Until the Colours Fade (17 page)

For two days following his escape from the gas-works, Tom Strickland had wanted to leave Rigton Bridge, but his badly bruised ribs and stomach had been too painful for him to
consider
travelling south. He had not felt himself in any danger, since he thought it most unlikely that Joseph Braithwaite would have discovered what he had done on Nomination Day, and with so many other matters to occupy the manufacturer’s mind, still more improbable that he would do anything about it, even were he to possess such knowledge.

As Tom’s pains had diminished, his depression had also lifted; and, since the election was now only three days distant, he
decided
to stay on at the Green Dragon until it was over. In spite of his conviction that Joseph would win the seat, Tom had
nevertheless
come to see polling day as a fitting last act to his time in the town, involving, as it would, so many of the people he had come to know. The worsening situation did nothing to change his mind and, in retrospect, he felt mortified that he had come so close to acceding to Crawford’s request to run away from events which he might never again have an opportunity to witness. To leave now would be, he thought, as absurd as it would have been if Daumier and Meissonier had turned their backs on the Paris revolution in ’48, fleeing to the country to paint placid village scenes. To bear witness, to record, and maybe even penetrate the external surface of things, so they might be apprehended more fully: these were tasks from which he should never have allowed Crawford to lure him.

When therefore, on Monday morning, the boots brought up a note to Tom’s room, written by Miss Crawford and delivered by her maid, informing him that her brother wished to see him before noon on polling day, he wrote back at once declining, only to learn that the maid had not waited to take back an answer. Later he felt disquieted. Although he had found out from the
servants
at the Bull Hotel, where Magnus had been first carried from the gas-works, that the doctor, who had attended him there, had not considered his condition grave enough to forbid his removal to Leaholme Hall, Tom had still felt guilty for
wanting
to avoid seeing him. But notwithstanding, in this respect his
feelings had not changed since their calamitous failure on
Nomination
Day. He had allowed personal admiration to get the better of his judgment and still felt ashamed of himself; his aches and pains, and the knowledge that he might easily have suffered far worse, had done nothing to make him grateful to Crawford. But, being honest with himself, he had to admit that he had
willingly
accepted the risks involved. Nor, when he thought about it, did it escape him that Magnus would know how he felt, and would therefore have reasons quite as good as his own for
wishing
to avoid a meeting. Yet this was what he was asking for. If the man wanted to express his contrition for having miscalculated so badly, Tom foresaw an embarrassing and pointless interview; but he might need to tell him something of importance, possibly to do with court proceedings. After further deliberation, Tom reluctantly tore up his note and decided to call as requested. He would make sure he arrived early enough to be able to get back to Rigton Bridge by midday, to be in time to see the majority of the votes cast in the election.

On the day itself, Tom had left the livery stables, where he had hired his hack, by eight o’clock and an hour later was nearing his destination. The sun shone from a clear steel-blue sky, casting back a dazzling light from the snow-covered hills. Across the fields were the clearly defined tracks of stoats and weasels, with sometimes the deeper imprints made by a fox or badger. From time to time heavy lumps of snow fell into the road from the laden branches with a soft plump, obscuring the deep furrows cut by the wheels of carriages. From the brow of the next low hill Tom saw, in the centre of a sparsely planted park, a range of low rambling buildings squatting darkly against the surrounding whiteness. His horses’ hoofs thumped pleasantly on the compact snow and the animal’s breath came in steaming clouds. A little closer and he could make out the snow-capped battlements of the squat central tower of Leaholme Hall. In the stillness of the countryside, Tom found it hard to imagine the frenzied scenes that might already be taking place in Rigton Bridge.

*

Magnus was lying in a four-poster bed while a woman in a grey morning dress read to him. As Tom entered, her back was to the door, so he could not at first see her face, but knew from her voice that she was young. For several seconds he did not dare look at Magnus in case his expression betrayed shock or pity.

‘How are the mighty fallen, Mr Strickland?’ murmured Magnus with a rueful smile which changed at once to a grimace
of pain. ‘In my case not in the high places of Gilboa but on the premises of the Rigton Chartered Gas-light and Coke Company.’ He looked down at his strapped and bandaged arm. ‘I’m grateful to you for coming.’

