Give Us This Day

by R. F Delderfield

  2

  Adam received the news that his daughter was to take a second husband with reservations. He knew all about the Irish fillibusters at Westminster and was scornful of their tactics. It gave him no confidence that, when, as he predicted, they gained their precious Home Rule, they would govern themselves any better than they had been governed by the British, but he was glad that Henrietta welcomed the match, realising that she had never really ceased worrying about Helen since hearing that story about the girl shooting a man in cold blood and exulting in the deed. She said, "It's positively the best thing that could have happened, Adam, and it doesn't matter a dropped stitch if Clarke is the firebrand you say he is. The fact is she'll be settled again, and it's not too late for her to hope for a child to take her mind off her troubles."

  That, he reflected with a chuckle, had always been Hetty's way with difficulties of any kind as far as her daughters were concerned. Children represented continuity, and continuity to Henrietta Swann, daughter of a pushing millhand and a penniless Irish immigrant, was paramount. Also, he supposed, with another chuckle, the act of begetting them, for no woman in this self-righteous day and age could have approached that with more enthusiasm. He contented himself with replying: "Well, they're an enterprising bunch, I must say, when it comes to choosing partners. Just tally up our in-laws and try and find the common denominator. We've got a farmhand, a general's daughter, an Austrian peasant, a millionaire's daughter, the son of a pill manufacturer, and that social lioness who gobbled up old Hugo. Now, to add variety, Helen is giving us a ringside seat at Donnybrook Fair. And we've still got young Edward and Margaret in reserve. What's brewing in that direction, I wonder?"

  He was not to wonder long. News came via Giles that same season that Margaret, postscript of the tribe (conceived, he recalled, the night they buried the old Colonel, in 1879) had found a cogent reason for prolonging her stay in the Welsh valley and would almost surely, or so Giles predicted, marry a Welshman, "Without," as he described it, "two halfpence to rub together."

  * * *

  Her youngest daughter's shy but prolonged renunciation of the social scene, her seeming inability to make an impact on any one of the eligible young males her brothers had introduced into the house over the years, had been a source of concern to Henrietta for a long time. She reasoned that Margaret, at twenty-five, was in a fair way to becoming an old maid, totally absorbed in what Henrietta thought of as time-wasting pursuits, of the kind once recommended to young girls to keep them out of mischief until a suitor came knocking at the door. And this, in her view, was quite unnecessary, for Margaret had claims to be considered the prettiest (she was certainly the most feminine) of all the Swann girls. She had the kind of face that would retain its youthfulness into middle-age, perhaps even later; a delicate pink and white complexion, despite hours spent outdoors in all weathers; a gentleness of disposition that none of the other Swanns, male or female, possessed; a low, pleasing voice; an equable temper; a quick, shy smile; and a trim figure, all of which, in her mother's experience, were qualities young men sought when they came looking for a wife. She had, in addition, two characteristics that were even rarer in girls, especially pretty girls: intelligence and the good sense to conceal it, for it was Henrietta's experience that young men were frightened off by signs of intelligence in a woman, indicating, as it usually did, that they were bad listeners. And yet, as the years passed, nobody came asking and, what was worse, Margaret showed no disposition whatever to worry about her lack of suitors. She was quite content, it seemed, to enjoy her endless love affair with nature, to woo and be wooed by spring landscapes, cloud movements over the Weald, the song of the wind in the larch coppices bordering Tryst to the north, or the older woods that crowned the spur behind the house. She had a predisposition to wear clothes until they all but disintegrated under the tug of briars and hedgerow, and her shapely hands (hands that her sisters envied) were usually stained with paint when she answered the lunch bell summons.

  Adam and Deborah maintained that Margaret had a rare talent for painting pastoral scenes, but Henrietta, whose ideals in painting were battle scenes reproduced in the Strand Magazine, was not equipped to evaluate her daughter's artistic potential. This, she would have said, had nothing to do with the three essentials in a young woman's life: finding a husband, founding a family, and keeping both contented.

