Theirs Was The Kingdom (63 page)

There were blondes and brunettes and redpolls. There were women nudging thirty and girls halfway through their teens. There were blushers and girls who had forgotten how to blush. There were the dowered and undowered, the chaperoned and the unchaperoned, the tall and short, the tightly corsetted and the uncorsetable, the shy, the talkative, the earnestly informed, and the twitterers who specialised in the vapours; all kinds of women on the
qui vive
for a glance, a stammering invitation, a chance word that could, with luck, persistence, skill, or all three, be coaxed into a proposal. For that, in her experience, was how women set out in search of security and the freedoms a hearth of one’s own had to offer. They had always done it and they were about it still, but no one in that room of husband-hunters had been clever enough to spring a trap on him and she thought she knew why. Some of them must have had promise of a kind, but it was not his kind. He was looking for something that no one there was equipped to provide. It wasn’t money and it wasn’t beauty. It wasn’t charm, good breeding, fidelity, or even the most urgent of his needs at that time, simple physical gratification. It was something far less tangible and definitive than any of these things, and by the mercy of God, she had it in her bones and her blood. The spirit of adventure that was at once her patrimony and her matrimony, for Sam Rawlinson, with all his faults, had been a trier, whereas her mother, moved by who knew what primeval instinct, had gone in search of a destiny across the sea, turning her back on home and kin and sailing deck-passage to Liverpool, years in advance of those who followed her during the famine years.

That was the promise he had been looking for and he had recognised it in her. At a glance, possibly, certainly after a day or two in her company, when they were cooking rabbit stew over their first campfire under the Pennines and he had revealed to her not merely the necklace, the touchstone of his fortunes, but also his dreams.

Certitude, of the kind she looked for whenever he was here at night with what she still thought of as his sword-arm flung across her breast, settled on her like an extra quilt.

Four

1

G
ILES SWANN, EIGHTEEN AND MORE CURIOUS ABOUT HIMSELF THAN THOSE WHO had come to know him well, had no special favourites among the English lyrical poets. He loved them all, for one verse or couplet or another, deriving so much satisfaction from their work over three centuries that he sometimes wondered if poetry was not his true vocation. But then the practical streak that showed in all Swanns sooner or later (and was, Adam said, the legacy of a string of greedy mercenaries reaching back beyond the French wars) would reassert itself, so that he would remind himself, severely, “No, no! That’s not me, not really. Poets contribute certainly, but most of them point the way and leave it at that!”

It was in this kind of mood that he closed his well-worn copy of Matthew Arnold’s poems in early April 1884, unpacked and repacked his knapsack (discarding all but what he considered essentials to get the overall weight below the sixty pound maximum), and set off due north, over the first few miles of his private odyssey, with Arnold’s lines from
The Scholar Gypsy
running through his head…

But once, years after, in the country lanes,
Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew
Met him, and of his way of life inquired.
Whereat he answer’d, that the Gipsy crew,
His mates, had arts to rule as they desired,
The workings of men’s brains…

He saw himself, at that moment, as the gentle Arnold’s prototype, putting theory into practice, turning his back deliberately, a little self-righteously even, on the temptations of a three-year intellectual spree at Oxford, in order to search more diligently for secrets where they were more likely to be found. In the lanes and hedgerows. Along the high road. Through the old, close-set woods. On windy uplands and, more surely perhaps, among the fume and clatter of the industrial North and Midlands, where his father’s waggons moved through complexes of railyards, back-to-back houses, and tall belching chimneys.

He had no clear idea what he was seeking, but whatever it was he was sure, in his own mind, of one thing. He was more likely to find it here than in the pedant-haunted quadrangles of Arnold’s city of spires that he had visited (and at once distrusted) when he went up there to sit for his scholarship the previous autumn.

Thompson—his earnest, monocled headmaster—thought him mad and told him so, more than once. “You’ve got more intellectual promise than any boy I’ve had under my hand,” he said, a day or so after Adam gave Giles permission to bypass Oxford. “I’m not questioning your father’s judgement. Unquestionably he made his way without the mental disciplines and friendships available at a good University. But you’re both forgetting something. Your father travelled the world in his twenties and fought in a number of wars. War and travel educates a man and sometimes enables him to recognise truth when he sees it. Truth about himself and truth in general. But you don’t even intend crossing the Channel or looking down the barrel of a gun in the way your eldest brother has since he enlisted. What, apart from a bit of botany, are you likely to learn living the life of a tramp? That’s what I’d like to know, lad.”

