Читать книгу They Seek a Country - Francis Brett Young - Страница 15

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Next Sunday, the first in August, the sexton affixed the first of the three statutory notices to the board in the church porch, and Parson Ombersley, whose strong point was not his sense of humour, read a sermon, the first that came to his hand, that was based on the story of Naboth’s vineyard. After the service was over, a group of cottagers stood and stared at the notices. A few, following the letters with their fingers, laboriously spelt out the portentous, unintelligible words, while others, who could not read, stood gaping and listening.

“If John Oakley was here,” one said, “he could tell what this here paper it meant in no time.”

Tom Collins, who heard him, passing out with his wife on his arm, turned round with a laugh:

“Master Oakley will know what it means before long,” he said. “If it does naught else, it’s going to cook his goose, and just about time, too.”

There was a parish meeting held in the vestry a few weeks later. Only a few cottagers whom Collins and Willets, the overseer, had cajoled or intimidated came to it. Its purpose was merely to get a petition signed by land-owners representing three-fifths of the value involved; and that was not difficult, for the greater part and the best of the land was already in the promoter’s hands. John Oakley watched the pitiful farce without speaking. He saw that Tom Collins had his bleary eyes on him, expecting him to protest. Therefore he kept silence. But he knew, and was glad to know, how many of the men who scrawled their signatures of consent or put their marks to them were acting of their own free will, and how many weakly did what their masters told them. And he knew that his time was not yet; that it would not come until this, together with the contrary petition he had drafted and filled with as many other uncouth signatures, should be presented and perfunctorily accepted by Parliament and passed on to the committee “upstairs,” whose bored votes would settle the fate of both.

To find out when that fateful moment arrived was not easy. After the vestry meeting no further public notice was given. Apart from The Times, which came to The Hall and was passed on, when the colonel had finished with it, to Parson Ombersley, no London paper with Parliamentary reports ever reached Grafton Lovett; and the sevenpenny Methodist Pioneer, which Mr. Haslam, the minister, occasionally sent John from Dulston, was too deeply concerned with the wrongs and rights of industrial workers to record the progress of an obscure agricultural enclosure. To avoid the risk of being caught napping, Oakley trudged twice a week to Worcester, where, at the cost of a pint of beer, he could scan the mangled pages of a London newspaper in the bar of a superior ale-house. There, one day, he discovered that the Grafton Lovett Enclosure Bill had been passed to a committee of the House of Commons for examination in the following week.

He had no time to waste. It was a hundred miles and more from Grafton to London. But he was young and strong and the fire of faith burned in him, and his boots, which he had made for himself, were stouter than any other pair in the village; so, without waiting to ask for money which he knew would be grudged and given suspiciously, he took what was left of his Uncle Jabez’s dwindling hoard of guineas and set off southward early on the next day.

It was a fine, dry morning with an unclouded sunrise. The air had a nip in it, and the coarse grass of the common where his cow ran loose (it was a piece of luck she was dry) lay whitened with a silvery bloom so delicate it was hard to guess whether it were mere dew or the earliest rime. As he stepped out of the hovel and fastened the padlock that closed it, John Oakley was suddenly conscious of the affection that now bound him to this place that had once seemed so unpromising. Though he had only lived there two years, it had been his home. There was no spot in the world as he knew it where he would rather live or which he would leave with more pain. He loved the wide sweep of the common with its scattered thickets of gorse and thorn in which nightingales sang; the emerald swards of fine rabbit-bitten turf with its thymy tussocks; the depressions of boggy, undrained land where turf had been cut and water lay and the commoners’ cattle came to drink; in the distance, the dark line of coppice called Pritchett’s Wood, where his mother had once picked bluebells, and where he himself had been wont to gather his firewood; and, near at hand, the once-neglected vegetable-plot, newly fenced with stag-quicks, in which the orderly rows of potato-haulms grew rusty and ready for digging before sharp frost caught and withered them. Here, humble as it might be, he told himself, was something to lose and something worth fighting for. As he took the Chaddesbourne road, he turned and looked back at it, with love in his heart—and also a sudden, cold disquietude, as though that turning to look had not merely been an act of his conscious will, but the result of some mysterious admonition to make the most and to look his last on it.

