Theirs Was The Kingdom

by R. F Delderfield

  Where would self-deception on this scale lead the nation? Men like these were not qualified to inherit the revolution of Brunel, Watt, and Stephenson. Historians were already comparing the British Empire with Rome but it had taken Rome five centuries to reach the ramp of complacency that launched it into oblivion. To his way of thinking this kind of leadership would achieve the same result in Britain in forty years.

  He did not know the answers to these questions. He did not really seek to know them. He could applaud the severely practical rescue work of men like his waggonmaster Keate, or the efforts of a man like Barnardo to find refuges for children who slept out in winter, but this passionate involvement with other people's souls baffled him, as did the fashionable vanities of everyone he met who pocketed more than a sovereign on a Saturday.

  He did not, by any means, dismiss the shortcomings of his own family as regards planlessness, or preoccupation with what he thought of as fads.

  Alexander, something of a coxcomb after his spell at a military academy, was already costing him more in the way of a quarterly allowance than he earned as a lieutenant in the field. George, who seemed in no hurry to return home and hitch himself to a waggon wheel, had not earned his beer and baccy money since leaving school. Hugo, at fourteen, seemed to think that fleetness of foot was all that was needed to justify one's attendance at school, as though his ambition was to qualify as the fastest pickpocket operating between Aldgate Pump and the Law Courts. Giles, although intelligent and well-read, was no more than a dreamer, who had yet to make up his mind how, if ever, he would put dreams to work on something more practical than Gladstone's diatribes concerning Armenians in Asia Minor, a place that was not even under the flag. Stella, to some extent, had made amends, and sometimes he saw her as the pick of the litter. At least she was proving a good wife to that husband of hers and had recently presented him with a nine-pound boy, the first Swann grandchild, and secretly his grandfather's pride and joy, although he grumbled at Henrietta's inclination to spoil the child and denied her claim that little Robert favoured the Rawlinsons rather than the Swanns.

  As to the younger girls, Joanna and Helen, all they seemed to think about was horses, dancing lessons, and piano-tinkling, Phoebe Fraser having reported that neither showed any aptitude for cooking or needlework. How had it come about that an industrious father and an eye-to-the-main-chance mother had produced such a feckless tribe? He asked this question of her more than once but she seemed to find it no more than amusing, telling him, when she had had her laugh, that he was getting stale and frayed down there at the stinking yard of his, and failed to make allowance for youthful high spirits. And after that, half-seriously, she added a rider. “Give them time,” she said, “and they’ll do you proud, every man jack of them! And the girls too, I wouldn’t wonder. How old were you before you made a serious decision? I can tell you exactly. Thirty-one, whereas Stella, your eldest, is still only twenty-three!”

  There was, he had to admit, something in what she said. He had made a very late start but was none the worse for it. It was unfair, however, to compare him with a generation that had begun life with so many advantages. At eighteen, like it or not, he had been pitch-forked into the army, and it sometimes seemed to him that he would have been well-advised to repeat the process with his sons, whilst making sure that his daughters equipped themselves for something a little more useful than a steeplechase or a set of lancers.

  2

  He was in such a mood as this one airless summer morning when Tybalt appeared telling him that his adopted daughter, Deborah Avery, wanted an audience. The prospect of seeing Deborah, and fighting one of their time-honoured, amiable duels concerning the ultimate meaning of the universe, promised a welcome diversion from desk work, so he told Tybalt to send the lady up and be sure to bring counting-house coffee at eleven sharp.

  Deborah appeared a moment later, a graceful, slender woman of twenty-eight but looking, he decided, much younger despite her dowdy clothes, perhaps on account of small bones and a healthy complexion. He did wish she would spend her allowance on boots that made the best of pretty ankles, instead of squandering it on drunks or fallen women or whatever flotsam she collected these days.

  The relationship between them had always been that of two people who agreed to differ, but it still pained him to see a handsome, intelligent woman like Josh Avery's girl spend herself on an assortment of waifs and strays, most of whom, to his mind, were professional beggars.

  There had been some silly talk, Adam remembered, of Deborah taking the veil when she was about seventeen, but he had come down very heavily against that. Instead, he had seen to it that the girl received the very best education that was available to her—a spell at Cheltenham, and afterwards as one of the first girl undergraduates at Girton College—so that he could now regard her as the one really educated woman of his acquaintance. Nothing could shake his belief that one day, given the right opening, she would surprise not only the Swanns but also her generation.

  She kissed him affectionately and he noticed that, unlike most of his visitors up here, she did not wrinkle her nose at the stink of the tannery and soap factory. Instead she began, gaily, “I want you to be the first to know, Uncle Adam. I’ve got what I wanted at last, a real job of work that could lead somewhere if I’m lucky. I wonder if it will have your blessing?”

