“It was good of you to come,” he said. “I hope it wasn’t a trouble.”
“On the contrary,” Astell replied, coughing harshly, “it suited me very well.”
The colleagues stood, formidable and controlled masters of law and effort, against the turbulent chaos of the spring.
“Come in. Come and have tea. It’s a bit cold here.”
They went into a small room on the ground floor, Snaith’s drawing-room, all ivory and green and honey coloured, a delicious room. An immense white cyclamen laid back its snowy ears and snarled with crimson lips from the broad window-sill. A fountain of mimosa splashed from a porcelain jar. The cold landscape was framed in glowing green silk curtains, shot with firelight.
Astell saw neither the elegance of the Adams fireplace nor the perfection of the flowers. He unwound his scarf and came to the point.
“Have you decided?”
“Yes.”
An amber-coloured cat leapt on to Snaith’s chair and settled there. It added frivolity to the conversation.
“Is Carne going on with his idiotic case?”
The housekeeper entered with a glittering tea-tray.
“Do sit down. He says so. Do you like Indian or China tea?”
“He hasn’t a leg to stand on.”
“No.”
“It’ll ruin him.”
“Possibly.” Snaith chose Indian tea from a silver caddy, and warmed the shining pot.
“What damages are you asking?”
“Ten thousand. Do you prefer cream or lemon?”
“Oh—anything—Has he got ten thousand pounds?”
Few could perform better than Snaith the priestly rite of tea-making, but it was hard to conduct the ritual in the face of Astell’s almost contemptuous indifference. He would see no distinction between Snaith’s Earl Grey mixture and the brown treacly stuff from the urns at Unity Hall.
“How true is it—this about Stillman raising a mortgage and selling it to Tadman? I suppose there’s nothing in it?”
Astell gobbled the small puffed scones with appetite rather than appreciation.
“Oh, that’s quite true.”
“True?”
Astell gasped with amazement, swallowed a crumb, and choked.
“Perfectly true. It started because I lent old Huggins five hundred pounds——”
“But that’s what Carne said!”
“Quite. Carne made several perfectly true statements.”
“But . . .”
“With this money Huggins acquired, in the name of a chap called Aythorne, the sheds on Leame Ferry Waste.”
Astell stared.
“Aythorne let Stillman the undertaker acquire a mortgage, In order that he might buy a shop in Dollstall.”
“But—but why did Huggins . . .”
“Because he had reasons for marrying off a girl to Mr. Aythorne.”
“Oh!”
“Huggins, who is not on the Joint Committee with Kingsport, but who is on Town Planning, thought he was sure we were going to build on the Leame Ferry Waste site. Therefore he persuaded Tadman and Drew to come in with him, to buy off Stillman, to get hold of the rest of the site, to put machinery in the sheds so that they could claim damages, and to advertise valuable building property, in order that the council would be forced, when they wanted it, to pay through the nose.”
“And you knew this?”
“At first I only guessed a little. Lately I have made it my business to find out everything I wanted to know.”
“But this is all just what Carne said.”
“Yes.”
“Then—then—Carne’s got his case.”
“Oh, no.”
Snaith picked up another slice of wafery bread and butter, folded it with precision, and smiled at the bewildered socialist.
“Oh, no,” he repeated, “because the Joint Council is, on my persuasion, not going to recommend Leame Ferry Waste.”
“Not—going—to——”
“No. No. I think we shall find that Schedule B—you remember the land on Schedule B?—is the more convenient.”
“You mean south of the new road—the old point-to-point course?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s out of the question. Surely. The high land value—good agricultural land.”
“Not so high as the Waste now that Drew’s advertised a— ‘valuable building site.’”
“It’s so far from Kingsport—we shall have that fearful Clixton business again—the men unable to pay their fares to work—and taking them out of the sums needed for food.”
“Not if the Kingsport Electricity Association runs that new light railway we discussed, with cheap workmen’s tickets.”
“That’s one of your shows, isn’t it?”
“It happens to be so.”