That apprehensiveness, so vague as not to be reasonable, kept him company far into the golden September morning. It stayed with him until he had surmounted the Cotswold scarp on the way to Oxford, where corn-coloured roads ran straight between stone-walled downs where men were carting the remains of that year’s blighted harvest. But here the hill air was so thin and so sweet and the rolling prospect so free that, encouraged by these, the sheer joy of living and breathing and being young in the pride of his strength dispelled the shadowy disquiet; and when, having bought a loaf of bread in the town of Chipping Norton, he found a soft bed in a barn full of hay, he fell asleep and awoke to the dawn next morning not only with no care in his heart but with a sense of exhilaration and high adventure.

At dusk on the fourth day from Grafton Lovett, he reached the outskirts of London. The approach to the capital excited and awed him. He had no clear ideas of what the city might be, though Mr. Haslam had warned him of the wickedness of this modern Babylon, and his reading of Cobbett, who hated it, had taught him to think of it as a monstrous morbid growth—the “wen,” as he called it. Yet at first he saw nothing in London to curdle his blood; it seemed only another, less grimy Dulston, with wider streets and taller houses. For all that, he felt nervously, again and again, for the guineas tied up in his handkerchief, and regarded each man he met as a possible footpad or pickpocket ready to rob him—unnecessarily, as it seemed: for when he wished them good night, in his rustic fashion, they stared with surprise and answered him barely, or surlily, or not at all.

The first things, indeed, that struck him were the hardness of the stone pavements on which his great hobnails rang; the brilliant light of globed gas-lamps, turning night into day, and the hurrying crowds that surged to and fro at an hour when, in Grafton Lovett, all decent folk had long since gone to bed and only poachers were abroad. And then, as the labyrinth of brick and stone grew denser, came buildings which seemed so to soar and impend on either hand that their heaped storeys looked to be in danger of toppling and falling—while, in some, walls were rising still higher, like Babel’s tower, with masons clinging like flies to the dizzy scaffolding and climbing ladders with hods of bricks to be laid and plastered by the lantern-light that shone through the smoke-haze like bleared stars. He saw one great mansion darker and grimmer than the rest. It stood back from the street behind a barrier of iron railings, and the windows in its mournful façade were jagged and broken. Oakley halted and stared at it. He guessed it was Apsley House, the abode of the Duke (there was only one Duke in England) whose window-panes, smashed by the mob in the days of Reform, had never been mended but left to await the revenges of Time.

The mere magnitude of these vast masses of masonry was crushing to the spirit and affected him with passive awe, as being something more than human or reasonable; but what filled him with a greater sense of confusion (and even of danger) was the speed and strepitant roar of the torrent of wheeled traffic that thundered past: landaus, cabriolets, chaises and chariots and top-heavy coaches, their horses’ wet flanks flecked with splatters of foam. This way and that they hurried ceaselessly with an imperious crack of whips and a trail of sparks struck from iron-shod wheels and hooves, and the suggestion of something contemptuous if not fiercely hostile for common folk forced to go on foot reflected in the blank, bored faces of powdered footmen perched high behind.

