by A. J. Cronin
At that moment Armstrong came into the office. Arthur looked up with nervous intensity.
“I want you to start overtime immediately on that coking coal, Armstrong. Take as much out as you can and stack it on the bank. Do you understand?—as much as you can manage. Make every effort, use every man.”
“Why, yes, Mr. Barras,” Armstrong answered in a startled voice.
Arthur had not the heart to enlighten Armstrong then. He made a few more calculations on his pad, threw down the pencil and stared away in front of him. The date was the 16th of February.
On the following day the Association met. As a result a secret circular was dispatched to all district mine owners discreetly indicating the approaching lock-out and urging that reserves of coal should be built up. When Arthur received this confidential document he smiled bitterly. How could he build up four months’ output in a bare six weeks!
On March 24th the Coal Decontrol Act became law. Arthur served notices upon his men to terminate the contracts. And on March 31st, with half his contract obligation unfulfilled, the stoppage began.
It was a wet, sad day. In the afternoon, as Arthur stood in his office staring gloomily at the last tubs coming outbye in the pouring rain, the door opened and, quite unannounced, Tom Heddon walked in. There was something almost sinister in Heddon’s silent entry. He stood, grim and formidable, with his back to the shut door, facing Arthur, his compact figure slightly bent as if already burdened with the load of the approaching lock-out. He said:
“I want a word with you.” He paused. “You’ve served notices on every man in this pit.”
“What about it?” Arthur said heavily. “I’m no different from the rest.”
Heddon gave a short, bitterly sarcastic laugh.
“You’re this different. You’re the wettest pit in the district and you’ve served notices on your safety men and pumpers.”
Striving to keep control of himself, Arthur replied:
“I feel too badly about this to quarrel with you, Heddon. You know my obligations compel me to serve notices on all grades.”
“Are you looking for another flooding?” Heddon asked, with a curious inflection in his voice.
Arthur was very near the end of his resistance; he was not to blame; he would stand no bullying from Heddon. A wave of nervous indignation broke over him. He said:
“The safety men will carry on.”
“Oh, will they?” Heddon sneered. He paused, then rasped with bitter emphasis, “I want you to understand that the safety men are carryin’ on simply because I tell them to. If it wasn’t for me and the men behind me your bloddy pit would be flooded in twenty-four hours. D’you savvy that—flooded and finished! The miners you’re tryin’ to starve into the muck heap are goin’ on pumpin’ to keep you fat and cushy in your bloddy parlour. Just bite on that, will you, for the love of Christ, and see how it tastes.”
With a sudden wild gesture as though he could trust himself no longer Heddon swung round and banged his way out. Arthur sat down by the desk. He sat there a long time until darkness came stealing into the office and all but the safety men had left the pit. Then he rose and silently walked home.
The lock-out began. And through the long dreary weeks it drearily dragged on. With the safety of the mines assured there remained only to stand aside and contemplate the struggle between the men and the spectre of want. Day in, day out, with a heavy heart Arthur saw the limits to which this unequal conflict could be pushed—the gaunt cheeks of the men, the women, yes, even the children, the darkness that lay on every face, the streets without laughter, without play. His heart turned within him in a cold pain. Could man inflict this cruelty upon man? The war to end war, to bring great and lasting peace, a new and glorious era in our civilisation. And now this! Take your pittance, slaves, and toil in the underworld in sweat and dirt and danger, yes, take it or starve. A woman died in childbirth in Inkerman Terrace—Dr. Scott, when pressed by the coroner, used a word, tempered officially to malnutrition. Margarine and bread; bread and margarine; sometimes not that. To raise a sturdy son to sing the song of Empire.
