James Hilton: Collected Novels (26 page)

The ordeal of the great cities continued. Night after night the wail of sirens and thudding of gunfire wakened Browdley, and sometimes a wide glow on one of the horizons gave a clue as to which of the greater near-by cities were being attacked. One night there came an emergency call for help from Mulcaster, and George accompanied several truckloads of Browdley men in a top-speed drive to the stricken area. Till then all his fire fighting and similar work had been a rehearsal; but that night, from soon after midnight till long past dawn, he knew what the real thing was, and of course, like all real things, it was different. Crawling into smoking ruins while bombs were still falling in the neighborhood, giving first aid to the injured before a doctor could arrive, he directed his squad of co-workers under conditions which, despite all the training they had had, were in a dreadful and profound sense novel.

A youngish doctor asked him when the raid was over: “Been in this sort of thing before?”

George shook his head.

“I’d have thought you had, from the way you handled those stretchers.”

“Oh, I’ve done
that
before.”

“The last war?”

“Aye.”

“How would you compare it—this sort of thing—and that?”

George answered irritably: “I wouldn’t. And nor would you if you could.”

The men returned to Browdley with scorched and blackened faces, minor injuries, and a grim weariness of soul which, after sleep, changed to bitterness, determination, cheerfulness, even ribaldry—so strange is the alchemy of experience on men of differing make-up.

On George, after that first irritable outburst (which he later regretted as being needlessly melodramatic and quite out of character), the principal effect was a decision to do something which, at any previous time, would have been an acknowledgement of defeat, but which now, the way he could look at it, seemed more like victory over himself. He gave up the
Guardian.
He did not even try to sell it; he abandoned it. For years it had never more than just paid its way, and sometimes not even that; but the real issue, in George’s mind, was not financial at all. He suddenly realized that the paper had been costing too much in human effort, including his own, that could better be devoted elsewhere.

“It’s one thing with another,” he explained to Wendover. “Will Spivey’s getting old—it’s all he can do to manage the job printing—I’ll have to keep
that
going, of course—it’s my living. And then there’ve been newsprint difficulties, and you can’t get paper boys any more, and I’ve just lost another man to the Army…And besides all that, I haven’t the time myself nowadays. If we should get a big raid on Browdley one of these nights, we’d all have our hands full. I know what I’m talking about, after what I saw in Mulcaster. Because I’d be responsible for things here, in a sort of way. There’s a lot more work in being Mayor than there used to be.”

“And I haven’t heard any complaints about how you’re doing it, George.”

“I’ll do it better, though, when the paper’s off my hands.”

“You’re sure you won’t regret not being an editor any more?”

“
Editor
?” George grinned. “What did I edit? Births, marriages, funerals, meetings, whist drives, church bazaars. The
Advertiser
’ll do that just as well—and one paper’s enough in a town of this size. Most folks always did prefer the
Advertiser
, anyway.”

“But you used to write your own stuff in the
Guardian
sometimes.”

“Aye, and there you come to another reason why I’m giving it up. D’you remember when I came to talk to you about that speech I made just after Dunkirk?”

“You mean the one in which you prophesied that Hitler would never lick us? Yes, I remember. And I’m beginning to think you were right.”

“For once. But as you said, I’d been pretty wrong before. I’m glad you said that because it made me think about it, and I never realized how wrong I actually had been till the other day I got out the back files of the
Guardian
and reread some of my old editorials. By God, they were wrong. After Locarno, for instance, I wrote about France and Germany finally burying the hatchet, and after Munich I said that even though the settlement wasn’t perfect, at any rate it might keep the peace of Europe for a generation…and only a few months ago I was blabbing that the Germans couldn’t break through in the west because of the Maginot Line…Mind you, I was always perfectly sincere at the time, but that only makes it worse. Seems to me, Harry, I’m just not cut out to deal with world affairs.”

“You’ve been as right as a good many of the politicians.”

