by Tim Jeal
‘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 Independent, 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 fac
e 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.
‘Do you think,’ he murmured, ‘that I’m the fool Catherine said I was to be doing this?’
‘If it’s what you want, why should I?’
‘Because I might want to deceive myself into thinking better of myself. That’s what you think I’m doing, isn’t it?’
‘If you succeed, why should deception come into it? I wouldn’t do it myself, but I’m not you. There wasn’t much room for pride or heroism at the engraver’s where I was apprenticed. My grandfather never lost a leg. My father was a fire insurance clerk. My mother gave music lessons.’
Stung by the unfamiliar harshness in Strickland’s voice, Magnus still managed a slight smile.
‘You said that rather too proudly to be laughing at aristocratic pride. You’re forgetting how you came after me the other day because you couldn’t bear to be thought disloyal. You said so yourself.’
‘Can’t you see the difference?’ asked Tom, with a hint of contrition. ‘I wanted you to think well of me. That’s not the same as doing something to be able to think well of oneself.’
The carriage slithered slightly at a bend, making Magnus wince with pain.
‘If others think badly of us,’ he sighed, ‘surely we think the same of ourselves?’
‘You don’t care what most people think of you.’ He looked at Magnus sadly. ‘Can’t you understand? I’d never met anybody like you. I cared about your opinion because I admired you.’
In the distance Magnus saw the dark sprawl of the town, its harsh outline transformed and softened by the snow. He turned to Tom.
‘But you don’t any more.’
‘No. That isn’t your fault though. I never thought what was possible or likely. I envied you … your assurance, manner … things like that.’
‘Which of course aren’t worth a brass farthing.’
The effort of talking had taken Magnus’s mind off his shoulder, but hurt his mouth and jaw.
‘I didn’t mean that,’ Tom replied softly.
‘You weren’t paying me a compliment either.’
Magnus was surprised by an almost imploring look from Tom.
‘Haven’t you ever met somebody, and thought he knew everything that you had wanted to….’
‘And later found out how wrong you were?’ Magnus smiled. ‘Who hasn’t? But I sometimes ended by liking the people I’d expected too much from … after I’d forgiven them for my own mistaken estimate.’ He looked intently at Strickland’s handsome face. ‘Are you too proud to do that, Tom? Perhaps you think I took advantage of you because of my class; asked you to take risks because I considered it my right. I asked you because I liked you; yes, from the night of the riot, when you pointed out so clearly that I had no rights over you. Any favours there may have been were conferred by you. I have no plans, no prospects. You help me today, but I can do nothing for you tomorrow. I’m the debtor, Tom.’
Strickland looked away.
‘I didn’t expect friendship as a reward. You needn’t fear that burden.’
‘Burden?’ cried Magnus. ‘If you’d known a quarter of the loneliness I went through in Ceylon, you wouldn’t call friendship that.’
‘I’m sorry.’
From the pained look on the artist’s face, Magnus did not doubt his sincerity.
‘Didn’t it occur to you,’ he asked, ‘that I wanted you with me today so I could prove something to you? Just as you once wished to prove something to me.’ He fell silent and both listened to the creaking of leather and the muted thud of the horses’ hoofs. ‘A pity,’ he said at length, ‘that I chose the wrong thing. Stoicism’s probably no more than a refuge for the lost and scared.’ He banged sharply on the roof and the coach slid to a halt. ‘Shall we go back?’ he asked Tom, who stared at him in astonishment.
‘No, no, of course not. I didn’t explain well, but it doesn’t matter. I want to go with you.’
‘I’ve made it impossible for you to say anything else.’
‘It’s not that at all. Really.’
*
Soon they were passing through the deserted outskirts; the town seemed silent at first, until they heard a low distant rumble, as might be heard approaching a race course at a large meeting. It was not loud at first, but grew as the pure white snow gave way to blackened slush and the wide span of the iron bridge came in sight. Magnus caught Tom’s eye and, though he did not smile, knew that he had changed his mind. The pain in his shoulder was worse, but he suddenly felt happy.