Thoughts like these burned incoherently in Arthur’s mind. He could not, would not stand it. At the end of the first month he started soup-kitchens in the town, organised a private relief scheme for the utter destitution in the Terraces. His efforts were met, not with gratitude, but with hatred. He did not blame the men. He understood their bitterness. With a quick pang he felt his inability to turn the tide of sentiment towards himself; he had no gift for spectacular publicity, no winning personality to utilise. Right from the start the men had distrusted him at the Neptune and now outside his soup-kitchen the words were scrawled: To Hell with the Conchy. Rubbed off, the phrase, or one more obnoxious, was rechalked at night ready to meet his eye on the following morning. A body of the younger men were most hostile to him; headed by Jack Reedy and Cha Leeming, they comprised many who had lost brothers or fathers in the Neptune disaster. Now, for no reason he could imagine, their hatred expended itself on him.
On and on went the ghastly farce. With a strange disgust Arthur read of the formation of the Defence Force, a fully armed and uniformed body of 80,000 men. The Defence Force—in defence of what? In May trouble began round the Amalgamated Collieries and troops were drafted to the district. There were a great many Royal Proclamations and Mr. Probert took himself and his family for a well-earned and most enjoyable holiday at Bournemouth.
But Arthur remained in Sleescale—through April, May, June. It was in June that the postcards began to arrive—anonymous postcards which were childishly defamatory, even scurrilous. Every day one came, written in a sprawling, unformed hand, which Arthur thought at first to be disguised. At the outset he ignored them, but gradually they came to cause him pain. Who could pursue him with such malice? He could not guess. And then towards the end of the month, the culprit stood revealed, caught in the act of handing a freshly scribbled card to one of the message-boys who came about the Law. It was Barras.
But the old man’s ceaseless scrutiny was even worse to bear, watching, watching Arthur all the time, noting his comings and goings, gloating at his dejection, rejoicing in the manifest evidence of trouble. It fell on Arthur like a scourge, that peering, bloodshot, senile orb, sapping away his energy, depleting him.
On July 1st an exhaustion like that of death brought the struggle to an end. The men were beaten, humiliated, crushed. But Arthur had not won. The loss on his defaulted contract was a heavy one. Yet as he saw the men stream slowly and silently across the pit yard once more and saw the wheels revolve again above the headgear, he shook his discouragement away. Reverses must occur. This, through no fault of his own, was one of them. He would not let himself go under. Now, from this minute, he would begin again.
EIGHT
A summer Sunday of 1925 and David, returning from his afternoon stroll along the Dunes, met Annie and little Sammy at the east end of Lamb Street. At the sight of David, Sammy ran forward with a triumphant shout—he was “a great one” for David, Sammy was, and he chanted:
“Aw’ve got my holidays Saturday. Isn’t that gud?”
“It’s grand, Sammy, man.” David smiled at Sammy, reflecting behind his smile that Sammy, outgrowing his strength, looked as if he needed a holiday. Sammy was eight years old now with a pale face and a nobby forehead and cheerful blue eyes that disappeared every time he laughed, like his father’s had done before him. He was dressed very neat and clean for his Sunday walk with his mother in a suit which Annie had made for him out of a grey serge remnant bought at Bates’. He was shooting up fast, and his boots, bought less for beauty than to keep out the wet, looked enormous at the end of his thin growing shanks.
“You’ll have your hands full, Annie.” David turned to Sammy’s mother who had come quietly up beside them. “I know these holidays!”
“I’m cross with Sammy,” Annie said in a voice that was not cross. “He would climb the gate at Sluice Dene and he’s cracked his new celluloid coll
ar.”
“Ah, it was to get some oak nuts,” Sammy declared earnestly. “Aw wanted th’ oak nuts, Davey.”
“Uncle David,” protested Annie reproachfully. “How can you, Sammy!”
“Never mind, Annie, lass,” said David. “We’re old friends together. Aren’t we, Sammy?”