“Aye, and that’s no compliment. Maybe it was a good thing I never got to Westminster—I’d have been just another fool with a bigger platform to spout from…And another thing occurred to me—I was thinking about it last night on warden’s duty—and it’s this—that the nearer I stay to Browdley the more use I am and the fewer mistakes I make. Look round the place—I have done
some
good things—not many, not enough—but they’re here, such as they are, and I don’t have to try to forget ’em same as I do the stuff I used to put in the paper…Look at the Mill Street Housing Scheme, and the new Council School, and the Municipal Hospital, and the electric power station the Government took over. Aye, and the sewage farm, if you like—that’s mine too—remember what a fight I had over it? Those things are
real,
Harry—they exist—they’re something attempted, something done. They’re what I’ve been right about, whereas Czechoslovakia’s something I’ve been wrong about. So give me Browdley.”

“You’ve got Browdley, George.”

“Aye, and it’s got me. Till the war’s over, anyhow.”

“And afterwards, perhaps.”

“Don’t be too sure. There’s young chaps coming along as’ll make me a back number someday, but they’re in uniform now, most of ’em…‘Vote for Boswell and Your Children’s

Future’—that was my old election slogan. I hope nobody else remembers it. I’d rather be remembered for the lavatories I put in the market square. Because they’re good lavatories, as lavatories go. Whereas the children’s future that I talked so much about…”

Wendover smiled. “I get your point, George. But don’t oversimplify it. And don’t throw all your books on world affairs in the fire.”

“Oh no, I won’t do that. In fact when I’ve got the time I’ll study more of ’em. I want to find out why we’ve all been let in for what we have. And I want to find out why folks ten times better educated than me have made the same mistakes.”

“Maybe because education hasn’t much to do with it, George.” Wendover added: “And another thing—don’t be too humble about yourself.”

George thought a moment, then came out with one of those, devastatingly sincere things that endeared him to his opponents even oftener than to his friends. “Oh, don’t you worry—I’m not as humble as I sound. That’s what Livia once said.”

He did not often mention her now, and when he did the name slipped out casually, by accident, giving him neither embarrassment nor a pang. So much time can do.

But the remark gave Wendover the cue to ask: “By the way, heard anything of her lately?”

“No, I suppose she’s still out there.”

And then, after a silence, the subject was changed.

Even in Browdley by now the affair was almost forgotten, and George could assess with some impartiality the extent to which it had damaged his career. Probably it had lost him his chance at the general election of 1923, though his subsequent failure at two other Parliamentary elections might well have happened in any case. Undoubtedly the divorce had alienated some of his early supporters, especially when (due to the legal technique of such things in those days) it had been made to seem that he himself was the guilty party. Many of his friends knew this to be untrue, but a few did not, and it was always a matter liable to be brought up by an unscrupulous opponent, like the old accusation that he had put his wife on the municipal payroll. But time had had its main effect, not so much in dulling memories, but in changing the moral viewpoints even of those who imagined theirs to be least changeable, so that the whole idea of divorce, which had been a shocking topic in the twenties, was now, in the forties, rather a stale one. George knew that a great many young people in the town neither knew nor would have been much interested in the details that had so scandalized their parents.

Those details included Livia’s remarriage, at the earliest legal date, to the Honorable Jeffrey Winslow, who had given up a diplomatic career to take some job in Malaya. Except that Lord Winslow died in 1925 and left a large fortune, some of which must have gone to the younger son, George knew nothing more. The Winslow name did not get into the general news, and George did not read the kind of papers in which, if anywhere, it would still appear. But when Singapore fell, early in 1942, he could not suppress a recurrent preoccupation, hardly to be called anxiety; it made him ask the direct question if ever he met anyone likely to know the answer and unlikely to know of his own personal relationship. “I think they must have got away,” he was told once, on fairly high authority. It satisfied him to believe that the fairly high authority had not said this merely because it was the easiest thing to say.

