that he must go somewhere, do something, put an end to the doubts teasing him. But he must also buy her something and prove his love for her. He must buy her a dog, for dogs went with the picture of successful inn-keeping which he had formed in his mind—a happy twilight—Darby and Joan, the firelit parlour and the dog. Something handsome and exotic—a Great Dane, an Alsatian. Something that would give character to the Inn and pay tribute to Lily’s quality—a watch dog, a present, a love token—because he was disturbed by the rumour of a road north of the railway line, because he had played that evening the high-minded host of the Nag’s Head, because he loved his wife, and because he liked dogs.

His mind was made up. He would buy a dog to-morrow.

“I
WOULDN’T
go, Mr. Astell, I wouldn’t really. It’s not as if you held with them voluntary hospitals.”

Mrs. Corner, Alderman Astell’s landlady, paid spasmodic tribute to Socialist theory as she understood it, whenever it coincided with Astell’s interests. This was not often. The conviction which had driven him through desperate poverty to a hardly-earned schoolmastership, out of school into a conscientious objector’s prison, from prison to a semiamateur printing press on the Clyde, from Scotland to Dublin, Dublin to South Africa, and from South Africa back, a physical wreck, to England, had done, she considered, damage enough already. She held no brief for it. Her late husband had voted first Radical, then Labour, but now here was Mr. Astell turning out on a cold November night, with a sea roke blowing, to sit up till all hours in a stuffy hall just because the Mayor, who was a friend of his, had asked him, as the new alderman, to present the prizes at the Hospital Fancy Ball.

“I’ve no patience,” said Mrs. Corner, who had nursed one man till his death through pneumonia and pulmonary tuberculosis, and had no desire to bury another for the same reason. “Go out and sit talking there till midnight and wake up tomorrow with one of your coughing fits, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. You’ll go and kill yourself one of these days and then may be you will be satisfied.”

Astell was not afraid of death. He was afraid of a haemorrhage, of a sanatorium, of the survival of his restless mind imprisoned within a helpless body. When he returned a doomed man from the Transvaal, he had been told that any further political campaign or emotional excitement might finish him off quickly. Only by a quiet light routine in the open air, and preferably by the sea, could he hope to preserve some kind of utility during the crippled remnant of his life.

“Live like a cabbage,” said the doctors. Astell, coughing, sick, exhausted by fever and emaciated by haemorrhage, submitted to their orders. Once he had known himself. He had been a fighter, driven by faith, shrinking from no hardship. In his Glasgow days nothing had been too much for him. He knew well that he was distinguished by no special talent; but to possess energy beyond the common run seemed simply a matter of indivdual choice. Others could speak better, write better, negotiate better. Joe Astell worked. He would do anything, go anywhere. Even when he married, he chose a little Jewess, gay, dark, equally ardent, selfless, who followed him from Glasgow to Dublin, where he went to report on Black and Tan outrages, from Dublin to Lanarkshire again, then died from influenza in 1924, before he left to work as a trade union organiser among the native miners in the Transvaal. He had thought himself inexhaustible, if ever he thought of himself at all, until the week when he had collapsed, after a speaking tour, with what at first was thought to be pneumonia, and which had developed into tuberculosis. He had spent three months in South African hospitals, then he had come to England for an operation at the Fulham Hospital for Tuberculosis. From that time he had been a stranger to himself, constantly ailing, unable to be sure that he could keep an appointment or fulfil a promise, horrified by his own unreliability, ashamed of impotence.

His colleagues had been kind to him. In Yorkshire there had been a little printing press kept by the deceased John Henry Corner. He had turned out pamphlets, leaflets and a small local monthly paper cheaply for the trade unions and co-operative societies. It was suggested that Astell should inherit his work—a light job, run as an excuse for pensioning invalids. So he came to Yorkshire, lodged with Mrs. Corner, and slept in the garden hut built for her late husband.

There were days when he could not work at all, nights when he lay in terror waiting for the cough which tore his body, dawns when he awoke with racing pulses, hunted down corridors of dreams by hounds of fancy. Yet, month by month, confidence returned to him, his attacks of fever recurred less frequently, he dared to stand for election to the County Council, and find himself a councillor, then alderman, the pampered lodger of good Mrs. Corner, the guest of the Mayor of Kiplington at a dance for the Cottage Hospital.