For the rest, they were actuated mainly by the natural discontent arising from the belief that he had inculcated among them, that the men of the railway camp were monopolizing the female society that the floods had left them, and were endeavouring to force an agreement upon them which would perpetuate this condition. But those who followed his leadership would, if they were unable at the moment to assert their rights, at least retain their freedom to claim them when opportunity should become more favourable.
The men whom he thus enlisted were not all whom he could have persuaded to such a course. He had no use for wasters, or for such as would be likely to prove a source of future weakness or discord. He wanted men of his own stamp. Hard, unscrupulous, but not dissolute. Men who would submit to discipline, if they recognized the efficiency that enforced it. He was a good judge of such men, and he probably collected all that remained alive that were worth having.
But, having done this, he saw that they were not sufficient to justify him in an immediate trial of strength. The risk was too great.
Having decided this, he had a long talk with Rentoul, the one man alive who could ride a horse, and who had done so farther than the pedestrian wanderings of his fellows. The following morning Rentoul had disappeared, and Cooper’s horses were no longer in the field which he had fenced to confine them.
A long interview with Butcher followed, and the next morning he walked over to the railway camp and sought out Tom Aldworth. He went very early in the day, because he was naturally an early riser, and he chose an hour at which he felt sure of finding Tom at the camp. He wished neither to make a formal appointment nor to risk an abortive call.
Some men might have hesitated about the reception they would meet, or even for their personal safety under such circumstances, but Cooper had no lack either of courage or self-assurance, and he felt no doubt of his ability to control any situation which might arise.
He walked easily in spite of his weight. He was still fleshy, but in better condition than he had been six weeks ago, and he had always been an active man.
He looked keenly right and left as he made his way through the fresh greenness of a country that had been washed by heavy rain in the night and was now responding to the warmth of the early July sun. He cared nothing for natural beauty. He knew little of agriculture.
But he saw everywhere disorder, waste, and confusion, which his soul loathed. If he did not understand agriculture, he understood building, and he looked with contempt at the slack incompetence of the efforts to repair or rebuild which he saw around him. Law. That was what was needed, law. Law to make the lazy dogs work twelve hours a day, till they got the place straight. Law, to make them do what they were told, and to tell them how and when to do it.
He had lived when there had been so many laws that no man living could even know them completely, and when they were being increased continually. Because a central parliament, however diligent, could not increase them with the required rapidity, they had had local assemblies in every town to supplement these exertions. He had himself assisted to make some hundreds of additional by-laws for the restrictions of the liberties of his fellow-citizens. He had never doubted the necessity of the work he was doing. It was true that a summons had once been delivered at his own door for an infringement of one of these regulations, but that was merely the blunder of an officer who did not know him, and two minutes on the telephone with the chief constable had settled that nonsense…
He had crossed the Larkshill Road, and passed the ruins of the ironworks, and crossed the canal-bridge, before he saw a human creature stirring, and then it was only an untidy slut (as he called her in his mind), who sat at the door of a half-fallen cottage, idly strumming on a banjo, to which she sang at intervals.
For some reason best known to herself she changed the tune as Jerry Cooper approached her and started a ribald music-hall ditty of the previous winter, on which a voice came from the interior of the cottage, “Chuck it, Doll; you know I hate that one.”
Cooper remembered the name, and looked at her more curiously. So that was the young woman who was to reward the industry of Reddy Teller! She looked a worthless baggage. Probably didn’t know how to boil an egg. What fools men were!
If he had hoped to find Tom Aldworth unready or unfit to receive him, he was disappointed. He met him talking to Ted Wrench at the top of the railway embankment. He was evidently giving some admonition to a youth who received it sulkily, but this ceased as Jerry approached, and he turned to receive him politely enough, though without cordiality.
Jerry did not want cordiality. He had come to ascertain if he had yet any chance of getting his own way, but he did not expect it, and without that he wished to quarrel—up to a point.
He commenced on a jeering note which he could make more offensive than the harsh and dominating tone which was his usual manner.
“Well, Tom, you’re a great man now. You’re so sure you can smash us all that you don’t even need to keep a watch on who’s coming over the bridge.”
“There’s a sentry at the old works. He’d give us warning of anything dangerous. But he’d let you pass,” Tom answered easily. (Had Harry Swain really been awake or asleep, he wondered. Well, never mind now!)
Cooper scowled.
“I told you,” he went on, “when you came to me for help, that we could work together if you’d talk sense, and you wouldn’t then. I wonder if you will now. If we’d understood each other, they’d never have ventured here at all. Of course, you knocked them out, but there’s some gone who might be alive now, if you’d listened, and it’s just the same today. If we’d pulled together there isn’t a dog’d bark without asking if it might, and we should get the damned place straight.”
Tom said, “Well, I asked you to help us.”
“You asked me to play your game.”
“I asked you to help turn those brutes out, and now we’ve done it ourselves.”
“Yes, you did that well enough. And now they’re gone, can we deal?”
