Give Us This Day

by R. F Delderfield

  "Yes, he is," Lloyd George said, thoughtfully, "and a bad man to work for, they say. But your father is a radical, I'm told. Did he bring you up the way you should go?"

  It was difficult to withstand the man's charm, even though, behind his amiability, there was irony, and that hint of patronage, as though Giles had been a small public meeting of the faithful. He had the most winning smile Giles had ever seen on the face of man or woman and he could understand why he had a reputation with the ladies. His personality played over you like a warm draught, but a searching one at that, Giles thought, telling himself that it would be dangerous to be less than frank with a man whose shrewdness showed in his eyes—merry, teasing eyes, but feeding every impression back to the calculating brain in that big, proud head. He said, "You've probably heard about my father's methods. His above-average pay-scale and his provident scheme. He was a pioneer in that field and many City men dislike him on that account."

  "But he never tried to enter politics?"

  "No. He's a merchant first and foremost."

  "Probably more useful to us in that capacity," Lloyd George said, chuckling. "At least he's demonstrated that it isn't necessary to chain his workers to the oar in order to balance his books." He broke off, looking down at the tumbling water with a relaxed but watchful expression. "And how about you, Johnny Peep? Are you a convert, or have you always had a conscience? No, that's not what I'd like to know. Put it this way. Suppose we found you a constituency to nurse, and after times out of mind addressing lukewarm audiences in draughty church institutes, the walls of Jericho fell and you clawed us another seat from the privileged? What qualifications would you claim to enter that pint-sized chamber where we meet and make your maiden speech to gentlemen who weren't listening?"

  It was not at all the kind of interrogation he had been expecting. The man's complete lack of formality and touch of irony ran contrary to one another, so that it was difficult to decide whether he was posturing or deliberately seeking to discourage. Giles said, finally, "I've had far more administrative experience than most applicants. I'm in charge of a provident and pension scheme for two thousand hands, and I've read most of the social prophets in my time, deeply enough to quarrel with most of them."

  "That's a point in your favour. Nearly all were theorists. Anything more?"

  It was a time, Giles thought, to gamble, and he had the advantage of having Celtic ancestry on his mother's side. Irony was a weapon in this man's armoury but it wasn't the one he employed very much in his attacks on every aspect in the system where he saw, and bitterly resented, injustice and inherited privilege. Colourful detail and dramatic licence spiced every public address he had ever made, either as courtroom solicitor or a member of Parliament, and it followed that he would be likely to respond to his own stock-in-trade. Giles said, "When I was a boy I watched an elderly farm labourer and his wife expelled from a tied cottage and sent off to separate workhouses. I never forgot that. It had a direct bearing on what I read and what I thought about when I was still at school. The month I left, thirteen years ago now, I walked from North Devon to Edinburgh to see things for myself. One incident made a deeper impression on me than anything else. It was on the deepest level of a Rhondda coal-mine. A young miner had his foot crushed by a runaway tub and I visited his parents that same night."

  "Well?"

  "They saw the accident to their son as a piece of rare good fortune. It meant he could still earn money but in safety, on top, a cripple with a sporting chance of survival. If we can't do better than that, as the richest and most powerful nation on earth, something's wrong with our thinking as Christians."

  He saw at once that the gamble had paid off. The politician was looking at him with interest, and the gleam of mockery behind the eyes had gone. "That's what we're looking for, Johnny Peep. But I wouldn't have expected it from a man with your background. Where is your holiday home in Beddgelert?"

  "On the Caernarvon Road, about two hundred yards this side of the village. It's called 'Craig Wen'."

  "The white rock. I know it. Might I invite myself to call and have tea with you and your wife tomorrow?"

  "My wife would be delighted, Mr. George. But you could meet Romayne now if you wish. She's waiting for me in the dog-cart up on the bridge."

  "Ah no," he said, "that would be taking advantage of the lady. Anyone sharp enough to write that letter and steer you here would want to do the honours. Tomorrow. Around four."

  It was a polite dismissal and he got up, extending his hand. "You've already been more patient than I had any right to expect."

  "And you've been more entertaining, Mr. Swann. Constituents who buttonhole me as you did usually want to talk about the disestablishment of the Welsh church, or get a shilling off their rent. Good day to you."

  He shook hands, casually, and picked up his amateurish rod and line. When Giles looked over his shoulder halfway back to the bridge he was still hunched there. He looked very boyish for someone they said would end his career in the Cabinet or in prison.

  2

  Neither of them ever forgot one detail of that first visit of the Welsh Cyclone, as some of his admirers were calling him, to the pleasant house under the chain of mountains that enclosed the Nant Gwynant Pass all the way to Capel Curig, and on through the softer Vale of Conway to the sea. It was a house that had happy memories for him, for it was here, when he was no more than a schoolboy, he had lost his heart to the lovely restless girl Romayne Rycroft-Mostyn had been in those days.

