The Four Swans

by Winston Graham

  ‘Don’t try,’ said Demelza.

  ‘No, it would be a pity, wouldn’t it? He has no real concern for his estate; he has no interest in guns and will not even shoot a rabbit; horses he mounts occasionally for the convenience of getting more rapidly from place to place; he will not go near the hunt; he never drinks himself under the table; he never bawls at the servants; I think our marriage has been a great mistake.’

  Demelza looked at her.

  Caroline said: ‘Almost the only consoling feature of my married life is that Horace, who viewed Dwight at first with sick resentment, has now taken to him in a most amazing fashion. Dwight can make the fat little beast do tricks – believe it or not, at his age! He will sit up and beg for a sweet and, when given it by Dwight – but only by Dwight – will hold it in his mouth while he rolls over on his back, until he’s given permission to eat it!’

  Demelza said: ‘Dwight has a habit of being able to induce people to do what he wants.’

  ‘I know. I have to be constantly on my guard. What do you make of his looks?’

  ‘A little more better. But he is still pale.’

  ‘And as thin as a shotten herring. He ministers to his own needs, of course. But even if he consented to be doctored by another, I know no surgeon or apothecary within the Duchy that I’d trust him to.’

  ‘When the warm weather comes it will make a difference. This summer—’

  ‘He’s so vilely conscientious, Demelza. It was after Christmas before I could get him to apply for his discharge from the navy. Though he sympathizes with the Frenchies, he is still prepared to fight them! . . . And now, in spite of anything I say, he’s preparing to resume his doctoring at full stretch. I hate to see him going among the sick and think of what putrid infection he may chance to pick up from among them!’

  ‘Surely it is only a little time he needs, Caroline. He has only been out of the prison a few months and will recover his strength in a while. I know how you must feel but there is no way out for you, is there? Men are headstrong.’

  ‘Like horses that have never been broken.’ said Caroline.

  They clopped along while a chill night breeze soughed around them.

  Demelza said: ‘It must take time.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘For someone like Dwight to recover. He is lucky to be alive. Lieutenant Armitage suffers from his sight, he tells me. Trying to read in the half dark—’

  ‘His poor sight did not seem to prevent Lieutenant Armitage from looking at you today. If I were Ross I should keep you under lock and key for a while.’

  ‘Oh, Caroline, what nonsense you do talk! It was nothing more than—’

  ‘My dear, I verily believe that if you and I walked together into a roomful of eligible men, they would immediately all look at me; but in five minutes they would all come to be clustered round you! It is an enviable complaint, for which I think there is no remedy.’

  ‘Thank you, but it’s not so. Or only with some . . .’ Demelza gave a brief laugh which came to have a tremor in it. ‘Sometimes I don’t have half enough influence with those that matter to me.’ She pointed with her crop at one of the figures riding ahead.

  ‘They’re a plaguey couple,’ Caroline agreed.

  ‘But Dwight – I will try on Dwight. Next time he comes to see Jeremy or Clowance. It’s not right that he should risk too much too soon. You have so recent come to harbour. If you think—’

  ‘He knows what I think. But another still small voice might help to impress him with its importance . . .’

  A shooting star moved lazily across the sky and some night bird twittered as if alarmed at the sight. Dwight’s horse shook its head and shivered in its nostrils, anxious to be home.

  Dwight said: ‘You will tell Demelza?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What will she think?’

  ‘If there is one unpredictable thing in the world it is what Demelza will think about anything.’

  ‘You’re sure refusal is the right course?’

  ‘How could it be anything else?’

  ‘Such a position could offer you great opportunities.’

  ‘For self-advancement?’

  ‘For exercising an influence in the world. And in you I know it would be a moderating influence.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes. If I could call my soul my own.’

  ‘Well, hasn’t Basset said—’

  ‘Besides, I don’t fancy being elected for Truro as a sort of puppet, representing Truro’s resentment at George Falmouth’s treatment of them. If the revolt were successful and I went in, I should feel that any personal merit I may possess was not involved at all. If it were unsuccessful I should feel even more humiliated. Of course I owe nothing to the Boscawens; whether I offend them is neither here nor there. But I would owe something to a patron who would not be above driving a hard bargain in the end.’