“I’ve no quarrel,” said Tom. “But you’re not liked here. That’s plain talk, and plain talk’s best. We’d best go our own ways.”
Jerry glanced round contemptuously. There was nothing particularly in sight where they stood, but Tom knew what he meant before he spoke.
“It’s the way of pigs,” he said brutally. “You go your way, and I’ll go mine, and we’ll see who comes out top in the end.”
Tom knew that there was some justice in the comment. There was little of order, method, or cleanliness in the camp during these desultory plundering days. He did not doubt that Jerry Cooper would handle matters differently if they should unite to support him. He knew that he himself lacked the force of personality that the position required, and he was unhappy because he could not settle his mind on a better man. But he did not like Jerry Cooper—nor trust him. No, they must go their own ways.
So he stood silent, and Jerry spoke again. “Well, you’ve had your chance. You can always remember that. I shan’t stay in; this muck…. I don’t say I shan’t come back.”
He turned his back on Tom as he said it, and walked away. The interview hadn’t gone quite as he had meant it. He hadn’t mentioned the question of the women—nor others. But he had not done badly. He was retiring because he had failed to rule, and he would be first in his own place, whatever it might be, but he had contrived to give it an aspect as of one who moves his seat in a public vehicle to avoid a verminous neighbour.
Tom wondered vaguely what he meant to do. He had no feeling of victory.
The next day Jerry had gone. What he could, he took; but he left most of his possessions, including, inevitably, the house he had been rebuilding. He could always face a small loss for a larger gain. He looked ahead.
BOOK THREE
Chapter Thirty-One
COOPER disappeared into the deserted country to the south or west, and for the next two months very little was heard of him.
He may have known more than was kn
own of him, for Reddy Teller appeared in Larkshill on several occasions, till it was made clear to him that such visits were unwelcome.
He certainly maintained communications with Butcher at Helford Grange; and it was known to those who rose sufficiently early that Rentoul would sometimes ride through the district in the early morning hours, which had once been sacred to cats, and milkmen, and market-gardeners. But his location remained unknown. The plundering expeditions, which still continued as the weather permitted, did not go far enough, or were not in the right direction to find him. But there had been fewer of these, because the weather broke a day or two after his departure, and there was heavy rain, which drove men into the shelters which they had erected during the previous weeks, and taught them the importance of rain-proof building. Even on the sunniest days, the ground was wet and unpleasant for camping. Fields of heavy, unmown grass hold the wet, and are unpleasant to struggle through, unless feet and legs are well protected.
Tom had only succeeded in capturing one of the horses for which he had rashly undertaken liability in exchange for barbed wire, which, like many larger military expenditures since the world began, had not proved to be of much ultimate importance.
The horses, of which there were now two or three herds feeding in the lower lands, were increasingly wild and wary, and neither Tom nor his friends had any previous experience in such enterprises.
Butcher relieved the difficulty by offering to take six boxes of matches instead of the three horses which were still owing.
The offer was less generous than it appeared, as he had received a message from Cooper that he was now getting all the horses he wanted, and the order need not be executed, but the selection of matches in substitution, and the moderate quantity specified, was a shock to Tom, and to others to whom he told it.
They came of a race which must rank high, if not highest, among the most wasteful that the earth has known. It had declined to learn anything even from the forced economies of the years of war, and ten years afterward it had been as improvident as though such an experience had never entered its national life. Even when it announced to the not unintelligent or indifferent Eastern races that it could no longer afford the lives of its children, it still wasted sufficient food in its kitchens to have fed a county.
Every one wasted matches, and most would have shown an open contempt for anyone who objected to do so. It had happened that the goods which Mrs. Millett had saved from her husband’s burning store had included a large case of these articles, and from this and other sources they had been freely scattered during the earlier weeks, and used without a thought of the time when they would become exhausted. But Butcher’s ways were known. How large a proportion of Mrs. Millett’s salvage had already found its way to his extensive cellars will never be told, but when he made open demand for any article, and put a high price upon it, it was a sure deduction that he had already cornered the available supplies as far as possible, and that he foresaw a shortage, against which he would be able to fix whatever price he pleased.
So men began to count their matches with care, and to give the unopened box less freely than they would have done yesterday. They remembered the lesson of a previous week when the price of tobacco, in all its forms, had been suddenly doubled, although every one knew that Butcher’s men had looted an unburnt store, and it had been said that there weren’t enough men left alive to smoke it in ten years’ time. However that might be, other supplies had been getting short, and applications to Butcher had increased, and now it could only be dearly bought, and only for certain exchanges, such as tea, which had been in short supply from the first days, and was now at a fantastic height of comparative values….
The wet days gave more time for talk, and for attention to the interior amenities of the dwelling-places of the community. More time, also, for taking stock of what had been collected already, and hard work at times in providing additional protection for valued goods which had been allowed to stand out in the weather.