  “I doubt it,” he said, gloomily, “for I don’t regard anything you’ve done so far as a job. It's been mostly curate's work, but even curates, poor devils, get some kind of stipend. No one has ever paid you wages for all that poking about you do among the city layabouts. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that six out of every seven shillings you’ve ever had from me hadn’t found its way down the gullets of plausible scoundrels. Are you telling me you’ve got a billet that actually earns you money?”

  She said, with a merry smile, “Come now, Uncle Adam, that Gradgrind attitude never did fool me, not even when I was a child. I wonder that you still trouble to use it in my presence. Underneath it you’re as soft as a tub of butter and always have been, ever since you appeared at the convent that morning with a Dutch doll under your arm, swearing my father had sent it. Just ask me how much I expect to be paid.”

  “Very well, how much?”

  “Thirty shillings a week, rising to two pounds in six months if I succeed in getting evidence.”

  “Evidence of what? How many families in London use a communal privy?”

  She laughed. He had always liked her laughter. There was no ruffling Deborah. She had a quality that was rare in men and almost extinct in women: an ability to laugh at herself, heartily and often.

  “That's not all that wide of the mark,” she said, and her glance shifted to his desk, where a pile of newspapers were stacked beside trays spilling over with invoices. “Do you read the Pall Mall Gazette regularly?”

  He was impressed. “Has that firebrand Stead had the brains to publish something you’ve submitted?”

  “Not yet,” she said, “but I think he will. Tell me, uncle, what is your personal opinion of ‘that firebrand Stead’?”

  “That he's a good journalist, one of the best in the country, but that he could sometimes do with editing himself,” and she laughed again, saying, “Well, that's one thing we might agree on, but I won’t oblige you by passing it on. He can be very irascible when challenged, particularly on his home ground. Now tell me something else. What do you know of the Contagious Diseases Acts?”

  “That they were passed in the sixties to combat the spread of venereal diseases among troops in garrison towns. Is Willie Stead still riding that hobbyhorse?”

  “Indeed he is, and will be until we get the Acts repealed. You do believe in repealing them, don’t you?”

  “Never made up my mind,” he admitted. “They serve some kind of purpose, I imagine, but it's always struck me that Stead—and that volcano of a woman, Josephine Butler—have good grounds for asking why compulsory examination is confined to women when their cust
omers can pass on infection to their wives without so much as a smack on the back of the hand.”

  “Then I can see you’re well on the way to being converted,” she said, but suddenly she read in his expression a repugnance for the turn of conversation, and he at once proved as much, saying, “It defeats me why a personable young woman like you, with an education that equips her for anything, should be encouraged by chaps like Stead to lift the lid on that kind of stew. Damn it, I’m not a prude and never have been. If I was I wouldn’t be sitting here discussing soldiers’ pox with a woman your age. Are you writing a piece for the Pall Mall Gazette about the prospects of repeal?”

  “No,” she said, “but it was a letter I sent on the subject that got me an interview and a trial with Mr. Stead.”

  “What could you possibly know about it that you hadn’t dug out of Hansard and medical studies?”

  She looked at him coolly, her head on one side, and for once he caught a rare glimpse of her father, the man who had launched him and later swindled him. She said, mildly, “I know more than most people. More than Stead, for that matter. And much more than those Westminster windbags whose speeches are printed in Hansard. I was arrested by the Morals Police in Portsmouth one night last autumn, and spent the night in a cell while they found someone who could vouch for my story that I was on my way to pay a call on a naval chaplain stationed there. Well, he turned up and claimed me and efforts were made to hush it up when they found out who I was. But supposing I had been someone else, or they hadn’t been able to locate that chaplain? Do you realise what could have happened to me?”

  He was shocked but not in the way she had hoped.

  “It's absolutely monstrous,” he burst out, “that the cranks you consort with expose you to that kind of risk! What the devil were you doing in Portsmouth? At night? And alone on the streets? And how did it happen that the Morals Police didn’t apologise and turn you loose the moment they saw you in a good light?”

  “You ask them that,” she said, tight lipped, “just as Mr. Stead did when he published my letter. What happened to me isn’t uncommon. It happens to respectable women every night of the week in Portsmouth, Plymouth, Colchester, Chatham—anywhere members of the armed forces congregate. I wouldn’t like to tell you how many women's reputations have been ruined in that way, and that's only one reason why this monstrous insult to all women, including outcasts, has to be removed from the statute book. Every woman abroad in a garrison town after dusk is assumed to be a harlot, and liable to arrest and medical examination. She has the right to refuse, of course, but God help her if she does, if she's poor and friendless. If the chaplain hadn’t let slip I was entitled to call myself “Swann,” and was a close friend of Mrs. Butler, I know very well what might have occurred. The worst thing about the whole incident was their grovelling attitude when I was shown the door. It was that more than the filthy blankets and the unemptied slops in the cell that made me vomit on the way out!”

