The next morning they toured the city from Aldgate Pump to Marble Arch and when they had had their fill of sightseeing he asked her if she would care to renew her acquaintance with Uncle Franz and see the scrapyard in all its squalid glory.
‘It hardly qualifies as a Coronation attraction,’ he said, ‘but the Valley owes it a good deal. If I’d had my way I should have cut myself off from it altogether and it would have taken all of twenty years to put the estate in good heart.’
She said she would enjoy meeting Franz and spending an hour among his old iron, so they crossed the river and drove through the sweltering streets to the yard, where Paul noticed that there had been some extensive changes.
The place was as forbidding as ever but there was a certain grandeur about its disorder and multiplicity of its pyramids of junk. Several more acres had been enclosed on the far side and the fires now burned in braziers, mounted on brick hearths. Uncle Franz’s shack had given place to a red-brick building with waggon-sheds alongside and among the carts Paul noticed two or three cumbersome motor vehicles, shaped like barges on wheels and called, he was told, ‘lorries’. There was an air of efficiency about the place that had not been there in the earlier, more casual era. Doors in the office building had wooden plaques with ‘Foreman’, ‘Weigh In’, ‘Chief Sorter’ and ‘Cash’ painted on them. He said to Franz:
‘My word, things must be looking up! It used to be just a frowsy dump and now it’s a slum empire!’
Franz was his usual chirrupy self, extending to Claire the same Continental courtliness as he had shown Grace and he amused her very much by gravely kissing her hand and telling her that, whilst he was grubbing among scrap in a brick jungle the luckier and more discerning Paul had found ‘A pearl beyond price in the provinces’. Paul said, ‘Don’t take the slightest notice of him, Claire! He talks like that to every woman he meets under sixty! It comes from a lifetime of coaxing housewives to empty their attics!’ but to Franz he said, seriously, ‘You seem to have made a lot of changes round here and I must say the place looks a lot less sleazy than before. Have you taken in more land over there by the viaduct?’
‘Another four acres,’ Franz said casually, ‘and business was never better, my boy! Thank God for Kaiser Wilhelm and his shining armour! He’s the man who put new life into the scrap industry! I don’t suppose you ever look at the balance sheets I send you?’
‘No,’ Claire told him, ‘he doesn’t, only the dividend slips and even those have to be brought to his attention by the bank manager.’
‘Well, you might be interested to know that our turnover last year was treble that of our best South African War year,’ said Franz. ‘If this naval race continues until either of us or Germany goes bankrupt you’ll die a rich man, Paul, providing, of course, you don’t pour the whole of it into those Devon quicksands of yours!’
‘At least I do something practical with it,’ retorted Paul, slightly nettled by the old man’s irony, but Claire said, quickly, ‘Don’t tease him about the Valley, Uncle Franz! Ordinarily his sense of humour is good but that’s his sensitive spot!’ and Paul, suddenly ashamed of his huffiness, was grateful to her for her intervention.
They took Franz back to the hotel for tea and afterwards to a theatre, a musical extravaganza that Paul privately thought ridiculous but which Claire obviously enjoyed. During the interval, as he and Franz smoked a cigar in the foyer, the old man said, affably, ‘Well, Paul, I must say you should be congratulated on your taste in wives! She’s just as pretty as Grace and more tolerant of your eccentricities! You’re obviously a happy man.’
‘Yes, I am,’ Paul admitted readily, ‘and, in a way, I have to thank you for it, Franz, for I don’t suppose I should have bestirred myself to try again if you hadn’t jogged my elbow! Claire is a wonderful wife and mother and there’s no fear of her disappearing into the blue to join the Militants! Have you seen anything of Grace?’
‘Oh, once or twice, for an hour or so,’ Franz replied, rather too airily Paul thought, ‘she pops across the river to collect her subscription.’
‘What subscription? She gets her allowance regularly, doesn’t she?’
‘Oh, I’m not referring to the hundred a year you allow her,’ Franz said, laughing, ‘I mean the subscription I make to the Sacred Cause.’
‘You subscribe to suffragette funds?’
‘Certainly I do, twenty guineas annually!’
‘Good God!’ exclaimed Paul, genuinely astonished, ‘I didn’t think you cared two straws about votes for women.’
‘I don’t,’ Franz said, ‘but I like to see politicians harried and anyway, I admire their spirit.’
The thought crossed Paul’s mind that the real reason for the wily old Croat’s support of a movement that was embarrassing a Liberal Government lay much deeper than this, and had far more to do with his preference for a government inclined to spend even more upon armaments and thus, by inference, upon scrap, but he only said, ‘How is she, Franz? Still as fanatical?’
‘More so I’d say,’ Franz replied but no longer joking, ‘their front-line fighters have been getting a very rough handling up here. They don’t put everything in the papers.’
