Robin looked at Leslie major, but that young gentleman was eating strawberries placidly. Their eyes met for a moment and Robin felt certain that Leslie major was giving him what in war jargon would be called a token wink. Suddenly he couldn’t help laughing. The tension of which the men had been conscious relaxed; Mr. Birkett made a real effort and emerged from his depression, and the evening ended as pleasantly as Sunday evenings usually did.
The fact that a Polish Government of National Unity had been formed interested nobody except those who wished to believe in it. June came to an end and a few days later Anne Fielding went to Hatch End to visit the Hallidays. Sylvia had shed her uniform, but found to her disgust that she was about an inch bigger everywhere and apt to burst out of her summer dresses without warning. This, with a visit to Rushwater in view, was very annoying, and the Winged Victory was on the verge of angry tears when Anne said she thought Madame Tomkins might help her. For the friend of so old a client as Lady Fielding, Madame Tomkins agreed to stretch a point, so Anne and Sylvia went to Barchester by the train from Little Misfit, spent an hour with Madame Tomkins and had lunch at Number Seventeen. The idea of going to lunch as a guest with her own mother seemed so upside-down to Anne that she was almost shy at first, but presently recovering herself chattered away happily. The only blot in the visit was that Sir Robert had to attend a public lunch and could not get away from the office till late.
“Do you think daddy will get in?” said Anne.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Lady Fielding. “And what is more, I really don’t know if I should like London or not.”
“I’d loathe it,” said Sylvia. “I want to do landwork like Emmy. I don’t mean market gardening. Running a big place with a dairy farm or something of the sort. It’s the only way to live now.”
“I hope you will find a farm with plenty of sheets and towels and china,” said Lady Fielding. “How anyone is to set up house now I cannot imagine, unless their parents can give them furniture. Anne, it is dreadfully sad, but I can’t get that cup riveted. I have tried everywhere in the city. We have only three left, not much use if people come to tea.”
“I’m sure I could get it mended, Lady Fielding,” said Sylvia. “Our carpenter can do absolutely anything and I know he mends china for our cook.”
So the cup and its handle were wrapped up and the girls went back to Hatch End, leaving Lady Fielding a little desolate, but on the whole glad that Anne was finding her own feet, even if only in a small way.
When Sylvia and Anne got out of the train they walked across the water meadows and a plank bridge to Hatch House, where they found David Leslie having tea with Mrs. Halliday and telling her about his visit to Paris.
Sylvia said she had never been abroad.
“Good Lord!” said David. “Come to think of it, thousands of you haven’t.”
“It’s all very well for you, David,” said Mrs. Halliday with slight asperity. “You have been going abroad whenever you wanted to all your life and getting abroad during the war. Most of the girls haven’t been out of England since 1939.”
“You ought to go to Paris,” said David, not disputing Mrs. Halliday’s statement and addressing himself to Sylvia. “You would adore it, and the French would adore you. They like Englishwomen to be statuesque blondes.”
“Well,” said Sylvia, “I don’t really want to go abroad much. I wouldn’t mind exploring, somewhere off the track, but I’d hate a lot of French people gabbling at me. They haven’t been much use in this war, anyway.”
“I’d love you to meet my cousin Rose Bingham,” said David. “She’d show you Paris. She has a flat there and her faithful maid has kept it all through the war.”
For some reason that our readers may be able to explain better than we can, both young ladies immediately took a violent dislike to Rose Bingham, about whom they knew nothing at all, and each decided in her own mind to hate her for ever. Then David went away and the girls took Lady Fielding’s cup out to the carpenter’s shop where Caxton, who thought but poorly of his home compared with a workshop where a man could always lay his hands on what he wanted, was apt to linger as long as there was daylight enough to work by.
Sylvia introduced Anne and the cup to him. Caxton said he could make a nice job of the cup and enquired if the young lady’s father was the gentleman that was standing for Barchester.
“I hope you will vote for him,” said Anne shyly, but feeling that she ought to do some work for her father.”
“I don’t vote in Barchester, miss,” said Caxton. “East Barsetshire, that’s what I vote for. But Mr. Gresham will get in easy enough. There’s always been a Gresham in for East Barsetshire.”