“I see. It’ll be rather a good thing for you, won’t it?”
“I hope so.”
There was this at least about Snaith, thought Astell, he was no hypocrite. He did not pretend to be a philanthropist when in truth he was raking in profits. Snaith continued, bland and genial.
“We shall bring forward Schedule B as the recommendation from the joint committee. I have the Kingsport people in my hands now, I think. I have promised to straighten out that mess with the new maternity home. They’re very keen on it.”
“Quite.”
Astell’s sardonic humour greeted Snaith’s frankness. He recognised this bargaining, intriguing, compromising world. So long as he worked with Snaith, he must play his game.
“The rates will go up again a little,” Snaith continued, balancing a lump of sugar on the slice of lemon floating in his cup—a water-lily on a leaf, he thought fancifully, applauding his own taste for metaphors. Chinese, he considered it. “But that won’t matter so much. These new people will stand it. The garden city will bring to the South Riding a quite different type of rate-payer. These tenants in our council houses belong to a new generation—the age of the easy purchase system, of wireless and electricity and Austin Sevens. They want good motor roads, because they dream one day of driving their own cars. They want libraries and schools and clinics and cheap secondary education. They attend lectures in townswomen’s guilds and women’s institutes about ‘The Rates and how we spend them.’ They have a quite new kind of communal sense. Don’t you agree with me?”
“Yes,” murmured Astell, and suddenly was aware of the immense relief of liberation, because he was reaching the end of all this casuistry and bargaining. He was tired of compromise.
He had seen what it could achieve, a better hospital here, a more generous benefit rate there, the eyes of one or two councillors opened to reality. Because he had worked with Snaith in the garden village scheme, instead of exposing his selfish and predatory methods, slums would be pulled down, a certain number of families would move out into the red-roofed, neatly-ordered council houses. There would be gardens for them, with fruit and vegetables, and broad green plots for children to play in; there would be hospitals and schools and libraries. Fewer mothers would die in childbirth, fewer babies would sicken in airless basement bedrooms, fewer housewives would collapse into lethargy, defeated by the unending battle against dirt and inconvenience.
Perhaps it was worth while, but this was not what Astell wanted. He had not struggled and sacrificed health and prosperity and ambition in order that a few Kingsport shopgirls might gratify their snobbish ambition of decorating their houses with leather suites, and dream of possessing a Morris Cowley.
Nor was he one of those men who enjoy fighting over detail. There were such, and he knew and admired them. His great friend in South Africa had been a man like that, who constituted himself the gadfly of the Chamber of Mines, harrying them first over a point of workman’s compensation, then over the interest on the deferred pay system, then over the rates for piecework underground. But these were not Astell’s ideas of a good fight. While on the county council he had compromised with capitalism in order to achieve certa
in concrete results. Now he was sick of it. Now he would get free.
I’m going away, he gloated. I’m getting free.
He beamed at Snaith through his round glasses.
“Good,” he said. “I wish you luck with it. And, by the way, you mention secondary education. Don’t forget the new buildings for the High School. I think we ought to move it inland a bit, and make a big boarding-block for the whole Skerrow-Kiplington area.”
“I’m not likely to forget with you here to bully me,” smiled Snaith.
“But I shan’t be here. That’s just it.”
“Shan’t be here?”
“No. I’m retiring from the council and clearing out.”
“Your health?” There was genuine kindness and anxiety in the quick inquiry. “It’s worse?”
“No. Better. That’s just it. I’m going back to Glasgow. Got an organising job on the Clyde.”
“My dear fellow! You can’t do it. It’ll kill you in a couple of years.”
“Will it? And does that much matter?”
“But—but we can’t spare you.”
The little alderman was really troubled.
Yet it was not so much for Astell that he was grieved, as for himself. Here he was up against it again, up against that uncalculating generosity and rashness which plunged into action, which identified itself with an impersonal aim. And it troubled him.