To John Oakley’s eyes and ears, accustomed to the subdued quality of country sights and sounds, there was something not merely bewildering but cruel and terrifying in this nightmare of noise and frantic motion. He was dazed but thankful when, without knowing where he went, he found himself in a quiet backwater where street-lamps were farther apart and the roaring of wheels on stone, though it never ceased, rose and fell in gusts like a wind that buffets a wood. If the turmoil was less, the air in this narrower street smelt foul and lifeless as if it had been breathed and rebreathed by too many lungs. The people who crawled past him over the littered pavements were decrepit and malodorous too. They eyed him curiously; and one aged woman, muffled in rags, put out a skinny hand—as he thought to stay him, but, in fact, to beg. Here and there a painted face leered at him under the lamplight; street women spoke softly and beckoned him as he passed. Their shameless words shocked him and brought the blood to his cheeks and made his skin tingle; and once he turned instinctively, for the voice was a Worcestershire voice like his mother’s, but the rouged and ravaged face and the lax mouth that smiled at him filled him with deeper horror. On and on he walked, strangely shaken, always looking for some place where he could sit for a moment and spare his bruised feet. There were no hedgerow-banks to rest on here: only vertical walls of brick and slimy slabs or cobbles. It began to rain drearily. Even the water on his lips tasted stale. He went on and on till the straight street opened upon a square that looked like a market-place, for the stones were littered with vegetable refuse that smelt like a winter cabbage-field, and phantom shapes of empty stalls stood ranged in rows. On one side of the square stood a church with a pedimented and pillared portico; and in the shelter of this, in the company of half a dozen others as homeless as he, he propped himself up against the church wall and stretched out his aching legs and, somehow, fell asleep, his fingers carefully clutching the money in his handkerchief.

Familiar sounds woke him: the cracking of whips, the squeaking of wagon wheels and the cries of carters. A tawny dawn backed the house-tops across the square. He found to his surprise and distaste that he had had a bed-fellow: a young woman who had pressed her body against his for the sake of warmth. She still slept, and her breath smelt heavily of gin when she cursed him for waking her. His other companions in destitution, whose number had increased during the night, still lay scattered under the portico’s shadow like corpses; but the square was growing noisy with trampling hooves and grinding wheels, and lanterns moved hither and thither. Men were heaving hampers of green stuff down from the laden wagons and dressing the stalls; and one of them, as John stood watching, called on him to lend a hand. He was a countryman with a broad, whiskered, humorous face; his burly shoulders were covered in rain-soaked sacking and he spoke or shouted in a flat East Anglian accent. When John had helped him to clear his load the carter offered him the alternatives of a penny or a cup of cold tea and a hunk of bread. They sat down on a hamper under the tail of the wagon and munched together. John asked him what the market was called. The carter gaped with his mouth full.

“That’s a queer thing to ask,” he said. “Why, this is the Garden. Covent Garden the Londoners call it—but I knowed when I first set eyes on your innocent face, lad, you wasn’t no Cockney. What be you doing in London?”

John told the man of his mission. He munched and listened without any show of sympathy.

“Well, there’s got to be fools in this world, I reckon,” he said, “but the softest of all is poor simple labouring men that think they can ever get the upper hand of the gentry. You try it and you’ll find out. They may talk of Reform,” he said, “but that’s one thing that won’t never change; and if you want my advice, though you haven’t asked for it, it’s this, lad: go back where you come from and stay there like everyone else that’s got any sense.”

John asked him the way to the Houses of Parliament. The man said he didn’t know, and hoped, stubbornly, he never would—because Parliament warn’t no business of his or of the likes of him. All he knew of London was the road there from Braintree and back again. It was no doubt out of pity for John’s foolishness that he insisted on his accepting the penny as well as the breakfast. “If you won’t go back home where you come from,” he said at parting, “I’ll give you another word of advice not asked for, and that is this: you steer clear of policemen by day and false women by night, and if you want another job, you come here to this very place next Monday morning.”

John set forth in search of Westminster. There had been no more rain in the night. The pavements though they still offended his nostrils were dry, and had lost their dark terrors. It was still too early for much traffic, and the greater streets, into which he soon found his way, seemed spacious and handsome. Scavengers, equipped with besoms and shovels, were sweeping and clearing away the horse-droppings with which their whole width was felted ankle-deep. At the corner of Piccadilly where the curve of Nash’s noble quadrant marked the beginning of the grand new street leading to the Regent’s Park, he asked his way of one of them.

