Читать книгу They Seek a Country - Francis Brett Young - Страница 11

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The great three days’ fog had not throttled and shrouded the land on the day when John Oakley left London and started on the long tramp homeward to Grafton Lovett. He left the stony capital with a heavy heart and a bitter feeling of failure, far different from the enthusiasms with which he had approached it a week before. That visit had marked the first impact of grim actuality on an ardent spirit which, up till now, had been nurtured on dreams and had little acquaintance with reality outside the narrow limits of his own upbringing; and the shock sharply administered to his belief in human justice, together with an increasingly unpalatable sense of his own insignificance and impotence, made him equally humble and hurt and hotly rebellious.

He had been born and bred, as Colonel Abberley was informed, in the sooty borough of Dulston, a conglomeration of mean dwellings, foundries and workshops incongruously encircling the ruins of a feudal fortress, which the fierce draught of the industrial revolution had lately fanned into fervent life: a centre of hot volcanic activity fed by the fuel feverishly dug from the vast coalfield that surrounded and throttled it in the smoke of its monstrous combustion. His mother, an innocent pink-and-white country girl exiled in service at an ale-house in Sedgebury, had loved and married her first courter, a nail-maker who lived and plied his sweated trade in a domestic forge built on to the back of a cottage of smoke-grimed brick indistinguishable from twenty others in the same sordid row.

The life into which Oakley had been born, and which, as a child, he took for granted, was one of unceasing labour amid conditions of brutal savagery and bitter privation. Sixteen hours a day and more his parents toiled in their cramped and sooty cavern forging nails for the iron-shod hooves of the great Duke’s victorious cavalry. Twenty thousand horseshoe-nails a week Oakley’s father forged, each nail struck twenty-five times with the two-pound hammer: five million one hundred and sixty-eight thousand hammer-strokes of the sinewy spark-scarred forearm—and, as a result of this labour, the nail-maker’s grudging pittance of eight shillings a week. In the first ten years of his life, John Oakley’s ears never knew peace from the thud and tinkle of hammers; his eyes knew no respite from the spectacle of toil. His father and mother were more like machines than human beings. The moment they ceased working they ate what they could and flung themselves down on the bed they shared with him and slept; when they woke, they ate greedily again and worked till their eyes or their muscles failed them. In the strict economy of this inhuman labour even the strength of a child might count by helping to tip the nice balance between subsistence and actual starvation. Mere hunger was taken as a matter of course. So, as soon as his baby intelligence grew sufficient to grasp the working of that elementary mechanism, the child’s frail arms were set to the monotonous task of blowing the bellows that breathed on the forge’s gleed. That was a proud day when, six years old and perched on a box to reach the lever, he first set his hand to it, but it was not long before what had seemed an adventure became a slavery. Sometimes his mind wandered; sometimes he fell asleep; and the gleed went black and his father would swear at him fiercely but not unkindly. More than once, overcome by heat or fumes he grew giddy and fainted. Then his mother would run to him, smothering him with anxious tears and kisses. It was a shame, she said, to work the child to death; she would rather work longer herself, she protested, and wear her fingers to the bone; but her husband told her roughly not to be soft and asked her where she thought the next dinner was coming from.

Seven days a week the family worked and sixteen hours at a shift; and the fogger weighed the nails with false weights and haggled over slipshod workmanship and iron wasted, and complained and bullied because more of the carefully-counted shillings were not spent at his tommy-shop.

By the time he was ten John Oakley had not learnt to read or write. A few of the neighbours’ children, whose hands could be spared, were “put out” to be kept out of mischief by an unsavoury Dame who “taught school” for threepence a week. Other children of more prosperous households attended the Common Day School or even the brand-new British School in the Sedgebury Road, the dissenters’ counterblast to the National Schools which were attached to the Established Church; but these seats of superior learning exacted more than a penny a day, and that, in a week, amounted to more than the earnings of half a day’s work: and what was the use of book-learning anyway to a boy whose whole life, in the nature of things, would be divided, like that of his father and mother, between labour and sleep—who had been born to hammer and cut and shape red-hot rods of iron till the day of his death?

