South Riding (77 page)

“You’ll have to work for a revolution, Sarah. I know you don’t want it, and it’s a bloody, brutal prospect. But we can’t build anything permanent on these foundations.

“At least I fear so. Though sometimes I hope you may be right. You’re a grand girl, Sarah, but, in spite of all your civics, classes and so on, I don’t think you’re a politician. Your mind is too vague. You see ends, but not means.

“Does all this sound dispirited? I’m not, I promise you that. The fact is I’m mortally afraid of growing reconciled and complacent in my old age, and you were right about one thing. I haven’t stuck this job for the two years I promised myself. I’m laid up again after a haemorrhage. The open-air speaking in the by-election did it, I suppose. Still, we got our man in, and it was a bonny fight. I’m going up to the Trade Union Sanatorium at Pitlochry, as soon as there’s a bed. I don’t suppose they’ll allow me to come back here again.

“Personally I find I mind extraordinarily little. If I hadn’t had a shot at it, I should have been eternally ashamed. But now I’m tired, and glad enough to give over. I’m only sorry I stayed so long among the flesh pots of Kiplington.

“Maybe that’s why I can’t get too indignant even about your Jubilee. I can only feel glad that you’ll get your buildings out of it. I shall think of you, Sarah, stalking about your corridors in that palace of glass and chromium. I shall imagine you trying to look six feet high and ferociously determined, whereas I believe you’re at heart a bit of a sentimentalist and gentle as a dove. Still, if you can go on scolding silliness, laughing at sentimentality, debunking all the cant and humbug, wrestling with parents and governors, you’ll make a thundering good job of that school. I know it. And I shall be glad it was partly through my work that you have a decent place to work in. I believe in bricks and mortar. Whatever else I may have failed to do—and that’s a lot—at least I left behind in the South Riding a better battlefield for so brave a fighter. Don’t let your work be spoiled by bogies. I don’t know how, but I have a feeling that even if another war should come, and gas choke your girls and bombs shatter your classrooms, something will have changed, something be made better by the good work you did there. That’s as near to mysticism as I ever get—the belief that good work is never wasted.

“Go in and win, my dear.

“Your friend and comrade,

“J
OE
A
STELL
”

They were flying above the cliffs now. The blue sea danced and sparkled, glittering. Little dark fishing smacks cluttered its joyous surface.

This is the edge of England, Sarah thought. The bulwark that no longer fortifies. The plane floated easily, now above land, now above water.

Above the Huggins’ yard in Pudsea Buttock a huge Union Jack flapped grandly, but to the passengers in the plane it showed no more than a solitary dot of colour. Lovell was too high up to see and to describe the ingenuity of the loyal villagers who had chalked their flagstones red and white and blue.

Farther south the new road from Skerrow to Kiplinton lay like a polished sword across the country. North grew the pale and dusty rushes of the Waste, its undergrowth unchecked, its bogs undrained. The grass with reeds and rushes was there, true enough, but the desert did not yet, because of men’s complicated motives and self-interests, blossom as the rose. But south of the road, signs of the birth of the garden village were already manifest. The streets had been marked out; piles of rose-red bricks lay heaped in the green paddocks; soon enough the houses that Snaith had dreamed of, with their electric stoves and gardens and porches for prams, would rise there, and be lived in, and be thought of as “home” by children who knew no other.

“And he carried me away in the spirit to a high mountain,” thought Sarah, who had read through the Jubilee service to the girls, explaining and interpreting after her own heretical fashion. “And showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God.” Far to the right gleamed the slate roofs of that great city Kingsport, its satellite villages sprinkled along the silver Leame. Hardly from heaven, Sarah thought, but of the earth, earthly. Greed, ambition and stupidity have made it, an honest homely desire for a livelihood, passion and anguish and perplexity. It has been built by Mr. Holly with his roving eye and frivolous temperament, by Huggins, with his passion for righteousness at war with his appetites, by Snaith, subtle as a serpent, yet serving his generation, by Topper Beachall, who is little more than a kindly stupid animal.

“And the nations of them that are saved shall walk in the light of it.”

Oh, saved? thought Sarah. Who is saved? What is salvation?

And the thought of war threatening this placid country sickened her. She was shaken by foreboding, and weakened by old sorrow.

They had crossed the road; they had photographed Minton village. The red roofs of Yarrold clustered round its moth-grey abbey. Before them now spread the dimpled plain of Cold Harbour Colony. To their left lay Maythorpe.

The plane dipped. The photographer wanted a picture of the ancient church and the maypole, its ribbons fluttering, on the green outside it. As the pilot brought his machine down close to the earth, they swooped right over the empty shell that had once been Maythorpe Hall. Already the work of demolition was in progress. The roof had gone, the inner walls lay bare, and looking down Sarah saw, for the first and last time, the room that had been Muriel’s. In the ravaged garden lay the tubs of cement, the girders of steel, the scaffolding, waiting for the erection of the new institute for mentally defective children.

Then her heart failed her. She had thought herself cured. Time, work, necessity, courage she had summoned as the allies of forgetfulness. But they had failed her. She knew, she remembered, and she was assailed by suffering.

What did they matter now, the grand new buildings for which she had struggled, the foundation of her great girls’ public school? Her work, her ambition and her reputation?

Whatever she did, her success must be his failure. All this transformation of the country, these new villages, this school of glass and chromium and cement, all these were witnesses to his defeat.

He had tried to hold the South Riding in its old likeness, to preserve tradition, to dam the tide of change. And she had helped to ruin him.

I do not want to go on living, Sarah thought. She hated her body which had not allured him, her mind, which must betray him till she died.

The plane was floating above the banks of the Leame now; the tide was out; long shelves of mud lay exposed, soft purplish brown, tussocked with reeds and pocked with silver pools.

