God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  It astounded her that he could threaten her like that, that he could behave to her as Millward had treated the boy Jake when he had crept from the chimney, whining that he had lost contact with his fellow-apprentice. And then, in a freakish way, she accepted his tyranny, for it went some way towards extricating her from a crushing load of guilt, and as she became aware of this she began to work more attentively, removing layer after layer of grime from other chimneys than her own, and pausing every now and again to wring water from the cloths. When the water in the bucket was quite black he threw it out, replenishing it from the kettle.

  After about ten minutes Ellen crept in, her mouth forming a hard line as she realised what they were about. She said, in a whisper, “Dawson and the boy were in the spinney. They’m coming now,” and when he made no answer: “Mrs. Swann should go and lay down, sir. It's been a rare shock for her.”

  Henrietta thought then that he was going to strike Ellen across the face and braced herself against the blow that would send the housekeeper reeling, but then he locked one hand over the other, saying, “Take a cloth and help. There's something here you should see, the pair of you.” He made room for her and Henrietta stood aside too, following the direction of his pointing finger towards the boy's groin. She saw then that all was not as it should be, for a cluster of seamed scars showed in the crutch. Adam said, in something like a recognisable voice, “He's not only bowlegged and a hunchback, he's also a eunuch. He's probably been at the trade since he was five or six. That's a scrotal affliction caused by soot and known as chimney sweep's cancer. The only treatment for it is the knife. Slip this gown over him while I lift him. Take the other side, Henrietta.”

  She was past all thought of rebellion. There was implacability in every word he uttered, as though to question it would be to invite the prospect of being throttled and laid beside the child on the couch. Both she and Ellen accepted this and responded to it, so that between them, with him raising the body, they managed to shroud it in her nightgown. She noticed that, small as it was, the robe was too big for him. A foot or more of it had to be tucked under the feet. Then mercifully, he took another sheet from one of the chairs and covered the body, including the face.

  “Take her away now,” he said to Ellen, “but don’t either of you leave the house. You’ll have questions to answer, both of you, when the magistrate gets here.” They crept from the room, supporting one another like a pair of ageing drunkards and leaving him to his penance.

  4

  The enterprise was a vast, angled web with its threads running out across innumerable half-deserted turnpikes, dust roads, tracks, and streams, spanned by mediaeval packhorse bridges, and rail bridges hardly settled on their redbrick piles, leading to city, town, hamlet, and nearly a thousand miles of indented coastline. The coastline was the frame that extended up to the far north-west, along Hadrian's wall, down to the South Foreland, then west to the knob of the Cornish peninsula, but half-a-hundred shorter, lateral threads linked the country in between.

  His waggons, more than three hundred of them, followed the routes of derelict coaches now mouldering in outhouses and henruns, out across shire, spurline, river, marsh, across cities old and new, and down the narrow twisting streets of many an ancient market town and village. Yet, one way or another, each of those threads led back to where he sat in his truncated belfry above the Thames, and at every terminal were men answerable to him and him alone, for somehow, over the cygnet years, his zest and self-confidence had run out along the threads to sustain them, and now it was difficult to imagine an alternative dynamo that would keep the wheels turning, or enlist among them much more than a grudging servitude.

  This was how they saw it, and this was how he had always seen it, a huge, ever-expanding web, with himself as the master spinner, and in the spring of 1863, when the last of his waggons had rolled to their allotted territories, it had seemed a time for self-congratulation, for he had no need of reassurance that his steadfastness and vitality had confounded the Jeremiahs, and that when they doubted now their voices were muted and their warnings qualified. It was even, perhaps, time for retrenchment and consolidation, words that, until then, he had never used, for to him they signified a licensed idleness. In the years ahead there would, so he told himself, be ample time for further expansion, for encroachment into faraway areas like the Highlands where a boy could still grow to manhood without seeing a locomotive, or in Ireland where, despite political turmoil, haulage markets were wide open for the man with ideas and capital to invest. He thought of this as he trotted along the Kentish lanes with his wife's twenty-fourth birthday present in his pocket, warming himself at the glow of his own achievements. And then a thirteen-year-old child called Luke Dobbs came plummeting down his chimney, crashing on to his hearthrug and through the nerve-centre of his ethos.

