Contango (Ill Wind) (32 page)

So Elliott’s thoughts ran on, as he glanced through the newspaper,
half-seeing the printed words, but half-watching the children watch him. He
was very fond of children. He took up the volume of Blake’s poems and
smiled at Rose, who had given it him. “This is a good book,” he
said. Then Fanny looked up and began to talk about poetry. She was really
much more at home with dogs, but it was a weakness of hers to pretend that
she was passionately interested in all “cultured” things. Bill
made no such pretence, but he had a wholesome respect for what he believed to
be his wife’s superior enlightenments, and Elliott would have done
anything rather than disabuse him. Charming and delightful Fanny—and
never more charming than when she was talking nonsense about literature.
Elliott listened to her with an amused affection that made him want to ruffle
her sunlit hair and ask her where she had learned it all. “Yes,
it’s fine stuff’,” he agreed, when she made a pause.

“I wonder, Harry, if you would read the children
something—that marvellous poem—you know the one I
mean—I’m sure they’d never forget it if you
did—”

Elliott wondered if he dare wink, very slightly, at John. He was sure they
would never be allowed to forget it. It was another of Fanny’s pleasant
weaknesses—like the visitors’ book in which everybody had to
write something “original.” (Elliott had once rather shocked her,
after a week-end, by writing: “Thoroughly satisfied. At Cooking and
Everything Tip-Top. Can cordially recommend Chilver to anyone who likes a
real Home from Home.”) He knew that years hence she would be saying at
her dinner-parties: “Do you remember, Rose, that morning when Mr.
Elliott—you know, THE Mr. Elliott—read us that poem of
Blake’s out of the book you gave him for his sixtieth
birthday?”

“Certainly,” he replied, and turned to the well-known lines
which he guessed were probably all of Blake that Fanny had ever read. He
began in a mood of gentle raillery, thinking of her, and wondering if the
children were principally awed or bored, and noticing how the dogs
half-asleep in front of the fire looked up curiously as they heard the
different intonation. He had a beautiful voice, and he knew it, quite simply
and without conceit. But when he came to the lines: “I will not cease
from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,” he was caught
up by something both in himself and in the words. He was the fighter still,
at sixty. He would not cease from mental fight, nor would his sword sleep in
his hand, till he had built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant
land…. He finished, a little moved by the beauty of the words, but more by
the beauty of the scene out-of- doors and by Rose’s face turned to
him.

During the recital Jevons, his secretary, had quietly entered the room and
now made his salutations. He was a slim, handsome, and extremely clever youth
of thirty or so, with a well-bred cynicism that disguised emotion and opinion
alike.

“That’s a grand poem,” said Kennersley, to whom anything
was poetry that had rhymes and was read in an odd sort of voice.

“Yes, it’s good, Kennersley,” said Jevons, dexterously
slicing an egg on to his plate. “But I always catch myself boggling at
the word ‘Jerusalem.’ It gives the poem a faintly Zionist
flavour. And, anyhow, when you’ve seen Jerusalem, you wouldn’t
want to build it anywhere.”

Elliott laughed. “My point, if it comes to that, is that I
wouldn’t want to build any city—there are far too many already.
I’d leave the green and pleasant land alone.”

And so they went on rather frivolously chatting, until Kennersley’s
big Daimler, garlanded with pink rosettes, drove up to the front entrance.
“Well,” Kennersley said, seeing them off, “you’ll
have an enjoyable drive—for the first twenty miles, at any rate. I
hope everything goes along all right. We’ll all be listening in to you
at eight-thirty, and I’ll be up when you get back. Goo’bye.
Goo’bye, Jevons.”

Elliott was thinking, as he swished through the lanes and villages:
“This is my constituency.” … He found it rather hard to
realise. Those labourers in the field over there, and the man lowering the
sun-blind outside that shop, were, by the inexorable casualness of English
politics, installed for a moment as high instruments of fate. It had happened
peculiarly. In a recent general election Elliott had won an industrial seat
by a small margin. Then, several weeks later, when he had got well to work at
his new Cabinet post, somebody had discovered certain technical
irregularities that rendered the contest invalid. There had been no
suggestion of moral culpability, and an Act of Indemnity had been rushed
through Parliament to save him from the quite crippling fines to which he was
liable; but no Act could spare him the trouble and expense of re-election.
Nor was it beyond doubt that, with such a small majority, he would be
re-elected. In this emergency, the machine of English politics had been swung
to another angle, with the apparently inconsequent result that an elderly
member for an exceptionally safe seat had applied for the Chiltern Hundreds.
It had been hoped that Elliott would be elected without a fight, but at the
last moment the local opposition party had put up a candidate.