  It was her doubts concerning Margaret's future, indeed, that encouraged Henrietta to persuade Margaret to accept Romayne's invitation to pay a visit to South Wales and lend a hand with the children. Romayne, who had recently miscarried another child, was in poor health at a time when Giles was fully stretched preparing for the forthcoming General Election.

  Henrietta reasoned, no doubt, that Giles, centrepiece of a political arena, would be acquainted with any number of bachelors and perhaps, who knew, a comfortably-off young widower or two. He was, moreover, a kindhearted boy who would surely do his best to promote any promising friendship, so that she was all agog when Giles wrote in the autumn of 1905 that he was visiting Tryst during a dash to London, "and would pass on some intriguing news concerning Margaret's debut in the valleys."

  Henrietta could place but one interpretation on this, and when he appeared she whisked him into her sewing-room before Adam could bombard the boy with political queries. She said, closing the door and leaning against it, "Tell, then. Tell! That bit about Margaret? Does it mean what I hope it means?"

  Giles smiled as he peeled off his overcoat. The relationship between him and his mother was unique in the family. She had always stood in awe of him, even as a child. He was so scholarly, so dangerously knowledgeable about life and people, holding a kind of balance between the clamourings of eight sisters and brothers, a tolerant referee no one cared to dispute. In some ways he seemed even older and wiser than Adam, who often, Henrietta had noticed, deferred to him. Giles, for his part, saw his mother in the light of an amiable and impulsive elder sister, but there were aspects of her that he admired, notably her courage and resilience. He said, kissing her, "Oh, it's nothing sensational. Only that she seems to have taken a fancy to one of my party workers. A splendid young chap called Huw Griffiths. They go everywhere together and a day or so ago the poor chap came to me quite lost for words, very unusual for Huw. It seems he thought he should ask my permission to propose."

  "Good gracious! And you don't regard that as sensational! With Margaret twenty-six next December? What did you say to him?"

  "What could I say? I told him it was up to her, to both of them. As you say, she's surely old enough to know her own mind. If she had been younger I should have shuttled him to father. As it was, I advised him to throw his hat in the ring."

  "But what kind of man is he, for heaven's sake? I mean, how old and how eligible? And what does he do? Surely even you realise these things are important to us?"

  "To you, I daresay. Not to Margaret. She's in love, I think, not only with Huw but also with his valleys and the people who live in them. She's even taken to painting pithead scenes, and they're very good to my mind, full of truth and humour…"

  "Oh, fiddlesticks to what she's painting!" Henrietta exclaimed, impatiently. "Tell me about this man Griffiths. You said 'a splendid young chap'. Splendid in what way?"

  "Well, as a party worker for one thing. He's an excellent off-the-cuff speaker and a good organiser…"

  "Do you mean he's a member of Parliament?"

  "Member of P...? Old Huw? Lord, no, nothing like that. He's a miner. About Margaret's age."

  "A… a… miner? A coal-miner?"

  "Yes. A big, strapping chap, with hair as black as the coal he digs and a tribe of younger brothers who worship him. They all live in a cottage and look after their mother and one little sister. His father is dead, you see—silicosis, poor devil."

  "What would he earn?"

  "Oh, about thirty shillings a week, but he isn't likely to stay down the pit. He attends evening classes when he's on day shift and sooner or later he'll get a j
ob on top. I might even persuade him to leave the pits altogether and become my agent. Old Bryn Lovell is getting past it and we're looking for a younger man. If he and Margaret did marry I daresay he'd be tempted. We've got a good organisation and could pay a full-time agent three pounds a week."

