The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  “I don’t know any labor agitators,” Gillon finally said.

  Lord Fyffe began to laugh, not unwarmly Gillon thought, such an infectious laugh that Gillon found himself wanting to smile and, finally, smiling.

  “You never met Keir Hardie?” “Hardie” was said in such a way that Gillon wanted to flinch from the name.

  He felt tears of humiliation at the edges of his eyes. He had forgotten Hardie because he never felt he had really met him but as far as it went with them, Gillon Cameron had been caught lying. So he stood there until his hand began to tremble again.

  “Now, I know why I’ve been put on earth. I’ve been put here to mine coal to make money, and I’m going to do it.”

  Gillon found himself nodding.

  “If everyone felt he had a right to sue the company for everything that went wrong, do you know where we would be? Do you know?” Gillon shook his head.

  “You know but you won’t say it, so I’ll say it for you. Out of business.” He allowed time for that to sink into Gillon’s consciousness. “Your beloved butties out of work, their bairn in the workhouses, the pits flooded with water. All because of one man’s self-righteous, self-serving selfishness.”

  One of the serving girls at the far end of the Great Hall dropped a teaspoon and it clattered on the floor. It was not enough to cause even the other serving girls to turn and look, a single teaspoon on the parquet floor, but Gillon looked up and as he did the enormity of the room made itself felt to him. He hadn’t really seen it before, the looming portraits of ancestors looking down, sprawling tapestries of hunts and stalks and festive scenes on the walls. He felt unsure in the room’s vastness, and without knowing it, angry.

  “You’ve already caused enough misery in this town to last it a lifetime. Because of your arrogance thousands of people have gone hungry, thousands of pounds of wages will never be paid, thousands of tons of coal gone unmined and unsold.”

  My arrogance, Gillon thought. Mine! and then felt the reassuring warmth of anger.

  “Because of you one woman is already dead of starvation.”

  “Mrs. Wallace died of—”

  “Shut your gob when Lord Fyffe is talking,” Brothcock said.

  “Dead of starvation! We have the medical examiner’s certificate to that effect.”

  The medical examiner? Dr. Gowrie!

  “Now, I have a proposal for you. What are you asking from me?”

  Gillon was hesitant to say it aloud, it sounded so unrealistic in his mind, but he said it, four hundred pounds, in a voice so low that it had to be repeated over again around the room, each time to be met with a laugh of incredulity or scorn and anger.

  “But that’s more than I spend in a year at university,” one of them said. “Who does he think he is?”

  “Put a kilt on a collier and he thinks he’s a peer.”

  “That’s absurd, isn’t it?” Lord Fyffe said. “And you know it, Cameron. Look at him,” he told the people in the room. Even the serving girls moved closer. “Look at the color of the man’s face. If he had a sensible demand, would he have to stand there with the face of a man about to be hanged? Or, better, whipped?”

  Against his will Gillon looked down. There had been too many eyes on him for too long.

  “That’s a tradition my father honored, and things were better then,” Lady Jane said. “Ask any of the old miners. They preferred it that way. A good whipping and a man knew where he stood.”

  “Of course, we don’t do that any longer,” the Earl said in a cool voice, “but there are men in Pitmungo who just might do it for us, when they face starvation because of your efforts at robbery. What was that you said about hunger?”

  “Hunger is a good master.”

  “Yes, well, hunger is a good flogger.”

  He let that stand in the silence of the room.

  “We’ll supply the whips and your neebors their good right arms. Cake.”

  A tray of frosted cakes and shortbread was wheeled into the circle of people in the room and Gillon noticed that they ate them with their fingers. The girl pushed the cart toward him but didn’t stop.

  “Now, this happening,” Lord Fyffe said, but Gillon couldn’t hear the words because of the cake in the Earl’s mouth. The sides of his mustache were sprinkled with crumbs.

  “The what, sir?”

  “The happening—the happening in the mine.”