  ‘Basset is the most enlightened of the landed gentry around here.’

  ‘Yes, but he uses his power for his own ends. And he is strangely nervous about his own countrymen.’

  ‘It goes a long way back,’ Dwight said drily. ‘Magna Carta was designed to free the barons from tyranny, not ordinary folk.’

  They jogged on in silence. Ross was pursuing thoughts of his own. He said: ‘Demelza tells me I sentimentalize about the poor. It is a dangerous habit in one who has always had a full belly. I doubt not that good and ill are evenly spread throughout the classes . . . But that riot at Flushing which someone – Rogers – mentioned this afternoon, last month, you remember?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘D’you know what happened there? Verity, my cousin, wrote me about it. Some four hundred turned up in Flushing in a desperate temper and armed with sticks and clubs, all set to seize a cargo of grain just discharged from a ship, and looking very ugly about it. There were no warships in and no one to let or hinder them except a few men storing the grain – and well-furnished houses and genteel women ripe for the picking. But someone set a child with a fine voice upon a sack of corn and told him to sing a hymn. This he did, and presently one by one the men began to uncover their heads and join in the hymn with him – most of them being Methodists anyway. After it was done they all quietly turned about and tramped away, carrying nothing but their sticks and staves, home to Carnon or Bissoe or wherever they came from.’

  After a moment or two Dwight said: ‘When the history of this time comes to be written, I wonder if it will be looked on as the history of two revolutions. The French Revolution and the English – or Methodist – revolution. One seeks liberty, equality and fraternity in the eyes of men; the other seeks liberty, equality and fraternity in the eyes of God.’

  ‘That’s an even profounder remark than it seems,’ Ross said. ‘And yet I find myself fighting one and suspicious of the other. Human nature is abominable, even one’s own.’

  ‘I think the truth,’ Dwight said, ‘is that man is never perfectable. So he fails always in his ideals. Whichever way he directs his aims, Original Sin is there to confound him.’

  They were approaching Bargus, where four parishes met.

  Ross said irritably: ‘I could no more be Basset’s creature than kiss a Frenchman! It’s not that I think myself in any way better than the next – only that my neck is stiffer. As a petty squire I am my own man. As a Member of Parliament under the patronage of a great landowner, I could never be that, say what you will.’

  ‘Sometimes, Ross, one accepts compromises in order to achieve a small part of a desired end.’

  With a change of mood, Ross laughed. ‘Then let me put your name forward to Sir Francis in place of mine. After all, you are now a larger landowner than I, and much richer!’

  Dwight said: ‘I know that everything of Caroline’s now belongs to me, but that is a quirk of law I intend to ignore. No, Ross, I shall argue no longer. I was simply trying to put the other side. There are good men in the House as well as venal ones – Basset himself, I would say, Pitt too, Burke, Wilber
force, many others. In any event . . .’

  ‘What were you going to say?’

  ‘This is where we part. Would you like our man to come with you the rest of the way?’

  ‘Thank you, no, I have a pistol. What were you going to say?’

  ‘It was but a passing thought . . . I understand when you refused the bench, George Warleggan was offered the seat in your place. I was going to say that happily there can be no risk of its happening in this instance, George being so interested in keeping in with the Boscawens.’

  Chapter Six

  I

  An itinerant tinker selling and repairing pots and pans came round Wheal Grace Mine one day and said he had a message for the brothers Carne. He had been in Illuggan last week and brother Willie had had an accident and was like to lose both legs. Widow Carne had asked him to pass on the word. When Sam came up the message was given him, so he asked for the following day off to go and see them.

  When he left he bore with him not only a few things for his own family but some for the Hoskins too. Peter entrusted him with three shillings – asking Sam not to tell his wife – half a pound of butter and six eggs. Sam reached Illuggan by mid afternoon and found, as perhaps he should have expected, that the message had become garbled on its way from mouth to mouth. It was not Willie but Bobbie Carne who had been injured; Bobbie had fallen from a kibble or bucket as it was going down a shaft, and he was suffering from head and chest injuries, his legs having no hurt at all.