Thus Elliott found himself motoring on this May morning of his sixtieth
birthday through the constituency of East Northsex. Occasionally, on small
boards and in windows, he noticed the familiar command “Vote for
Elliott.” He was certain to get in, for the Kennersley influence was
still strong in the almost feudal countryside. There was only one place,
Sibleys, in which he might expect opposition; it was on the edge of a mining
area, and had a few factories, at one of which he had arranged to address a
lunchtime meeting of workpeople.

A freakish arrangement, when one came to think about it, he reflected.
Fate might make of him the pivot on which the wheel revolved through Paris,
Rome, Washington, Geneva; but England, parochial to the last, insisted on
this geographical attachment to its own hills and vales. Whatever he was,
history- maker or world-spokesman, he must remain the member for East
Northsex, and in all his plans for the regeneration of mankind he dare not
forget that Sibleys wanted power to run omnibuses or that Chilver was
disappointed with its sewage arrangements. Perhaps it was not a bad method,
in the way it worked out. But he despaired of explaining or justifying it to
any highly intelligent foreigner.

The sky was clouding over and drops of rain already speckled the car-
windows. He looked out upon the changing scene, talked a little to Jevons,
slit open envelopes and glanced through letters, turned to the newspaper
again. The rich fields and unspoilt villages merged into a more urbanised
area; tram-lines began; a horizon of coal-tips and chimneys lifted up. He had
never been in this part of the country before, yet he was going to represent
it— what a haphazard business! He said to Jevons, pointing ahead:
“Surely I don’t take in all that?”

Jevons laughed. “Lucky for you you don’t, sir. That’s
Loamington. Sibleys, which is where you end, is this side of it—a sort
of suburb.”

The traffic thickened in narrowing, mud-splashed streets; rows of
industrial cottages straddled a nearby hill like flying buttresses, and in
the trough below it the flat roof of a factory gleamed pewter-coloured in the
rain. “Sibleys,” said Jevons. Elliott looked out with interest,
commenting: “I don’t think I’ve ever been here
before.”

“No? But I thought you were a native of this county, sir?”

“So I am. I was born at Creeksend, about twenty miles the other side
of Chilver. But I never came here in those days—so far as I can
recollect. Nor during any of my visits to Chilver since.”

“Well, it’s hardly a spot they’d take you to for a
picnic, I admit. But don’t tell the crowd it’s your first visit.
You see, we’ve made a lot of your being a local man. A Northsex man for
Northsex— you know the tag.”

Elliott laughed. “Dear me, Jevons, couldn’t you think of
anything more original?”

“I could; but I was very careful not to. Originality has lost many
an election-contest.”

“What a game it is… WHAT a game….”

He felt a little weary, as he usually did, on the eve of a meeting. Not,
of course, that he had any doubts or apprehensions about it. He had probably
addressed some thousands of political gatherings during his career, and no
amount of hostility or heckling ever bothered him. He had a good platform
manner, a strong voice, and a quick brain that could turn a point against an
interrupter without making a lifelong enemy of him. He was what was called
“popular.” The cartoonists liked his hair, which they always
converted into a sort of halo; thousands of people all over the country
referred to him as “Harry.” He had no personal enemies that he
knew of and all his privacies were public—that his father had been a
country schoolmaster, that his married life had been idyllic, that his two
sons had been killed in the War, and that he enjoyed a good cigar.

The car was threading a steep street in between rows of huddled, meanly-
built dwellings, in some of whose windows he could see the display of his own
name and photograph. Men and women stood at their doors, a few of them giving
a cheer as he went by. The factory at the foot of the hill loomed suddenly
close. “Is this the place?” he asked Jevons.

“Yes. You’ll find them a pretty easy lot—there WAS a
time when they’d have been FOR you to a man, but lately they’ve
come under the Loamington influence a little. Loamington’s a hotbed, of
course.”

“This place looks bad enough. Is there anything special I ought to
know about it—local unemployment, or anything?”

Jevons had been working in the constituency for some days and was, in this
as in all other connections, a complete encyclopćdia with the unencyclopćdic
knack of giving only as much information as was really wanted.
“Sibleys,” he answered, “depends on the factory, which
makes machine-tools, and is on halftime at present. You’ll probably
hear a lot of complaints about housing. The trouble is, all this property is
nearly a hundred years old and the landlords nowadays can’t afford to
do repairs. It’s mostly leasehold. The Kennersleys own the ground
rents…. Oh, and there’s one other thing you might make a note
of—there’s a fellow named Collins in the Loamington football
team—he comes from Sibleys and the folks are very proud of him….
That’s all, I think.”