  There are little things that can change a man’s mind and make him see in some new way. For Gillon it was the cake being wheeled past him by the working girl. He suddenly didn’t care what happened to him or to his class. They wouldn’t even give one of their own a piece of bread. And then there was the word “happening.”

  “It was a pick, sir. A pick through the shoulder into the bone.” He said it quite loudly. One of the young men winced.

  “Ah, yes, a pick. I notice you’re doing quite well with your tea service … for a cripple.”

  “It’s done with a good deal of pain, sir, which I didn’t wish to show.”

  “I’m sure of that. A very heroic man.” It was the same boy who had called Gillon a liar about the Clearances.

  “The gentry don’t think we hurt as much as they do, but we do, sir.”

  “That’s romantic nonsense, Cameron.” It was Mr. MacCurry. Gillon hadn’t noticed him before. “That’s more of your agitator gibberish and you know it. The working classes are conditioned from birth to endure certain hardships, just as other classes are trained to appreciate certain refinements. It’s one of God’s protections.”

  “If you had put your pick through Elphinstone’s shoulder the poor ninny would have died from fright,” the Earl said.

  Brothcock handed the Earl a second card. “After all is done,” Lord Fyffe said, looking over the card, “you can’t really expect to retire for life at my expense.”

  “You already have at mine.” Gillon was barely able to believe he had said it.

  “What did you say?” Brothcock said. “What was that you said to master?”

  He wasn’t sorry that he had said it but he didn’t feel ready to say it again. One of the girls took his cup away and he was grateful to her.

  “Damned impudence, I’ll tell you that much. The fellow does want a beating,” one of the younger men said.

  Lord Fyffe went on as if nothing had been said. “This is what I’m offering you. Forty pounds, largely because of a letter from Elphinstone asking that I be generous—that would be a record croo from the master; is that correct, Brothcock?”

  “Aye, my Lord.”

  “That’s forty more pounds than you were going to get. A withdrawal of your summons in return for the payment and your signature on this paper.”

  He held up a paper and Gillon found, when he started forward to reach for it, that he could barely force his body to move. There was the number forty again, coming back into his life.

  “Can he read?” one of the young men said. “Maybe it should be read to him. A lot of them pretend from pride, you know.”

  “He can read,” Brothcock said. “This one can read the fine print off the bottom of the contracts.”

  I, ——————, do solemnly swear that under no circumstances whatever will I sue my Company or my masters for injuries sustained while working for the Company and my masters.

  I understand that I will rely upon their generosity and their discretion, as has been the way before, with the understanding that that generosity will honestly reflect what is best for both the collier and his Company.

  “Every miner who wants to work for me in the future will sign this paper before going down one of my pits. I will not be affronted in this fashion again, I assure you of that.”

  He was talking to the others more than to Gillon. All the paper asked was that a man surrender all his rights.

  “Forty,” Gillon said aloud. He didn’t know if he had intended to say it out loud.

  “Yes, forty.”

  It was the number that was aggravating a s
ore in his mind, throbbing there like the nerves around the bones in his shoulder. The forty after the ordeal of getting his salmon. The forty percent of cod-fish Christmas.

  “That will keep your family nicely until you’re ready to go back down.”

  “I may never be able to go back down,” Gillon said. Forty percent dividends in the bad year, the year they had put grass and stones in the soup. He felt the anger rising in him again and was glad of it, and afraid of it.

  “Nonsense. You’ll go back down. They always do.”

  “You really don’t think we bleed when we’re cut. Would you care to see the wound, sir?”

  “What kind of blether is this to master?” Brothcock said.

  “This isn’t my master. This is my employer.” Gillon felt his face burning but not from embarrassment.

  “What is he talking about?” Lady Jane said. “What is he trying to say? We have always been masters here.”

  “Forty percent is what I am talking about, Ma’am,” Gillon said. “Forty percent dividends when the children ate boiled grass, when we were driven to putting stones in the soup for taste. My God, I have to ask, what did you people take in the good years?”

