Читать книгу Fame is the Spur - Howard Spring - Страница 4

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When they buried the Old Warrior there was only one small wreath to go on the coffin; so, as the hearse stood there in the narrow street, with the two black horses drooping their heads under the leaden winter weather, someone ran back into the house and brought out the cavalry sabre that hung over the mantelpiece. This was laid on top of the flowers.

John Hamer Shawcross never forgot that moment. Years afterwards, on the other side of a gulf wellnigh incredible, he watched a uniformed and bearded King place with a kid-gloved hand a wreath of flowers at the foot of a cenotaph gleaming whitely under the pale blue of a London winter sky. Soldiers in formal lines, and beyond the soldiers the dense press of the people in Whitehall; and here, in front of the cenotaph, an open space yellow as the seashore with clean strewed sand. The air was cold, and the sun shone palely, and so great was the silence that the whickering of banners could be heard, and the passage of a pigeon’s wing. You could hear, too, the crunch of the spurred royal boot on the harsh texture of the sand as the King stepped forward a few paces, leaned the tall wreath against the tall white stone, stepped back, and saluted. And as he stood there with his colleagues of the government within the wide cleared space, dressed in his formal clothes, holding his silk hat in his hand, with the people away back there behind the barrier of the soldiers, with the King’s sons here about him, and a queen and princesses looking on from a nearby window, the Right Honourable Hamer Shawcross saw again the day when he was twelve years old, and a meaner wreath than this lay upon the coffin of the Old Warrior, and someone ran into the house in Broadbent Street and brought out the cavalry sabre.

But there was no use in thinking back. He had got out of the habit long ago; and as the military bands broke suddenly upon the silence with their rich pompous music he threw up his handsome head with a characteristic gesture and allowed his eyes to rest upon the sky. All the people began to sing the hymn which the bands were playing.

O God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come, Our shelter from the stormy blast, And our eternal home.

The words came draggingly through the frosty air, indescribably moving, and Hamer Shawcross, his eyes on the sky, gave himself up wholly to the sensuous melancholy of the moment. Some remote compartment of his being was not displeased to find that the salt of unshed tears was stinging behind his eyelids. His eyes came down from the heavens, rested for a moment upon the hymn-sheets wavering in royal hands, and then, drawn by a play of the wintry sunshine, fell upon the wreath standing in strong colour before the white stone. It gleamed redly, and the thought burst upon his mind that it was made of poppies, the flowers of sensuous illusion, the flowers of forgetfulness. He brushed his hand through the shock of white hair that fell upon his forehead, as it were impatiently brushing away a reflection so incongruous and untimely. It floated away, as the thought of the Old Warrior’s sabre had floated away, lightly as the white birds that passed ceaselessly to and fro down this broad highway between the Nelson column and the Houses of Parliament.

Soon the bugles were blowing Reveille, reminding the Right Honourable Hamer Shawcross, P.C., M.P., that there was so much to do, so much to do.

The house in Broadbent Street was very small. The houses were all in a row, with no division between them, and they had no gardens. The front doors opened right off the street, and if you went through one of them, you were in a narrow passageway with the stairs in front of you, going straight up between walls, with no handrails. Downstairs, there were two rooms: the front room and the kitchen, and behind the kitchen was a back-kitchen which you could hardly call a room.

Upstairs, there were two bedrooms. Ever since he could remember, little John Shawcross—no Hamer about it in those days—had shared the back bedroom with the Old Warrior. His mother and Gordon Stansfield, his stepfather, slept in the other. The Old Warrior had a large bed with fine brass knobs on the posts, and young John had a low pallet against the wall. Between them they filled the room. Often the child would awaken early and steal to the side of the old man’s bed and gaze spellbound at the wild disordered beard spreading over the counterpane, and the gnarled hands, ridged with hard violet veins, sometimes clenching and unclenching, as though in sleep he were again engaged in the exploits because of which, while still living, he was already a legend.

There were not many people in Ancoats, then, whose memories went back to 1819. So far as the Old Warrior knew, there were none at all. He was within two years of eighty when he died. There had been a time when he would look round the circle in which he happened to find himself and see the nodding heads and hear the murmuring voices which confirmed his story. But for long now he had been taken on trust, and those who listened to him noted an embellishment here and there, as a man, looking back to the home of his childhood, will, as it recedes farther and farther down the years, add to the height of its trees and prolong the golden splendour of its summer evenings.

But of the main facts there was no doubt. They were written in history. Always, with a hand that increasingly trembled, old Etchells, or the Old Warrior as they called him, would prelude his story by taking down the sabre from the wall. It hung over the mantelpiece in the kitchen, which was the family living-room in Broadbent Street, the loop of the handgrip resting upon a nail, another nail supporting the end of its curved shining length.