  The shattering unworldliness of the boy checked her outcry. His values were so alien to her, and no more welcome for being so innocently stated. Looking back over the past, she realised that this had always been so with Giles, strangest and most complex of the brood, a boy who, she recalled, always seemed to her to inhabit a different planet from her and the rest of them and even, to an extent, from Adam, the wisest man on earth. And yet, in this kind of situation, there was no place for other-worldliness. She said, gulping down her disappointment, "Margaret can't be serious. You just don't understand these things, Giles. She's probably bored down there and just… well, flirting a little. I suppose even that is encouraging in a way, for it's never happened before. But I do think it's time she came back, before she gives that young man silly ideas. You tell her from me I want her home, do you hear? And now here's your father, and you'll be talking politics nineteen to the dozen until luncheon. I'll go and see to it now." She withdrew into the hall before he could reply, calling to Adam, who was pulling off his gardening boots in the porch, "Giles is here. He hasn't long, he says."

  That was the way of Henrietta, faced with unpalatable facts or even trends. She had a trick of reversing them, of picking the meat from the bone of some grisly-looking morsel and persuading herself that it must be good for something, although she wasn't sure what and would have to think about it. If Margaret had taken up with a miner of her own age, it must mean that she was becoming aware of herself as a woman and that was hopeful, for it meant that with her daughter safely restored to her own circle, she could begin looking about for a real husband before the girl became restless and out of sorts, as was the way of unwed and uncourted females once they reached their mid-twenties. After lunch she would give her mind to the matter.

  * * *

  Margaret Swann's renunciation of her former lover, the soft, unchanging Kentish countryside, had occurred within a week of setting foot in the mining valleys. She did not understand what agency brought about such a betrayal, only that some gaunt, looming stranger, brooding but infinitely persuasive, rose out of the mountain under her feet and tugged at her sleeve buttons, bidding her look, ponder, and absorb. For here was something unique in her experience and far more soul-stirring than any pastoral scene, with its eternal half-tones of green, brown, and gold, its regulated light and the plodding figures seen about its fields and coppices.

  Here, her accoster insisted, was vitality, adventure, challenge, and an ugliness capable of crippling the spirit if you let it. But you didn't, seeing it for what it was—a stark setting for comradeship, laughter, and compassion among all the teeming families inhabiting the terraces that seamed the steep slopes of Pontnewydd bowl. Here was greed, certainly, and probably all the other deadly sins, but they were on the defensive, despite occupation of the landscape reaching up to the rain-heavy sky behind the town. Within this arena, a cheerful, beleaguered garrison manning a battered citadel, were people, a multitude of Joneses, Evanses, Pritchards, Powells, Howells, Morgans, Reeces, and Owens. And, of course, Griffiths, like the Griffiths of 107 Bethel Street, where the branch of the tribe lived.

  It all began, in fact, within a stone's throw of the open end of Bethel Street, where it joined the track leading out of the town to the fold in the hill where Giles and Romayne had their stone-built house. Not half-a-mile from the pit that provided some kind of justification for all this clutter, clinging to the side of the hill. Climbing up from the cluster of little shops on the floor of the valley, she could just see the winding gear crowning the summit, with its huddle of sheds and sidings and its single rail track that reflected the last rays of the afternoon sun, playing catch-as-catch-can with the clouds.

  Huw Griffiths was coming off shift with about a dozen other miners who lived in Bethel Street, and she recognised him at once as the impressive young man who had attended last Tuesday's committee meeting in Giles's parlour. He was, she would judge, an inch over six foot and his shoulder span, for a man with such a slender waist, was impressive. It was not his undoubted masculinity that had imprinted him on her mind, but his smile, that was ready and very winning but, at the same time, slightly tremulous, the smile of a child who wasn't sure if he would win some permission he sought or be excused some fault for which he was about to be blamed. For Huw Griffiths, a man in his mid-twenties she would say, looked no more than thirteen when he smiled, and he was smiling now, having seen recognition in her glance across the width of the narrow road. He crossed over to her, his great, clodhopping boots striking harshly on the rocky surface of the track, and, lifting a filthy hand to an almost equally grimed forehead, said: "It is Miss Swann, isn't it, now? I'm Huw Griffiths, the candidate's senior steward. You opened the door to me Tuesday's meeting, Miss."

