by Ellis Peters
Charles, of course, would have been quite a catch for any girl, with all the Harrow land in his hands; but the other one had still the rags of that glamorous reputation of his, for all his attempts to claw himself naked of them. Most people, when they thought about the issue at all, thought Io would be a fool if she didn’t take Charles; and most of the observers who had watched the rivalry, in its comedy setting, most closely, gave it as their opinion that in the end that was what she would do. They claimed to see the signs of preference already; but the only person who really saw them, with cruel clearness, was Chad himself. He saw them all the time, whether they existed or not. And to tell the truth, his temper was not improved by the fact that as often as not he was ashamed of his subjection, and knew himself every kind of fool. Diagnosis, however, is not cure, and a fool he continued, kicking himself for it all the way.
Two
« ^ »
An hour before closing time, on this particular evening toward the end of the August holidays, they were arguing about the Blunden appeal, which hung in suspense somewhere in the legal wilds, as yet unheard. It had come up because the sunshine miners were making vast, unpleasing harmonies in the bar, and their presence had reminded Charles how the grabs were steadily scooping their way nearer to his boundary fence.
“They say there’s nearly two hundred thousand tons of the stuff under the heath and the top pastures,” he said gloomily. “As if that’s worth tearing the guts out of those fields for! At the price it costs ’em to get it, too!”
“Only about twenty acres of the ground they want from you is pasture,” said Chad unpleasantly and promptly, “and you know it, so don’t go around pretending they’re proposing to take good agricultural land in this case. I can’t see why you’re kicking.”
“They very often have taken good agricultural land, and you know that. Years and years to get it back into shape!”
“I’ve seen that view questioned by better-informed people than you. It doesn’t take half so long to put it back in condition as you people make out. Read some of the books about soil, and see if they don’t bear me out.”
“I’m a farmer myself, and I know—”
“But farmers disagree about it themselves. And in any case, this time it’s just twenty acres of not so brilliant high pasture, and no more. The rest’s all waste land, being used for precisely nothing, not even building. Fit for nothing! If it was leveled at least it could be built on.” He had begun simply by taking the opposite side because he must, but by this time he was serious, dead serious, on one of his queer hobby-horses, almost all of which consisted in finding the good to be said for anything which was being denounced publicly and loudly, and in some cases with suspicious facility, by the majority of other people. He leaned across the table and spread his lean, nervous hand under Charles’s eyes. “Look! I know it looks like hell, I know it makes a positive wilderness while it lasts, I know it’s the fashion, almost the rule, to damn it out of hand. I know it does put land back from its full usefulness for some time—we needn’t argue how long, the experts are busy doing that—and I even know some bad mistakes have been made in judging the priorities in some cases, and good land has been taken. But for heaven’s sake, do consider this particular case on its own merits, and don’t just hand me out the arguments that might be justifiable if you were growing wheat on every acre they want to take up.”
“Twenty acres is twenty acres,” said Charles obstinately. “And they want the whole of the preserve, as well.”
“Oh, don’t let’s pretend that’s of any great value! You and your old man like to play with a little shooting there yourselves, but that’s all there is to it. The woods there are pretty enough to look at, but it isn’t a case of valuable timber or loss of soil. I bet you that land could be pasture at the most three seasons after it was relaid—I could show you land that was bearing a pretty good grass the second year after—and that’s what it’s never done in my lifetime or yours.”
“I very much doubt it. And anyhow, it’s an asset as it is— it’s woodland.”
“Private woodland, about half of it, with your fence round it, and not so hot at that. Come off it, Charles!”
“As much an asset, at any rate, as two hundred thousand tons of rubbish at an uneconomic price.”
“But the plant’s here, the labor’s here, it’s a continuation of the very job they’re doing, and if you let them carry on you’ll be bringing the price down, and handsomely. That’s the point!”
“Never within miles of the cost by the old way,” said Charles positively and truthfully; for his grandfather had been in the dog-hole colliery business in the later stages of Comerford’s shallow-mining past.