Elliott nodded. Invaluable fellow, Jevons. The car swung through wide open
gates into an ugly courtyard and pulled up outside a block of offices. A fat
man in morning coat and spats, looking rather ridiculous as he stood in the
rain, seized the door-handle and gave Elliott an effusive welcome. Elliott,
who was dressed in an ordinary and, if anything, rather shabby lounge-suit,
remembered him as Sir Compton Turnpenny, one of the New Year’s knights.
They had met before; Elliott had trained himself to have a good memory for
faces. He offered congratulations, introduced Jevons, and then passed into
the offices, where there were introductions of various other men, whom he
similarly and quite automatically memorised for the future. He chatted about
the weather and declined a drink. Fortunately, just before the time arranged
for the meeting, the rain stopped, and he walked out, with Turnpenny, Jevons,
and the rest, to an improvised platform in an inner yard with a littered
horizon of bricks and slates. England’s green and pleasant land… he
could not help thinking, not with irony, but with deep compassion for anyone
compelled to live amidst such scenes who hated them as much as he did. The
employés began to swarm out of the surrounding buildings, men, women, and
girls; they had all been allowed time off with pay, so there was a guaranteed
audience. Elliott climbed up and gave them that good-tempered smile without
which his entire career would probably have been undistinguished. Some of the
girls began to cheer noisily and shout “Good old Harry.” He gave
them an especial smile.

Turnpenny introduced him in a fulsome speech that jarred as many another
speech had jarred during Elliott’s quarter-century of political life,
but he had cultivated as tough a hide for compliments as for abuse, and
neither could get him rattled. Most of the time he let his thoughts wander,
while he distantly contemplated what he was going to say. He never prepared
much beforehand, except on very important occasions in the House. He had the
gift of smooth, extempore speech on any subject; the words came easily, yet
not prosily. Turnpenny, on the other hand, was thumping his fists like a
stage orator, and nothing, perhaps, but his position as managing director of
the firm prevented the crowd from openly jeering. Elliott almost wished they
would. He felt in a curiously wilful mood—as if he wanted to do
something unusual, a little shocking. Turnpenny’s emphatic assurances
that a vote for Elliott was a vote for the abolition of unemployment, cheaper
food, higher wages, British world-supremacy, and various other items, made
him feel wistfully sympathetic with the half-listening crowd. He looked at
their faces and tried to catch the glance he wanted to see—that of
alertness, independence, the sublime you-be-damnedness of free-souled men.
Instead, he saw cynicism here and there, vapid approval in a few places, but
for the most part only apathy and weariness. They too, perhaps, knew what a
game it all was. Then suddenly the vagrant idea came to him—suppose he
were to give them, instead of the usual meaningless stuff, the simple truth,
so far as he knew it? Suppose he were to begin: “Ladies and gentlemen,
I’m afraid I haven’t very much good news for you, and I
can’t make you any exciting promises. Frankly, I’m a little
pessimistic about things in general. The world’s in a pretty bad way,
and perhaps it isn’t quite so much a matter of supremacy as of
survival. One man can do little in the face of events, but of course I shall
try, as I’ve tried all along. Owing to the rather absurd machinery of
the English electoral system I have to ask you for your votes; and I must
confess I don’t know why on earth you should give them to
me—certainly not, I should hope, because I’m a Northsex man. Of
course, if you agree with my policy, that’s a reason; but then my
opponent’s policy isn’t so bad, either, and I’m sure his
intentions are just as honest as mine. And then I’m afraid in a lot of
ways you don’t know my policy, and wouldn’t understand it if I
told you—all this business about foreign affairs and the gold standard
and so on. Also, there’s the disquieting possibility that my policy may
be wrong after all. Frankly, I can’t think why you should give me such
a big blank cheque, except that somebody has to have one, and if it
weren’t me, it might be someone even less reliable. But remember, I
can’t honestly promise anything. I can’t even promise not to make
awful mistakes. Some little thing I do, with the best will in the world, may
start a war long after I’m dead—a war that may perhaps claim the
lives of your children. Remember that, when you’re shouting ‘Good
old Harry.’ And remember, too, that I shan’t have much time to be
bothered about you once you’ve elected me….”