“Well, there won’t be if you and the others don’t take the trouble to vote,” said Sylvia stoutly. “All the Labour people are working like anything to get their man in.”
“What beats me,” said Caxton, “is that young fellow calling himself Labour. If he’s ever done an honest day’s work in his life I’ll eat a pound of half-inch nails. I don’t hold with those lawyers. I’ve never been to a lawyer in my life and I hope I never shall. When I made my will I bought a printed paper at the shop and wrote what I wanted and got it witnessed all proper. No lawyer’s going to meddle with my affairs.”
Anne asked who the Labour candidate was.
“Candidate!” said Sylvia scornfully. “His name’s Hibberd. His father got made a lord but I don’t remember his name. Not Barsetshire people.”
“Well, Miss Sylvia, I’m not saying who I’ll vote for, because it’s a free country,” said Caxton, “but it won’t be that young Hibberd, lawyer or no lawyer.”
“It doesn’t matter whom you don’t vote for,” said Sylvia firmly, “but whom you do vote for. If you don’t vote for Mr. Gresham and don’t make all your friends vote, Mr. Hibberd will get in. And then the Government will put a huge tax on tools and say carpenters mustn’t work more than six hours a day.”
“Well, I do ask you, Miss Sylvia,” said Caxton, “what on earth would the use of six hours be? It’s all I can do to get through what needs doing without working short shifts. If anyone said to me, ‘Caxton, your six hours are up,’ when I’d got a nice little job on hand, well there’s no saying what I wouldn’t do. Chip a bit off his face with my mallet and chisel I would if he came meddling in my affairs.”
“Of course you would,” said Sylvia. “Now don’t forget to vote for Mr. Gresham, Caxton, because if you don’t Mr. Hibberd will make it a six-hour day.”
Caxton, with a look of great wariness, said again that he wasn’t going to tell no one who he was voting for, and anyone who thought he would vote for young Hibberd was mistaken, and if everyone was going voting there’d be a rare crowd at the Mellings Arms and he was never one for crowds and would like to get on with the repairs he was doing for the kitchen and then perhaps that Hubback would stop grizzling at him. And with this he turned on the electric lathe and made such a hideous roaring noise that the girls went away.
“That’s our lot all over,” said Sylvia. “They will not go to the polls. Their hearts are all right but their heads are like mules. I must go and beat people up a bit before the polling day.”
Anne, a town child, was deeply interested by this aspect of rural life and began to realise the feeling of responsibility that the landed people still kept for those who lived in their villages and worked on their estates; dimly apprehending a society more deeply rooted than the urban life of the Close or the rather small-town life of Hallbury. With Sylvia she did a kind of political district-visiting, talking to Mrs. Hubback at The Shop, to Mrs. Hubback’s cousin the landlord of the Mellings Arms, to cottage women, to elderly labourers, but seldom to the young: for the young were mostly away. Sylvia, she observed, had no particular gift for political argument, but a bulldog tenacity of purpose in bullying people to take the trouble to vote, and a good-natured patience that nothing ruffled.
“It doesn’t matter so much which way people vote so long as they
do vote,” said Sylvia to the Infant School Teacher whom she had caught just outside the church. “People just won’t bother.”
“Well, really, Miss Halliday, that is rather a peculiar way of looking at it if you don’t mind my saying so,” said the Infant School Teacher. “In Russiar as they tell us the under-eights are quite politically minded.”
“Poor little things,” said Sylvia with genuine sympathy.
“Of course this election doesn’t affect me,” said the Infant School Teacher. “My vote is in Luton. But I do the best I can to make the toddlers politically minded. There is such a nice little song—‘We’ll all go down the Big Red Road, And meet Joey Staylin there.’ The toddlers march to it every day at the physical recreation hour and it is going to be such a help to them when they go on to the upper school. The headmistress there has another very nice song, ‘My little Red Home in the East.’”
“Well, good-bye,” said Sylvia. “And that was a waste of time,” she added to Anne as they walked on. “I expect it all is.”