By the time he was ten, moreover, John Oakley had scarcely set eyes on a blade of green grass or indeed on any living green save that of the sickly trees which, clinging to the steep on which the Castle crumbled, shook forth in spring, with helpless obstinacy, bright feeble trusses of leaf whose verdure the impalpable dust of carbon that fell from the sky soon tarnished. The town of Dulston stood at the very heart of the blighted zone, marooned in the midst of a slagged and cindery wilderness, and this was John Oakley’s world. Beyond its bricky verges, if he had only known, lay as sweet a countryside as any in England, a tangle of green hillsides and flowing streams; but the child knew nothing of these save what his mother whispered to him when warmly huddled beside him in the cold bed shaken by the vibrations of his father’s snores, she spoke of the lost paradise of her own not so very distant childhood—of a remote, unimaginable heaven that went by the musical name of Grafton Lovett where the sun, it seemed, always shone, and harsh winds never bit to the bone, and children wandered, without a care in the world, through green lanes and cowslip meadows and bluebell-sheeted coppices, and a gentle old man, his grandfather, kept a cow and hissing geese on the common.

It was for her own pleasure rather than for his that Mary Oakley indulged in this vein of soft reminiscence; but the boy who listened absorbed it eagerly with that craving for fairy tales (her stories were no more real to him) which is natural to the mind of a child. And his mother, indeed, at these times, was little more than a child herself, lying there in the great cold bed and calling on the illusions of memory to trick her into brief forgetfulness of the present misery on which, without knowing why, or even protesting, she had blindly stumbled.

“Tell me more, mam,” the child would plead when her whispers ceased. “I don’t want to go to sleep yet.”

“But we must go to sleep, my precious, or how shall we ever get to work in the morning?”

“Must folk like us do nothing but work for ever and ever?” he asked.

“We must do as God wills,” she told him, without much conviction.

“But does God ... What is God?” he demanded.

Mary Oakley was silent. This question was far too complicated to be answered at that time of night, and the spiritual ministrations of the Reverend George Ombersley had hardly equipped her to cope with it.

“Shall we ever go to Grafton Lovett and see that there cow?”

“Oh yes, I reckon we ought to go home some day,” she sighed. “And some day you’ll go to heaven, provided you’m good.”

“I’ld much liever go to Grafton Lovett,” the child asserted stubbornly.

She laughed softly. “That’s wickedness, that is ... but so would I. Now come your ways, my pretty, and go to sleep.”

There came a time when sleep was none too easy for either of them. His father slept soundly enough. When the monstrous labour of his day’s work was done and he had filled his stomach, nothing less than the trumpets of doom could have broken the rhythm of his snoring. But now, when they lay down together, the child’s mother could not sleep. No sooner were they warm in bed than a savage cough tore her. It shook him as he lay in her arms, and though a kind neighbour next door gave her syrup of horehound laced with laudanum, nothing could stay it. It was the night air, she said, that caught her breath and choked her, though the gaps of the broken window-panes were stuffed with sacking and the crevices packed with paper. Yet even in the warmth of the forge she coughed as grievously; and that, she said, was because of the dust and the acrid fumes that tickled her throat. Sometimes, at night, when her desperate hacking woke him, the child shrank from the heat of her body which burnt him like a coal. Sometimes he woke warm to feel her icy, drenched in cold sweats. Living with her constantly his father and he grew used to her coughing, and failed to notice how thin and drawn she had grown and how the torn garments hung on her like those of an unstuffed scarecrow. But the neighbours who lived in the row and saw her less frequently noticed the change, and the woman who had given her the syrup of horehound and laudanum came complaining.

“That there cough of yourn, Mrs. Oakley,” she said; “it’s time you did summat for it. It shakes the wall terrible all night and stops my man sleeping. If I was you, I should go to the chemist and see about it. And if I was your husband I shouldn’t be satisfied, that I shouldn’t. That’s a churchyard cough if ever there was one, you take my word for it.”

Mary Oakley smiled wanly. She would try all she could, she assured her, to stop coughing at night. She was always a one for tissicking in winter, she said, but when summer came round she would be as right as ninepence.

The woman shook her head. “Well, that may be,” she said, “but I don’t like the look of you, neither. You’ve lost too much flesh for my liking. You put me in mind of a sister of mine that went off in a decline.”

The heart of the listening child went cold and sick with dread. His very ignorance of death made the menacing phantom more terrible. He began to watch his mother from day to day. It was true, as the neighbour said, that her face had lost the pink and white of its country roses. It was true that she had grown thin; that by day her peaked face had a bloodless pallor; but at night, when the forge was damped down, he took heart to see her pale cheeks brightened by vivid patches of colour, her eyes sparkling, her manner enlivened by a sudden gaiety which persuaded him that all must be well and that he had no need to fear. But when summer, on which he had been waiting, came, she did not lose her cough. It was on the day of Dulston Wake, when the streets were teeming with colliers and puddlers and nailers and chain-makers who poured into them from every town, village and hamlet of all the Black Country, that suddenly, as she was laughing and coughing together, a blood-vessel gave way and drenched the brick floor of the kitchen with blood. Her husband stared at the red deluge stupidly. It was she who whispered, smiling:

“Fetch the doctor, quick, my pretty. Oh, what a mess!”