It was always to young John Shawcross a magnificent moment when the old man got up to unhook the sabre. It was usually when someone had looked in, for Gordon Stansfield was a hospitable man who liked to see a friend or two about him. It was a lovely home, that little house in Broadbent Street, for Gordon’s wife, Ellen, who was John Shawcross’s mother, would have worked her fingers to the bone for the quiet man with the brown twinkling eyes who had put that roof over her head when, God knows, she had needed a roof and love beneath it.

She had found that, and she made Gordon’s house her Halleluiah Chorus, with its shining brass and steel, its scoured floors, its winking fire, its red curtains, which seemed, of a winter’s night, to be contentment’s very wings drawn and protective about the hearth. To one side of the fire was an old leather armchair, its crimson faded to a homely brown, its resilience undermined so that it no longer buoyed up a sitter but accepted him and absorbed him into its amorphous and decrepit amplitude.

Gordon bought the chair when the Old Warrior came to live with him. He was a brother of Gordon’s mother, and he had outlived most of his generation. He was beyond working, an old man who had never saved a penny, and no one cared whether he went to the workhouse or the devil. So Gordon bought the chair, and the big bed with the brass knobs that was now in the back bedroom, and then he invited old Etchells to make his home in Broadbent Street.

He arrived on a winter night, with a spare pair of boots and a clean shirt wrapped in a large red handkerchief, and the naked sabre gleaming in his hand. Before he would settle down, he demanded a hammer and two nails. He fixed the sabre over the mantelpiece, and there it had remained, for ten years now, undisturbed save when Ellen took it down every Saturday morning and laid it among the kitchen knives to be cleaned with a cork dipped in moistened powder of bath-brick, or on those occasions when the old man himself told the story of how he came to possess it.

Little John Hamer Shawcross would have found it hard to say whether the sabre or the Old Warrior fascinated him the more. There was the old man, his once-large body now a deflated sack, sagging in the chair, his head sunk upon his chest, his great untended beard imparting an indescribable air both of grandeur and ancientry, his old rheumy eyes, flecked with red haws like a hound’s, turned upon some far-back memory, his blue veined hands resting upon the chair’s arms and occasionally rising and falling as if beating the cadence of a song sung long ago.

He was so old and done with and finished; and there was the sabre, as old as he was, shining with a bright menace like a flame that might yet begin a conflagration.

And sometimes the flame that was in the sabre would be in the old man’s eyes when occasion led him to speak of 1819. He had told the tale so often that he never stumbled in its telling, not even now in the days of his last decrepitude. It ran down the grooves of his memory as easily as a ship launched on a greased slipway. He would evoke the gay break of the morning of that August day when he was a boy of twenty, a boy in love going out to meet his girl. He laid the sabre on the table under the lamp, and it shone like a curve of solid light.

“No, you wouldn’t think it to look at me now, but I was a grand lad at twenty. There wasn’t much to eat for the likes of me, I can tell you, in those days, but I had big bones, and I was six foot three.”

He held out his thin, old man’s wrists and looked at the hands dangling at the ends of them, and shook his head.

“Emma had asked me to breakfast,” he said.

He always used those words, and no one knew who that Emma was who had waited for her grand lad on the sunshiny morning so long ago.

“She wore gingham,” he said, “a gingham gown, and there was a red ribbon in her hair. She didn’t wear a hat. She was a little bit of a thing, not up to my shoulder, and when she wanted to kiss me she’d stand on my feet and then get on tiptoe. We worked in the same mill, but we didn’t go to work that day. None of us did. It was like a holiday. That was the funny thing about it. It was like a holiday to begin with: all fun, what with the bands and the singing and us all wearing our best.”

The Old Warrior paused and held out his transparent hands to the flames, and a look of wonder came into his eyes as though, even now, when nearly sixty years were passed, he could not get over that perplexity: the gay August morning, all fun, that was to close in so dark a night.

“Emma’s mother wasn’t up,” he said. “We had breakfast just to our two selves, with a bit o’ kissing, and then Emma pinned a rosette in my coat and we went to join the others.

“This was in Middleton, and there was Sam Bamford wearing green leaves in his hat and trying to shove everybody into order. ‘Come on you two handsome ones,’ Sam said. ‘You’ll look a treat at the head of a column,’ and he took me and Emma by the arms and stuck us in front of a lot of lads and lasses from our mill. ‘Let’s have law and order,’ Sam said. ‘March as if you meant it, an’ sing as if you meant it, but behave yersens.’

