Rotting Hill

by Lewis, Wyndham

  How things began was as follows. A married woman in the village in whom his wife and he had taken an interest (I suppose because she was a bad hat) had got herself in a fix. She had stolen something in a shop in Storby, and the presence of the stolen article in the house had led to difficulties—the details are immaterial. He wanted to ask his wife to come down and see this woman, and he went into “The Marquess of Salisbury” to telephone to the Rectory.

  The public telephone was situated at the far end of a passage, and in order to reach it one passed the two doors leading into, first, the public bar, and, next, the saloon bar. It was Saturday afternoon about two o’clock and there were people in both bars. As he passed the second door, which was open, he saw Jack Cox at the bar with two other farmers. He telephoned, and, having done so, as he turned around he found Jack Cox was standing there in the narrow passage looking at him.

  “Ah, hallo, Jack. I thought I saw you inside with Joliffe.”

  But Cox did not speak. What was more, he did not move and there was no room to pass him.

  Rymer is the most pacific and friendly of men, for all his arrogance, and I honour him for it, I cannot imagine him speaking roughly to anybody. Cox was plainly barring his way out and it might be assumed that he had been drinking enough for his ego to have swollen. There was probably nothing to be done but to push him out of the way. But English clergymen are not supposed to push human obstacles out of the way.

  “Well, Jack,” said Rymer, as if addressing an awkward child. He rested his shoulder against the wall and crossed one leg over the other, as though settling down for a chat. “How is the farm? I must run up there and pay you a visit. I’ve been intending to for some time.”

  “I shouldn’t,” said Cox.

  “Oh, why not, Jack?” he sang musically, with a teasing note, as if Jack was being a little silly.

  “Because I’ll kick you out of it on your bloody neck. That’s why.”

  “But why? That’s nonsense, Jack. Aren’t we friends?”

  At this point the most pacific clergyman should have taken steps to bring this colloquy to an end. Not so Rymer. No, he would charm this enraged animal into docility.

  “Jack,” he coaxed, “you’ve got this all wrong you know. You are not pleased with me, of course I know that, but you’ve got the wrong idea about me. Let’s talk it over, Jack! Shall I come up and see you tomorrow?”

  “Yes, come and convert me to communism. You’ve tried it on all the men who work for me. Come up and try it on me. But first of all take that.”

  With which he hit Rymer, the blow breaking two of the new set of Health teeth. Rymer straightened himself in a bound, putting his arms up in front of him—not pugilistically but to create an obstacle, and advancing at the same time: but Cox sprang to one side and shot in a second blow which brought the blood out of his nose.

  Jack Cox, whom I have seen, is half Rymer’s size, a little legginged English yeoman with a reddish bullet head. Although much older, I should suppose the larger could have annihilated the smaller had he wanted to. In this case the annihilation took a different form. With a great roar of “Jaaack!” which echoed all over “The Marquess of Salisbury”, the Man of God, as if in an access of love, flung himself upon Jack Cox and folded him in an ardent maternal embrace. Dropping blood all over Jack’s face and shoulders—when they caught sight of them people got the impression that Cox had been half murdered—Rymer practically carried him out of the public house.

  “Now, Jack Cox! Will you behave yourself,” he croaked huskily and breathlessly in Jack’s ear, as he hugged him under the inn sign of a bearded man, ostentatiously plastered with stars and medals.

  Those in the bars had come out into the street and people had come out of their houses, men, women and children, so that by now most of Bagwick was watching him. They did not watch in silence. The greater part of the men were Cox’s labourers. Rymer was surprised at the hostility towards himself. He had always believed himself popular and several of the hostile faces he could see as he struggled with his foully cursing prisoner belonged to men with whom only recently he had had most friendly conversations about labour conditions. But apparently they hated him! He thought inevitably of Christ and the Jewish populace.