“Are you seriously holding up the old way as a present-day possibility? As an alternative to surface mining?” Chad really looked startled, as if his friend had proposed a return to the stagecoach; so much startled that Charles colored a little, his broad, florid face burning brick-red under the dark, pained stare. But he felt the weight of listening opinion in the snug to be on his side, and answered sturdily:
“Why not? It got the coal out, didn’t it? Not that we need, in my opinion, to get such poor stuff as this out at all!”
“But it’s there, and the odds are it will be wanted out at some time. And it may as well be while the site here is open— clear the whole lot, and let’s have the ground back in service— whether in two years or ten, at least once for all. If you win your appeal, and they re-lay this site and go away, sooner or later that shallow coal left under your ground is going to be wanted. Supplies aren’t so inexhaustible that we can suppose any deposit of two hundred thousand tons can be ignored forever. Then how do you propose to get it out? Shallow shafts?—like last century?”
“Why not?” said Charles defiantly. “It was effective, wasn’t it?”
Words failed Chad for a moment to express the deadly effectiveness of uncontrolled shallow mining in Comerford. He leaned back with a gusty sigh, and reached for his beer. Io, watching them from the doorway as she went out with a tray, thought them unusually placid tonight, but did not suspect that for the moment she was forgotten. Her reactions if she had suspected it, however, would have been simple relief, only very faintly tinged with pique.
“Shallow mining,” said Chad, carefully quiet as always when he wanted his own prejudices to stop overweighting his case and erecting Charles’s defenses against him, “has done more damage to this district than any other kind of exploitation. Just at the back of the Harrow—off your land—there’s a perfect example, that little triangular field where all those experimental shafts were sunk when we were kids. You know it. Could you even put sheep on that field?”
“No,” admitted Charles, after a moment of grudged but honest consideration. “I suppose you couldn’t. Anyhow, I wouldn’t care to risk it.”
“No, and if you did you’d lose half of them. It’s pitted all over. They’ve had to wire off the path and take it round the two hedges instead of straight across, for fear of losing somebody down one of the holes; and even under the hedge the path’s cracking and sliding away. Until that ground’s finished subsiding it’s done being used for anything. And that may be for good, it’s certainly several lifetimes. You can’t even hurry the process. If you put heavy machinery on that ground to try to iron it out, you’d simply lose your machines. But it could be stripped and opencast, and at least you’d have some sort of usable land again.”
“But that’s a very extreme case,” objected Charles. “It’s hardly fair to judge by one small field that’s been ruined. The rest of the shafts round the district are fairly scattered.”
“Pretty thickly! Do you know there are at least fifty on your own land?”
They were warming again to enmity, perhaps because Io’s blue dress filled the corners of their eyes, and Io’s small, rounded and pleasing voice was saying something gay and unintelligible to a group of colliers just within earshot.
“Candidly, I don’t believe i
t,” said Charles, jutting his square brown jaw belligerently.
“You mean to say you don’t know?”
“I’m as likely to know as you, but no, I don’t know the exact figure. And neither do you! But I don’t believe there are anything like fifty!”
“All right, let’s prove it! One way or the other! Come round with me on Saturday afternoon, and I’ll show you shafts you didn’t know were there.”
“It’s likely, isn’t it?” said Charles, jeering. “I’ve been going around with my eyes closed all this time, I suppose?”
“I suppose so, too.”
“My God, I never saw such infernal assurance!” spluttered Charles.
“Well, come and see! What have you got to lose?”
“Damn it, man, it’s my land!”
“All right, then, you take me all round it, and show me how little damage your precious shallow mining did to it.”