Those years, 1941 and 1942, contained long intervals of time during which it might almost have been said that nothing was happening in Browdley while so much was happening in the rest of the world. But that, of course, was an illusion; everything was happening, but in a continuous melting flow of social and economic change; the war, as it went on, had become more like an atmosphere to be breathed with every breath than a series of events to be separately experienced. Even air raids and the threat of them dropped to a minimum, while apathy, tiredness, and simple human wear-and-tear offered problems far harder to tackle. But there were cheerful days among the dark ones, days when the Mayor of Browdley looked round his little world and saw that it was—well, not good, but better than it might have been. And worse, naturally, than it should have been. Sometimes his almost incurable optimism remounted, reaching the same flash point at which it always exploded into indignation against those old Victorian mill masters with no thought in their minds but profit, and the jerry-builders who had aided and abetted them in nothing less than the creation of Browdley itself. Yet out of that shameless grab for fortunes now mostly lost had come a place where men could have stalwart dreams. George realized this when—a little doubtfully, for he thought it might be regarded as almost frivolous in wartime—he arranged for an exhibition of postwar rehousing plans in the Town Hall—architects’ sketches (optimism on paper) of what could be done with Browdley if only the war were won and the tragedy of peacetime unemployment were not repeated. And by God, he thought, it
wouldn’t
be repeated—not if he had anything to do with it; and at that he wandered off in mind into a stimulating postwar crusade.

One day he was visiting a large hospital near Mulcaster on official business; as chairman of a regional welfare association it fell to him to organize co-operation between the hospital authorities and various local citizen groups. He was good at this kind of organizing, and he was good because he was human; with a proper disregard of red tape he combined a flair for sidetracking well-meaning cranks and busybodies that was the admiration of all who saw it in operation. Indeed, by this stage of the war he had won for himself a local importance that had become almost as regional as many of the associations and committees on which he served. More and more frequently, within a radius that took in Mulcaster and other large cities, his name would be mentioned with a touch of legendary allusiveness; somebody or other somewhere, puzzled momentarily about something, would say to someone else: “I’ll, tell you what, let’s see if we can get hold of old George…” And if then the question came: “Who’s he?”—the answer would be: “Just the Mayor of Browdley, but pretty good at this sort of thing”—the implication being that George’s official position gave only a small hint of the kind of service he could render. And if a further question were asked: “Where’s Browdley?”—the answer to that might well be the devastating truth: “Oh, one of those awful little manufacturing towns—the kind that were nearly bankrupt before the war and are now booming like blazes.”

After a meeting of the hospital board George was taken over the premises, and here too he was good; he knew how to say cheery words to soldiers without either mawkishness or patronage. And if any of the men were from Browdley or district he would make a point of drawing them into neighborly gossip about local affairs. It was noticeable then that his accent became somewhat more “Browdley” than usual, as if
how
as well as
what
he spoke made instinctive communion with those whose roots were his own.

On this occasion his tour of the wards was to be followed by tea in the head surgeon’s room; and on the way there, waiting with his nurse escort for an elevator, he happened to glance at a list of names attached to a notice board near by. One of them was “Winslow.” It gave him a slow and delayed shock that did not affect the naturalness of his question; she answered that the list was of patients occupying private rooms along an adjacent corridor—all of them serious cases and most of them war casualties. He did not question her further, but a few moments later, meeting the head surgeon and others of the hospital staff, he found himself too preoccupied to join in general conversation; the name was already echoing disconcertingly in his mind—Winslow…
Winslow…
Not such a common name, yet not so uncommon either. Surely it would be too much of a coincidence—and yet those coincidences
did
happen. At least it was worth inquiry.

So he asked, forgetting to care whether any of those present knew anything of his own personal affairs: “I noticed a name on my way here…a patient in one of the private rooms…Winslow…”

“Winslow?”

“Aye, Winslow.”

Someone said: “Oh yes…rather badly smashed up, poor chap. You know him?”

“Er—no…But I…I know
of
him—that is, if he belongs to the same family. Is he—er—related to
Lord
Winslow?”