  His tattered suit, under the strain of this violent encounter, was showing signs of disintegrating. Several patches had been torn off by Cox and he could hear a man derisively shouting: “Hi, sir, ye ’comin’ onstuck! Why don’t ee get t’misses to sew ee together!” But voices on all sides gave him very little comfort—the great tattered bleeding clergyman, hugging and heaving this way and that the little farmer, who was spitting insults up into his face like a little geyser of wrath, was not the sort of man to appeal to Hodge. He heard them cry: “Let him go! You coward, stand up to him!” “Trip him up, Jack! Kick him, Jack, he’ll drop yer then!” “Murder! Parson’s murdering Jack Cox!” There were no counter-cries to these. All were against him.

  Then Bill Crockett, the village “red”, arrived on the scene. Rymer could hear him coming and his heart sank. It only needed Bill Crockett to consummate the scandal. It would become a political issue, that man could be guaranteed to make political capital out of a dogfight. The “red’s” voice could be heard in raucous argument not far away, though there was so much noise he could not hear what he was saying. Rymer for the first time began to despair—this was just what Cox wanted. “Go away, Bill Crockett!” he called. But he had loosened his hold a little in order to expand his chest to shout, and Cox managed to jab him under the rib. Suddenly Crockett was shouting in his ear, “Squeeze the life out of the dirty little exploiter, Mr. Rymer. Teach him to soak the poor!” “Go away, Bill, for Heaven’s sake!” Rymer panted. But Crockett was kicking Cox on the shin-bone in his ideological enthusiasm. There was an indignant roar from Cox’s chorus, and out of the corner of his eye Rymer could see Bill Crockett exchanging blows with one of Cox’s men.

  Rymer became more depressed, confused and obsessed with the dread of the consequences every minute. “This is a bad dream. It cannot be happening!” was the semi-comforting idea that helped to sustain him.

  Releasing Jack Cox, and stepping back, he said:

  “Jack, let us put a stop to this disgraceful scene. You see what is going on. It does credit to neither of us. Do be sensible, Jack, and stop striking me. I am a clergyman, you know I cannot strike you back. It is cowardly to attack me.”

  Cox’s little eyes shone with malice as he stood listening and his little fists were tightly clenched. One of his little fists flew up into Rymer’s face. That is how he got his “shiner”. This nearly sent him to the ground; it also made him angry. He sprang at his enemy before the little fists could be used again and this time pinned him to the wall of the inn—holding him as before in his arms but up against the brick wall. That way it was less hard work, the wall assisting. Not of course that Cox remained just a bundle in his arms; he kicked, jerked this way and that, and stamped on Rymer’s toes. Nor, of course, did the people round them give him any peace and they might suddenly intervene in favour of their boss. Bleeding, perspiring, panting, he rode his little nightmare in a chaos of shouts, oaths, kicks, and chatter. The shrill voices of women pierced the murky fever of his mind. Mrs. Rossiter’s voice was the nearest and shrillest. His left eye was closing up now, so what happened to the right of him (the brick wall being in front) was less in his field of vision and less distinct.

  He could see no issue to this but, as a final absurdity, a stand-up fight with the farmer—for as he struggled in a hot blur his mind darted about seeking a means of escape. He saw the headlines in the Storby papers, “Fighting Parson. Riot in Bagwick. Farmer Cox’s story.” For more than a decade this man had been his enemy and it was most unlikely that he would let him off with anything short of the extremity of humiliation and scandal. His appeals to “Jack” he saw had been absurd. There was always Providence—it even passed through his mind that the Archdeacon might pass that way. He ran through all the mo
st unlikely visitants before reaching his wife. But Eleanor had said on the telephone that she would run down in the car almost at once, so it was after all in her that the best hope of intervention lay. He would hold this little rat pinioned to the wall until Eleanor stopped the car a few yards away, jumped out and hurried over to “The Marquess of Salisbury”. She would of course be horrified. “My poor darling!” she would cry when she saw his face, which was in a bit of a mess. And when she noticed Jack Cox was unmarked wouldn’t she just give Jack a piece of her mind which he richly deserved—and these brutes too, standing around here and allowing their Rector… well, he was their Rector!

