South Riding (70 page)

Tom Sawdon and Bob Heyer, both drinking quietly in a corner, noticed nothing. Their first notification of the quarrel came from a fierce—“Take that, then!” A girl’s scream and shout, and the resounding smack of a fist on flesh, from the crowd at the far end of the bar.

“Go it! Attaboy! Now then! Now then!”

The big commissionaire pushed round the door. Sawdon and Heyer sprang to their feet in time to see young Lovell, who was a pretty useful boxer, catch a neat punch on the side of the groom’s jaw, and send him staggering against the wall of onlookers.

“Now then. What’s all this?” asked the commissionaire.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” drawled Lovell, pulling down his cuff and feeling on top of the world. Hicks, vituperative and unappeased, raged against the restraining hands which held him.

“He didn’t like what this gentleman said about Carne of Maythorpe,” volunteered the lady with the osprey.

“Carne? What Carne? Who’s Carne?”

“Gent what chuckened hisself ower cliff,” explained her friend.

“And what is Carne to you?” inquired Lovell haughtily, hoping that his blonde was suitably impressed.

“He’s been groom at Maythorpe for forty years or more,” explained Sawdon. “You should keep a civil tongue in your head about your betters—Mr. Carne was a fine chap, and all us from Maythorpe liked him.”

“He’d never have broken a horse’s back—never,” gasped Hicks.

“I see.” Lovell was beginning not to feel quite so clever.

“He’s gotta take it back, the dirty little tike, or I’ll knock his bleedin’ head off.”

“You won’t. He’s a boxer,” sighed Heyer. “All rights, Geordie. You come along of us.”

“The young feller didn’t mean no harm.”

“Live and let live, I say.”

“I can tell you this—your Carnes and your Snaiths and your Colliers. Blasted capitalists, all of ’em, grinding the faces of the poor.”

But on the whole the company was with Hicks, including Lovell. For the young reporter was, though often silly, a generous romantic boy, and he appreciated loyalty; he felt that perhaps he had gone a little too far; he had libelled a man who perhaps was really dead.

“After all,” explained Sawdon, with the paternal benevolence practised by sergeants towards inexperienced subalterns, “you couldn’t know that. You were only airing your theories— like. You weren’t in a position to know the facts.”

“That’s right,” said the lady with the osprey.

“All right, old chap,” said Lovell handsomely. “I take it back. Didn’t know I was speaking of a friend of yours.”

After all, he had knocked the little fellow down. He was the better man. He could afford to be generous.

“You apologise?” growled Hicks.

Seeing that now the room was completely on his own side, Lovell smiled with patronising superiority.

“All right. I apologise.”

“You don’t think he did it on purpose?”

“You tell me he didn’t.”

“All right. He’s apologised. Come on, Geordie.” Heyer and Sawdon led him out.

“That’s right. Come along, Crystal,” said the lordly Lovell.

“Marvellous. A real scrap thrown in. You can’t say I haven’t done you proud,” said the London lady. “Do you want to go back for the second half, or shall we go home for a little drink now?”

Out in the side street into which the exit door opened, the little groom broke from his friends’ solicitous clutch, collapsed on to a municipal dust bin, and hiding his face in his hands, abandoned himself to grief. Beer, humiliation, excitement and misery had become too much for him. He sobbed with the unselfconscious surrender of a child.

His one consolation lay in his repeated inquiry, “He took it back, didn’t he?”

“That’s right,” Heyer soothed him. “You made him take it back.”

“Carne never done it.”

“That’s right. He was just a young fellow, talking off the top.”

“I made him take it back, didn’t I?”

Seeking their car, the occupants of the box saw the three figures grouped together in the dark cobbled lane. The light from one yellow lamp cut into the dark blue shadows. The chimney pots humped a jagged silhouette above them against the moon. Their lugubrious attitude struck the visitors as irresistibly grotesque.

“The three musketeers,” observed the lady. “Dead tight. Aren’t they just
too
adorable!” She passed them with her company, catching her fur cloak round her shoulders to shut out the chill April air. They did not see her.

For each, a world had ended; locked in their private misery, united in common desolation, they did not notice their charming admirer who stood, balanced on high heels on the cobbles, holding her sables with a white jewelled hand. They did not notice her until she addressed them.

“Thank you so
very
much,” she said in her high fluting voice. “You just
made
our evening for us. Too kind.”

They turned to see her step into her car.

T
HE HOUSING
and Town Planning Committee of the County Council was in session. It had before it the two schemes— Schedules A and B submitted by the joint committee which, together with members of Kingsport Corporation, had discussed the preliminary problem of rehousing dwellers from the Kingsport slums in one of the rural areas of the South Riding. It was certain that a new garden village would be built. The defeat of the former obstructionists on the council, Carne, Gryson, Whitelaw and their friends, had ensured that. Snaith was vice-chairman of the newly-elected council, and chairman of the Housing and Town Planning Committee. And Snaith was one of the most ardent advocates of housing reform.

Lovell Brown, hanging about the corridors, an imposing bruise over his left eye where Hicks had struck him, encountered Alderman Mrs. Beddows, hurrying to her room. Her room was the little office which, with its own cloakroom, had been set aside for the use of lady members of the council.

“May I have a word with you?” he asked.

“Well, you know I fine every man a guinea for my Nurses’ Hostel fund if they come trespassing into my private premises,” she said. She was making an effort, forcing her vitality and humour to over-ride the sorrow and desolation of her heart.

She’s looking her age now, thought Lovell.

“Will sixpence do?” he chaffed. “Press, you know.”

“Come in, then.”

“What’s going to happen about the new garden village?”

“
I’m
not on Town Planning. Ask Alderman Snaith.”