“Why do you do it then?” said Anne; not critically, but searching for information.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Sylvia. “One has to do something and people are such slackers. Come on; we’ve still got to get a few people before lunch. I wish this election were over.”
Everyone in England wished the election were over. Everyone was tired and trying not to show it; cross and trying not to give way to it. Thousands of people, probably tens of thousands of people, who had been removed from their houses by bombing, compulsory evacuation from seaside areas, or from land requisitioned for military purposes; by having to go and look after elderly invalid relations; by being directed (a phrase which deceived nobody) into various employments three or four hundred miles from their homes while other people from other places three or four hundred miles away were directed to the places the first people had come from; by having to move their school, their secretarial college (so-called); by happening to be staying at Ye Olde Bath Chappe at Little-Pigley-in-the-Pound when war began and never having the energy to do anything about it; all these people had, owing to National Registration, become voters in the place of their exile, and now having gone home again were unable to vote for their own candidate and could only express their anger by complaining that there were no proxies for civilians, while Bert and Sid and Alf in Europe, Africa and Asia, were able to exercise their privilege as citizens and vote by proxy in their native town or village for one of several people whom they had mostly never heard of; that is, if the holders of the proxies remembered to use them.
“I suppose you have got Fred’s proxy, Mrs. Panter,” said Sylvia to that lady, who was as usual ironing just inside her front door.
“I’ve got it all right, Miss Sylvia,” said Mrs. Panter, licking her finger and testing the iron she had just taken off the fire.
“Well, I hope you are going to use it for Mr. Gresham,” said Sylvia.
“Of course I am, miss,” said Mrs. Panter. “That Fred of ours he was all one for Labour. Never you mind about Labour, Fred, I said to him, you stick to Mr. Gresham. So when he sent me the paper he wrote to me and said I was to put his cross down for that young Hibberd, so when I wrote to him I said if he wanted to vote for Hibberd he’d a ought to have sent the paper to Scatcherd—he’s all for Labour Scatcherd is—but I’ve got your paper, Fred, I said, and I’ll vote for who I think proper. Don’t you worry, miss.”
Having exhausted the heat of her iron, she put it back on the fire and selected another. Sylvia and Anne walked on.
“Isn’t that rather unfair?” said Anne.
“Not a bit,” said Sylvia. “Mrs. Panter has twice the sense Fred has. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to give mothers a vote for each of their children until they get married and have children of their own.”
“Then you and George couldn’t vote,” said Anne.
Sylvia said it would need a bit of working out and they had better go and see Mr. Scatcherd before they went back to lunch.
After knocking several times at the front door of Rokeby and receiving no answer, Sylvia said they had better go round to the back. So they walked along the dank little path overhung by nasty dark evergreens, and round to the little verandah. Looking through the back kitchen or studio window Sylvia saw Mr. Scatcherd working at his large table, so she knocked at the door and went in, followed by Anne who secretly wondered if one ought to interrupt an artist.
“Hullo, Mr. Scatcherd, are you frightfully busy?” said Sylvia.
Mr. Scatcherd thought of saying something about Youth and Beauty being ever welcome to an Artist’s humble abode, but before he could get his higher self onto the job, his lower or grocerial self had said, “Pleased, I’m sure, miss. Pray take a seat,” and only by the skin of his teeth did he stop himself saying, “And what can I get for you?”
“I’ve only come for a moment, Mr. Scatcherd,” said Sylvia, “Are you voting for Mr. Gresham?”
“Ah!” said Mr. Scatcherd.
“Well, you ought to,” said Sylvia.
“Us artists,” said Mr. Scatcherd, “aren’t quite like other people. Politics are all very well, but what we say is, Art comes first.”
“That’s nothing to do with politics,” said Sylvia firmly. “If you vote for Mr. Gresham you’re voting for Mr. Churchill.”
“So Mr. Hibberd says,” said Mr. Scatcherd. “Leastways, if you take my meaning, Mr. Hibberd says it’s time Mr. Churchill went. And a change does us all good.”
“But, Mr. Scatcherd,” said Anne, braving the sound of her own voice, “Mr. Churchill is an artist too. You ought to vote for an artist.”