They would go, too, wrangling all the way in precisely the same manner, with the same more peaceful intervals, in which they would discuss the problem earnestly and even amicably, but disagreeing still. They were temperamentally incapable of agreeing upon any subject, and the more serious they were, and the less obsessed by their differences, the more sharply defined did those differences become. The inhabitants of the snug listened tolerantly and with interest, grinning over their beer; and the vigorous singing of the sunshine miners in the bar subsided gently into the tinkling of the piano, and reluctantly ceased. It was at this moment of calm that the lower pane of the window suddenly exploded inward with a shattering noise, and slivers of glass shot in through the curtains and rang like ice upon the table.
A single voice, indistinguishably venomous and frightened, began bellowing outside in the lane, and there was a sound of heaving and grunting struggle under the window, but no second voice. The snug rose as one man, emptying glasses on the instant of flight, to pour out by the side door into the lane and see who was scragging whom. They were not greatly surprised, for fights, though comparatively few, were potentially many these days; and the usual speculations came out in staccato phrases as they left their seats, answering one another equably.
“That Union Movement chap again with his ruddy literature, maybe—said he was asking for trouble, coming here!”
“D.P.S, I bet!”
“More likely sunshine miners and colliers arguing the toss.”
They tumbled out by the side door to see for themselves, all but Chad Wedderburn, who sat regarding his linked hands on the table with a slight frown of distaste and weariness. Even when Charles got up with somewhat strained casualness and said he might as well see the fun, too, Chad did not move. The sounds of battle had no charm for him. Io came in resignedly from the bar, and found him still sitting there, finishing a cigarette. He looked round at her, and even for her did not smile.
“What, one superior being?” said Io, none too kindly. “Are you made of different clay, or something?” She sounded hard-boiled, and a little ill-tempered; but she looked upset, and more than a little scared. It was all very well pretending, but she didn’t like it much, either. She went to the window, and began to brush tinkling splinters of glass out of the curtains and down from the sill; but at every louder shout from outside she started just perceptibly. A dozen people were talking at once, now, and the heaving and crashing had almost ceased; there was just a breathless trampling, a babel of argument and expostulation, and then the virtuous youthful tones of Police-Constable Weaver, pitched high, to assert who was master here.
“Now, then, what’s going on? What’s going on here?”
He was very young, he liked to say the correct thing, and Chad was tempted to suppose he even practiced the tone in which it should be delivered.
“All over!” said Chad, smiling at Io. “The law’s arrived. No need to worry about possible bloodshed anymore.”
“I wasn’t worrying,” said Io smartly, kneeling over the dustpan. “I couldn’t care less! Men! They’re no better than dead-end kids, got to be either hitting someone else, or watching two other men hit each other. Even a football match is no good unless it ends in a free fight!” She marched away furiously by one door as the dispersing spectators came in by the other in a haze of satisfied excitement, with fat voices and shining, pleased eyes, doing their best to justify her strictures, and settled down contentedly to their drinks again with a topic of conversation which would last them all the rest of the evening.
Charles, tweedy and broad-set, the perfect picture of the young yeoman farmer, came back to his chair rather selfconsciously, trying to look as if the spectacle of two men trying to take each other apart had really rather bored him. In fact the mind of Charles moved with a methodical probing caution which ruled out boredom. He said with a shrug and a smile:
“Another case for the old man’s bench next week! Disturbing the peace, or assault—if they can sort out who hit whom first—or whatever is the correct charge these days.” But he couldn’t disguise the excitement which flushed his fine, candid face, ruddy and solid and simple with all the graces Chad’s black-visaged person lacked. He leaned over the table as if he had a secret, though a dozen full-voiced conversations about him were tossing the same theme. “It could have been a bad business. Didn’t you see them? My God, Jim meant making a job of it this time! I knew there’d been some bad blood up there, and I believe they’ve already been pulled apart a couple of times, but this looked like being the real thing.”
“Jim? Jim who?”
“Tugg. Good Lord, didn’t you really look? Lord knows it does seem asking for trouble to take in a German laborer on the same farm—”
“A German?” said Chad, his lean brows drawing together. “Schauffler?”