“‘What’s it all about, Sam?’ I said; and Sam said: ‘Keep yer ear-oils open when you get there and you’ll know.’ And then, more quiet, he said: ‘It’s about bread, lad, and about liberty, an’ that’s why you’ve got to act like sensible chaps and behave yersens,’ and, with that, off he goes and tells the band to begin.”

So there they were, rolling down the gritty road to Manchester, the Old Warrior, young then in his strength, and his girl Emma who wasn’t up to his shoulder and wore gingham and a red ribbon in her hair. It was a gay procession, with the band playing and the sun shining on the men in their Sunday best and the girls with their ribbons, and they all sang as Sam Bamford, who knew so well how to write their songs, had told them to.

And as the miles went by, the procession swelled as here and there an odd enthusiast, and from side-roads regular marching bands, linked on, and the dust rose up from thousands of marching feet and dimmed the laurels in Bamford’s hat.

“And we were only the beginning of it,” the Old Warrior would say. “Thousands and thousands of ’em, marching with their bands and banners down all the roads into Manchester. I never saw so many people in all my life. Children, too, dancing along as they always will when there’s music and a march. You couldn’t move in Mosley Street—not if you wanted to move backwards, that is. You had to go on now, and Emma was tired and hanging on to my arm, and I ended up by fair carrying her into St. Peter’s Field.”

Young Shawcross could not remember how often he had heard the tale. But whenever his mind reconstructed the scene, as in later years it often did, it was always to recapture the thrill of seeing the old man, his eye shining wildly, leap to his feet and stand trembling upon the hearth, his gaze fixed upon the sabre. “Why did I do it? God damn and blast my body and soul, why did I do it?”

He was such a shambling, done-for simulacrum of a man that the swift torrent of fury tearing through him and shaking him like a reed seemed to come not from within him but from the dead, wellnigh forgotten years when all those thousands lived and moved who now were gone like Emma who died that day.

The Old Warrior sank down with trembling limbs upon the worn-out leather chair. It was always Gordon Stansfield who arranged the cushions behind his back, pushed nearer to his hand the table on which stood his nightly drink of hot toddy. He would moisten his lips and go on with the story.

There they were, then, those thousands upon thousands of Lancashire working folk, men, women and children, milling and shouting in the field that still stood open in the heart of the town. A holiday crowd for the most part, some of them intent, but not too seriously, on hearing what the speakers would have to say about this improbable question of their lives being made a little more bearable; and a few blackly set on a desperate venture. The bands brayed, the people shouted and cheered in front of the wagons from which they were to be addressed, and the hot August sun burned down.

“There were two lovely white horses,” old Etchells would say. “We squeezed back to let them go by, and they had to go so slow that Emma patted the one nearest to us. It was Orator Hunt going up to the platform in his carriage, and he had a woman with him, all in white, with a red cap on her head. It looked very pretty.”

Ah, poor Warrior! The Cap of Liberty, and one or two such symbols—see that banner with the skull and crossbones!—did not look pretty to the magistrates safely secluded in a room above the heated cheering crowd. There was on the old man’s face a look of pain and astonishment, as though a lifetime had not wiped out the emotions of that dark moment.

“We didn’t know!” he cried. “We never guessed!” But they knew then, with the grey rounded rumps of the horses pushing among them, with the sabres rising and falling.

“There were so many of us, we couldn’t move, and they came at us like mad. I thought at first they were just trying to clear us out, till I heard a woman shriek and saw the blood rush out of her mouth as she opened it. Even with that, her mouth spouting red, she managed to shout: ‘Dragoons! Dragoons! Get Annie out of it!” and then she fell and they went over her.

“My God, the shrieks and yells! They came from all round us, and they came from the ground under our feet where poor devils had fallen and were being trampled by men and horses. I wasn’t afraid....”

The Old Warrior’s eyes caught a hint of fire as he looked round the small circle of his hearers in the warm Ancoats kitchen. “No, my friends, I was not afraid. I used to wonder sometimes what I should feel if I found myself in a great danger, and now I knew. I was angry, not excited, but angry with a cold furious anger. I said to Emma: ‘Get behind me, luv. I’ll shove a way out for you,’ and I was ready to smash and kill any one who stopped me. ‘Keep hold of my coat, luv,’ I said, ‘an’ then I’ll know you’re there,’ and I pushed on with my big oak stick in my hand.

“I pushed through every one: bleeding men, and women with their clothes torn off them, and whimpering children, and wounded people down on their knees or flat on the ground. I wasn’t thinking about any of them. It was hot, and the sweat was pouring into my eyes, and I was thinking: ‘A soldier! By Christ! Let me meet a soldier!’

“And there he was coming at us. The crowd had loosened. You could hear their wailing spreading out and away, and there was a clear space, and this soldier coming across it on a grey horse. I saw his empty scabbard clicking at his side, and the sabre red with blood in his hand, and I rushed to meet him shouting: ‘God damn you, you bastard! You’re a poor man like us. What are you doing? What are you doing?’