  So in a sense he became numbed to outer sensations, he no longer heard the invective directed at him by his captive, he prosecuted the locking up of the little fists of Cox as an automaton. His mind supplied a feverish daydream to distract him as he rocked about on top of Cox. It ran on like a clockwork producing consoling images.

  But Jack Cox began to wriggle and to sink—he was slipping down all the time. Rymer tried to pull him up, but he had got down almost on his knees. Rymer at last was obliged to slip after him until he was on his knees too. It was impossible to hold him like that. He had to throw him over on his back, an operation he found none too easy. He did at last get him over, receiving a nasty punch or two in the process, and he then lay on top of him. Perhaps the earth would help him to hold Jack Cox better than the wall had.

  Meanwhile this was psychologically a less satisfactory position. He would have looked, to anyone suddenly arriving on the scene, more like an aggressor—lying there on top of a man as if he were a victorious wrestler, than he would have while they were both on their feet, and he obviously pinioning Cox’s arms, in the way a quite gentle police constable might. That, Heaven knows, was not a pretty picture: but this was a worse picture—should the Bishop happen at that moment to drive through Bagwick. He shuddered as he thought of the Bishop’s reaction on finding one of his clergymen lying on top of a man in the street, surrounded by a jeering crowd.

  He panted on top of Cox and it was much more difficult in this position to immobilize him. Their bodies lay parallel to the houses so he looked up at the road before him, the direction of the Rectory. Eleanor was taking her time!—or had something made it difficult for her to get away? (He refused to say impossible: difficult, perhaps.) Then, with a howl of pain, he leapt off Cox as if suddenly a bar of red-hot iron was there in place of Farmer Cox. He rushed away doubled up, in a crouching run. There was no longer any question of holding Cox. Without thinking, a wounded animal scuttling blindly for safety, he bolted from Cox as if that harmless-looking little countryman were possessed of some malignant property, fatal to life. He did not look back; he looked nowhere, heard nothing. Crouching and scuttling up the road he made for the Rectory.

  Jeering laughter followed him. Everyone was laughing and chattering, great hilarity prevailed in Bagwick as their Rector ran away from it screaming with pain. “Take it to y’missus, parson, she ’ull fix it for ’ee,” one of them called after him, a gust of fresh laughter beginning before the jeer ended. But the malice of Bagwick took a more tangible form. Mrs. Rossiter’s Jacko, from the start at his heels, now ran level with him, and, to round off the whole performance, plunged his teeth into Rymer’s calf. “First Jack—then Jacko!” as I said when he told me of the payment of that long-outstanding debt—pulling up his trousers and pants and showing me the relevant bandage.

  Eleanor appeared almost at once, he saw her red tam-o’-shanter. As she drew near to the crouching figure, smeared with blood, dishevelled, his patches gaping and fluttering, she could scarcely believe her eyes. As she stopped the car and sprang out she exclaimed “My poor darling!” just as she had done in his fevered daydream upon Cox’s breast. But the villagers began to move back into their houses as they saw her approaching, and Jack Cox had already gone back into “The Marquess of Salisbury”, so it was too late for the telling-off even had he not been suffering such atrocious pain. In the middle of the road was the inanimate form of Bill Crockett—who at first Eleanor had supposed must have been her husband’s victim.

  But Rymer was, it seems, practically inarticulate and she helped him tenderly into the car, saying “My poor darling!” again as she did so. One of the many thuggish tricks included in commando-training had been utilized by the farmer (who had been exempted from military service because of his farm but who had learnt a few of the best thug-tricks for use in civil life). All the facts were sorted out afterwards; Eleanor saw it was no time to ask questions. She turned the car round and with all speed made for home.

  His story greatly shocked me. I felt sorry about him as I should with a child. The majority of men are so cunning and practical, such little strategists. They would have known exactly what to do. They would in any case never have found themselves with a drunken farmer in their arms outside a public house.

