South Riding (67 page)

But, of course, he knew his spitefulness to be folly. Nature and life and the spring would break through all his barriers. Desire must fulfil itself even in a garden village. Why else must his enterprises provide walnut suites (8s. 6d. a week easy payment terms), constant hot water, sheds for perambulators? Oh, nature would get back on him all right, and from his barren bitterness he must cry to these clerks and artisans and little shopgirls, Love, Mate, Beget, Increase. Here, behind this green door, is the birth control clinic, behind that blue one, a mothers’ and babies’ club. In the Polytechnic you can learn cookery. He would plant a garden for the nursery school, where brown-limbed children would roll like living flowers, in their sun suits of blue and yellow and vermilion. My girl’s got a scholarship to the High School! What’s the matter with little Tommy, please, Nurse Johnson? Have you seen Mrs. Walker’s twins? Down the twilit, lamplit pavement girls would hurry beneath melting turquoise evenings to buy pink petticoats of artificial silk to wear at dances in Unity Hall. Love, locked out with the moles and mice and hedge-sparrows, comes home at night by corporation tram. It was not possible, it was not possible, to shut out the spring.

Very well; he must abet it. In his own reasonable cautious way, he would say to life: Fulfil your own nature. He would say to man: Increase and multiply. Oh, all ye creatures of the Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever.

Yet though his mind accepted this, his body ached with a nervous fatigue and discontent. He was sick to death of intellectual consolations and reasonable arguments. He hungered for the great crises of passion, the yielding to violent emotion, the surrender of choice that was denied him. He was a man rent by inward conflict.

He looked up to see a bus from Kiplington stop at his gate, and Astell’s lean ungainly form slouch loose-limbed up his drive like a sick greyhound.

Snaith came forward to greet him.

“It was good of you to come,” he said. “I hope it wasn’t a trouble.”

“On the contrary,” Astell replied, coughing harshly, “it suited me very well.”

The colleagues stood, formidable and controlled masters of law and effort, against the turbulent chaos of the spring.

“Come in. Come and have tea. It’s a bit cold here.”

They went into a small room on the ground floor, Snaith’s drawing-room, all ivory and green and honey coloured, a delicious room. An immense white cyclamen laid back its snowy ears and snarled with crimson lips from the broad window-sill. A fountain of mimosa splashed from a porcelain jar. The cold landscape was framed in glowing green silk curtains, shot with firelight.

Astell saw neither the elegance of the Adams fireplace nor the perfection of the flowers. He unwound his scarf and came to the point.

“Have you decided?”

“Yes.”

An amber-coloured cat leapt on to Snaith’s chair and settled there. It added frivolity to the conversation.

“Is Carne going on with his idiotic case?”

The housekeeper entered with a glittering tea-tray.

“Do sit down. He says so. Do you like Indian or China tea?”

“He hasn’t a leg to stand on.”

“No.”

“It’ll ruin him.”

“Possibly.” Snaith chose Indian tea from a silver caddy, and warmed the shining pot.

“What damages are you asking?”

“Ten thousand. Do you prefer cream or lemon?”

“Oh—anything—Has he
got
ten thousand pounds?”

Few could perform better than Snaith the priestly rite of tea-making, but it was hard to conduct the ritual in the face of Astell’s almost contemptuous indifference. He would see no distinction between Snaith’s Earl Grey mixture and the brown treacly stuff from the urns at Unity Hall.

“How true is it—this about Stillman raising a mortgage and selling it to Tadman? I suppose there’s nothing in it?”

Astell gobbled the small puffed scones with appetite rather than appreciation.

“Oh,
that’s
quite true.”

“True?”

Astell gasped with amazement, swallowed a crumb, and choked.

“Perfectly true. It started because I lent old Huggins five hundred pounds——”

“But that’s what Carne said!”

“Quite. Carne made several perfectly true statements.”

“But . . .”

“With this money Huggins acquired, in the name of a chap called Aythorne, the sheds on Leame Ferry Waste.”

Astell stared.

“Aythorne let Stillman the undertaker acquire a mortgage, In order that he might buy a shop in Dollstall.”

“But—but why did Huggins . . .”

“Because he had reasons for marrying off a girl to Mr. Aythorne.”

“Oh!”

“Huggins, who is
not
on the Joint Committee with Kingsport, but who
is
on Town Planning, thought he was sure we were going to build on the Leame Ferry Waste site. Therefore he persuaded Tadman and Drew to come in with him, to buy off Stillman, to get hold of the rest of the site, to put machinery in the sheds so that they could claim damages, and to advertise valuable building property, in order that the council would be forced, when they wanted it, to pay through the nose.”

“And you
knew
this?”

“At first I only guessed a little. Lately I have made it my business to find out everything I wanted to know.”

“But this is all just what Carne said.”

“Yes.”

“Then—then—Carne’s got his case.”

“Oh, no.”

Snaith picked up another slice of wafery bread and butter, folded it with precision, and smiled at the bewildered socialist.

“Oh, no,” he repeated, “because the Joint Council is, on my persuasion, not going to recommend Leame Ferry Waste.”

“Not—going—to——”

“No. No. I think we shall find that Schedule B—you remember the land on Schedule B?—is the more convenient.”

“You mean south of the new road—the old point-to-point course?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s out of the question. Surely. The high land value—good agricultural land.”

“Not so high as the Waste now that Drew’s advertised a— ‘valuable building site.’”

“It’s so far from Kingsport—we shall have that fearful Clixton business again—the men unable to pay their fares to work—and taking them out of the sums needed for food.”

“Not if the Kingsport Electricity Association runs that new light railway we discussed, with cheap workmen’s tickets.”

“That’s one of your shows, isn’t it?”