  The memory of the visit remained a red-letter day for him because it was here, rather than beside the tumbling Dwyfor, that he fell under the hypnotic spell of this strange, magnetic being, a force rather than a man, embodying, as Giles saw it, the romantic fervour of the Gelt and a shrewdness that was Norman rather than Celtic and served the purpose of brake, spur, and generator of a man whose life, up to this point, had been a calculated advance towards the limelight and the source of power. For Romayne it had deeper, more personal significance. She saw Lloyd George's patronage as the first practical attempt she had ever made to channel the potential of Giles Swann into a course where others, as well as herself, would accept him as a teacher and interpreter of his own uniquely compassionate philosophy. That, and the first real opportunity he had ever had of justifying himself in his own eyes.

  For two hours by the grandfather clock, the Welshman talked about himself. Not vaingloriously, and certainly not tediously, for it was like listening to a saga out of the remote past where a king without a kingdom set about searching for his destiny. He told them of his obscure but happy childhood in these hills, fathered by a shoemaker uncle who emerged from the tale as a kind of Chiron preparing Jason for the Argosy. He told how, having decided to make his protégé a solicitor as a first step, his Uncle Lloyd had coached him in Latin by first learning Latin himself from a sixpenny grammar, bought on a bookstall. He laughed over his adolescent exercises in oratory, in the pulpit of a Welsh chapel, his early forays into journalism and the dramatic incident that made him famous throughout Wales when he successfully defended quarrymen flouting the law by forcing churchyard gates and burying a Nonconformist father beside his child in ground forbidden to Dissenters.

  The rest was familiar, at least to Giles. His challenge, at the age of twenty-six, of the local squire at the hustings, his early days at Westminster and his rise to prominence as a politician who paid scant tribute to parliamentary procedure in his onslaught on the social sicknesses of his age.

  But then, as the sun passed beyond the mountain summits in its swing down towards the Irish sea, he returned briskly to the purpose of his visit, the possibility of settling Giles in a constituency where hard work and, as he put it, the gathering might of the people would elect him to Parliament and enable him to help convert Britain into a real democracy instead of a sham one.

  "For mark you, it's almost here," he prophesied, with one of his extravagant gestures, "this landslide that will sweep us into power and enable us to implement
reforms centuries overdue. Five years, ten at the most, but not more I promise you, and maybe you'll be there, Johnny Peep, to hammer out a constitution based on principles of justice, merit, and equality of opportunity."

  But it was not all rhetoric. He had a shrewd eye, for instance, for advantages to be wrung from the fact that Giles Swann bore a nationally known name in commerce, and it was while questioning Giles on his father's secure foothold on the southern perimeter of the region that he pounced on one specific area as an ideal jumping-off place.

  "Pontnewydd?" he exclaimed, after Giles had told him the name of the valley where he had descended a coalmine in the company of Bryn Lovell, for so long his father's viceroy based on Abergavenny. "I know it well and I've heard tell of Lovell, too. Isn't he the man who hauled a Shannon pump to the flooded shaft, and saved the lives of nearly sixty entombed miners? Why, man, it's a legend down there and legends are stock-in-trade. Pontnewydd is in Usk Vale country, that will likely fall to us after a couple of campaigns. Evan Thomas, the candidate down there, is over sixty and I doubt if he'll weather it."

  He was silent and contemplative for a moment. Then he said, "It would mean full-time campaigning, lad. Over a period of years unless you were exceptionally lucky. How dependent are you on your father?"

  "I've money saved and my holding in the Swann Company would bring me a small income. But wouldn't it be possible to campaign up to the next election on a part-time basis?"

  "No," Lloyd George said, uncompromisingly, "it would not. Winning a seat in Parliament was once a rich man's hobby but it isn't any longer, praise God. People stopped playing at politics when Gladstone broadened the suffrage. In a place like Pontnewydd it would be a fight with the gloves off, much like my first fight against Squire Nanney up here."

  "Couldn't he be chosen as a North Wales candidate, Mr. George?" Romayne asked. He said, smiling, "No again, my dear! He's an Englishman, who doesn't speak a word of Welsh. In the south that isn't important. They've had the English on their backs for so long they're half Anglicised themselves I'm told, although they wouldn't admit it. We might try for an industrial seat in England, but I wouldn't have much influence there. Many English Liberals regard me as a potentially destructive element. The more respectable among them have already joined the club."

  "What club is that?"

  His eyes danced. "One that I hope you'll avoid if you ever get to Westminster. The Pro-Consul's Club as I think of it, where the lions lay down with the lambs. Or the wolves. Dramatic personality changes occur in revolutionaries, once they've put on the Westminster straitjacket. You might even have difficulty distinguishing them from their opponents after a year or so in that hot house. It's a rare place for raising hybrids." He looked at his watch. "I'm due in Caernarvon for a constituency meeting at eight and must leave you now. May I take it you're prepared to put yourself in my hands? Well, you might do worse in your situation, for I've taken a rare fancy to you, Johnny Peep. A little more fire in your belly and you'll emerge as a very promising recruit to my way of thinking. A Tory-orientated young man, with everything to gain by accepting the advantages conferred on you by a rich background and good education, who accepts the radical as the arbiter of the twentieth century." He turned to Romayne. "You can play your part, my dear. The role of a politician's wife isn't easy. You'll soon learn that, I daresay. In any other profession a man can use what cover is available. Out there in the arena he's a sitting target and it isn't only his hide that takes a walloping from time to time."