This was where the children had found his body.

Her perverse mind filled itself with pictures of that beloved body tossed in the water, whirled in currents, driven slowly round the point of the cliff to that low shore where they had found it.

I cannot bear it, she repeated to herself. I do not want to live.

She had been for some months aware that the battle for serenity is a long one. Victory is not won overnight. Anguish, pushed to the back of the mind during the daylight, returns overwhelming in the darkness.

She suffered not only sorrow; she suffered shame. If he had loved me, even for an hour, she sometimes thought, this would not have been unendurable.

She wanted to get away from the South Riding, and not only from the South Riding, from herself. As long as she lived she would carry Carne’s image with her, the image of a defeated man, whom she had helped to destroy, and, in that treachery, had betrayed herself.

The camera-man was shouting to the pilot. He wanted to photograph the flags festooning the little quay of Cold Harbour itself, the flat-bottomed boats in the harbour, the toy-like wharf.

The pilot turned swiftly, perhaps too swiftly, for the wind here was uncertain, and in that second, the machine had stalled, and Sarah realised that they were dropping sideways, swift as a stone, down to the glancing water.

She knew then that her desire to die was false. She did not want it. She had work to do. What held her was not love, nor fear, nor hope of happiness, nor any lofty purpose of achievement. It was the small and nagging knowledge that if she were not present to bully architects, the new school buildings would not fulfil her dreams.

The earth was coming up now with smooth silence. A wall of mud and water rose perpendicular against her right ear, then span dizzily, circling moonwise towards her.

This was how death came, then, the water leaping upwards, the sky receding, the mind steady and vivid, and all life, in one instant offering its riches.

She turned and smiled at the appalled young face of Lovell Brown, tilted towards her. But even as she smiled at death, unwilling but unafraid, the pilot recaptured control of his machine, the engine roared, the falling wing straightened, and might indeed have lifted, had not the tip of a wing hit a taller hummock of grass, and quite slowly, elegantly, the whole affair somersaulted over, scattering its occupants bruised, breathless, shaken, but otherwise little injured, in the mud.

Sarah, who had seen the wall of earth climb, approach, recede, then vault over her head with dazzling velocity, received a bang above her left eyebrow, and plunged into darkness, to awake with her mouth full of mud, her body sprawling along a narrow pool.

The Cold Harbour villagers, who had perceived the eccentric conduct of the aeroplane, rushed to the rescue, much relieved to find four muddied fliers staggering to their feet. The only serious casualty was the machine. Even the photographs, their owner hoped, might be uninjured.

The urgent business was the return to Kingsport. The lorry had left. One Cold Harbour resident, keeper of a small store, owned a motor-bicycle with a side car. He agreed to take Lovell Brown and the camera-man back to their office in order that the afternoon edition might have its photographs. Sarah rang up Tom Sawdon and asked him if he could bring his car to drive her home.

So it happened that the head mistress of Kiplington High School, her red hair plastered with mud, a cut on her cheek, a fine black eye developing, drove through the Jubilee morning with Tom Sadwon. She was bruised and shaken; her head ached, and her left side seemed all stiff and twisted. But she was elated with a senseless exaltation.

She had been shaken out of sorrow. She had looked into the clear face of death and known her lover. She would fear no longer—not even Carne’s sad ghost. She would live out her time and finish the task before her, because she knew that even the burden of living was not endless. Comforted by death, she faced the future.

All the way to Kiplington she listened to Sawdon’s gossip, hearing more of Cold Harbour and Maythorpe and those who lived there, than she had learned during her years in the South Riding.

She had time to bathe, breakfast and change into gala clothes, before she joined her girls on the asphalt square behind the school for the procession to the esplanade where the Jubilee Service was to be broadcast. News of her exploit had rustled through the town, and as she appeared, her battered face striped with court-plaster, a lump like a prizefighter’s disfiguring her left eyebrow, the girls, formed up already in procession, broke into spontaneous cheers.

She pretended wrath, but was secretly pleased. She knew that she had done the right thing again. By surviving an air crash on Jubilee morning she had lived up to that legend of audacious unconventionality in which the girls delighted. Popularity might be a bubble, but it was a bubble which kept alive prestige, not only for herself but for all that she tried to stand for. It was the charm by which she drew the girls after her idea of the good life.

She raised her hand.

“There is nothing in the least clever,” she said cuttingly, “in having accidents. The clever thing is to avoid them. However, it is natural that you should enjoy my making a fool ot myself—the customary attitude to authority.” They cheered again. She waited, a strangled smile twisting her lip. Then she said, “About this service. I’ve discussed it with you quite enough. Perhaps too much. But there is one thing I forgot to mention. You’ll be singing that strangely moving hymn written by Cecil Spring Rice, ‘I vow to thee, my country.’ There’s a couplet in it I’ve been thinking about this morning:

‘The love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test, That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best. . . .’

Don’t take that literally. Don’t let me catch any of you at any time loving anything without asking questions. Question everything—even what I’m saying now. Especially, perhaps, what I say. Question every one in authority; and see that you get sensible answers to your questions. Then, if the answers are sensible, obey the orders without protest. Question your government’s policy, question the arms race, question the Kingsport slums, and the economies over feeding school children, and the rule that makes women have to renounce their jobs on marriage, and why the derelict areas still are derelict. This is a great country, and we are proud of it, and it means much that is most lovable. But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence. Vow as much love to your country as you like; serve to the death if that is necessary. . . .” She was thinking of Joe Astell, killing himself by overwork in the Clydeside, dying for his country more surely than thousands of those who to-day waved flags and cheered for royalty. “But, I implore you, do not forget to question. Lead on, girls.”