“You can spare me very well,” smiled Astell. “After all, you hardly know what I am and who I’m like. You’ve only seen a sick man. While I was here, I more or less kept truce. But you just wait a little.”
“Shall we see you preaching revolution?”
“I hope so.”
“And turning us all upside down, and destroying instead of creating?”
“No—in order to create. Look here, Snaith, you and I have worked pretty well together, but we’re in opposite camps really. You want entirely different things from what I do.”
“Do I? How do you know? How do you know what I want?”
Astell smiled. He was a free man. He was happy. He spoke from the exalted height of his own renunciation of security. He said, “I know what I want, you see. And whatever you want, it’s not the same as this. I want a great cooperative commonwealth of free peoples, all over the world. Without distinction of sex, race or creed. I want to see them controlling their own lives, what they do and how they do it. That means control of things, of raw materials, transport and industry. It means real economic as well as political democracy. It means social equality. It means spiritual freedom. And that isn’t going to come by working as I’ve worked here. Oh, I know that all this is useful—so far as it goes. But it’s not changing men’s values. It’s not destroying their destroyers.”
“You mean, it still leaves evil-minded individualists like me to be able to reap a little profit?”
“Yes. I do.”
“And you would destroy me?”
“Neck and crop.”
“You won’t, you know. You’ll only destroy yourself. The English don’t take easily to revolution.”
“Do you think any revolution’s been easy? All revolutions are bloody and barbarous. But so is life bloody and barbarous in present circumstances. As for me, I’ve tried acting the invalid and taking a cushy job, and I don’t like it.”
“I see.” Snaith sighed, envious of a passion that was beyond caution, of a faith that could over-ride the scepticism that ate into his own desires like acid. “You’re like the old Spanish knights who greeted each other with the wish, ‘May God deny thee peace and give thee glory.’ That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” squirmed Astell uncomfortably. He had no taste for metaphors and proverbs. He saw the fun of the fight before him, the smoke-filled halls, the older grey men with union badges in their buttonholes, the piles of fingered, soiled press cuttings in the offices. He was going back to work—back to life. He was happy, yet it never occurred to him that Snaith was envying him with a tormenting and bitter envy.
Snaith’s manservant came in with the evening paper.
“Sad thing this about Mr. Carne,” he said.
“What sad thing?”
Christie spread the paper on the lacquered table. Snaith read slowly the big black letters of the headline: “Fatality feared to well-known Yorkshire Sportsman.” And underneath: “Cliff Fall of Mr. Carne.”
“What is it?” asked Astell.
“Look at this.”
Astell came and stood behind him. Together they read.
“It is feared that Mr. Robert Carne, the well-known Yorkshire sportsman and gentleman farmer, who for thirteen years was member of the South Riding County Council for the division of Maythorpe, has met with a fatal accident. Last night he left the Crown Inn Stables at Kiplington at about 6 p.m. to ride home to his residence at Maythorpe Hall. On his way, he had arranged to call at Spring Farm for a business interview with his tenant, Mr. Eli Dickson. As he did not appear, Mr. Dickson visited Maythorpe Hall and learned from the servants that Mr. Carne had not arrived. It was supposed that business had detained him in Kiplington, but early this morning Mr. T. Beachall of Maythorpe, while gathering driftwood along the Maythorpe sands, at low tide, noticed a new and substantial fall of earth from the cliff, and on it, partially buried, the body of a horse. He quickly summoned help from Maythorpe village; the carcass was disinterred, and recognised as the famous Black Hussar, for many years winner of the Hunt Cup at the South Riding agricultural shows; Mr. Carne was riding this animal when he left the Crown Inn. His riding crop and hat were also found, but so far there has been discovered no trace of his body, which, it is thought, may have been washed out to sea. The path along the cliff had been newly broken and there is no doubt that while riding home yesterday evening, Mr. Carne found the earth breaking under him and was thrown from his mount in the act of falling. The coastal erosion along the south cliffs has long been a cause of anxiety to the local authorities. . . .”
“Suicide?” asked Astell.