“I waved my stick, and I could hear the leather creaking in the saddle and see the shine of his lovely boots. And then, when I was on him, his horse reared up, and I could see its front hoofs dangling over my head with the shoes gleaming, and the big veins in its belly. I struck upwards with my stick and hit the beast in the belly, and then Emma shrieked and pulled me backwards. I slipped in some blood and fell, and when the hoofs came pounding down I thought I was done for. But they missed me, and I lay there for a second with the dark arch of the horse over me, and then I saw the sabre sweeping past the side of the arch and a spurt of blood hit me in the face. Then the horse was gone, and there was Emma, lying on the ground.”

The old man’s voice trembled. His hands trembled on the arms of the chair. “She was dead. The blood was spurting out of her neck.”

He didn’t speak for a moment, then he said simply: “He had cut through her hair at the side of her head, the bit she had tied the ribbon on. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. There was nothing I could do for her then. I went to find the soldier.”

He found him spurring his horse into a desperate mass of fustian and corduroy, gingham and shawls and ribbon found him with his arm again uplifted to strike. “I whirled my staff—good solid oak it was—and you could hear his elbow crack like a broken stick when I hit it. My anger was not cold any longer. God alone saved me from murdering the man. I was red and blind. The sabre fell on the field, and I picked it up, dropping the stick from my hand. I swung it round my head and aimed at the middle of him with a blow that would have cut him in two. He dug his spurs into his horse, and the beast gave a sideways leap that ended my blow in the empty air. Then the soldier pulled him round and fled with one arm dangling at his side as though it were tied on with string.

“I was finished. All of a sudden I was done for, no more fight left in me. I felt weak and wretched, and saw that the field was nearly empty, except for the groaning people lying on the ground. I went back to look for Emma, but I couldn’t find her anywhere, and it wasn’t till I was wandering down Mosley Street that I realised I was still carrying the sabre. A man went hurrying by me. ‘Drop it, chum; throw it away,’ he said. ‘If they cop you with that, you’re done.’ And then I saw that I had the sabre in my hand.

“It was dangerous to keep it. Thousands of panic-stricken people were hurrying now down all the streets that led away from St. Peter’s Field. They were hurrying to hide themselves, as though they, God help us, were the sinners who had committed some crime. The dragoons were harrying here and there, still shouting and striking, and the police were everywhere.

“But I knew I wanted to keep that sabre. I didn’t know rightly what Sam Bamford meant about bread and liberty, and goodness knows whether I should have understood what Orator Hunt was talking about if they had let him talk. But I knew that this sabre had something to do with it. I knew that all us simple thousands, slashed and trampled by the soldiers, had something to do with it. Thoughts were beginning to trouble my head as I stumbled through the streets, and the sabre was the symbol of all that was worrying me: Emma dead, and me, that had never done anything but work hard for a small wage, chased through the sunshine by the police and the dragoons.

“So I slipped into my brother’s little barber’s shop in Oldham Street, and we hid the sabre there. And there it stayed for many a day.”

The Old Warrior gazed, almost with affection, at the curved, shining length of steel. “A symbol,” he said. “Not much now to me.” He shook his head and his beard trembled. “And not much to you,” he said, looking with affection out of his watery eyes at Gordon Stansfield, kindly and placid on the other side of the hearth. “No, not much to you, you man of peace.”

Then he turned his old head slowly towards young John Hamer Shawcross, sitting spellbound beside the lamp. “But what about him, eh?” he asked. “What about this young shaver? You’ve got a long way to go, young feller. You’ll see things—many strange things. A symbol might help you to sort ’em out. Gordon there is a man of God.” There was a hint of rarely-permitted raillery in the Old Warrior’s voice. “He will tell you ‘They that take the sword shall perish by the sword.’ Well, there’s a sword from the field of Peterloo. Think on, lad.”

And now the tale would be told no more. The Old Warrior was in his coffin upstairs, and little John Shawcross stood in the parlour with his nose against the window-pane watching for the arrival of the hearse. He always felt proud that he lived in Broadbent Street, because Broadbent Street was different from any other street he had seen. On one side were the houses, on the other a wall breast-high, behind which oozed the slow waters of a canal with the high soot-caked brick front of a factory rising beyond it. Young Shawcross, who liked browsing among the few books that Gordon Stansfield possessed, had once come upon a picture of Venice, with fretted balconies, flower-hung, breaking the façades of old palaces dreaming above the water; and often of a winter night, when the raw damp air of Ancoats was favourable to illusion, and a light fell here and there with a diffused blur upon the water, he would imagine that Broadbent Street was as near to Venice as makes no difference, especially if you could shut your eyes to everything else and concentrate upon the flow of the water under the smooth round arch of the hump-backed bridge away towards the end of the street.