Paul was going to tell him about Grenfell’s championship of the movement and of the photographic evidence he had seen but at that moment the intermission bell sounded and they rejoined Claire in the stalls. The old man refused an invitation to accompany them on the morrow and see the procession from the M.P.s’ stand, so they watched him drive off across Leicester Square to his Portman Street home, after he had promised to make another appointment by telephone before they returned home at the end of the week.
That night, when they were alone, Claire said, suddenly, ‘You can’t help liking Uncle Franz, Paul, but …’ and she hesitated, as though fearing to offend him.
‘Under his charm he’s rather frightening; is that what you were going to say?’
‘Yes, it was, but maybe all people who make money are frightening.’
‘Well,’ Paul said, ‘I don’t suppose we should be sanctimonious about it. We put the money he makes to good use in the Valley and have been damned glad of it. I daresay we could struggle along without it now but it seems to me that to reject it would be a rather pompous gesture; all the same, I would do it, if you had strong feelings about it.’
She made no immediately reply, sitting on the dressing stool brushing her long hair, so he added, ‘Well? Have you?’
‘No,’ she said, as though she wasn’t altogether sure, ‘but the time could come when I might have. Do you suppose all this battleship building could lead to anything serious; to people actually killing one another, as they did in that war between Russia and Japan?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t, for in my opinion it’s all a game of bluff played by men like Franz and by others, bigger and more ruthless than he! I don’t think the Kaiser ever wants to use his Dreadnoughts; he simply has them so that he can strut about the decks in fancy dress but our people take him seriously—or they pretend to. No major power could afford that kind of war for more than a week or so!’
‘Well, I hope not,’ Claire said, ‘but the next time I see Franz I shall ask him that one!’
In the event they did not see Franz again. Within forty-eight hours of parting from him they were on the way home, bolting very much as Paul had bolted six years before. The Coronation procession proved even more spectacular than the newspapers had promised. Watching the cohorts of splendidly uniformed men march past, and hearing the deep-throated roar of the densely-packed spectators as the Royal coach and its escort of Household Cavalry came in view, Paul was gripped by a sense of climax about the spectacle, as though it symbolised the extreme high tide of the Victorian and Edwardian eras and had been deliberately staged to advertise the enormous thrust and weight of British Imperialism. It had seemed strident enough in the days of the Transvaal War but now, to him
at all events, it was even more vociferous and glittering. He said, aloud, ‘My God! It’s like a Roman triumph!’ but his voice was lost in the wave of sound that seemed to rock the tall buildings and a moment later the coach and escort were gone, the roar moving forward like a boosted echo.
‘Did you say something, dear?’ Claire asked when the next military band was still a hundred yards off and Paul said nothing of any consequence but suddenly he felt homesick for the simplicity of a national celebration in the Valley, attended by no more than two hundred people and patronised by the beaming Henry Pitts and the biblical shepherd twins, who asked no more of a national holiday than a tug-of-war between ‘Outalong’ and ‘Downalong’.
The next afternoon they were given tea on the terrace at Westminster by a sprucely-dressed James Grenfell, who seemed optimistic about the prospects of getting ahead with the Liberal programme, provided nothing disturbed the existing arrangement with the Irish members and Labourites, whose support gave them, their overall majority in the House. They were standing near the West door of the great hall on the point of saying good-bye when Paul saw a party of police dash by, coming from the direction of Westminster Bridge and disappear, whistles shrilling, in the direction of the railings fronting the House.
‘Hullo, what’s happening there?’ he asked and James, looking anxious and uncomfortable, said, ‘Probably another raid by the Militants, their headquarters are just across the Square and this happens pretty frequently now that the Suffrage Bill looks like being talked out. I’ll get a cab, Paul, you should take Claire away.’
Although he did not say so it was obvious that he felt there was more than a likelihood of Grace being among the demonstrators and Paul, sharing this misgiving, said, ‘All right, James, let’s get away!’ but unexpectedly Claire spoke up, facing them and saying, ‘Why? Why do we have to turn our backs on it? We backed you in two elections on this issue, James, and I think we ought to see for ourselves!’ Then, as neither made a reply, ‘It doesn’t matter if Grace is there! We ought to judge the issue on more than photographs, James!’
James said, uneasily, ‘I suppose she’s right, Paul, it might be important for you to see what I’ve seen often enough in the last year or so,’ so they moved towards the vortex of the disturbance under the statue of Richard I but were soon obliged to link arms to prevent being separated by the crowds now moving in from all directions.
‘Sometimes it’s no more than a scuffle,’ James said but they saw at once that it was more than a scuffle today, for the whole area in front of Parliament was boiling like the scene of a revolution, with mounted police laying about them with rolled-up capes and foot police fighting to seal the area in front of the statue where two prison vans were drawn up with doors open and police on the steps. Then a larger section of the crowd swept in from the far side of the Square and they were all three, together with a bearded police sergeant and two younger officers, washed back against the railings, the sergeant losing his temper and shouting to his men, ‘Get through to them, damn you! Use your fists if you have to!’ and after a renewed heave Paul was parted from the others and carried closer to the vans as the police drove a passage through the mob enclosing him in the cordon.