  It was followed by silence because they weren’t prepared for the outburst.

  “Where did you get that nonsense?” the Earl said. “Who fed you that pack of lies? I want to know so I can deal with it. Speak up!”

  “I can read, sir. Lots of us can read. I read it in The Scotsman, sir. I can recite it for you if you wish, sir; I read it so often, you see, sir.”

  “What is it he wants?” Lady Jane asked. It was all incomprehensible to her. “What is he after? Is he a collier or not?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Then what is he talking back for? Colliers don’t talk back to master.”

  “I think he’s a little daft,” someone said.

  “All we ask is that when we finish a week of work that we be not hungry for it. Is that asking too much? And that when we’re hungry and the Company is fat, we might have a little of the fat to see us through.”

  “When my father was still alive,” Lady Jane said, “colliers were flogged for acting this way. We used to beat them.”

  “And we want to see that we are subject to the laws, and not to the whims of any master, sir. There is no master and no slave in this country any more, sir, and the men are learning that.”

  “Is that it?” Lord Fyffe said. “Are you quite through…?”

  He couldn’t remember what it was he had said; it had all poured out in such a rush that he had no sense of the words he had used. All he was conscious of was that for once in his life he had said what he wanted to say to the man he wanted to hear it, and he wasn’t sorry. He knew that it was all over for him in Pitmungo, and he wasn’t sorry. He was as dazed now as he was when he had come into the room.

  “When I came down here, I came down to accept your offer—” Gillon started to say.

  “Silence,” Brothcock ordered. His face was almost touching Gillon’s but Gillon barely saw him. “I’m going to shut your mouth by breaking it.”

  “There is no offer now,” Fyffe said. “You’re going to be crushed and your family crushed with you.” He sounded amiable about it.

  “But he needs his beating first,” someone said.

  “He needs a good whipping. His kilt down and flogged like a schoolboy.”

  “He needs,” a young man said, “another pick inside his arm.”

  They were silent again, the signal that Gillon could never see.

  “This is a civilized house and we are a civilized people,” Lord Fyffe said. “When the time comes for a flogging, he will get one because his own kind are going to give it to him for the misery he is going to cause them. Now get out. Go!”

  He didn’t know which way to go. People were all about him. He was afraid of someone hitting him on his bad arm and when someone touched the arm he almost cried out. It was a serving girl leading him out. He passed through them, conscious of the sway of his kilt against his knees but not of any faces.

  “And Cameron, one other thing.” The serving girl stopped him and turned him around to face the Earl.

  “Why are you wearing my shoes?”

  “Your shoes?”

  “My shoes.”

  He stood as he had turned, halfway around, his mouth open, not understanding.

  “My shoes, Cameron.”

  Gillon knelt down and clumsily, barely able to manage his fingers, untied the laces and slid off a shoe. In the back, near the heel, were the Earl of Fyffe’s initials. Gillon looked up, still not comprehending, and they began to laugh. It was the kind of laugh that grows upon itself and it continued to grow for as long as he knelt on the floor of the Great Hall looking inside the shoe and up at them. He untied the second shoe and placed it next to the first one. Just the sight of the shoes in the middle of the room made them laugh. Even Lady Jane could see the humor now and was laughing. A man in a kilt in the middle of the room with no shoes on. Gillon got up and for a reason he never understood began backing across the room, backing his way to the corridor, and once in the corridor he turned and began to run. He ran down the hallway to the door and turned the heavy knob one way and pulled and it wouldn’t open and the other way and pulled and pushed, it was the last of their tricks, he felt, they had locked him in where he would be forced to listen to the sound of their laughter—when the girl opened the door and he was outside, running on the gravel walk. The gravel cut his feet but he didn’t mind; he liked the humiliation of the stones’ hurt.