Tom lowered his eyes, shaken by Magnus’s swollen mouth and the cuts and bruises visible on the unbandaged parts of his face. In the darkness of the retort-house, he had not thought him nearly so badly hurt.

‘I’m truly sorry.’

‘At any rate you were more fortunate; not that I can claim any credit for it.’ He turned to the young woman who had been
reading
. ‘Kate, you have not met Mr Strickland. Mr Strickland, my sister, Miss Crawford.’ As Magnus lay back, evidently tired by the effort of supporting himself on his uninjured arm, Tom looked at Catherine with her blond ringlets and clear blue eyes and was struck as much by her air of sadness as by her beauty.

‘My brother has told me what you did for him,’ she said quietly.

Distressed to find Magnus so much worse than he had
expected
, and guilty that he had thought so little about him, Tom
replied
curtly:

‘I did very little. You may judge by my face.’

‘My brother does not praise those who do not merit it.’

Still embarrassed and determined not to be taken for a selfless and devoted follower, Tom met her eyes.

‘I followed your brother, Miss Crawford, because he thought I had betrayed him and for no other reason.’

‘I deserve your anger,’ sighed Magnus.

‘I chose to go.’

‘You think what we did was valueless?’

‘I suppose,’ replied Tom, ‘that it’s better to try and fail, than to do nothing at all.’

Magnus lay back and gazed up at the canopy above him.

‘Thank you for saying that. I too regret the result but not the attempt. You have every right to have a poor opinion of me.’

‘If I do, I must have the same opinion of myself.’

Tom longed to be able to leave. He had dreaded fulsome apologies and admissions of failure.

‘I was worried about you afterwards. Kate sent servants to ask at hotels and lodging houses. When I heard you were still in Rigton Bridge, I wished I’d never asked you to leave.’

‘I’m sure you had my safety at heart,’ replied Tom, touched by this.

‘You were right to stay.’ Magnus closed his eyes for a moment.
‘I can understand your reluctance to come here … but it makes what I want to ask of you harder to say.’ He was struggling to prop himself up on his pillows, and Catherine came over to help him. Tom saw her take a damp cloth and wipe beads of sweat from his neck and below the bandage across his forehead. As soon as he was settled, Magnus went on, with a flash of his old spirit: ‘I’ve lost … made a fool of myself, as my devoted brother delights in reminding me; but I didn’t ask you to come to hear apologies or excuses.’ His eyes were bright and feverish with pain. ‘You see there’s still something to be done…. I can cast my vote.’

‘How, Magnus?’ asked Catherine with horror.

‘In the usual manner.’ He turned again to Tom. ‘Beaten I may be, but not broken. Will you help me cross the square to the
polling
booths?’

‘I am not afraid to be seen with you,’ said Tom in a low voice, his reluctance quite plain. He wished only to forget the whole affair.

‘But will you come?’ asked Magnus impatiently.

‘You must be mad, Magnus,’ cut in Catherine. ‘Only a
handful
of people will see you in the crowds. It’s nothing more than a fool’s pride.’

‘I don’t deny,’ he murmured, ‘that it would be satisfying to be seen by Braithwaite and his lackeys, but I’ll be content to have my name entered in the poll books.’

‘And who will know it?’ she cried.

‘You, Kate. Mr Strickland here. Charles, I daresay. And
I
will, which, being selfish, means most to me.’

‘Refuse to go with him,’ Tom heard Catherine whisper in an imploring voice. ‘He doesn’t know how much they hurt him.’

‘I have a fair idea, Kate.’ He looked at Tom. ‘It’s strange, but my cracked finger hurts far more than my head or shoulder.’

‘Neither of which, as you can see, Mr Strickland, were more than scratched.’

Ignoring Catherine’s desperate irony, Tom crossed to the window. Through the diamond-shaped panes he could see bright drops of water falling from the eaves above. The sun was already melting the snow.

‘All right,’ he said without turning, ‘I’ll go with you.’

Magnus made no comment upon his evident lack of
enthusiasm
, but said to his sister:

‘I shall need clothes. You must cut them; perhaps only a shirt; a coat can be fastened at the neck and I can wear a cape over it.’