The child ran to the corner of the High Street and called the doctor, who said he would come at once. He ran home again without stopping. But too late. His mother was dead.

The parish gave Mary Oakley a pauper’s funeral. No bell was tolled—the Dulston Guardians cared little for the living and less for the dead—and the parish “box” was so hastily knocked together that the bearers had doubts if it would hold till the frail body was dumped with perfunctory rites into its anonymous grave. No mourners followed the coffin but John and his father, though the neighbours stood at their doors and gaped as the pitiful procession trudged by. The boy saw their curious faces with hatred in his numbed heart. He was dazed with desolation; there was no place in his empty mind for any emotion but hate of the callous world that had allowed his mother to die. The man by whose side he walked with dry eyes had an even larger share in his blind unreasoning hatred than the gaping neighbours. His father had never been more than a stranger to him and a dreaded rival in his mother’s affections; a sullen, capricious tyrant to whom he had only truckled for her sake. He had once seen his mother beaten and had never forgotten it. Now, the last compunction gone, not even sympathy in their common loss could soften the savage dislike which, for her sake, he had concealed.

At the gates of the cemetery whose monstrous bars of black iron seemed to add imprisonment to the other penalties of death, a third mourner silently joined them: a pale, spare, diminutive man with close-cropped iron-grey hair and a stubbly grey beard above a black woollen neck-cloth. Tom Oakley greeted him with a surly nod; but John did not know he was his father’s brother Jabez. The two brothers, in fact, had come to words and parted long since; for Jabez was a Methodist and intolerant of Tom’s godless ways, and Tom counted the other’s piety as softness; but, Death being a solemn peacemaker and forgiveness a brotherly duty, Jabez had left his last (for he was a jobbing cobbler by trade) and come to the funeral. He had a subtler mind than his brother’s and a more sensitive heart. As his weak eyes, behind their rusty iron-rimmed spectacles, saw the boy standing utterly apart from his father, dry-eyed and haggard and desolate, pity moved him; and when the rites were over he came to John’s side and put his arm round him protectively.

“I’m a stranger to you, lad,” he whispered. “I’m your Uncle Jabez. But I know this here loss means more to you than to your father, and I’m sorry for you, if that be any help.”

It was no help at all, but rather the contrary. This unexpected touch of warm human tenderness snapped the boy’s tense control. For the first time, he burst into tears.

“Be you coming down home, Jabez?” his father said surlily.

“Ay, I reckon I’ll come along with you. This lad here wants looking after.”

And all the way home he walked with his arm round John’s shoulder. He did not speak a word, but the boy knew he was kind.

In the desolate house there was a keg of ale for the bearers. That was part of the funeral ritual in Dulston in those days. Tom Oakley drank more than any of them. The liquor brightened his surly eyes. He glared at his brother, remembering their ancient quarrel. When the last of the bearers had gone, he spat on his horny hands and stripped off his coat.

“Come on, lad,” he growled. “There’s no call to stand moping about like that. The burying’s over. Get out of your coat and look sharp and kindle that gleed!”

The boy started to obey him mechanically; but his uncle checked him.

“What’s this, Tom?” he cried indignantly. “You don’t tell me you’m going to set the poor child to work within an hour of his mother’s burial? Shame on you, brother!”

Tom Oakley slewed round and stared at him, lowbrowed, like an angry bull. Dusky patches of red suffused his forehead; pulsating arteries stood out on his temples like whipcord.

“And who be you, I should like to know, to say what I should do? The burying’s over. The lad’s got to earn his living, and so have I. Strip your coat, lad, and do as you’m told!”

“He’ll do no such thing,” the little man answered firmly.

“So you’ll stand between me and mine, will you, you bloody whining Methody? There’s no room for idle hands in this house. The lad ates like a man, and he’s got to work like a man. He works or he starves.”

“He bain’t going to work this day, Tom, I tell you that straight. It bain’t decent nor proper; and you know that as well as I do.”

The boy, listening and trembling, yet too desolate even for fear, was conscious, in the brief interval of tense silence, of a conflict of will. In a physical contest he knew that the strength of this spare, scrubby man would have been no match for that of the angry animal he challenged. Perhaps the strain of the late disaster had tortured and weakened Tom Oakley’s spirit more than he deigned to show; perhaps he too had suffered. There was one thunderous moment in which, as he glowered at them both with purple face and clenched fists, it seemed as though the controls would snap and mad violence break loose; till, suddenly, his glaring eyes flinched and fell, his fists relaxed; he threw back his head and burst into a scornful laugh.