The coping of the wall that divided street from canal was a favourite place for the boys of Broadbent Street and the district round about to sit and talk; and standing now at the window, John saw that Arnold Ryerson and Tom Hannaway were there, looking with intense interest at a place so romantic as to contain a corpse.

Although John’s nose was to the window-pane, he could not see much, because the blind was down. He could see only the narrow strip of territory revealed by drawing the blind slightly to one side. He wished he might pull the blind up, so that Tom Hannaway and Arnold Ryerson should see him properly. He was wearing a new black suit, and he hoped that his face was pale and interesting with grief. He felt no grief at all; but that was no reason why he should not hope to appear grief-stricken.

He was a thin, undersized boy, with a face that was almost white. His forehead was beautiful—smooth and splendidly proportioned—with black curling hair falling slantwise across it, and large eyes, so dark as almost to be black, shining below the thick straight brows. Small as he was, his appearance was further diminished by the rounded stoop of his shoulders. He looked almost hump-backed, and the boys called him Charley, because he had a Charley on his back. He hated the nickname the more because he was too weak to fight, and he didn’t see why a back like his should excite derision. In his own mind it was held to be interesting. He often looked at himself in the glass, and if he had weighed up in one word the dark eyes, and the broad brow brushed by its wing of hair, and the thin stooping figure, he would have called it interesting.

He pulled the blind a little aside and looked again into the street. A few women were leaning now against the wall on which the boys sat. They made quite an audience. Gordon Stansfield, who was upstairs in the back room, sitting by the coffin, had told him to stay where he was till the hearse came; but he opened the room door, went out into the passage, and thence by the front door into the street.

He did not look at the people on the other side of the way. He began to pace with a slightly dragging gait up and down in front of the house, his face composed into the accents of sorrow. He noticed with satisfaction that all the blinds along the street were down, so far as he could see. He would have liked tan-bark to be strewed in the road. That gave a real note of solemnity. He had seen it outside houses where someone was sick within, and had more than once paused to notice the satisfying parenthesis of silence that came when the lumbering lorries, drawn by heavy horses, slipped instantly from their thundering progress on the road to the softness of the tan, and then out to their thundering again. But tan was used only when someone was suffering a long illness. The Old Warrior had given no trouble. He had taken up his toddy one night, dropped the glass as it was touching his lips, and slid down from his easy-chair swiftly into his last darkness.

Aware of the eyes watching him with the sympathy that goes out always to the bereaved, John Shawcross paused for a moment to gaze profoundly at the pavement, then raising his head and, with a swift sweeping gesture that was to endure for a lifetime, putting back the hair from his forehead, he saw the two black horses drawing the hearse round the corner of the street.

For a moment the boy was filled with elation at the thought of riding behind two such horses. They were magnificent creatures, black as coal, with red distended nostrils from which they blew clouds of breath that hung palpably on the heavy winter air. Their steel bits, polished to the brightness of silver, were frothy with spume. It would be grand if Hannaway and Ryerson could see him riding behind that noble pair. But a moment’s reflection showed him that all this might of rumps and shaggy fetlocks and arching necks would be harnessed to nothing more considerable than the boxed corpse of the Old Warrior. There, within the glass, were the silver rails between which the coffin would be pushed home, so that it might be borne, as if in a shop-window on wheels, to the cemetery. This insignificant cab, drawn by one horse of ignoble proportions and whose very colour was not decidedly black: that would be the vehicle destined for him and Gordon Stansfield.

All the inhabitants of Broadbent Street who happened to be at home were now either standing at their doors or leaning against the canal wall. Very conscious of them watching him, the boy looked at the approaching hearse with a melancholy eye, and when it had come to a stand at the front door, he went into the passage and called upstairs: “They’re here.”

The passage was so narrow that a hatstand which usually stood there had been pushed into the front room to make a way for the coffin. Two of the undertaker’s men carried it out easily: the Old Warrior, at nearly eighty, had not much substance left over from the young giant who, at twenty, had marched to Peterloo. Gordon Stansfield and his wife came down behind the coffin. Both were wearing black, and Gordon carried a silk hat in his hand. He was accustomed to wear it on Sundays when he went forth to his labours as a Wesleyan local preacher; but now it had an unusual air, derived from a band of heavy black crape. A band of the same material had been sewn by Mrs. Stansfield round the left sleeve of John’s overcoat.