  He said, unable to keep the depression from his voice, “Very well, you’ve made your point. I’m glad you got to Stead through it, for once you make allowance for that chap's fire and brimstone he's a force for fair play and social progress, and there aren’t so many around that we can afford to sneer at him. What kind of work does he want you to do? Isn’t he running a series on slum housing south of the river?”

  “He has other campaigns in mind. One is an investigation into the export of British girls to Continental brothels. That's what I shall be doing. A preliminary survey on the spot.”

  “He’ll send you to Brussels? To meddle in that kind of undertaking?”

  “Oh, not alone, I assure you. My inclusion is more for training than anything else. Mrs. Josephine Butler is going over and a young Free Church minister, by the name of Gordon.”

  “It's mad, none the less. Mad and dangerous.”

  “It might be dangerous, if all they say about the Belgian police is correct, but it isn’t mad, Uncle Adam. Someone has to do it and the government won’t lift a finger to help us. Do you realise how those girls are recruited?”

  “By their own folly mostly, I’d say.”

  “You’d be wrong. Not one in twenty go there willingly, or go knowing what is expected of them. The houses don’t want that kind of girl. The more innocent they are on arrival the higher the price the madams can get from a client. Those girls are nearly always country girls, drawn to London by an advertisement offering a good situation and appearing in journals that are Sunday reading in British homes.”

  “But in God's name, girl, they must know the purpose behind transportation to the Continent.”

  “They don’t. They’re met and told some plausible story about their new employers being abroad. After that they are fitted out, escorted across the Channel, and tricked into signing some document that absolves the procurer. Even if they make their escape the police can charge them with stealing the brothel-keeper's clothes, the only clothes they have since their own have been taken away. How many get home again? Or would care to come home after an experience of that kind?”

  He looked at her steadily, reluctantly admiring her involvement with the underdog and her courage and ability to put a case. But he was convinced, for all that, that people like Mrs. Butler, Stead, and especially novices like her, had no real knowledge of the kind of opposition they were facing in a theatre of this kind. Her father, Josh Avery, could have told her plenty about organised vice. Himself a virtuoso, he would, no doubt, have been outraged to learn that a child he left behind to be reared by nuns should be venturing into the kind of stews she described, with only theoretical knowledge to guide her. As a mercenary who had spent years in the Orient, he himself could have told her stories that would make her hair stand on end, but he held his tongue. She was really no different from any of his children. She would have to discover for herself that it takes more than a band of dedicated reformers and a newspaper, even such a newspaper as Stead's, to make more than a dent in the social conscience of a society with money in its pocket, and its vices driven underground to fester.

  He said, resignedly, “You’re twenty-eight. Any guardianship I exercised over you lapsed years ago. Neither would anything I could say turn you aside, for in your own way you’re just as pigheaded as your father, and see where pigheadedness landed him in the end. I’ll wish you luck but don’t ask for my blessing. An investigation here, perhaps, into any evil you can name, but not one conducted outside the jurisdiction of a British court. That's to sit up and beg for trouble and I believe you’re intelligent enough to know it.”

  “Yes, I know it. And it was to ask your help in guarding against trouble that I came here and risked a quarrel. We never have quarrelled, have we, Uncle Adam?”

  “We’re close to quarrelling now.”

  “I don’t think so. I think you’ll help if you can. You haven’t earned the reputation you have among your work-people by turning your back on them. Half those boys down in that yard would have ended as pickpockets and pimps if it hadn’t been for men like you and Saul Keate.”

  “That's neither here nor there,” he said gruffly, hating to be identified with any cause but his own. “I don’t sign on those urchins from motives of charity, I can assure you. They earn their bread and salt once they get their names on my tally book and I see to it that they do. But how the devil can I help you spy on Brussels whorehouses?”

  “By giving me letters of introduction and an excuse for being in Belgium,” she said. “You don’t think we shall proclaim the purpose of our visit, do you?”

  “Was that Stead's idea?”

  She flushed and stood her ground. “No, it wasn’t. I put it to Stead and he fell in with it. Very readily.”

  “I’ll warrant he did,” said Adam, with a grin, and it struck him again that this was precisely the kind of deviousness for which Josh Avery had been famous, as soldier, financier, and rake. “They always said of your father that he could charm a fakir from his bed of nails. That's one thing you do ha
ve in common. Am I to understand that you and Mrs. Butler and that parson want to pose as representing my interests in Belgium while you’ve got your eyes to the keyholes?”

  “That would be as good a way of going about it as I can think of. We could be doing a survey into the prospects of Swann-on-Wheels opening a Continental branch. That would give us the entree into some of the big warehouses and I don’t doubt that we should make contacts with any number of gallants who might talk. That's what Ned thinks, at all events.”

  “Ned?”

  “Ned Gordon, the minister I mentioned.”

  “So you’re on Christian name terms? I take it this crusade is interdenominational?”

  “All of Mrs. Butler's campaigns are. The fact that Ned is a Free Churchman and I’m a Roman is a strength, not a weakness.”