  "I remember you very well, Mr. Griffiths."

  Although reckoned shy by Henrietta and others who did not know her well, Margaret Swann was never embarrassed by strangers. Men, young and old, had been coming and going all her life at Tryst, and she noted them all, for her eyes were trained to record tiny details and idiosyncrasies about people as well as those of petals, leaf patterns, and sun-shadows on gorse and bracken. Besides, there could be nothing to fear from a man with such a childlike smile and she smiled back as he went on, seemingly encouraged, "Might I ask a favour, Miss? I've some draft leaflets, you see—for the candidate, they are. Promised for tonight but there's an evening class, see, and I've scrub-up and tea ahead of me. Our place is only a step and if you'd be so kind…"

  "I'll take them, certainly, Mr. Griffiths." She fell into step with him, lengthening her stride over the uneven surface of the road and saying, for something to say, "What exactly is senior steward, Mr. Griffiths?" and his smile widened. At the corners of his mouth tiny furrows overlaid with coal-dust seemed to wink large black stars on a white ground. The smile fascinated her so much that she hardly heard his small joke in reply.

  "Just a handle. To make a man feel someone, you'd say, Miss Swann. The candidate's like that, you see…" He referred to Giles as though he was a stranger to her, "He likes to haf everybody in there with a part to play. Not just himself, like all the others."

  "What others?"

  "Oh, the party bigwigs, those who come yer to speak, you know."

  "But what do you do, Mr. Griffiths? Write leaflets to put through doors?"

  "Ah, no, I only copy them. It's practice, you see, for I'm not much at writing yet. But I can talk when I've a mind to." He expanded then deflated himself with another smile. "All I do is go on ahead to meetings and put out the chairs. Stand by for hecklers, too, but the candidate isn't one for clearing the hall, not unless things get too rough, mind. Any old job handy, I reckon, that would cover it. Here's our place, Miss," and he stopped in front of one of the redbrick dolls' houses, identical in almost every detail with all its neighbours, save that its knocker gleamed as though it had just had its daily polish.

  "I'll get the leaflets…" But then, hesitating, "Won't you step inside, Miss? It wouldn't do to leave the candidate's sister on the doorstep."

  She moved in ahead of him, into a narrow strip of passage formed by planks partitioning off the parlour, then, one step beyond, into a kitchen filled with people half-seen through a cloud of steam and drying washing. He squeezed past her, blocking the way. "No, no, Miss, not in there. Mam and the kids are home, and my bath is laid out. Into the parlour, please."

  She turned and he reached over her shoulder to open the parlour door, revealing a room about eight feet by ten, stuffed with furniture. Inside the tiny house he became a giant, but a giant moving over familiar ground, so that every movement was pre-judged. "Take a seat, Miss," and she sat on the one red plush chair, its back protected by a lace antimacassar, while he sidled out aga
in and she heard him subdue a sudden babel from the kitchen, hissing them down as though her presence had converted the kitchen into a chapel. "Ssh, Mam! Shssh, Miriam… It's the candidate's sister. Mustn't keep her waiting…" and after that a long hush, broken only by whisperings and stealthy movements on the other side of the wall.

  She looked about her with the keenest interest. The room, vastly overcrowded as it was with table, chairs, a large green plant pot containing a huge aspidistra, knick-knacks of the kind she had seen won as prizes at Ton-bridge Fair, and an assortment of wool mats worked in all colours of the rainbow, was none the less cleaner than any room she remembered. It was, she supposed, the holy place of the house and very seldom used, for it felt cold and damp in contrast to the street and steaming kitchen. Family photographs decorated the walls, dominated by an oak-framed portrait of a thickset man of about forty, wearing his Sunday best and gazing down at her as though hypnotised by her presence. The eyes and the heavy square jaw betrayed him as Huw Griffiths's father, and she wondered where he was, concluding he was probably down the mine on the night shift.