The scavenger looked him up and down from his clumping boots to his ruffled hair. “ ’Ouses of Parliament?” he said, with a Cockney accent. “Honoured to make your acquaintance, sir.” He swept off his hat and winked at his mate. “ ’Ere, Jim, hinformation required! The honourable member’s come up to Parliament in the new Reformed ’Ouse of Commons and don’t know the way to ’is seat! Look you ’ere, my lad,” he went on kindly: “just you follow your own bloody nose till you see a column they’re building for a sailor with one eye and one arm, and then turn sharp right down W’ite’all till you get to the river, but mind as you don’t fall in: there’s ten chaps from the country, the image of you, got stuck in the mud there this year!”

John laughed and thanked him. Outside Westminster Hall he accosted a magnificent policeman in a blue frock-coat and tall hat, who scanned him as suspiciously as if he suspected him of being a new Guy Fawkes or one of the Cato Street conspirators.

“And what should you want with the House of Commons, young man, I should like to know?” he demanded, with such severity that John remembered the Covent Garden carter’s last words. “The Grafton Lovett Enclosure Bill? Well, I might ’ave guessed it! Now understand this: His Majesty’s Commons don’t sit on a Saturday nor never have done since Lord Walpole or Orford, who you never heard of I don’t suppose, took to beagling. So don’t come ’ere ’anging about and asking questions till next Monday, see? Or you’ll get into trouble, and don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

For two days John Oakley tramped London. He loathed it as deeply as Cobbett had loathed it for its vastness, its heartlessness, its huge, remote unconcern; for its contrasts of wealth and grandeur with an utter squalor which seemed somehow more hopeless and vicious than any he had seen before; for its elegant women of fashion, so exquisite in their varnished chariots, and the bloated tight-waisted bucks who swept off their hats to them or mooned in the windows of clubs; for the diamonds and emeralds that sparkled behind caged windows, and the ordure in the gutters; for the “false women,” as the carter had called them, with their whispers and clutching hands and raddled faces, and the drunken men vomiting or prostrate in Seven Dials; for the great houses blazing with chandeliers of cut crystal and the black alleys between Bow Street and Drury Lane where women ran screaming from men with knives in their hands within a stone’s throw of the roaring, jostling Strand. For two nights he slept, as best he could, in the company of outcasts poorer than himself, under the pillared portico of St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden, where, at least, there was quiet, and watched dawn tawnily brighten the fringe of chimney-pots, and stretched his cold-cramped legs and shivered and bought a half-loaf of bread and went his way thankful that another night had gone.

All morning John Oakley hung about Westminster Bridge. The tide was out. The oozy foreshore in which the Cockney scavenger had begged him not to get stuck was streaked with black runnels of sewage seeping from the Strand. The River Thames was nothing but one vast sewer serving all London. Gulls wheeled over it with desolate cries. An east wind crisped the ebbing tide with dirty wavelets and the dome of St. Paul’s glimmered white and ghostly out of a haze of black smoke. As midday struck in Whitehall, John left the bridge and approached the Houses of Parliament.

The same contemptuous constable observed him: “Oh, so you’re here again!” He posed magnificently, busily lifting his top-hat to a number of members who drove or walked past on their way to the House, and far too grand to deal with John’s questions. As he stood there waiting for an answer, a brisk, youngish gentleman, with abundant chestnut hair and whiskers, and a strong, finely-featured face, to whom the constable had vouchsafed a halfhearted salute and who had given John a shrewd glance in passing, suddenly paused in his progress, as though struck by an afterthought, and approached them.

“What does this young man want, constable?” he asked in a tone of authority.

“Oh, he’s only one of these country chaps, sir, come up for an Enclosure Bill.”

“What Enclosure Bill?” he asked sharply.

“Grafton Lovett, sir, down in Worcestershire,” John replied.

“Grafton Lovett in Worcestershire? Your member, Mr. Holland in Baring’s Bank, is a friend of mine, though, of course, a political opponent. These Enclosure Bills interest me. I am not altogether pleased with the way they are handled. If you like to accompany me, I’ll take you straight to the Committee Room. Come along, my friend.”