“Whatever his name is! The fellow they’ve got up there. Big, fair-haired chap nearly Tugg’s own size. I heard Hollins had had a bit of trouble with them already. Seems it’s Jim who usually starts it—”
“Yes,” agreed Chad thoughtfully, remembering another, safer, easier Jim who was just out of hospital and back at the hostel, with only a long scar on his ribs to show for it, “yes, it would be.”
“Oh, I don’t know!” protested Charles, failing to understand. “He’s usually a reasonable enough chap, I should have said. There must be something behind it. Tugg doesn’t just fly off the handle. But a German, of course—it was a fool trick to have him there, if you ask me.”
So everyone would be saying, of course, and so perhaps it was; but where, thought Chad, as he finished his drink and quietly took his leave, where is the right place for the Helmut Schaufflers? What’s to be done with them? No keeping Helmut on the Hollins farm after this, however big a something there is behind it; and no other farmer will touch him with a bargepole, with the certainty of upsetting all his other labor. And yet we can’t get rid of him. If he does something too blatantly his own fault and no one else’s, we can deport him, he’s still German; but he won’t ever be left visibly the only guilty party in any clash; it will always be the other fellow who begins it.
He was depressed. He went out, and began the green walk home by the field path, up toward the rim of the bowl; and before long, as he walked slowly, someone overtook him, and he found himself walking side by side with Jim Tugg. Jim was quite untouched, that was easily seen in the early dusk; he was neat and light and long in his walking, quiet of face, content but dark, gratified but not satisfied. He greeted Chad from the outer edges only of a great preoccupation, but in a friendly tone, and accepted a cigarette. He didn’t have to act as if nothing had happened, because everyone knew by now that it had. No need even to wonder if it had reached this particular person; it had reached everybody.
“That’ll mean a summons for assault, I suppose,” said Chad.
“Be well worth it,” said Jim serenely, narrowing his far-gazing eyes against the blown smoke of the cigarette.
“What did he say to you?”
“Who? Weaver?”
“Helmut. What was it he said, to m
ake you hit him?”
Jim turned his big, gaunt face and looked at him narrowly. “What makes you think he didn’t hit me first?”
“The Helmuts don’t—not unless you’re small, peaceful, and at a disadvantage—and they have no other immediate way of getting at you.”
The dark look lingered on him a long minute, and then was withdrawn, and Jim gazed up the rise of the fields again, and walked intact and immured in his own sufficiency.
“Didn’t say nothing to me. I got tired of waiting.”
“He knows how to angle for sympathy,” warned Chad.
“He can have all of that.”
“Well, you know your own business best. But you could find yourself in gaol unless you’re more forthcoming in court. If you don’t put him in the wrong, he’ll take jolly good care he doesn’t put himself there.”
“Thanks for the goodwill, anyhow!” said Jim, and smiled suddenly, and went on up the rising path with a lengthened stride, to disappear in the twilight.
Three
« ^ »
The chairman of the magistrates was Selwyn Blunden, the old man himself, Charles’s father. He behaved admirably, eliciting, as on the bench he frequently did, some less obvious aspects of what on the face of it was a simple case. As a result of which astute activities, the bench discharged Jim Tugg on payment of costs, and with a warning against taking the law into his own hands. His previous unspotted record of civic usefulness, especially his war reputation, stood firmly by him; his plea of guilty, which spared everybody the trouble of lengthy evidence, did him no harm. Even Helmut’s able display of hunted and frustrated good intentions, his portrait of a misunderstood young stranger in a very strange land, did not appear completely to convince Blunden. He delivered a short but pointed lecture on the responsibilities of an ex-P.O.W. to a country which had made repeated efforts to find a niche for him. It had been a generous gesture on the part of Hollins, said the chairman, to take him in after a previous conviction, and it could not be accepted that the failure of the experiment was due only to Tugg; it would appear that something in the nature of a special effort was now required from Helmut himself, if he was to remain persona grata in this country.