“An artist in words you mean doubtless, miss,” said Mr. Scatcherd. “An ARTIST is a rather different pair of shoes.” And he smiled pityingly.
“But he is a proper artist,” said Anne. “I mean he paints pictures.”
Mr. Scatcherd, visibly shaken, said this was quite a new light on things.
“And he has them framed,” said Sylvia; though with no grounds for her statement.
Anne said she did think artists ought to stick together.
“That young Hibberd, he may be a lawyer, but he’s all for a Ministry of Fine Arts,” said Mr. Scatcherd.
“He must be frightfully artistic,” said Sylvia, secretly despising herself for using the word. “Did you know he was a Director of the National Rotochrome Polychrome Universal Picture Post Card Company?”
Mr. Scatcherd laid down his pencil and stared.
“Mr. Gresham told me,” said Sylvia. “They offered him a seat on the board too, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with it.”
“The N.R.P.U.P.P.C.C.?” said Mr. Scatcherd, gradually going purple in the face.
“Yes, I suppose it is,” said Sylvia, to whom the initials meant nothing except that they made her think vaguely of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
“Do you know what that firm, for body I will not call them, is doing?” said Mr. Scatcherd.
“I don’t,” said Anne.
“Well, miss,” said Mr. Scatcherd, hitching his chair nearer Anne in a very alarming way, “it’s out to ruin Art.”
Anne, backing her chair a little, asked why.
“Simply to make money,” said Mr. Scatcherd. “Doing those coloured photos of all our beauty-spots and selling them cheap, so as real Artists will starve. I’ll give you some facks, miss. Before the war I used to make as much as fifty or sixty pounds most years with my black and whites. Easy money you may say, but I can assure you I’ve often been a week without finding the identical beauty-spot I had in my mind, not to speak of being out sketching in all weathers like the time I got the pewmonia in Northbridge churchyard doing my sketch of the tower from the north-east—one of my most popular bits that was. And now along comes a young whipper-snapper that I wouldn’t take as an errand-boy, with his two hundred guinea chromo-camera and takes the identically same view as I did, simply stealing it from me, miss, only he missed that little bit where t
he ventilation pipe comes up, and turns out his photos by the gross. And the public buy these commercial photos, miss, and mine don’t sell. And that’s your art-loving British public!”
He then laughed so bitterly and sneeringly that Anne moved away a little further.
“WELL uncle what’s all this noise about,” said his niece Hettie, irrupting suddenly from the verandah, “I only have to turn my back for five minutes and go down to The Shop to see if there’s any starch in which of course there isn’t and here I come back and find you shouting at the young ladies and Miss Sylvia not even with a chair to sit on good GRACIOUS you ought to be ashamed of yourself and how are you Miss Sylvia?”
Sylvia said she was quite well and she and her friend who was staying with her had only looked in to ask Mr. Scatcherd to vote for Mr. Gresham.
“Don’t you worry with uncle miss,” said Hettie. “I’ll see he votes for Mr. Gresham if I have to lock his trousers up WELL uncle I’m downright ashamed of you arguing with Miss Sylvia and that other young lady I thought you were all for the people and against the lords and there’s that young Hibberd’s father gone and got himself made a lord and everyone in Barsetshire knows the Greshams have never been lords and wouldn’t not if you paid them to don’t let me hear a word more about that young Hibberd uncle and if you got your pictures finished for Lady Graham’s sale you’d do a sight more good than sitting here idling and gossiping good GRACIOUS it seems I can’t go out of the house for a moment but you’ll be up to something silly.”
Sylvia felt she had done enough canvassing for that day, and having said good-bye to Miss Scatcherd and in a less degree, owing to his niece’s presence, to Mr. Scatcherd, went back with Anne to Hatch House, both girls very ready for lunch.
“Emmy Graham rang up this morning while you were out,” said Mrs. Halliday. “The Ford van is going into Barchester on Friday and Emmy said it would come back this way and take you both to Rushwater. She wants you to stay till Monday week.”
Peace Breaks Out Page 20