“I doubt it,” Snaith replied.
There was a great deal more in the paper. About the Carnes of Maythorpe and their beneficent activities in the county; about Carne’s marriage to the Honourable Muriel Sedgmire (“now for some years an invalid”), about his war service, about his sporting and athletic prowess, about Midge (“now a pupil at the Kiplington High School for Girls, of which her father was a governor”), about the currents of the tide and the improbability of Mr. Carne’s survival after such a fall, even if the tide had not been high that evening.
“Could he be alive still?” asked Astell. “Could this be staged?”
“I hardly think so.”
“A getaway? He was in a fearful jam.”
“Yes; he was. But he wasn’t the sort to run away.” Snaith did not want to think so. He did not want to think of his opponent as less noble and obstinate than he had believed him.
He was shocked. This was something unforeseen and violent, something that disconcerted him, upsetting calculations.
Astell was less distressed. To him Carne had been a nuisance and an obstructionist. He had never forgotten that incident of the Public Assistance Committee, when the farmer had proved abler at comfort than himself. He could not pretend to feel any deep emotion. Carne was merely one enemy to his cause the less.
“Will this affect your plans—Schedule B, for instance?” he asked Snaith.
“No. Why should it?”
The little vice-chairman of the council seemed distracted, staring now at the paper, now at the dancing flames. Astell left soon. He had given his notice of withdrawal; he had agreed, as his last service to the council, to accept and work for Schedule B. He caught his bus in order to take a meeting at the Co-operative Women’s Guild at Dollstall.
But Snaith could not so easily evade the thought of Carne’s accident. Directly Astell had left, he set in motion the obsequious instruments of his active life. He seized the telephone and rang up the police, the bank, the lawyers. He bec
ame master of the facts of the situation. He learned of Carne’s financial failures, of his swollen expenses, of his recent efforts to set his house in order. He learned that already the insurance company was a little dubious. He tapped his pencil against his teeth and pondered, inexplicably distressed and yet somehow gratified by his discoveries.
He did not know quite what emotion moved him. He left the telephone, put on his overcoat, and went out into the garden. Away to the west the final tattered banners of a vivid sunset paled the sky. A ploughman, topping the rise, stood silhouetted for a moment against it, a grave traditional figure. On Snaith’s lawn his ancient ash creaked in the nagging wind. Old, thin, decaying; it had better come down, thought Snaith.
The Carnes of Maythorpe, he thought, were like that tree—rooted deep in the earth; they understood that; their leaves and branches were lifted high and all men saw them, a conspicuous growth, proud, decorative. What they could not see, what they had never learned to recognise, were the winds that blew from all the ends of the world, Canada, Argentine, Denmark, New Zealand, Russia. They would survive. But the wind and the rain and the storms from west to east, taxes and tariffs and subsidies and quotas, beef from the Argentine, wool from Australia, economic nationalism, fashions and crazes—all those imponderable influences of which their slow, strong, rigid minds took no heed—these would destroy them. If Carne were dead, or if he were in flight, what difference did that make? He was defeated. The tree must be cut down.
Yet there was no triumph in Snaith’s heart as he stood with his hand on that half-hollowed trunk. Carne had lived; he had been rooted deep in the soil; he had loved and hated and begotten and feared and dared. He had never shrunk back from life; he had done everything that struck his limited imagination as worth doing. When he fell into a blind passion for his peer’s daughter, he had married her. When his country went to War, he put on uniform. When his hounds hunted, he rode after them. He never held himself back as Snaith had done. His violent, immense, instinctive growth had brought him sorrow, but he had known colour, increase and passion. He had lived.
And I? thought Snaith. Between Carne who lived by instinct and Astell who lived by an idea, he felt that he was nothing—a stream of water, cold, metallic, barren, without colour or form, moving along its self-chosen channel till the sand sucked it up and it disappeared. Unfecund, flavourless, formless—a direction—a flow—a nothing. Here lieth one whose life was lived as water. It has evaporated; it no longer exists.
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