  Sam ate a meagre supper with them listening to his stepmother’s tiring voice – it was a voice made for complacency but driven by circumstance into complaint. Her nestegg was steadily being encroached on by the needs of the family she had married into. Luke was wed and away, but three of the brothers were still home, and she had one child of her own. Moreover John, the fourth boy, had recently married – the new, rather sulky and very pregnant wife was there – and who knew how many extra mouths there might yet be to feed?

  Sam slept on the floor beside his injured brother and spent the following morning with him, then started for Poole on his other mission, having left his last week’s earnings for the widow.

  A rabble of Hoskins lived in a cottage in a scarred valley between two disused chimney stacks on the track between Poole and Camborne. They were an average family, none of them shiftless but lacking the capacity to make the best of bad conditions. Poverty can be endured if it is endured with pride. They worked where and when they could and were good workers, but they had no initiative. Sam sat for a while in the kitchen talking to the older ones while the half-naked children played on the floor, which was inches thick in dirt and cinders. Then, having passed on Peter’s presents, and having said a prayer, he was about to leave, when John, Peter’s eldest brother, came in with another man from a meeting. Sam knew the other man – who was called Sampson: ‘Rosie’ Sampsom was his nickname because of his florid face – and thought him something of a malcontent.

  To Sam’s mild questions, after the greetings, John Joskin said, no, they had not been to a prayer meeting, and grinned and looked at his friend and added no more. But ‘Rosie’ Sampson said:

  ‘Well, tis no secret! There’s no reason to be secret wi’ Sam. We been to a meeting ’gainst the millers and the corn factors. Wi’ wheat at two guineas the bushel they’m still holding on to it, waiting for it to climb higher! While folk be in want and starvation, the millers d’live in plenty, the corn stacked in their ’ouses! Tis wicked, wicked, and we d’need to do something ’bout’n!’

  Peter’s father said: ‘Ye’ll get no good outcome from taking measures into your own hands, Rosie Sampson. Nor you, John. Tis danger, that way. Two year back—’

  ‘I know, I know, two year back, the soldiers,’ said ‘Rosie’. ‘But they’re gone and bye. There’s no soldiers in the county to speak of. And what do we want? Not revolution but justice. Food at a fair price. Work at a fair wage. So’s to keep our wives and our young alive. What’s wrong wi’ that?’

  ‘Naught wrong wi’ it,’ said Peter’s father, ‘tis but right ’n proper. But ye d’need to keep within the law, whether or no. Soldiers may be gone. But these yur Volunteers, all over the county; mebbe they was formed to keep out the Frenchy, but there’s other uses for they. They’d like as not ride to save the millers.’

  ‘And d’you know what?’ John Hoskin said to his father. ‘D’you know what? Miners of St Just be talking of the forming of a miners’ army to keep the Volunteers quiet. See? One ’gainst th’other. Not for revolution. Nay, but for justice. Justice for all!’

  Being a man to whom the next world was all-important and this a transitory life of less significance, Sam had little in common with people who talked of breaking the law. But he walked home troubled, sympathizing with the distress though believing that their way of attempting to alleviate it was wrong. Yet he knew he could not have said so in that company without exciting derision. They were in the gall of bitterness and in spite of their professed religion were yet estranged from God. ‘Through hidden dangers, toil and death, Thou, Lord, hast gently cleared my way.’ He prayed aloud as he walked that all people should be saved from the hidden dangers of riot and violence and that the way should be clear for them to a new realization of the mercy and forgiveness of Christ.