  It would be unrewarding to look for logic in his reaction. Logic, although playing a role in his tactics, had no place in his strategy as man or merchant. For four years now his strategy had been based upon certain concepts, and in the main they were concepts at odds with his time. He subscribed neither to Palmerston's laissez-faire, nor the simple zealotry of evangelicals like Keate and Tybalt. Philanthropy, as such, made no direct appeal to him, and neither did the militancy of reformers like Catesby, although he made allowances for all these creeds. He saw his own and his nation's destiny in terms of an adjustable balance, labour in one scale, capital in the other, and at centre nothing but an amalgam of commonsense, human dignity, and administrative efficiency. But Luke Dobbs, crashing feet first down the chimney, destroyed that equilibrium, and for the time being indeed, for a long time to come, he was without a formula and at war with himself in search of one.

  Perhaps the most salutary aspect of the incident was the sense of isolation it introduced. He had observed and counted the blood money of commercial imperialism at Cawnpore and Lucknow, and had witnessed, on the setts of Seddon Moss, the vicious recoil of the age, but on these occasions the impact had shocked without shaming, for he had been able to seek sanctuary in self-righteousness, merely shrugging and telling himself, “Not this way. Not for me and my concerns.” But this was no longer possible. Luke Dobbs had been crushed and suffocated in his chimney, and at the instance, if indirectly, of his own wife, who thus demonstrated that she valued her soft furnishings above the flesh and bones of children. This involved not only him but his whole concept of civilisation, as though the world he had chosen was not a place of commerce at all but a carnival of lunatics dancing a carmagnole on the bones of the underprivileged.

  A thing like this, taking place in broad daylight, and inside a Christian home, made nonsense of every word that dripped from every pulpit in the land, and every pious platitude that issued from the mouths of lawgivers at Westminster. It reduced to obscenity the popular music-hall ditties extolling the land of the free, and a theology that sent missionaries to win heathen souls. For while the savage slew and sometimes ate his adversary, he did it in obedience to ritual or hunger. Savages did not feed their fires with the children of the vanquished.

  When the little coffin had been trundled away, when the coroner had tongue-lashed the mastersweep and revoked his licence, when all the messages had been sent to all Henrietta's guests informing them that there would be no supper-party at Tryst he would have thought that the tide of self-disgust would recede, but it did not, and one reason why it did not led back to the smallness of the stir about him. For the unspeakable death of Luke Dobbs occasioned less local newspaper comment than Ratcliffe's lion-catching exploit, or Blubb's brush with the Fenians, and seemed to make no more than a dent in the armoured complacency of his staff and intimates. He could have understood this in the case of his father, or the coachman Blubb, who were men of the eighteenth and not the nineteenth century. He could even accept it in the Keates and Tybalts, having personal access to Jehovah who had assured them that, given time, he would reward the just and punish the wicked. But there were others, among them his wife and neig
hbours, and the doctor who had certified the death of the boy, who seemed to accept Luke Dobbs’ murder as nothing more than an embarrassing mischance, that could occur in the best regulated household and could be forgotten now that the corpse had been hustled out of sight, the room tidied, the sweep reprimanded, and a report sent to swell the postbag of the good Lord Shaftesbury, currently canvassing an Act of Parliament aimed at extending the life span of chimney sweeps.

  That Adam Swann was unable to follow their example was his misfortune and evidence, possibly, of his eccentricity. At first his morbid preoccupation with the fate of Luke Dobbs passed almost unnoticed. Then, in ones and twos, people began to remark on it, and it was seen that, in the breaking and recasting of his mould of thought, his character had undergone a dramatic change, and that his judgements, formerly so concise and original were becoming clouded. What was worse, his absorption with his enterprise changed to a self-absorption that led him to spend his time mooning about the woods and heaths, and writing letters to newspapers and cranks, who were campaigning for all kinds of obscure causes, of which the elimination of the trade of flueboy was but one.

  At first, individually and collectively, they tried to humour him, and when this failed, to argue the case with him but they had little success. Sometimes he would listen to them and then, without comment, set out on one of his solitary walks, but more often, the moment they touched upon the subject, he would urge them to mind their own damned business and they would go away shaking their heads, wondering why such a commonplace occurrence should make such a deep impression on a man who had seen service in Bengal and the Crimea. They hoped, fervently, that his withdrawn mood did not indicate the onrush of religious mania, and that soon, seeing his leaderless business in a trough, he would pull himself together and attend to more important matters.