  “Sir,” the girl was calling from the door. “Jock. Your hat,” she called. “You’ve left your hat.” But she didn’t offer to bring it out to him and he would never take a step back toward her and so he continued on his way, running once more, out to the Low Road. All that he could get straight in his mind was that he had lost another hat. Maggie would never forgive him for a second hat.

  12

  “No settlement.”

  That’s all they learned at first, but the words went up the rows and lanes ahead of Gillon, leaping from house to house, through stone walls and across the Sportin Moor in the mysterious way news is spread in small towns where all the interests are one.

  Gillon met Walter Bone and the other leaders on the Low Road and told as well as he could—the parts he could remember—what had taken place in Brumbie Hall, and then he handed them the paper and started down along the river to be alone. Mr. Bone and the rest of them went back to town to tell Pitmungo what they knew.

  For many of them it was sad and for some frightening. They were set for settlement. They had had enough of hunger and living on nerves and marrow. But still, as far as they could learn, one of their own had done what no one had ever dared before; he had talked back to the coal master. For most that was enough to keep supporting the cause. And then there was the “yellow-dog agreement,” the paper that asked the men to give up their rights before going down in the mines. The agreement solidified them. Before Gillon came back up the hill, the words “Dogs Sign, Men Don’t” was the rallying cry of a new resistance.

  He remembered later as little of the coming up as he did of the going down. He heard the questions being called to him and he tried to answer a few, but mostly he kept walking upward, asking himself over and over if he had done the right thing and not being able to remember exactly what it was he had done or said.

  “Where are your shoes?” people would ask. “What did they do to them, man?” and his mind would go back to some other aspect of the afternoon. How had it gotten to the point where neither of them could find a way to back down? When had the turning point come, the time of no turning back? He couldn’t recall, he could only see himself kneeling on Lord Fyffe’s floor taking off the Earl’s own shoes.

  “What happened to the beautiful hat we bought you, man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Dr. Gowrie came down the Walk toward Gillon and Gillon had difficulty recognizing him and he
aring him.

  “Looked in on that lad of yours. He’s going to be all right. Can’t keep a mine boy down.”

  “No.”

  “If the pits were open tomorrow, which I gather thanks to you they won’t be, I’d send the lad down.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Little inflammation in the throat but we took care of that. A little fluid in the lungs but we’ll dry that out. What we might prescribe for your hard head is another matter.”

  “Thank you,” Gillon said, and started back up.

  “I don’t know, I’m sorry, I forget, I forget,” he said all the way up through Doonietoon and past Lord Fyffe No. 1 and up to Tosh-Mungo Terrace.

  They were arguing about something, Sam and Sarah and Maggie and Andrew, in tight, hushed voices, when Gillon came through the door.

  “We heard, Dad, we heard all about it. There was nothing else for you to do,” Andrew said.

  “We heard. You really told the son of a bitch the facts of life down there, Daddie. Oh, we’re proud of you,” Sam said.

  Maggie wouldn’t look at him. “What have you done, Gillon? What have you done this day?”

  “I don’t know what I’ve done.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have begun,” she said bitterly.

  “He did a brave thing,” Sam said.

  “Brashness without wisdom isn’t valor, boy. A dumb horse with blinders will run into a cannon. Call that brave?”

  Gillon pushed his way through them and went into the ben. He had to be away from them. He lay down on the cot they had fixed for him since Jemmie had the bed and studied the patterns on the smoked ceiling. They were arguing again in those controlled hushed voices, low but filled with tension. If only, Gillon thought, he could convince himself that what he had said had not been the vainglorious mouthings of a fool. But he couldn’t remember what he had said, things about slaves and masters and the rule of law. If only he could feel proud of himself, if only he had been able to walk out of the Great Hall in dignity instead of fleeing from it, the sound of laughter in his ears. He could hear Jem, from the bed in the corner, shift his body and groan once and then begin to breathe in a terribly labored way, gasping for air like a man coming up from a long immersion. He got up.