  II

  When Sam went in Drake was shoeing a horse for Mr Vercoe, the Preventive man, and Sam sat on a log by the gate watching the scene until it was done and Vercoe rode off. Each time Sam called at Pally’s Shop he noticed that more had been accomplished to improve the place, to tidy the yard, to repair the fences and to clean up the fields. As the days were lengthening more could be done. Sam wished he could see a similar improvement in the new blacksmith. Drake worked without stop from dawn to dusk, but there were still too many lonely dark hours to endure, and he had not yet found a pleasant way to endure them. Nor did he show any interest in the local girls or the balmaidens, most of whom would have been all too happy to marry a good-looking young tradesman. Indeed with a small but unencumbered property and an old and honourable trade at his finger-tips, he had become the ‘catch’ of the neighbourhood.

  Sam worked the bellows while Drake hammered out an iron stave. Among the clanging and the sparks he told his brother where he had been.

  ‘Poor Bobbie! D’you think he’ll come brave and well again?’

  ‘They believe he have come to no mortal hurt, thanks be to God.’

  ‘I thought you were early from core. Twas good of you to go but you should have left me know. I’d have come with you.’

  ‘You’ve customers to tend,’ Sam said, looking around. ‘Be away a day, someone’ll call, think that’s no good and go elsewhere.’

  With a forearm which remained obstinately pale Drake wiped the sweat from his forehead. ‘Ye’ve missed a core at the mine? Leave me pay you for that. I’ve more’n I need here.’

  ‘Nay, I make do, boy. You’ll need all you make here for a while yet . . . But the good Lord has set you in pleasant places—’

  ‘Cap’n Poldark done that . . . I got a letter last week Sam . . .’

  A shadow passed across Sam’s face, for he dreaded always that Morwenna might write.

  ‘. . . from Geoffrey Charles.’

  This was close home but to be preferred to the other.

  ‘He say he’s doing brave at Harrow, and he’s longing to see me when summer come.’

  ‘I doubt his father will give him leave.’

  ‘Stepfather. They’ve not been back at Trenwith yet. The less truck I have with they the better, but Geoffrey Charles may come and go as he pleases—’

  Among Drake’s earliest purchases was an old cracked ship’s bell that he’d bought for a few pence in St Ann’s; it now hung over the entrance to the yard so that a customer might draw attention to himself if Drake were working in the fields. Someone now started drawing attention to themselves in no uncertain fashion. Drake went to the door. Sam, following more slowly, heard a woman’s laugh that he instantly
and painfully recognized.

  ‘Wheelwright Carne! Finished that job for us, have ee? Two weeks gone since I brought’n in . . . My dear life and body, Parson Carne too! Did I break in on a praying feast? Shall I call again Friday?’

  Emma Tregirls, black hair shredding in the breeze, pink cotton frock caught at the waist with a red velvet belt, heavy black shoes smeared with mud; skin glinting in the sun, eyes alive with animal vitality.

  ‘Tis all ready for ee,’ Drake said. ‘I made a new arm. Twas no dearer than to repair the old, and there’ll be a longer life to him.’

  She came in and stood arms folded while Drake lifted out a heavy wooden bar with an iron crook on the end. Sam said nothing to her, and after her first taunt she said nothing to him, but watched Drake.

  She was a little piqued at finding the older brother there. Two weeks ago, on her afternoon off, she had visited her brother Lobb who ran his tin stamp at the bottom of Sawle village near the Guernseys and found him with part of a broken lifting bar, and about to put it over his shoulder and carry it to the blacksmith in Grambler for repair. But as usual he was coughing hard and worried about his old rupture, so she had said she would take it instead. At the top of Sawle Combe she had turned right instead of left. It was a deal farther to Pally’s Shop but she had heard Pally had sold out and a handsome young wheelwright now worked there on his own, so she thought she would look him over.

  This she had done, though not with noticeable effect so far as he was concerned. She was quite impressed with his looks but piqued that for once in her young life her own looks seemed to go unnoticed. He treated her with courtesy, and soberly, walking with her to the gate when she left; but there was no ‘look’ in his eye at all; she might have been thirty. It didn’t please Emma.

  Now she was back to test out the temperature of the water again; and here was his bible-spouting brother to spoil it all! Indeed the bible-spouting brother was looking at her with more interest, she was certain, than the wheelwright, though how much concern was for her body and how much for her soul she couldn’t be sure.