Here, the ugliness of the struggle was revealed to him far more vividly than in James’ photographs and scenes were being enacted that he would never have associated with an English political demonstration. The cordon re-formed behind him and although he looked everywhere he could see no sign of James or Claire and forgot them as he was swept closer to the heart of the riot. He saw about a score of women, most of them well-dressed, grappling with as many police and plain-clothes men and there was no evidence of docility on the part of the suffragettes, or of chivalry on the part of their assailants. It might have been a police descent upon a thieves’ kitchen, south of the river. Fists were flailing, hats and umbrellas flying, helmets skidding under the feet of horses and, here and there, police and women were rolling on the ground in a flurry of blue tunics and white petticoats. Paul stood aghast at the brutishness of the spectacle. He saw a middle-aged woman propelled up the steps of the Maria with a punch in the back aimed by a straw-hatted man whose face was distorted with fury and whose nose streamed blood; he saw that one van was already full to overflowing for suddenly a young woman, hair streaming over her shoulders and mouth open in a soundless scream, appeared for an instant at the door before being dragged back by someone inside; he saw an elderly man, whom he identified as a sympathiser by the rosette he wore, wave a banner on which the single word ‘Votes’ was distinguishable and then a mounted policeman tore the banner from him and began using it as a stave to clear the struggling pedestrians from the area about his horse. Then, almost under his feet, he saw a young woman in grey, crouched on hands and knees, hatless and with a mass of dark hair masking her face as she contracted herself to avoid being trampled.
He recognised her as Grace even before a young, helmetless policeman seized her by the shoulders and half raised her and he grabbed the man just as someone laid hold of him from behind, so that all four of them, locked in a grotesque chain, lurched and cannoned into the group struggling around the remains of the banner. The din was hellish for by now the cordon had broken and the crowd, predominantly men, were pressing in from all sides so that the van lifted on two wheels and would have overturned but for the plinth of the statue. A certainty that, in a matter of moments, Grace would be crushed to death in the mêlée, gave him the impetus to shoulder the young policeman aside and break free of the restraining hand on his collar. His hat flew off and his collar burst loose but he steadied himself by shooting out his arms and bracing himself against the plinth so that, for a moment or two, he formed an arch over Grace who now lay flat on her face, the man who had been holding the banner crouching almost on top of her. At that moment mounted police moved forward three abreast, clearing a small space under the statue and an inspector, running round the plinth, shouted to Paul, ‘Get her on her feet, man!’ and he shouted back, on impulse, ‘She’s nothing to do with the damned riot! She’s my wife, we’ve been in the House …!’ and taking advantage of the momentary lull, tore out his wallet and flourished Grenfell’s card under the inspector’s nose. The man glanced at it and shouted, ‘Hold hard, there!’ as if he had been in the hunting field and to Paul, ‘Work your way behind the statue! I’ll get the van moving! If some fools are run over so much the worse for them!’
Paul lifted Grace as the van began to plough through the mob, moving diagonally across the Square so that soon there was space enough to edge round behind the statue where there was a measure of sanctuary after the crowd had streamed away in pursuit of the vehicle. The inspector had forced his way round in their wake and said, breathlessly, ‘You can vouch for her? She’s your wife you say?’ and Paul said, savagely, ‘Yes, and I’m damned if I ever thought I should be ashamed to be English! What the hell has happened to people? Has everyone gone raving mad?’
‘It’s those women, sir,’ the inspector said, ‘it happens day after day but we weren’t prepared seeing it’s Coronation week. We thought they would have given over until the celebrations were done. Is she hurt?’
His manner was friendly but by no means anxious until James appeared, also waving a card and announcing that he was an M.P. and intended raising the subject of the riot in the House at the first opportunity. As soon as the link between the unconscious woman and a Member of the House was established the policeman’s attitude changed abruptly and he said, a little desperately, ‘I hope you don’t hold me responsible, sir! She was right in the thick of it, and so was this gentleman! You can see for yourself the hopelessness of our job when they start trouble at peak hours! They’ve been warned often enough, God knows.’ James said, with a glance at Paul indicating that he was to stay out of discussion, ‘Well, this one wasn’t, Inspector! I was showing her where English laws are made when this happened!’ and the man said, ‘I’m very sorry, sir, but how can we distinguis
h? Let’s take a look at her; maybe it’s only a faint!’ And then, as all three of them peered at the limp figure in Paul’s arms, Claire rejoined them and the crowd melted away, running towards the Abbey. A helmetless policeman, who seemed to have sized up the situation, bustled up and said, ‘I’ve got a cab, sir! Over there by the Members’ entrance!’ and the inspector, giving him a look of approval, said, ‘Good work, Crutchly! Get her in first and look for your helmet afterwards!’
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 72