John went with him gratefully to the constable’s obvious disapproval. This was the first friendly word he had heard in the streets of London. As they walked, the chestnut-haired gentleman plied him with brisk shrewd, pointed questions as to the conditions of labour in Grafton: how the people were housed, what wages they earned, and what, exactly, their commonage meant to them. “I believed in the benefits of Enclosure once,” he said, “and so did Mr. Cobbett; but the more I know of the working of these acts and the more I see of the way in which they are juggled through Parliament, the less liking I have for them. Be sure I will do what I can for you. At least, I’ll see that you’re heard.”

They passed at a surprising pace (his gait was so impetuous) through numerous court-yards and stony corridors and finally up a flight of worn stairs to a small, stuffy oak-panelled room, resembling a court of justice, where he nodded and smiled good-bye and took his seat among a sprinkling of lackadaisical gentlemen who decorated the benches in uninterested attitudes of boredom or of repose. On the right of the chairman, a tall man with a constricted waist and a chest like a pouter-pigeon stood shuffling his papers and loudly clearing his throat and losing his way in the theme he expounded. He mumbled so much and halted so frequently that John, sitting alone at the back of the room, had no idea what he was talking about; but nobody—not even the chairman, who sat scribbling with a quill-pen—appeared to be listening. At the end of a peroration, which seemed to include the words “vexatious and intolerable encroachments,” he sat down so suddenly that one honourable member who had been dreaming awoke with a start, and two others, who had been laughing and talking in whispers, looked round with aggrieved astonishment. For a moment it seemed as if nobody else wanted to speak. Then, suddenly, John’s companion popped up.

“Sir,” he said, “I understand there is present at this moment a witness representing the cottagers of Grafton Lovett who desires to offer his evidence. As I gather that honourable members have completed their observations on Clause Five—Allotment of Residue—and seeing that Clause Six—Encroachments—is the one in which these petitioners are concerned, the present moment, sir, would seem opportune for the hearing of his evidence. I might add, sir, that this man has walked up to London from Worcestershire for this purpose at considerable inconvenience.”

A horsy young man with a brick-red face who sat with his feet on the bench in front of him and was dressed in the outmoded style of a Corinthian, gave a guffaw. “Inconvenience! Well, was there ever?”

The chestnut-haired gentleman bowed to him. “If the honourable gentleman, sir, had ever walked over a hundred and twenty miles in four days, he might possibly fathom the meaning of the word inconvenience.”

“What is this witness’s name, Mr. Roebuck?” the chairman asked surlily.

“John Oakley, sir.”

“And the grounds of his claim to be heard by this committee? Is he himself a cottager?”

“He is, sir, I understand, what is vulgarly known as a ‘squatter,’ with recognized rights of commonage.”

A thin, tall man, with a pale face pockmarked and crinkled like parchment, jumped up angrily: “I feel I must vehemently protest, sir, against the honourable member’s phrase. Recognized rights, sir! Recognized when, and by whom? If this Committee of the House of Commons comes here to waste its time listening to any contentious busybody who claims to bear witness on the strength of his possessing a cow and having walked a hundred and twenty miles, sir ...”

Mr. Roebuck held his ground. “That is for the Chair to decide, sir,” he said quietly.

The chairman looked from one to the other. It was clear that the last thing he wanted was any disturbance.

“Is this petitioner represented by counsel?” he asked wearily.

“The people who consider themselves aggrieved by this bill, sir, are not of a condition that permits the enjoyment of such costly luxuries. I myself, sir, fortunately, have some acquaintance with their objections, and am qualified, as I think you are aware, to represent them. With your permission, then, I present myself as their counsel.”

The pockmarked member was on his feet again.

“I rise on a point of order, sir,” he blustered. “Is the honourable member for Bath entitled to spring this surprise on the committee without proper notice?”

The chairman appeared to be embarrassed. He shuffled his papers and peered at them. “That point seems to be clear. A petition has been presented and referred to this committee: all petitioners to have voices, to examine witnesses, if they please, and to be heard by their counsel. The learned and honourable gentleman is certainly in order. This is only a common petition against a common enclosure, Sir Charles.”