Ellen took Gordon’s face between her two hands and looked at him with eyes in which love and solicitude were mingled. They had been married for ten years, and she was to him mother and wife. “Look after yourself, lad,” she said. “It’ll be cold up there.” She twisted a warm muffler round his neck. “I’ll have everything straight by the time you get back.”

It was then that Gordon brought the small wreath of yellow chrysanthemums from the front room and laid it on the coffin. There was a card tied to it with a broad mauve ribbon: “Last love, from Gordon, Ellen and John.” It looked a forlorn little tribute lying there in the crystal and silver box; and perhaps it was this that led Mrs. Hannaway to make her impulsive gesture. She knew, as every one in the street knew, that the old man’s sabre was kept over the fireplace in the kitchen; and she was always the one who could be relied on in Broadbent Street to do spontaneously a thing that the popular mind would approve. And so, starting forward now from the canal wall where she had been leaning beside her son Tom, with her hands wrapped in her apron, she shouted: “Will you hould on now a minute! ’Tis a poor bit of a funeral the poor old sowl is getting’, with one cab and a few flowers that’d trim a doll’s hat. Wasn’t he a hero wanst, an’ he wrestling swords out of the hands of wild dragoons?” She rushed into the house, pushing past Ellen Stansfield who stood in the doorway, and soon was out again carrying the sabre in her hand. She put it into the hearse on top of the wreath. “There, my Ould Warrior!” she cried. “I’ve heard ye myself tell your grand story, and that’ll help ye to prove it to St. Peter.”

Then she went back to lean on the wall, and she crossed herself as the small procession started, and the boys and the few men came forward from their lounging or sitting, and stood upright, and took off their caps. John Shawcross noticed all this, looking out of the window of the cab, and he turned it over with satisfaction on his mind’s palate. It was nice to see people stand suddenly upright and take off their hats as he went by, though even the child knew that the tribute was half for death itself and half for Gordon Stansfield, whom every one in the street looked on with affection and respect.

The cab was an old four-wheeler, smelling of mildew and mouldy leather. Gordon, who had a mortal fear of cold, pulled up the window, leaned back, and took John’s hand in his. He did not speak as they went at a slow trot through the lugubrious Manchester streets, with the grey sky pressing down upon them, and no tree, no open space, greeting the eye anywhere. Brick, stone, windows, chimneys, pallid people pausing on the pavements to stare at the black horses and the yellow flowers and the unaccustomed note that the sabre gave to a spectacle not otherwise unfamiliar.

“What’s a symbol, Father?” the boy asked suddenly. Gordon had always been Father to him, and the Old Warrior Grandfather, though in law neither was anything of the sort. “What did Grandfather mean when he said his sword was a symbol?”

“A symbol,” Gordon patiently explained, “is a material thing to remind us of some condition. A royal crown is a symbol that the man who wears it has the condition of kingship. This ring,” he said, extending his left hand, seamed with work, blunt-nailed, “is a symbol that your mother and I are in the condition of marriage. I suppose what your Grandfather meant when he called that sabre a symbol was that it represented a condition of warfare existing between two sets of men.”

“What sets of men?” the boy asked.

“Well,” said Gordon, who was ever, as the Old Warrior had called him, a man of peace, “I suppose your Grandfather would have said between men like him and men like those who turned the soldiers on the people at Peterloo.”

The boy said no more. The cab windows by now were misted over with condensed breath. He could hardly see through them, and he was content to sit there holding Gordon Stanfield’s hand in the comfortable stuffy obscurity. It was a hard knotted hand, but there had never been a time, so far as John Shawcross could remember, when he hadn’t liked to hold it and feel comfort flowing into him from it.

Suddenly Gordon said: “There’s the bell,” and above the sound of the horses’ trotting feet the boy heard the long leaden note dropped into the leaden murk of the afternoon. The trotting of the horses stopped; they had fallen into a walk; and, sponging down the window with the sleeve of his overcoat, John saw that they were passing up a gravelled roadway. As far as his eyes could see, the gravestones stood up in the black earth blanketed over with sooty winter grass. Some of the stones gleamed white in the grey melancholy of the afternoon; some were as soiled as the earth itself, open there to the slow perpetual downward drift of mill-smoke.

The sound of the bell continued to drop at long intervals upon the disheartening scene, and when presently the cab came to a standstill, and the driver, holding his crape-enveloped hat in his hand, opened the door, the boy stepped from the security and isolation he had enjoyed with Gordon into a world that seemed suddenly inimical and immense.

The hearse and the cab had halted in front of a chapel, soiled, like everything the eye rested upon, with thick black accretions, and standing there on ground that rose a little, John could see the melancholy funereal landscape, dotted with recumbent stones, and upright crosses, and angelic monuments, reaching through the dun afternoon to the surrounding impingement of the town: line upon line of smoking chimneys and mean roofs, with a tall mill stack soaring here and there into the sky which already was darkening before the onrush of a premature night.