“You can have your way this time, Jabez,” he said. “It’s all one to me. I tell you the lad’s a feeble, halfhearted brat and not worth rearing, and a sullen, spiteful young dog at that, if you want to know. A woman’s more use to me, and I reckon it won’t be long afore I get me another; so the sooner I’m shut of him the better for all on us. One thing I can tell you: he’ll never make a nailer; so if you want to make a cobbler on him, you can take him and welcome and do me a good turn for once.”

Jabez Oakley looked at the boy with his weak, kind eyes.

“Will you come with me, Johnny?” he said.

The child nodded solemnly. He dared not speak.

“Then the sooner you clear and take the brat out of my sight afore I changes my mind the better,” Tom Oakley said.

Hand in hand the small grizzled man and the boy climbed the slope towards Sedgebury. For John Oakley it was the beginning of a new life that was different from any he had known, yet strangely friendly. Not that the aching emptiness of his loss was filled for many months. He still woke with a start in the night to miss the nearness of his mother’s body, her warmth, her softness, the tones of her voice and her quiet laughter; to hear, without any reason, certain words which she had always spoken in a way of her own, in a country accent different from that of the Black Country, and which seemed to him, in the consciousness of half-sleep, more exquisite than any imaginable sound. He would cling to their echoes with desperate anxiety until they faded into the silence of night; yet, as time went on, these ghostly visitations grew less frequent and less substantial until, at last, to his disappointment—and somewhat to his shame; for this was disloyalty—they came no more.

John’s new state was not merely happier than the old but more healthy. The air that rasped the high Sedgebury ridge so mercilessly had more life in it than that heavy element which, vitiated by the exhalations of crowded chimneys and human lungs, settled low, as in a sump, at the foot of the Castle Hill. From the Sedgebury ridge there stretched open vistas of a wider and as yet unreal world, revealing, beyond the smoke of Dulston, green plains and sombre woodlands and cloud-coloured hills folded range beyond range, dissolved at sunset into a molten flux. All life seemed more airy and neat and clean and spacious; even the cobbling which his uncle set him to learn was a cleanly, a meticulous and even a quiet craft compared with his father’s. It involved a series of separate problems, not one changeless mechanical routine performed in a desperate race against jealous Time. There was room for talk in it and quietude for reflection. Though its rewards were meagre enough, his uncle’s trade was better paid than the nail-maker’s slavery. John never had to go to bed hungry as he had often done in his earlier childhood, and the abundance of coarse but nourishing food and pure air and undisturbed sleep had the effect of making him shoot up sturdily with the strength of a half-starved, hard-pruned tree transplanted into a more generous soil, so quickly that, within a few years, he grew taller than his uncle.

Even more important than this, though he did not know it, was the spiritual expansion that kept pace with this bodily growth. Until now the boy had known no companionship save the almost physical tie that had united him to his mother. In his Uncle Jabez he found his first friend as well as his first counsellor; and this friendship gave as much pleasure to his mentor as to himself. Jabez had lived a bachelor’s life, self-centred and lonely, and the joy of watching this almost savage young animal change by degrees into a sentient and civilized human being filled his heart not merely with a sort of paternal solicitude but with creative pride. The boy, his first shyness gone, was quick-witted and responsive. In his uncle’s workshop and at night in the candlelit kitchen, he learnt his letters. Within a year he could read and write. His text-books were the Bible and Wesley’s hymns, which Jabez knew nearly by heart, Tom Paine’s Rights of Man and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. The contents of these four tattered, thumb-marked volumes coloured all his childhood. It would be true to say that—reinforced by the infectious influence of his uncle’s attitude, which was that of what Colonel Abberley would have called a “Brummagem Radical”—they coloured the rest of his life.