“Ay!” Sammy grinned; and David smiled again. But as he looked at Annie he stopped smiling. Annie really seemed quite done up with the heat; she had a dark line under her eyes and she was quite as pale as Sammy who, as his dad had been, was naturally pale. She held her hand against the side of the wall, supporting herself a little as she stood there. He knew that Annie was continually hard put to it, with old man Macer now completely crippled by rheumatism and Pug not working steady at the Neptune, and Sammy to look after. Annie had been doing washing, he knew, and going out days cleaning to keep things going. He had offered to help Annie a dozen times, but Annie would not look at money, she was very independent. On an impulse he asked:
“Come to think of it, when did you last have a holiday yourself, Annie?”
Her calm eyes widened slightly in surprise.
“Well, I had my holidays when I was at the school,” she said. “Like Sammy has the now.”
That was Annie’s idea of a holiday—she had no other, no notion of change of scene and air, of white esplanades, gay beaches, music mingling with the waves. The unintentioned pathos of her answer caught David by the throat. He took a quick and most unexpected decision. He said casually:
“How about you and Sammy coming for a week to Whitley Bay?”
She stood very still with her eyes on the hot pavement. Sammy let out a whoop, then fell into a kind of awe.
“Whitley Bay,” he echoed. “By gosh, aw’d like te go te Whitley Bay.”
David kept his gaze on Annie.
“Harry Nugent has written and asked me to meet him there on the 26th.” Then he lied: “I’d made up my mind to take a week there beforehand.”
She still remained motionless with her eyes on the hot pavement, and she was paler than before.
“Oh no, David,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
“Ah, mother,” Sammy cried appealingly.
“You could do with a change, Annie, and Sammy too.”
“It has been sort of hot to-day,” she agreed. The thought of a week at Whitley Bay for Sammy and herself was dazzling, but her head was full of the difficulties, oh, half a hundred obstacles; she had no clothes, she would “show up” David, she had the house and her father to look after, Pug might go on the drink if she left him to himself. Then a brilliant idea struck her. She exclaimed: “Take Sammy!”
He said grimly:
“Sammy doesn’t go an inch without his mother.”
“Now, mother,” Sammy cried again, his little white face filled with a warning desperation.
There was a silence, then she lifted her eyes and smiled her quiet smile at him.
“Very well, David,” she said. “If you’re so good as to take us.”
It was settled. All at once David felt glad, immensely and surprisingly glad. It was like a sudden glow within him. He watched Annie and Sammy go down the road towards Quay Street with Sammy capering about his mother, big boots and broken collar and all, capering and talking about Whitley Bay. Then he walked home along Lamb Lane to his house. Now there was no chickweed on the path, the little garden was trim and neat at last, and bright yellow nasturtiums grew up white strings on the wall where Martha had trained them. The doorstep was very whitely pipe-clayed and scalloped by Martha, and the window-blinds had a full twelve inches of wonderful crochet-edging worked as only Martha’s hands could work it. All the best colliers’ houses had crochet-edged blinds—the sign of a tidy collier!—but none in Sleescale were finer than these.
He hung up his hat in the hall and went into the kitchen where Martha was on her feet preparing some watercress for his tea. Martha was always busy in his service, a perfect demi-urge of house-proud service beat beneath her sober bodice. The kitchen was so clean he could have taken his tea off the floor—as they say in these parts. The woodwork of the furniture shone, the china on the dresser gleamed. The fine marble clock, won by Martha’s father for pot-stour bowling, and brought down from Inkerman Terrace when she gave up her home, ticked solemnly, a sacred heirloom, on the high mantelpiece. The high clear stillness of Sunday was in the house.
He studied Martha. He said:
“Why don’t you come to Whitley Bay for a week, mother? I’m going there on the 19th.”
She did not look round but went on scrupulously examining the watercress: she could not bear a speck upon lettuce or watercress. When he began to feel she had not heard him, she said:
“What would I do with Whitley Bay?”
“I thought you might like it, mother. Annie and the boy are coming,” he made his tone coaxing. “You better come too!”