Already the coffin was out of the hearse. Its few flowers made a little yellow gleam that seemed no more effective than a candlelight to disperse the immense darkness of the cemetery. Balanced on four shoulders, the coffin was moving ahead, following a minister who had been waiting under the porch of the chapel, and who now went forward with long swinging strides, as though anxious to have an unpleasant business over and done with. Gordon took off his hat, and he and the boy, hand-in-hand, followed the coffin. A little wind had arisen, enough to catch the words flying out of the minister’s mouth and blow them like distracted birds about that desolate and stricken field.

There was not far to go. Soon they left the gravel path and trod upon the wet, black grass, threading deviously in and out of moulds and monuments, and so came to a new gash in the earth, piled round with yellow glucous clay. John was not aware of what the minister was saying. Gripping Gordon Stansfield’s hand with an intensity of emotion, he was aware only of that deep narrow hole, and of the men taking the flowers and the sabre and laying them to one side before they passed ropes under the coffin and stood there with the box that contained the Old Warrior held back from the abyss only by those cords that were stained with clay like the hands that held them. Then the ropes began to slip through the hands and he could hear the rasping sound of them, and presently saw the tension on them slacken. He wanted to step forward and gaze down into that hole in the ground, but he dared not. Instead, he let go Gordon’s hand and turned his back on the spectacle and looked across the grim prospect to the sky that the night was now invading with swift strides. He did not turn even when he heard the first thud of the clay upon the coffin; he did not turn at all. He stood there till Gordon took him by the hand again and began to lead him away. Then he saw the sabre lying on the clay, and he picked it up. It made him think of the Old Warrior not as he now was, not even as he had been in his last years, sagging into his sagging chair by the kitchen fire, but as he had been on that morning of which his great story told. He looked up into Gordon’s face and asked: “What was the good of it?”

“The good of what?” said Gordon.

“All his fighting.”

A sad smile played about Gordon’s kind mouth. “Well, between you and me, he didn’t do so much fighting.”

“But that day. Was it any good?”

And now that it was so long over, and this last tardy, survivor passed beyond the possibility to recall it, one might indeed ask: Was it any good?

Gordon looked at the darkened sky, drew his muffler closer as the wind rose to a keener note, and shuddered a little. “Who can say?” he asked. He looked at the sabre in the boy’s hand. “Are you taking that thing with you?”

“I’d like to, please.”

“Very well, then.”

When they got back to the chapel, the hearse was already gone. Of such meagre pomp as had attended the Old Warrior’s departure from the sight and knowledge of men nothing now remained but the four-wheeler cab whose solitary horse was dejectedly waiting for the last lap of his working day. The driver, now that the funeral was over, and there was no solemnity of a corpse to put cramps upon his demeanour, did not get down from the box or mute his voice. “’Op in,” he said cheerily. “We’ll soon ’ave you ’ome.”

As though he were as anxious as the horse to have done with the miserable business of his day, he laid his lash along the creature’s side when the cemetery gates were left behind, and John’s spirit rose with youth’s fortunate resilience as they went at a spanking pace through streets now almost completely in the grip of night. The cab windows were fast shut again, the warm reassuring presence of Gordon seemed once more to wrap him about; the sabre lay across his knees. He kept the window clear with his coat sleeve, so that he might see the lamps shining behind fanlights and glittering on the tempting shows of corner shops; and, more speedily than they had made the outward journey, they were home again, and Mother was standing at the front door with the passage lighted behind her and the hat-rack against the wall once more. There was a light in the parlour window, too: an unusual sight.

Again the driver did not get down. Gordon and John let themselves out of the cab, and as soon as they were on the pavement the man whipped up his horse and shouted “Good-night.” They stood there watching the bunched-up figure, with the big cape swelling monstrously round it, caught by the wind which now had an audible voice and was snarling in the street. Presently the cab turned into Great Ancoats Street and Ellen, who had joined them on the pavement, said: “Well, that’s the end of that. Come on in.”

Ellen was having no truck with grief. So long as the Old Warrior was alive she had looked after him, because it was Gordon’s wish that she should do so. Now that he was gone, she would make no pretence of undue regret; nor, if she could help it, would Gordon be plagued by recollection. “Come on in,” she repeated briskly; and then caught sight of the sabre in John’s hand.

“Whatever made you bring that thing back with you?” she demanded. “I thought we’d seen the last of that.”

“I like it,” said the boy. “It’s a symbol, and Father says I can keep it.”

“Well, don’t keep it where I’ll have it under my eyes all day long,” Ellen commanded him. “Keep it upstairs in your bedroom.”