  He was well aware, of course, that they were talking about him, and that when he continued to drift about the house, silent and all but unapproachable, his father, his wife, and his sleeping partner Avery had taken counsel together, but he neither knew nor cared what conclusion they had reached or what course, if any, had been decided upon.

  It was some time after that that Avery made his direct approach and got short shrift for his pains, being told, sharply, to let the matter rest and take charge at the yard for a spell.

  Then Tybalt sought him out on the excuse of discussing some new contracts Catesby had sent down, and when these had been referred to Tybalt touched, somewhat hesitantly, upon the death of Luke Dobbs, saying that Adam had no reason to take it so much to heart for, from the facts Tybalt had gathered, the boy had been dead before he had arrived on the scene. Adam stared him down so menacingly that the little man began to shuffle. “And how in hell does that absolve me?” he demanded. “It happened in my house, and it was my wife who stood by and let that scoundrel Millward drive the other boy back into the chimney!” Tybalt almost said something to the effect that the ladies would have their places kept spick and span, but, fortunately for him, he bit on it and reminded his employer that a bill was likely to pass Parliament forbidding the practice, and that in the meantime any number of matters were waiting his personal attention in the yard. “We miss your drive more than I can say,” he said, earnestly. “Mr. Keate sent his compliments, and hopes to have the pleasure of discussing an applicant for the Derbyshire base as soon as possible.”

  “Tell him to do nothing,” Adam said, “for I doubt if I shall go ahead in The Pickings. I might even contract,” and Tybalt left feeling less secure than he had felt for a long time. It seemed to him incomprehensible that the future of a thriving concern like Swann-on-Wheels could rest upon the fate of a thirteen-year-old chimney sweep. He was a kindly man, who devoted most of his spare time to good works of one sort or another, but he did not think the death of one chimney sweep should be allowed to clog the wheels of commerce. It was Tybalt's experience that foundlings had always been expendable. One saved the souls of some, but the workers in the vineyard were few and he supposed a majority must find their own way home in the dark.

  The next approach was made by the Colonel, but his decision to intervene was urged upon him by what he considered a protracted and largely pointless quarrel between a son he respected and a daughter-in-law he had come to cherish. It was Henrietta, in fact, who asked him to try, declaring indignantly that Adam seemed to blame her for the whole sorry business and this, she felt, was the ultimate in unreason.

  The old man came upon his son one evening when he was standing in front of the fatal chimneypiece, having just caught a disconcerting glimpse of himself in the mirror that hung there. What he saw dismayed him. The face was haggard and the eyes sombre, the eyes of a man who had not slept soundly in a long time, and even in his present, self-punitive mood this struck him as incongruous. He thought, wretchedly, “God damn it, I didn’t feel this badly at Cawnpore, and nothing like so helpless when her father rode over that boy at Seddon Moss. What the devil is it, then? Are they all of a piece? Is that poor devil of a chimney sweep no more than a reminder of the monstrous hypocrisy we practise about here? Because if so it's high time I left hauling to somebody else and set about making my voice heard at Westminster alongside Shaftesbury, and the few like him,” and then the Colonel came in, saying, in his gentle, woman's voice, “There's no logic in blaming her, boy. She was no more responsible for what happened than I was, for I was about the house at the time, tho’ I’m not pretending I would have stopped it. Lads have been cleaning chimneys ever since they’ve had chimneys.”

  “Not my chimneys,” growled Adam, and then, as he decided the Colonel was here as her envoy, “Let Henrietta speak for herself if she's anything to say. She's mistress here in my absence, and one glance at that man Millward should have been enough to induce her to send him packing.”

  “Very well,” the Colonel said, mildly, “then tell her so, and put it all out of mind. It's done now and can’t be undone, and there are your children to consider into the bargain.”

  “My children! Good Christ, don’t you realise I find it difficult to look at them without being aware of the gulf between cossetted brats like that and a majority of children in this day and age? Sometimes I think Catesby is right. If people like us don’t bestir ourselves we’ll soon have a Paris-style revolution on our hands, and a damned good thing too, for I know where you’d find me if it did happen!”