The tides, with a change of wind, threw up in a single day more of the buried wealth they covered than they had done in a month previously. Most of it was spoiled or worthless, at least for any immediate use, but there was still much which was worth the toil of transit, and the uncertainty of what the day would bring was, to many, an alluring gamble that surpassed any possible satisfaction that could follow a more regular occupation.
And amid such spasmodic activities the summer days passed quickly.
* * * * * * *
One day, Martha Barnes closed her cottage, haring sent her family into hiding (for reasons which will appear) among the Larkshill ruins, and made her way to the railway camp, seeking an interview with Tom, who was away at Hallowby Lodge. Not being one to be turned from her purpose lightly, she looked round, and observed Monty Beeston, seated on the bucket of which we know, and surveying the landscape with his usual diligence.
“Any bosses about?” she inquired, with a laconic directness which was her habitual economy.
Monty considered her without haste. She was a woman, and therefore of no importance. Probably a woman would know best how to deal with her.
“There’s Miss Temple,” he suggested.
“I don’t want no truck with ‘shes’. I’ve come serious.”
Monty looked at her more indulgently. She was a woman of sense, though a woman still. But he had no better offer to make.
“Miss Temple’s different,” he explained vaguely. “She’s the only boss here today.”
“Then where’s her?” said Martha, with no further waste of words in opposition to the inevitable.
Martha found Muriel on the off-side of the train, seated on one of the boxes by which she mounted to her own compartment. She was sewing a torn garment, and four of the five young children, which were all that the camp contained, were seated opposite to her on the down-line rail. Muriel had tried for three weeks to secure practical organization, and the reassertion of spiritual and moral values as she understood them and this was the extent of her victory. Four children, out of five, all of whom would have been useful to a surviving relative or some self-selected guardian, as cleaners, carriers, water-fetchers, or in a hundred other casual ways, had been released that Muriel might give them such instruction as she thought appropriate to their present circumstances, and the probabilities which were before them; and in two instances this concession had only been bought by services to be rendered to the children’s needs, of which the garment on which she was then working was an illustration.
Martha surveyed the scene with some reduction of her usual grimness. She looked at Muriel, who had resumed the Rector’s coat, as more suitable for her daily occupation than the war-path garments of the one-time owner of the trunk that she had plundered in Sterrington. Becoming aware that someone had paused on the other side of the line, she ceased the tale she was telling, and lifted her eyes from her work.
The two women looked at each other. for a moment in a critical silence. Within a year they were of the same age. The one was work-worn, bony, and meagre; the other, though the capacious coat partly concealed it, still had the dim and graceful figure that she had kept from the youth that was so far behind her.
The one showed a lined and wrinkled face amid untidy wisps of greying hair, and her eyes, though bright enough, were small and sunken beneath their puckered lids; the other looked from eyes that were clear and wide open, beneath unwrinkled brows, and had a complexion that a child might envy. To a casual glance it might have seemed that a space of twenty years divided them, yet it might be that the body of Martha Barnes, reared in privations, and habituated to certain toil and to uncertain nourishment, had a more enduring vitality than that which outwardly appeared so much less battered.
Widely as their experience of life had differed, they were alike in regarding their bodies as subservient to their own wills, and alike, too, in a hundred ways which it would have surprised them about equally to discover.
“Can I speak to you, miss
, for ten minutes?” Mrs. Barnes inquired.
Muriel had a trained memory for faces. She remembered Martha as the one who had exchanged words with Ellis Roberts on the subject of Datchett’s cow—now the happy mother of a very promising calf—as they Lad approached the outskirts of Larkshill. She considered that the woman must have had some serious cause to come so far. She dismissed the children, and invited her visitor to enter the compartment in which she lived.
“We can talk here quietly,” she said. “I had one of the children in here till last week. It was unwell, and there was a fear of infection, but it proved to be nothing but a result of bad feeding. I have been alone since then.”
She may have felt that some explanation was needed for her degree of comfort in that crowded camp. She valued her solitude, but was doubtful whether she ought not to make a more definite offer to share it with others than she had yet done, since the child had gone back to its own place.
But Martha made no comment. She had something else on her mind.
“It’s this way, miss,” she began at once, when she was seated. “I’ve got three children left livin’: there’s two young ones, an’ Davy, that’s a grown lad; and there’s a girl in the house that’s not mine at all.
“When that mad rush came, there was a big motor ran off the road an’ somersaulted down the field that’s ’side the hill, above my cottage. I thought they’d be all dead; an’ two was, but there was a girl with her head broke, an’ a leg, an’ I did what I could, with two children livin’, an’ one dead, an’ not a wall left standin’. It was better when Davy came back from the mine on the next day—but it’s waste talk of all that. We all went through it, an’ here we are. But I did what I could for the girl, an’ put her leg straight, an’ in a day or so she comes round, an’ her head healed itself, an’ her leg mended in a month, or under, though not proper. It’s a bit short of the pair, an’ it’s like it will. But she’s all right now, bar that, an’ a bit more useful than she’d ’a’ been in her ma’s house. She knowed naught when she got up, an’ she don’t know much now, but she’s one to learn.
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