“Which site do
you
favour, Mrs. Beddows?”

“My people want Leame Ferry Waste on the whole; but they aren’t unreasonable. They’ll put up with whatever’s best for the Riding. It doesn’t affect us much.”

“And do you think Mr. Snaith knows what’s best for the Riding?”

She paused. She had sat down at the square table with its green baize cover, and was sorting pens in a little tray.

“I’ll tell you what Snaith knows,” she said, “and you can put this in your paper. He knows that we—all of us, aldermen, councillors, chairmen of committees, we come and go; but the permanent officials stay on. The experts—Mr. Smithers, Mr. Wytten, Mr. Prizethorp and all the rest of them—they are the people who really matter, and in the end they mostly get their own way.”

“Isn’t that what you call bureaucracy, Mrs. Beddows?”

“I don’t know what you call it. It seems to me common sense. Those men spend their lives on the job of local government, and have little to gain from any particular vote.”

“Well—if you say so. . . . There’s one other thing, Mrs. Beddows. What about this Maythorpe mystery? Do
you
think Mr. Carne was drowned?”

A change came over her face. The young reporter remembered stories of her rather comical friendship with the missing farmer. He knew that she was looking after the child. He began to wish he had not asked the question.

“You mean do I think that Mr. Carne staged an accident in order to run away from his responsibilities?”

“Well, you know what people are saying.”

She stood up. Her squat square body had never assumed greater dignity.

“I’ll tell you not only what I think, but what I know. Robert Carne may sometimes have been obstinate and sometimes unwise. But in all the years I knew him I never once saw him do a dishonourable thing. Nor did any one else. He never ran away from danger; he never shirked responsibility. He was one of the most honest and courageous people I ever knew.”

“I didn’t mean . . .”

“Mean? You only meant that you had listened to silly sensational stories. Like a lot of other people you’d like to think that a fine man was really no better than his neighbours. You’d
like
to be able to prove a nasty story. It’s an excuse when you feel you haven’t behaved any too well yourself, now, isn’t it?”

Her face was red with indignation. The young man, abashed and discomforted, wished himself a thousand miles away; and what would have happened next is difficult to say, if at that moment the Town Planning Committee had not adjourned, and its members come clumping down the stone corridor past the open door of Mrs. Beddows’ office. Delighted of an excuse to escape, Lovell muttered an apology, ran out and button-holed the chairman. Snaith as usual was walking my himself, neat, self-contained, uncommunicative.

“Have you any news for me, Mr. Snaith?”

“News? You’d better ask our clerk.”

“Have you chosen a site?”

“Certainly.”

“A or B?”

“B.”

“Good. Splendid. Unanimous?”

“No. No. . . . Hardly unanimous. But adequate. Well, Mrs. Beddows, and how are you?”

Lovell Brown, turning away with his unexhilarating news that a garden village was to be built on this site rather than that, missed what would have interested him far more—the strange contortion of the woman alderman’s face as she looked at Snaith without answering and then quietly shut her door against him.

She was not his political opponent; she did not disapprove of his business technique; she did not, like some of his detractors, shrink from his curiously dry and metallic personality. But she was still too raw from the shock of Carne’s death to face his antagonist with equanimity. She did not believe that Snaith had treated Carne badly. She didn’t even believe that Snaith had started the rumour about Carne’s having faked his accident. She simply could not bring herself yet to speak to the man who had defeated Robert, and who still lived and triumphed now that Carne was dead.

The old lady’s getting a bit deaf, was Snaith’s first thought. Then he realised that the snub had been deliberate, and he shrugged his shoulders and went along to the little room which bore the card on its door.

“Vice-Chairman.”

He sat down at the desk and rested his head on his hands. This was his room; he had fought for it and won it. He held it as a pledge that one day, when old General Tarkington had retired, he would stand in his place; he would be chairman of the County Council; he would, to all practical purposes, rule the South Riding.

He could do it; his clear mind grasped detail; his concentrated will altered opinions. He could see the district he loved both as it was and as it should be. By an effort of the imagination he shifted his desires from his own inadequate self to this part of England. From Hardra’s Head to the Leame he would set his mark upon Yorkshire. He might, in himself, be nothing, unloved, unfulfilled, unhappy; but he would identify himself with the happy and triumphant development of his county. I am the South Riding;
L’état, c’est moi
, he told himself.

He had the field to himself now; Astell was retiring, Carne was dead. There was no other man on the council with power enough to thwart him. He sat in the cold April sunlight that flickered among the chestnut trees outside his office window, and he shivered, tasting the acrid flavour of unshared victory.

The door flew open.

“And now, Mr. Snaith . . .” he heard.

He looked up to see Councillor Alfred Ezekiel Huggins scowling down at him.

“Oh, Huggins. . . .”

The big preacher was wearing a carnation in his buttonhole. He had paid threepence for it in Kingsport market that morning. He had decked himself for the result of the Town Planning Committee as for a bridal feast. He came anticipating the triumph of his well-laid schemes. He had seen them thrown heedlessly to the winds.

“And now, Mr. Snaith, perhaps you’ll be good enough to explain yourself.”

“Explain myself?”

“What does this mean about Schedule B?”

Wearily Snaith drew the plans towards him.

“I thought you understood. We have decided to abandon the Leame Ferry Waste site and build south of the Skerrow road, north of Garfield.”

“So I heard. That’s clear enough. I heard you were rigging the committee, but what I want to know is, what about the Waste? What about those sheds?” ‘

“Sheds?”

“You can’t have forgotten. Those sheds we bought last year. You and I. You really. You made out the cheque yourself to Reg Aythorne. Five hundred pounds.”