The boy pushed the sabre for the time being on the floor behind the hat-rack. Ellen unwound the muffler from Gordon’s neck, helped him off with his coat, and led him into the front room. “I thought we’d have tea in here for once,” she said. “It’s more cheerful. You must be fair clemmed and yon cemetery’s a cold place at best o’ times. Hark at wind. It’s getting up proper.”

A gust shook the window and the flame in the lamp jumped. Ellen looked up from her kneeling position at Gordon’s feet. She was taking off his boots, yellow with the cemetery clay, and putting on his warm slippers. “John,” she said, “go and get sausages from kitchen.”

The sausages were long thin bags made of stockings sewn together and stuffed with sand. John knew their use. He placed one on the ground inside the front door, then, coming into the front room and shutting the door behind him, he placed another in front of that, thus sealing up the crack through which a draught might blow into the room. The third he laid along the window where its two halves met. He did this quickly, because he feared to look from a lighted room out into darkness. You were all lit up; anything out there might see you. He let the red serge curtains swing hastily down, and turned gladly to the room, to the firelight, to the lamp, with its white opaque globe, standing in the middle of the table spread for a meal.

Gordon and Ellen were already seated, their heads bowed, and as soon as John had scrambled to his chair he bowed his head too. “These mercies bless,” said Gordon, “and grant that we may feast in Paradise with Thee.”

“Amen,” said Ellen. “Pass me your plate.”

She lifted the cover of the dish before her and laid upon the plate a thick rasher of ham grilled to a golden brown. On top of that she placed a piece of bread that had been crisply fried in the fat. “If you get that into you, you won’t hurt,” she said, and filled Gordon’s teacup.

Then she served John, and finally herself. The little room, filled with quiet lamplight, with the fire whispering and rustling in the grate, with the storm, now full-throated, howling and sobbing without, seemed islanded and inaccessible in its happiness, its simple undemanding contentment. To the boy, with the poignant memory of the cemetery, and the passing bell, and the wind-blown incomprehensible words of the minister, still too fresh upon his mind, it seemed perpetual and secure, among the fundamental things of life that nothing could change or destroy.

There was not much about it. It was a simple little room with red serge curtains and red serge, fringed with balls, looped from the mantelshelf, a few family photographs on the walls, and the fireplace differentiated from the kitchen fireplace only by this: that there the fender and fire-irons were of gleaming steel, here of gleaming brass. A bamboo tripod stood before the window, with a harts-tongue fern in its green glazed pot, and a rag-carpet, into which Ellen had put months of her spare time, was on the floor. But always for John Shawcross the firelight and the lamplight, in recollection, would have here a special quality, never captured elsewhere, a quality that he could not have defined but which was associated in his mind with a remark Gordon once made: “I feel, Ellen, that ours is a Bethany household.”

He was packed off to bed soon after the meal was over. “Good-night, son, don’t forget your prayers,” said Gordon. “And thank you for coming with me to-day.”

Ellen took him upstairs. He carried the Old Warrior’s sabre with him. He was tired now, and it trailed, clanking against the cold, oil-clothed steps. “You see,” said Ellen. “I didn’t waste much time while you were away.”

The big bed that had housed the Old Warrior was gone. John’s little pallet had the whole space to itself. “This’ll be your room now. Do you like it?”

He didn’t. But he wouldn’t say so. For the first time he realised that he would be alone. The old man’s groanings and snorings and mutterings in his sleep had sometimes been frightening, but it was always a human sort of fright that you could take hold of and deal with. This loneliness in the bleak room, so different from the warm room downstairs, was another matter. He glanced furtively to the window, saw with satisfaction that the curtains were tight drawn. “Yes,” he said firmly. “I like it.”

Ellen put the candle on the chest-of-drawers, and the draught from the open door sent the light dancing and her shadow flickering hugely across the ceiling. “Very well,” she said. “Say your prayers now.”

He knelt by the pallet, and she waited till he had done, and then waited till he was undressed, robed in his long nightshirt, and in bed. She tucked in the blankets and kissed him. “Good-night.”

Then she and the candle went. The door was shut. For the first time, he was alone in the dark. It was long before he went to sleep. He could hear the comfortable rumble of voices coming up from below, overcome now and then by a fiercer lamentation of the wind. Thoughts of the Old Warrior obsessed him, and of the sabre which he had thrust under the bed. To keep his mind from fear, he resolved to think steadily of the old man’s fight and to repeat over and over again: “Peterloo—Peterloo—Peterloo.” And again and again the wind hammered at the window, hammered at his thoughts, till it seemed to him to have the voice of a wolf-pack hunting hungrily through the night. “Loo-oo! Loo-oo! Peterloo-oo!”