“It happens to be so.”

“I see. It’ll be rather a good thing for you, won’t it?”

“I hope so.”

There was this at least about Snaith, thought Astell, he was no hypocrite. He did not pretend to be a philanthropist when in truth he was raking in profits. Snaith continued, bland and genial.

“We shall bring forward Schedule B as the recommendation from the joint committee. I have the Kingsport people in my hands now, I think. I have promised to straighten out that mess with the new maternity home. They’re very keen on it.”

“Quite.”

Astell’s sardonic humour greeted Snaith’s frankness. He recognised this bargaining, intriguing, compromising world. So long as he worked with Snaith, he must play his game.

“The rates will go up again a little,” Snaith continued, balancing a lump of sugar on the slice of lemon floating in his cup—a water-lily on a leaf, he thought fancifully, applauding his own taste for metaphors. Chinese, he considered it. “But that won’t matter so much. These new people will stand it. The garden city will bring to the South Riding a quite different type of rate-payer. These tenants in our council houses belong to a new generation—the age of the easy purchase system, of wireless and electricity and Austin Sevens. They
want
good motor roads, because they dream one day of driving their own cars. They
want
libraries and schools and clinics and cheap secondary education. They attend lectures in townswomen’s guilds and women’s institutes about ‘The Rates and how we spend them.’ They have a quite new kind of communal sense. Don’t you agree with me?”

“Yes,” murmured Astell, and suddenly was aware of the immense relief of liberation, because he was reaching the end of all this casuistry and bargaining. He was tired of compromise.

He had seen what it could achieve, a better hospital here, a more generous benefit rate there, the eyes of one or two councillors opened to reality. Because he had worked with Snaith in the garden village scheme, instead of exposing his selfish and predatory methods, slums would be pulled down, a certain number of families would move out into the red-roofed, neatly-ordered council houses. There would be gardens for them, with fruit and vegetables, and broad green plots for children to play in; there would be hospitals and schools and libraries. Fewer mothers would die in childbirth, fewer babies would sicken in airless basement bedrooms, fewer housewives would collapse into lethargy, defeated by the unending battle against dirt and inconvenience.

Perhaps it was worth while, but this was not what Astell wanted. He had not struggled and sacrificed health and prosperity and ambition in order that a few Kingsport shopgirls might gratify their snobbish ambition of decorating their houses with leather suites, and dream of possessing a Morris Cowley.

Nor was he one of those men who enjoy fighting over detail. There were such, and he knew and admired them. His great friend in South Africa had been a man like that, who constituted himself the gadfly of the Chamber of Mines, harrying them first over a point of workman’s compensation, then over the interest on the deferred pay system, then over the rates for piecework underground. But these were not Astell’s ideas of a good fight. While on the county council he had compromised with capitalism in order to achieve certain concrete results. Now he was sick of it. Now he would get free.

I’m going away, he gloated. I’m getting free.

He beamed at Snaith through his round glasses.

“Good,” he said. “I wish you luck with it. And, by the way, you mention secondary education. Don’t forget the new buildings for the High School. I think we ought to move it inland a bit, and make a big boarding-block for the whole Skerrow-Kiplington area.”

“I’m not likely to forget with you here to bully me,” smiled Snaith.

“But I shan’t be here. That’s just it.”

“Shan’t be here?”

“No. I’m retiring from the council and clearing out.”

“Your health?” There was genuine kindness and anxiety in the quick inquiry. “It’s worse?”

“No. Better. That’s just it. I’m going back to Glasgow. Got an organising job on the Clyde.”

“My dear fellow! You can’t do it. It’ll kill you in a couple of years.”

“Will it? And does that much matter?”

“But—but we can’t spare you.”

The little alderman was really troubled.

Yet it was not so much for Astell that he was grieved, as for himself. Here he was up against it again, up against that uncalculating generosity and rashness which plunged into action, which identified itself with an impersonal aim. And it troubled him.

“You can spare me very well,” smiled Astell. “After all, you hardly know what I am and who I’m like. You’ve only seen a sick man. While I was here, I more or less kept truce. But you just wait a little.”

“Shall we see you preaching revolution?”

“I hope so.”

“And turning us all upside down, and destroying instead of creating?”

“No—in order to create. Look here, Snaith, you and I have worked pretty well together, but we’re in opposite camps really. You want entirely different things from what I do.”

“Do I? How do you know? How do you know what I want?”

Astell smiled. He was a free man. He was happy. He spoke from the exalted height of his own renunciation of security. He said, “I know what I want, you see. And whatever you want, it’s not the same as this. I want a great cooperative commonwealth of free peoples, all over the world. Without distinction of sex, race or creed. I want to see them controlling their own lives, what they do and how they do it. That means control of things, of raw materials, transport and industry. It means real economic as well as political democracy. It means social equality. It means spiritual freedom. And that isn’t going to come by working as I’ve worked here. Oh, I know that all this is useful—so far as it goes. But it’s not changing men’s values. It’s not destroying their destroyers.”

“You mean, it still leaves evil-minded individualists like me to be able to reap a little profit?”

“Yes. I do.”

“And you would destroy me?”

“Neck and crop.”

“You won’t, you know. You’ll only destroy yourself. The English don’t take easily to revolution.”

“Do you think any revolution’s been easy? All revolutions are bloody and barbarous. But so is life bloody and barbarous in present circumstances. As for me, I’ve tried acting the invalid and taking a cushy job, and I don’t like it.”

“I see.” Snaith sighed, envious of a passion that was beyond caution, of a faith that could over-ride the scepticism that ate into his own desires like acid. “You’re like the old Spanish knights who greeted each other with the wish, ‘May God deny thee peace and give thee glory.’ That’s it, isn’t it?”