Giles could be stubborn. “Stevenson learned something in the Cervennes, didn’t he, sir? And so did Borrow and Cobden, by moving around.” But Tommy, who had nourished the boy for five years now, made an impatient gesture, so that his monocle fell from his eye socket.

“Stevenson is a sick man in search of health. And as for Borrow and Cobden, they were eccentrics, who didn’t live in an industrial age. Like it or not, technology is taking over from here on. You would be far better advised to make an engineering pilgrimage, like your other brother. Poking about local hedgerows, as you propose to do, is no more than a fad, and if you ask me your father is merely humouring you.”

Was he? Giles was by no means sure, despite the amiable discussion they had had a month before up at Forty Beeches. The governor had done the same thing himself, it was true, but with a specific purpose in mind and to survey a field in which he meant to operate. He had no such specific purpose, only a vague curiosity to discover for himself the underlying reasons why this country, alone among Western nations, had sloughed off its ancient traditions, turned its face from an agricultural past, and sprouted wings that had carried it to the ends of the earth and made it the new Rome.

The answer, diligently as he had searched, was not to be found in books, but it was there somewhere lying out among the broken shards of the old civilisation and the smoke-tainted manufactories of the new. The important thing to discover was how this convulsion, less than a century old but now pushing shock waves across the world, governed the lives of ordinary people. People like that old couple, for instance, whom he had seen ejected from their cottage and separated by Bumbledom; people like those wharf rats his father recruited as vanboys; people like the sweep Luke Dobbs, who had choked to death in a Tryst chimney only a few years before he was born.

He said, uneasily, “I don’t know what I’m looking for, sir, but if I find it I’ll make use of it one way or another and you’ll be the first to hear about it. I’ve been very happy here. This is a wonderful place to spend one’s formative years, and I’ll always need to come back, again and again. Maybe I’ll come back for good one day. I don’t know. I’m not sure of anything save the need to learn more before I can teach.”

Thompson did not miss the hint and regarded the boy thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you one thing more, Swann, before you raise blisters on your feet. I always have thought teaching was your vocation. You’ve got something most professional teachers haven’t got and rarely develop. Genuine intellectual curiosity, plus natural tolerance. They’re your principal assets, so don’t squander them on social indignation.”

They shook hands on that and Giles went up to the Brereton dormitory to spend his final night at school. Hugo was asleep, his great limbs sprawled half in and half out of the narrow iron cot, and Giles, regarding his genial, slightly bovine features in a shaft of moonlight that clipped the line of wash basins and touched the bed, thought, a little enviously, “Good old Hugo! One of the lucky ones. Whatever he does, wherever he goes, his physical apparatus will be his compass, for the needle doesn’t swing above his neck,” and outside, in the beeches of the east drive, an owl corroborated.

The route of his first stage differed from that of his father’s ride of more than twenty-five years ago.

Adam had ridden northeast from Plymouth to Gloucester, before heading north to the cotton belt, so that his way had taken him through nearly two hundred miles of predominantly agricultural country as far as Warwickshire and then, a day or so later, to the Potteries. To an extent this had governed the entire nature of his enterprise, at least in the early years, for even now around half his hauls involved produce.

Giles, having come to manhood in a more sophisticated age, aimed at the heart of the new Britain, striking across familiar North Devon moorland to the Bristol Channel where he found a collier at Minehead. For half a crown the captain set him ashore in Wales, midway between Cardiff and Swansea.

His instinct, at this time, was to explore the mining districts, where newspapers said there was always industrial tension, where militant radicalism was gaining ground in the ruined valleys, where hundreds of thousands of Welshmen whose fathers had been farmers now clawed for coal, the staple commodity of the nation. Coal. That gritty, shining substance that looked worthless when you held a knob in your hand, wondering at its relationship to the primeval forests that had covered all England when England was a spread of green fingers thrust into the Atlantic, with the wrist somewhere about the delta of the Rhine. Coal, that black, yellow-seamed, rather brittle substance was really everything inasmuch as it made everything else work when you thought about it. For without it, without the men who risked their lives every day to get it, there would have been no industrial revolution, no factories and foundries, no ironclads and no ships to carry four-fifths of the world’s wealth from one coast to another. There would have been no Swann-on-Wheels either, and probably no Giles Swann to ask questions about it. Yet here it lay in abundance, enough, they said, to last for another century, or so long as Welshmen could be bribed or bullied to hack it from seams deep below the spoiled hills and valleys of their homeland.