Her back was towards him and she did not speak for a minute. But finally, in a bleached voice, she answered:
“No. I’m as well here!” When she turned with the plate of watercress her face was stiff.
He knew better than to press her. Sitting down on the sofa by the window he picked up the current number of the Workers’ Independent. His weekly article, a series he had been contributing for the past twelve months, was on the front page, and a speech he had made at Seghill on Tuesday was given verbatim on the middle sheet. He read neither. He was thirty-five years of age. For the last four years he had worked like a nigger, organising, speaking, getting about the district, not sparing himself. He had increased the Edgeley membership by over four thousand. He had the name for tenacity and strength and ability. Three monographs of his had been published by the Anvil Press, and his paper The Nation and the Mines had won him the Russell medal. The medal was upstairs, lost somewhere, behind a drawer. He felt a momentary sadness come over him. Down in the Dunes this afternoon he had listened to the lark, and the sound of the lark had reminded him of the boy who used to come to the Dunes nearly twenty years before. Then he had fallen to thinking of Jenny. Where in the name of God was Jenny? Dear Jenny—in spite of everything he still loved her and missed her and thought of her. And the thought of her striking through the sunshine and the song of the lark had saddened him. Meeting Annie and Sammy had lifted up his spirits, it is true, but now the sadness was come on him again. Perhaps Martha was responsible—her attitude! Was it not futile for him to keep striving to change the movements of great masses of humanity when the secret heart of each human unit remained secret and unassailable and unchanging? She was very unforgiving, Martha.
He felt better after his tea—the watercress in spite of Martha’s unforgiving heart was good—and he sat down to write to Harry. Dudgeon and Bebbington and Harry had all kept their seats in the election that year. A very near thing it had been for Bebbington; there had been some scandal over divorce proceedings brought by Sir Peter Outram, when Bebbington had been named, but the affair had been hurried over, and Bebbington had just managed to come through. David wrote a long letter to Harry. Then he took up Erich Flitner’s Experiments in State Control. He had been interested in Flitner lately and in Max Sering too, especially Assault on the Community, but to-night Flitner rather dodged him. He kept thinking about the coming assault on Whitley Bay and he decided that it would be uncommonly good fun to take Sammy for a swim. There would be ice-cream too; he must on no account forget the ice-cream. It was just possible that Annie might have a secret weakness for ice-cream, the real Italian stuff, a slider. Would Annie remain immutable if confronted with a slider? He lay back and laughed out loud.
In fact, for the whole of the next ten days he couldn’t get Whitley Bay and the swimming and Annie and Sammy out of his head. On the morning of the 19th when he arrived at Central Station, Tynecastle, where he had arranged to meet Annie and Sammy, he was genuinely excited. He had been detained by a last-minute compensation case and he came in with a rush to the booking-hall where Annie and Sammy stood waitin
g.
“I thought I’d be late,” he exclaimed, smiling and breathless, and decided it was good still to be young enough to feel excited and breathless.
“There’s plenty of time,” Annie said in her practical way.
Sammy said nothing, his instructions were to say nothing, but his shining blue eyes in his beautifully washed face expressed a whole philosophy.
They got into the train for Whitley Bay, David carrying the suit-cases. Annie did not like that; she wanted to carry her own suit-case, or rather the suit-case she had borrowed from Pug—it was heavy, and too shabby for David to be seen with. Annie looked distressed, as though it were the most improper thing in the world for David to be carrying the suit-case when she had often carried a fish creel three times the weight herself, but she thought it not her place to protest. Then they were in their compartment, the whistle blew and they were off.
Sammy sat in the corner seat next to David and Annie sat opposite. As they rolled through the suburbs into the flat countryside Sammy’s enthusiasm was enormous and, forgetting that he had been vowed to silence, he shared it generously with David.
“See that engine, an’ the waggons, and that crane!” he cried. “Oh, and look at the size of that chimney. By gosh, I’ve never seed a chimney bigger nor that afore.”