When Catherine had left the room to fetch her sewing-box, Magnus leant over the small table beside his bed and mixed
himself
a draught, which Tom supposed would contain laudanum. He would need it, if the heavy strapping round his shoulder meant, as Tom was sure it did, that a bone had been broken.

‘You know that misguided women in Rigton Bridge give their babies opium to stop them crying?’ Magnus raised his glass and drained it. ‘I hope it may do the same for me.’ He lay back, as if intent on concentrating all his reserves of strength for the ordeal ahead. Then he sat up and swung his legs round. Tom saw that he was gritting his teeth to stop himself screaming. After several seconds he let out a long sigh and took a deep breath. When he spoke again, Tom was surprised that Crawford’s voice was so steady:

‘My grandfather was conscious when the ship’s surgeon hacked off his leg. Afterwards, or so the story goes, he asked to be carried back to his quarter-deck in a canvas cradle.’ He braced himself and then stood up, nearly falling, but steadying himself on the arm of a chair.

Appalled that anyone should voluntarily subject himself to such suffering, Tom looked away; his sense of the futility of the gesture Crawford was making was increased by his mention of his grandfather. For an admiral to allow no pain to prevent him seeing the issue of the day was understandable. But any such comparison, even if ironically intended, merely emphasised the utterly different circumstances in which Magnus was acting.
Because
Tom had thought him free of most of the attitudes of his class, he was doubly saddened to see Magnus now prove a slave to a code of honour, pathetic and self-glorifying except in war. Wanting to argue with him, Tom realised that, having promised to come, he would do better to remain silent.

*

As the brougham swayed out of the lodge gates, Magnus listened with closed eyes to the swish of the wheels. The snow cushioned him from the worst of the jolts and bumps he would otherwise have had to endure, but even the gentle rolling motion of the
carriage
caused him pain, dulled by the laudanum, but still sharp at times; so that he experienced successively detachment and an acute awareness of his body, enabling him, it seemed, to see
matters
both in distant perspective and in close personal terms. He knew that Strickland had not wanted to come, and this depressed him. When he thought of their care-free elation at the
Indepen
dent
,
his gloom deepened. He had thought Tom’s determination
to search out creditable motives, proof of an involvement as great as his own. But now, looking at Strickland’s downcast face, paler than usual with the reflected whiteness of the snow, and his remote dark brown eyes, Magnus felt a chilling isolation. He looked towards the ending of the day as though into a lighted tunnel and saw at the end only a wall. Had he not deliberately given to the election a significance it had never possessed, simply to avoid having to look beyond it? Without turning his head, he said:

‘What do you think will happen? I don’t mean today, but after the election.’

Tom said nothing for a moment and then gave a slight shrug.

‘Should anything be different? When the strikers give up, won’t things go on as before? Wages will rise with demand,
tempers
will cool … how quickly, I suppose, depending on what happens today.’

Magnus did not answer, but looked out through the window at the shimmering trees, their branches bent down by the snow. Perhaps whatever he had thought and done, nothing would have been changed. Progress was a lie; history an endless repetition, and no individual able to affect even a part of its vast cycle. Barbarism, wars, despotism, democracy, civilisation, decline, anarchy, and barbarism once again. And justice? He
remembered
Rochefoucauld’s mocking maxim: ‘Love of justice in most men is no more than the fear of suffering injustice themselves.’ Was it even worth weighing passive acceptance against a more positive philosophy, when both ended in the same inevitable
failure
? Whether in Ceylon or here, the end would be the same. Most men by the age of thirty abandoned individual ambition, sinking it in class, family or nation, living for others or for nothing in particular. Why not him too? The cottager who cut down a tree for firewood survived as well as the poet who meditated under its branches or the botanist who gave it a Latin name. But
Strickland
had something else: the self-contained conviction that art mattered – a faith possibly no more reasonable than a belief in the existence of evil spirits, but a faith and one that enabled a man calmly to turn his face from the world of events without feeling any debilitating loss. In spite of the man’s show of
concern
for what they had attempted, it had been no more than a game to him.