13
From their headquarters in the Town Hall, Lord Goodchild and Colonel Summers looked down anxiously at the surging crowd in front of the polling booth in the centre of the market square. At the next window, beside the Town Clerk, stood a tense-faced St Clare. As on Nomination Day, Braithwaite had assembled a paid mob to protect his voters from the vast crowd of non-electors favouring the Liberal candidate, but, once again, their presence merely served to cause greater antagonism. Nor were the hundred special constables, employed to keep the two factions apart, a dependable force. Freshly issued truncheons and black and white cockades could not be expected magically to transform an untrained levy of shopkeepers and warehousemen into a body sufficiently disciplined to remain calm for long under the barrage of stones, dead rooks, rats and rotten fruit raining down on them from both sides. So far they had managed to protect Tory voters on their perilous path to the polling booth, but the mood of the crowd was worsening.
By noon the Liberal agent’s tactics had become apparent. For the first two hours after the opening of the poll the Tories had been allowed to establish a narrow lead, but now the Liberals were pushing forward forty or so voters in a rush to achieve a tenuous majority. Their hope being that, as the Tory vote inevitably rose towards parity, the fury and disappointment of the crowd, whose expectations had been falsely raised, would be enough to discourage the more faint-hearted of Braithwaite’s electors from turning out. Although to date there had been no violent attacks either on individual electors or on property, Goodchild felt far from confident; the unpopular special constables would not remain for long the sole targets of the stones and bottles being thrown; and, when Tory voters had to contend with greater intimidation than the spitting, jostling and hooting they were currently enduring, action would have to be taken.
Their problem, as Goodchild and Summers knew very well, was that, if rioting broke out, they would be unable to clear the square without serious repercussions. In Millcroft Fields, an open space just outside the town, the Spinners’ Union was holding a meeting of five thousand strikers and had promised a march to the market place. To meet this threat five troops of cavalry – two of dragoons and three of lancers – had received orders to seal off the entrances to the High Street and Silver Street, the two principal thoroughfares leading into the square. This would stop the Union’s procession reaching the centre of the town and also prevent the crowd already assembled in the square leaving it en masse and joining the strikers. Clearly, if the situation in the market square did become critical, the mob could not be driven out by either of the main exits, since this would bring them up behind the cavalry sealing off the streets, thus exposing the soldiers to attack from both sides. The square could only be cleared by forcing the crowd through the three small alleys on the south side – an action which would cause panic and bloodshed, since several thousand people could not rapidly be squeezed through such small openings without terrible crushing and trampling.
As Goodchild watched, two Tory voters were being escorted to the booth from the Swan Hotel, flanked by a dense screen of constables. A flurry of movement passed over the crowd around them, like an angry squall over water. A moment later the police were attacked with staves and bottles, but they managed to get the electors safely to the booth. On coming out, their protectors faltered and both men were kicked and punched, one having his coat ripped
off. The idea of bolstering the special constables with a company of foot-soldiers had been suggested but rejected, since their appearance in the square would probably start the riot they had been put there to prevent. Also unmounted men were easier to overwhelm, and if the mob succeeded against one group of soldiers they would feel confident that the same could be achieved against others. This consideration apart, Goodchild was convinced that it would be madness to place his men in a situation where they might have to fight hand-to-hand with people from their own class and background; up on a horse they would be more likely to do their duty. That morning a number of pamphlets and posters had been tossed over the barracks wall. One of them Goodchild still had folded in his pocket:
SOLDIERS!
Ask yourselves these questions: Must I, at the word of command, fire at and destroy my fellow creatures, more especially when special constables have aggravated them almost to madness, hired ruffians at five shillings a day, and I as a soldier at little above a shilling a day, harassed almost to death in protecting those very policemen who have been the aggressors? Heaven and Justice forbid it!
Goodchild remembered from the riots of 1842 that troopers, to avoid hurting the crowd, often secretly bit out the ball from their cartridges.
A chaise with shuttered windows had drawn up outside the Town Hall; moments later Joseph Braithwaite leapt out.
As soon as Goodchild saw the manufacturer’s infuriated face, he knew what to expect. Joseph strode up to St Clare.
‘May I ask whether you intend to wait until murder is committed before reading the Riot Act?’
Summers stepped forward in the same shabby undress uniform Goodchild had first seen him in.
‘Mr St Clare’s restraint has been at my request.’
‘My voters are being set upon, sir. I demand you clear the square.’
‘If there is a riot it will be quelled,’ returned Summers in an even voice.
‘Colonel, you are permitting a brutal and vicious mob to prevent my voters reaching the polling booth.’