“Then for God’s sake let’s get it over!” the pockmarked member said petulantly. He sat down, rammed his beaver over his eyes and sat with folded arms. The other rose quietly once more and beckoned John forward.

“Your name is John Oakley?” he said.

“That’s right, sir.”

“You are one of the signatories of the petition against this Enclosure Bill and you live in the parish of Grafton Lovett in the County of Worcester in a dwelling which you believe to be your own property and in the occupation of which you have enjoyed hitherto certain rights of commonage?”

“Yes, sir. My grandfather built it and lived in it till he died.”

“Very well ...”

The manner was so smooth as to seem insinuating, yet so gently persuasive in its quietness that the fear which had made his clenched hands sweat and his head go giddy when first he stepped forward began to evaporate. He believed that this friend, whom sheer chance had precipitated into his affairs, must be trusted, and answered the questions he put to him without reservation, convinced that, even when he did not understand where they led, they must be right and that the words which were written down would not go against his cause. He was conscious, none the less, of an increasing hopelessness. After the little breeze which the horsy young man and the pockmarked gentleman’s indignation had raised, the atmosphere of the committee-room relapsed into its former state of doldrums. The clerks scribbled the questions and answers dutifully; but apart from their scratching quills there was no sign of any activity. The chairman, having given his ruling, leaned back, his eyes fixed on the Jacobean ceiling; the member who had slept resumed his heavy breathing, the two gossips their whispers, while the remainder of the committee appeared to have surrendered themselves once more to drowsy boredom.

At last, through the heavy air, he heard his examiner’s voice:

“Very well, Mr. Oakley; that will do,” he said. “I have finished.”

John stared at him in amazement: “What? Is that all, sir?”

He could not believe it was all he was allowed to say: these plain “Yeses” and “Noes” confirming the bare shape of a summary of facts dispassionately marshalled and left to speak for themselves. Could this be the moment for which he had schemed and hoped and steeled himself through all those weeks of waiting, and tramped the hard roads to London? Why, these lounging, smug, indifferent committee-men had not even troubled to listen to him. He would make them listen; he would give them something to think of! They might seize him and throttle him and throw him out of the room, but so long as there was breath in his body, he would speak his mind. The room swam before him. He began to speak rapidly with cold fury: the angry indignation, so long repressed, poured past his lips with such turbulence that he neither knew nor cared what he said. His voice, his words were not longer his own, nor was he his known self, John Oakley, the ignorant squatter from Grafton Lovett, but rather the inspired, unconscious mouthpiece through which, suddenly, the inarticulate bitterness of the remote downtrodden village found speech. As he spoke, blinded by his own passion, he was only vaguely aware of the consternation his impropriety had created: of the distressed face of his friend, imploring him to be silent; of a hubbub of murmurs and protests; of the pockmarked gentleman wildly appealing to the Chair; of the chairman himself, who had risen from his seat and was pointing at him with an accusing arm outstretched and calling on the Sergeant-at-Arms; until, of a sudden, a hand was clapped on his shoulder and another over his mouth and he was forced to his seat. The turmoil subsided, and now the chairman was speaking.

“You are not here,” he said, “to address the committee, but to give evidence in a proper manner and to be heard in due course by your counsel. This disorderly interruption is most regrettable. Not even your ignorance can excuse it. It is now for learned counsel for the first petitioners to cross-examine you, if he so wishes.”

A stout, ruddy-faced man in a wig and a shabby silk gown, stood up on the chairman’s left with a sardonic smile.

“If you please, sir,” he said, “I think honourable members will have been able to judge from this intemperate and lamentable outburst how much value should be placed on the witness’s evidence. I do not propose to cross-examine.”

There were loud murmurs of “Hear, hear!” from the benches.

“Very well, Mr. Vizard,” the chairman said. “In that case we will proceed. The witness may go.”