  It occurred to the Colonel then, and for the first time in years, that this tall, scowling son of his was only half an Englishman, and that this must be the French half of him talking. As someone who had grown to manhood in the period when a mob reigned in Paris, who had seen at first hand the cruelty and social chaos that attended revolutions, the remark had the power to shock him. He said, stiffly, “We don’t incline to that in England, boy. When collision-course threatens, we legislate. Soon enough we’ll legislate about this, the way we already have about the children in the factories and coalmines,” but Adam said, bitterly, “Aye, we’ll do that! In twenty years, forty years! And meantime helpless little devils like Luke Dobbs will choke to death in flues, and when they don’t answer a hail will be dragged out feet first by a rope, or have a fire lit under them! God damn it, don’t you feel any blood on your hands? You fought your way from Lisbon to Paris alongside boys like that apprentice, but that was half-a-century ago. Even so, did you treat them as he was treated, to keep them up to their duty?”

  “No,” the Colonel said, “I never did, for that wasn’t my way. But others did. I’ve seen men flogged senseless for a trivial act of insubordination, and others hanged for looting on enemy soil. But that kind of ordinance has been expunged from Queen's Regulations, as I said it would be at the time. However, I didn’t come here to discuss social reform but your responsibilities as husband and father and employer of labour. Pull yourself together, man, and begin by telling Henrietta that you don’t identify her with that brute Millward.”

  “In a way, I do.”

  The Colonel lifted his shoulders. “The
n you’re more of a fool than I took you for,” he said, and left, closing the door quietly behind him.

  It was, he supposed, reasonable advice, and despite his denial it must have made some kind of impact on him, for that night, for the first time since Luke Dobbs had been carted away, he came out of the bedroom along the corridor that he had been occupying and went to her.

  She was sitting up in bed reading one of her trashy novels and looked, he thought, small and pathetic under that vast canopy. She glanced up hopefully, throwing her book aside, and for a moment he thought she was going to cry. Then, apparently deciding that he had not come here in search of tears, she forced a smile and he thought, fleetingly, “Damn it, the old man is right. It hasn’t touched her. She blames anybody but herself and that's her way. She's Sam Rawlinson's daughter all right, and her mental age is ten,” and suddenly he felt a terrible need to commune with a woman whose thoughts and actions and responses were not at the mercy of her emotions, who was capable of helping him to get this thing into focus. She said, chirpily, “Don’t let's sulk, Adam. It's so silly letting something like this come between us. Surely you understand how dreadful it was for me at the time, and how much I would have given to prevent it, but how was I to know…”

  He cut her short with a gesture that expressed not so much impatience as a kind of hopelessness, although she saw it as an impulse more characteristic of him, and obligingly wriggled over to her side of the bed. She waited until he turned out the lamp before indulging herself in the luxury of a suppressed giggle, reflecting that she must have been a fool to imagine that a man as lusty as he could sulk indefinitely. But later, when he had turned away, and seemed to be sleeping, she wasn’t sure that it was as uncomplicated as it seemed, for he had used her in a way that was strange to her, absentmindedly, and entirely without that affectionate boisterousness to which she had grown accustomed and which she took for granted. It was as though he was performing a duty urged upon him by his loins, and was in a hurry to accomplish it and retreat within himself once again, and because of this, or perhaps because her mind was still preoccupied with the long, smouldering quarrel, she took no pleasure in him, despite all her efforts to please. Then she found comfort in the reflection that he had his pride and this, no doubt, was his way of capitulating without too much loss of face. Reconciliation, she supposed, would have to be accomplished in stages, spaced over a week or two, and so long as she kept her mouth shut, and went to work on him with her body, she was confident it could be achieved without much bother. At all events, even this was better than having him skulking out of her reach, and in the moment before sleeping she felt grateful to the dear old Colonel for his intervention. Men were an odd lot and he was more odd than most, shunning her and turning the house topsy-turvy because of an accident involving the death of someone who was not even a relation. It was almost as though little Alexander had choked in the chimney, and she was the one who had ordered him to climb it. Thinking this she gave a little shudder and then, as was her way with all unpleasant thoughts, she shooed it out of mind and slept.