  Rymer’s departure from my flat was rather sudden. He recalled the hospital hours: I offered to go with him but he would not allow me to do that. He hobbled past the Italian workman who was still glazing though he had stopped hacking. Rymer’s back went slowly along the corridor; that was more than six months ago and it is the last I have seen or heard of him. I have written several times but received no reply. I am beginning to wonder whether Rymer exists or whether he is not, rather, a figment of my imagination.

  2. My Fellow Traveller to Oxford

  When I entered the train at Paddington station I was absent-minded—indeed I was an automaton. I took my seat in a first-class carriage and it was only when someone coughed that I became aware that I was sitting in a corner seat opposite the only other occupant.

  You will assume perhaps that it is my habit to go around in a dream. This is not the case. I had been reading a book I had bought the day before, Human Rights, and on the way down in the cab I had been thinking about my “freedom”. I had reflected what a wonderful thing freedom of displacement was: what a delightful feature of the individualist way of life it was that I could decide to go to Oxford by the next train and all I had to do was to buy a ticket—or to anywhere in England. Once it had been possible to buy a ticket for anywhere in the world: shades of the prison-house were gathering deeply about us in these islands. Today I could go down to the station, buy a ticket, and go to Penzance or to John o’ Groats—quite a big prison-yard to exercise in, and as a matter of fact I seldom went further than a hundred miles. But I could not go to Calais or Boulogne. Tomorrow, it might be, I should have to secure a permit to travel to Oxford. I should then be walking around and around in Rotting Hill.

  That I could not go to Calais or to Boulogne without an official permit was no fault of the Government. If anyone is to be blamed it is the selfish greedy fools who pushed England into blood-bath after blood-bath. If a nation ruins itself by going to war on a sumptuous scale twice in a generation its touristically-minded citizens have to be restrained. Also the present government did not withhold its permission for travel to the most distant countries if the journey were to be undertaken for some serious purpose, cultural or commercial. Nevertheless, we were not as free as we were, and, having said that, I reminded myself that it was only the middle-class that had ever been free—had ever gone anywhere, so it was only they who suffered. I was very philosophic—but strangely preoccupied.

  As I went along the carriage-corridor I was thinking of that middle-class. And I was still thinking of the middle-class as the cough called me away from it. I looked up. I saw the working class.

  These railway-carriage tête-à-têtes in the first-class carriages of English trains can be rather disagreeable; and as the train left the station it was still a tête-à-tête. There are fewer people every day who travel first class in England. Some Englishmen in such a situation bury their countenances in a copy of The Financial Times or The Economist, or look coldly out of the window; make it quite plain that they object to conversation and will pull the alarm-chain if you compel them to do so by remarking that it is w
arm for the time of year. This man in front of me, however, looked at me fixedly. I did not need, therefore, to examine him furtively. I looked in his eyes and found them grey, self-satisfied, and aggressive. I noticed that his head was rather narrow, of an English pink—that he was probably approaching forty. What a man wears is no longer, in England, any indication of his economic status. It is not a classless society yet, but it is a uniformly shabby one.

  I did not like this face but I thought I had better break the ice.

  “England is becoming the rat-catcher of Europe,” I said.

  He gave a frosty, superior smile.

  “I was obliged,” I continued, “to call in the Ratin Company. We are infested with mice. The Ratin representative informed me that Ratin flew an outfit over to Reikjavik last week, at the request of the Icelandic government. They get many such summonses from abroad. It appears that we have ten times as many rats and mice here as formerly. So the ship cannot be sinking, can it?”

  “There are plenty of rats still in this country,” he observed disagreeably.

  “And mice—who think they are rats and behave as such,” I told him. “You would never have thought that ours were mere mice.”

  I knew that I could say nothing to this individual that he would not be superior about, even scornful. The train was a non-stop to Oxford. What was he doing at Oxford, or was he “a commercial”? In the days when there were classes he would have belonged to some section of the working class. His aggressiveness might be on account of that, alone it would not account however for his smouldering alertness.