  They were both well aware of what was explicit in the warning. As recently as last July Lloyd George had been cited in a divorce suit that threatened to topple him, but he did not act like a man under a cloud. His denigrators, Giles decided, would have to get up long before sunrise to catch David Lloyd George napping.

  * * *

  Adam was in his tower working by lamplight when Giles came to him with the letter. An invitation to present himself at an Usk Vale constituency meeting, where preliminary steps would be taken to replace the retiring Liberal candidate at a rally of the Executive in the new year. Evan Thomas, a local councillor who had fought three unsuccessful elections, had stepped down earlier than anyone expected, on grounds of failing health. Almost certainly, Giles decided, he had been nudged by younger elements of the party in the area, men working in close liaison with Lloyd George, who was already accepted by the thrusters as the real leader of the Welsh Liberals.

  Giles had kept Adam informed to date but there hadn't been much to pass on and, in any case, his father's energies were fully absorbed in the gigantic task of reorganising and rebuilding headquarters while still exercising control of the provincial network. Giles had not been able to help him much. His own experience was confined almost wholly to welfare on the one hand, and the investigation of claims on the other, and he rarely spent more than two days a week in the capital. But Adam had not complained. Indeed it had seemed to Giles, through those busy autumn months after the New Broom had vanished from the scene, that his father relished the task thrust upon him by George's leave of absence, and the havoc wrought by the fire.

  "You'll be going down to look them over, I take it?" he said, and Giles reminded him that it was more a case of being looked over.

  "Swanns do the looking," the old man said, half in jest.

  But Giles replied, "Oh, I don't give myself much of a chance. They'll be sure to choose a local man in favour of a candidate who can only pay flying visits to the valleys," and failed to notice his father's abstracted look as he took the letter and held it closer to the circle of lamplight. "I thought I should let you know I'll be out of touch Monday and Tuesday of next week. I'll get those Swansea claim forms from the clerks and deal with them over the weekend."

  Adam said, sharply, "Wait on, son. Don't be in such a confounded hurry. I need time to mull this over. Pour me a noggin and help yourself to one while you're about it."

  "But you're swamped with work. Look at that desk."

  "I'm getting on top of it."

  Giles went to the wall cupboard his father had reconverted into a cellarette. Ever since he could remember his father seemed far more relaxed in this queer octagonal chamber than in his more comfortable surroundings at Tryst. The place still had the air of a bivouac, tenanted by a campaigning general with spartan tastes and a passion for work.

  "How do you feel about going the whole hog, boy?"

  Giles looked at him, encouraged by the smile plucking the corners of his mouth.

  "You mean shifting down there permanently? Leaving you to cope with this mess alone?"

  "I'm not alone. Keate has come back four days a week. And that young brother of yours is a damned quick learner."

  Giles noticed he said nothing of old Hugo. He had always been disposed to dismiss old Hugo as an amiable oaf. Anywhere outside a sports stadium, that is.

  "One of us ought to stand with you, apart from a kid Edward's age."

  "Not you, boy. For one thing your heart's never been in it and for another this letter tells me you've got bigger fish to fry. Well?"

  "I don't know. I as good as told Lloyd George I couldn't accept a full-time candidacy."

  "Question of money?"

  "No. We could get by on a modest income down there."

  "That won't get you far, son."

  "How do you mean?"

  "The Liberals are not only short of young talent at the moment. I happen to know they're desperately short of ready money."

  "I didn't promise them any money."

  "You didn't have to. I'm not saying that chap Lloyd George doesn't recognise good political potential when it comes knocking at his door, but it wasn't that that got your foot in the door. If you could bring the local party a sizeable annual subscription they wouldn't give a local man a second look. I know that much about party politics. You've got your share of Sam's residue. It's more than enough to win that seat, backed by hard graft."

  "Isn't it a bit like buying your way in?"

  "You hav
e to buy your way into everything, son. You always did, even in my day. Only now it's twice as expensive. Only those Keir Hardie crusaders see politics in any other light and they'll come around to it as soon as the Labour Party settles down."

  "Lloyd George got himself elected without financial backing."

  "So he did. But who keeps him there, pitching away at the coconut shies? His family practice mostly. I've had that on good authority."

  "It still doesn't entitle me to leave you in the lurch."

  Adam sipped his brandy. "Tell you something I've not told anyone else, Giles. Something I wouldn't admit to your mother, if only for fear of hurting her feelings. I'm happier here, back in this slum, than I've ever been since the day I walked out on it, and turned my hand to making something of Tryst. That was a challenge while I was doing it, but now all that's left for me to do is to watch the trees and shrubs grow and I'll be gone before they mature. Oh, I daresay George regards what I'm doing here as a sacrifice, and I mean to let him go on thinking it. It might help to keep him in line, after that silly business with that Lockerbie woman. The truth is I put myself out to grass before I was used up, and it does a man a power of good to realise that when he's seventy and get a chance to prove it. Lift your glass, boy, and drink to the first Swann to make laws. They've been busy bending 'em ever since Agincourt. It makes a change."