He had never previously visited Wales and took an instant liking to the Welsh, with their tug-of-war between body and soul that was evident, even to a stranger, in the number of chapels in every township and village he visited, in their sad songs, in the soft lilt of their tongue, and, above all, in the terrible squalor of their pits and crowded dwelling areas close by. Every brick hutch seeming to lean on its neighbour, like stacks of very grubby, finely balanced playing cards laid in rows across the hillsides where no grass grew, and the scrabble for coal had converted what had once been an enchanting land into a midden.

Even here his terms of reference remained vague, but he had done what he could to prepare himself. In his knapsack was a sheaf of introductions, and the first put him in touch with Bryn Lovell, manager of the Mountain Square, who met him at a small town in the Rhondda and obtained permission from a customer to take him down a coal mine.

Bryn, whom he had met briefly at Stella’s wedding, refused the offer of a guide. He had himself been below on many occasions, he said, and knew this particular pit, having worked on top as a boy when his father had been in charge of the pumps. He said, as they made their way to the pithead, “You’ll ask awkward questions, no doubt, and I might find it embarrassing to give you a straight answer in the presence of their outside men. After all, this mine is worth good money to your father, and it won’t do to let them know my convictions concerning the industry as a whole.” He looked at Giles shrewdly. “Just what do you expect to find in the Rhondda, Mr. Swann?”

“I haven’t the least idea,” Giles told him, cheerfully, “but I’m very curious about coal-mining, and I’ve heard all about the risks these men run down there. I suppose I want to see the conditions they work under and the compensations there are, if any. I’ve talked to miners on the way up, and spent a night with one family. There were seven of them sharing three little rooms. Two of the boys, both pitworkers, were under thirteen. I was amazed to learn they were working underground.”

It seemed to Giles then that Lovell’s face hardened, taut lines showing either side of his mouth. He had, Giles decided, a very ascetic face, but his manner, even when you made allowance for the fact that he was entertaining one of his employer’s sons, was uneasy. He said, briefly, “Nothing unusual about that. Within a mile of where we stand there must be two to three thousand lads under twelve on the lower levels. We’ve been agitating for legislation to stop it for years.” He gave Giles one of his shrewd, impersonal looks. “Can you imagine this place as it was when I first remember it? And I’m only sixty.”

Giles glanced up the valley, noting the rampart-like ridges of the mountains and, between them, a widespread smouldering furnace, spiked with skeletal pitheads and scarred in a hundred places by the steeply rising tiers of miners’ houses. It was a fine day but the sun did not penetrate here, or only in fitful gleams, occasionally striking a slag heap or a patch of turgid water. “I can’t imagine it was ever pastoral, Mr. Lovell.”

“You’d be wrong,” Bryn said. “There were open-cast workings, plenty of them, but no real blight, as you see now. Men grubbed coal from near the surface, with hardship, maybe, but not much danger. Read Roscoe, and discover for yourself what it was like to walk down the valley of the Rhondda and other Glamorgan streams a generation ago. Roscoe talks of waterfalls, of the mountain current breaking clearly on rocks, of pools you could fish in and heavy timber on those hills. Look at it now and judge for yourself the price we Welsh have paid for the coal-owners’ country estates, and the nation’s industrial lead you read so much about in newspapers printed by men who have never drawn a breath of Welsh air, fair or foul. However, we’ll go below as your father did once in my company.”

“My father went down a coal mine?”

“He did that, for he’s also a man who likes to see for himself. Maybe that’s one reason why he’s reckoned a good gaffer in the network.”

Giles would liked to have asked him more, but Lovell was obviously bent on an object lesson rather than a lecture. They borrowed miners’ caps, lamps, and leather jerkins from the pithead store and entered what seemed to Giles a very insecure cage that rushed them down into the mountain at a speed that made his senses reel.