All the visitors who dropped in of an evening for a cup of tea and a chat with Jabez Oakley were poor men like himself, yet made of the metal of Cromwell’s Ironsides. All their talk (and the talk to which the rapt boy listened was endless) was concerned with Religion—the militant Puritanism of a minority—or with Politics: the politics of industrial democracy groping to find its feet. The prophet of the first faith was Wesley. Those of the second were Paine and Cobbett, whose Political Register was read aloud and eagerly discussed as a ritual every Saturday night. Those were days of strong spiritual ferment and bitter discontent. There were grievous recent wrongs that could not be forgotten nor forgiven: the suppression of the Lancashire and Nottingham Luddites, the March of the Blanketeers, the pitiful stupidity of the slaughter of Peterloo. But “Reform”—the blessed word echoed and re-echoed continually in his ears—“Reform” was in the air. A time must come, and come soon, when the votes of the helpless would weigh in the ballot-box and their voices, so long suppressed, be heard in Parliament. There was no thought of violence or conspiracy in the minds of these men; their religion countenanced neither; only unquenchable hope and serene determination and endless patience and faith in themselves and in each other. When, in mid-June of the year ‘thirty-three, the first Reformed Parliament met and the Dulston Political Union paraded in triumph with banners and music and thundered cheers for Reform and Lord Grey and the King and Brougham, that grew louder when barrels of beer were broached in the market-place, Jabez Oakley and his friends gathered quietly in his workshop and celebrated the great victory in prayer.

It was the old man’s Nunc Dimittis. That same week the revelries of the Reform Bill’s passing were forgotten: the Russian cholera which, with the first summer heats, had begun to smoulder in the undrained warrens of Worcester where heaped ordure steamed and stank in the sun, swept northward from main-road village to village, like a grass-fire fanned by the wind. In Dulston, where water was scarce and bucketed from shallow wells, the germ found carrion even more to its liking. Within a week twelve hundred folk were taken with it, and one in five died. Whole quarters were stricken. No man dared speak to his neighbour; the streets lay empty. All the shops, save the flaming corner gin-palaces, which did uproarious trade, stood shuttered and lightless. Rumour heightened the fear of the pestilence and an awful uncertainty; for not even the doctors knew for sure how the disease was spread (some saying it was borne by the air and some by touch) or anything more of it save that, like God, it was no respecter of persons, that a man might be hale in the morning and dead by night, and that death by cholera was not only swift and terrible but agonizing. There were no nurses in Dulston to tend the sick but a few decrepit and ignorant midwives, whose foul fingers carried the living poison from one house to the next, and a handful of brave men who counted the sickening and useless service their duty.

Jabez Oakley and the minister of his chapel were among these. For three weeks they went out together doing what they could, which, God knows, was little enough, in the lower town, carrying no medicine with them but faith and cheerfulness. John Oakley pleaded to join them; but his uncle forbade him to stir from the house. The carrying of the dead, he said, was no job for a lad of seventeen; besides which, the cholera had more appetite for the tender flesh of the young, whereas wrinkled, leathery carcasses such as his were not to its taste and would take no harm. The best John could do, he said, was to bide at home and put his hand to such cobbling jobs as turned up, but never, if he could help it, to allow anyone who came from the town to cross the threshold.

Every night the old man returned, his set face reflecting the horrors he had seen. What he did or saw in the lower town, John never knew: when he came home he had no energy left for speech or even for eating; and in any case, the sights he had seen would not bear talking of. He came in with a nod and a cheery smile, but soon his face fell. He slumped down in his corner chair and sat there limp, with closed eyes, till he fell asleep so soundly that John did not dare to disturb him, but left him sleeping. The nights were so stifling hot that he knew he would take no chill. At dawn Mr. Haslam, the minister, called and roused him. Before it was light they had brewed their tea and set out on their grim business again.

At the end of three weeks it seemed as though the blaze had begun to burn itself out. Shopmen took down their shutters and people began to reappear in the deserted streets. But there were courts and alleys in which the disease still smouldered, and, though he confessed that the worst appeared to be over, Jabez Oakley refused to abandon his task while anything remained to be done. One night, when he had left his uncle asleep in his chair as usual, John was wakened suddenly by the sound of a heavy impact in the room below. He hurried downstairs, half asleep; by the light of his tallow candle he saw the spare body of his uncle lying on the floor, his thin knees drawn up to his stomach, his face grey and bloodless, his mouth stretched, teeth clenched in a grinning spasm of pain.

“Go away, lad,” the old man gasped. “Go away—don’t come nigh! The cholera’s got me. There’s naught you can do but pray to our merciful Lord and trust in His goodness. Nay, don’t touch me! I’m best where I be. Get out into the open as quick as you can: there’s death in this air. Run along to the minister’s and see if he’s taken too. If he be, fetch the doctor to him. Now go, lad, and do what I tell you ...”

John ran barefooted over the cindery streets and hammered on the doctor’s door and brought him back with him. The small house was deathly quiet: not a breath to be heard. The struck lucifer showed them the body of Jabez Oakley huddled on the hearth. He lay dead on his side, like a sleeping child, with his knees drawn up. But his fists were clenched in agony, and his open eyes stared, unseeing.