Rotting Hill (11 page)

    He could see no issue to this but, as a final absurdity, a stand-up fight with the farmer—for as he struggled in a hot blur his mind darted about seeking a means of escape. He saw the headlines in the Storby papers, “Fighting Parson. Riot in Bagwick. Farmer Cox’s story.” For more than a decade this man had been his enemy and it was most unlikely that he would let him off with anything short of the extremity of humiliation and scandal. His appeals to “Jack” he saw had been absurd. There was always Providence—it even passed through his mind that the Archdeacon might pass that way. He ran through all the most unlikely visitants before reaching his wife. But Eleanor had said on the telephone that she would run down in the car almost at once, so it was after all in her that the best hope of intervention lay. He would hold this little rat pinioned to the wall until Eleanor stopped the car a few yards away, jumped out and hurried over to “The Marquess of Salisbury”. She would of course be horrified. “My poor darling!” she would cry when she saw his face, which was in a bit of a mess. And when she noticed Jack Cox was unmarked wouldn’t she just give Jack a piece of her mind which he richly deserved—and these brutes too, standing around here and allowing their Rector… well, he
was
their Rector!

    So in a sense he became numbed to outer sensations, he no longer heard the invective directed at him by his captive, he prosecuted the locking up of the little fists of Cox as an automaton. His mind supplied a feverish daydream to distract him as he rocked about on top of Cox. It ran on like a clockwork producing consoling images.

    But Jack Cox began to wriggle and to sink—he was slipping down all the time. Rymer tried to pull him up, but he had got down almost on his knees. Rymer at last was obliged to slip after him until
he
was on his knees too. It was impossible to hold him like that. He had to throw him over on his back, an operation he found none too easy. He did at last get him over, receiving a nasty punch or two in the process, and he then lay on top of him. Perhaps the earth would help him to hold Jack Cox better than the wall had.

    Meanwhile this was psychologically a less satisfactory position. He would have looked, to anyone suddenly arriving on the scene, more like an
aggressor
—lying there on top of a man as if he were a victorious wrestler, than he would have while they were both on their feet, and he obviously pinioning Cox’s arms, in the way a quite gentle police constable might. That, Heaven knows, was not a pretty picture: but this was a
worse
picture—should the Bishop happen at that moment to drive through Bagwick. He shuddered as he thought of the Bishop’s reaction on finding one of his clergymen lying on top of a man in the street, surrounded by a jeering crowd.

    He panted on top of Cox and it was much more difficult in this position to immobilize him. Their bodies lay parallel to the houses so he looked up at the road before him, the direction of the Rectory. Eleanor was taking her time!—or had something made it difficult for her to get away? (He refused to say
impossible:
difficult, perhaps.) Then, with a howl of pain, he leapt off Cox as if suddenly a bar of red-hot iron was there in place of Farmer Cox. He rushed away doubled up, in a crouching run. There was no longer any question of
holding
Cox. Without thinking, a wounded animal scuttling blindly for safety, he bolted from Cox as if that harmless-looking little countryman were possessed of some malignant property, fatal to life. He did not look back; he looked nowhere, heard nothing. Crouching and scuttling up the road he made for the Rectory.

    Jeering laughter followed him. Everyone was laughing and chattering, great hilarity prevailed in Bagwick as their Rector ran away from it screaming with pain. “Take it to y’missus, parson, she ’ull fix it for ’ee,” one of them called after him, a gust of fresh laughter beginning before the jeer ended. But the malice of Bagwick took a more tangible form. Mrs. Rossiter’s Jacko, from the start at his heels, now ran level with him, and, to round off the whole performance, plunged his teeth into Rymer’s calf. “First Jack—then Jacko!” as I said when he told me of the payment of that long-outstanding debt—pulling up his trousers and pants and showing me the relevant bandage.

    Eleanor appeared almost at once, he saw her red tam-o’-shanter. As she drew near to the crouching figure, smeared with blood, dishevelled, his patches gaping and fluttering, she could scarcely believe her eyes. As she stopped the car and sprang out she exclaimed “My poor darling!” just as she had done in his fevered daydream upon Cox’s breast. But the villagers began to move back into their houses as they saw her approaching, and Jack Cox had already gone back into “The Marquess of Salisbury”, so it was too late for the telling-off even had he not been suffering such atrocious pain. In the middle of the road was the inanimate form of Bill Crockett—who at first Eleanor had supposed must have been her husband’s victim.

    But Rymer was, it seems, practically inarticulate and she helped him tenderly into the car, saying “My
poor
darling!” again as she did so. One of the many thuggish tricks included in commando-training had been utilized by the farmer (who had been exempted from military service because of his farm but who had learnt a few of the best thug-tricks for use in civil life). All the facts were sorted out afterwards; Eleanor saw it was no time to ask questions. She turned the car round and with all speed made for home.

    His story greatly shocked me. I felt sorry about him as I should with a child. The majority of men are so cunning and practical, such little strategists.
They
would have known exactly what to do. They would in any case never have found themselves with a drunken farmer in their arms outside a public house.

    Rymer’s departure from my flat was rather sudden. He recalled the hospital hours: I offered to go with him but he would not allow me to do that. He hobbled past the Italian workman who was still glazing though he had stopped hacking. Rymer’s back went slowly along the corridor; that was more than six months ago and it is the last I have seen or heard of him. I have written several times but received no reply. I am beginning to wonder whether Rymer exists or whether he is not, rather, a figment of my imagination.

    When I entered the train at Paddington station I was absent-minded—indeed I was an automaton. I took my seat in a first-class carriage and it was only when someone coughed that I became aware that I was sitting in a corner seat opposite the only other occupant.

    You will assume perhaps that it is my habit to go around in a dream. This is not the case. I had been reading a book I had bought the day before,
Human Rights,
and on the way down in the cab I had been thinking about my “freedom”. I had reflected what a wonderful thing freedom of displacement was: what a delightful feature of the individualist way of life it was that I could decide to go to Oxford by the next train and all I had to do was to buy a ticket—or to anywhere in England.
Once
it had been possible to buy a ticket for anywhere in the world: shades of the prison-house were gathering deeply about us in these islands. Today I could go down to the station, buy a ticket, and go to Penzance or to John o’ Groats—quite a big prison-yard to exercise in, and as a matter of fact I seldom went further than a hundred miles. But I could
not
go to Calais or Boulogne. Tomorrow, it might be, I should have to secure a permit to travel to Oxford. I should then be walking around and around in Rotting Hill.

    That I could not go to Calais or to Boulogne without an official permit was no fault of the Government. If anyone is to be blamed it is the selfish greedy fools who pushed England into blood-bath after blood-bath. If a nation ruins itself by going to war on a sumptuous scale twice in a generation its touristically-minded citizens have to be restrained. Also the present government did not withhold its permission for travel to the most distant countries if the journey were to be undertaken for some serious purpose, cultural or commercial. Nevertheless, we were not as free as we were, and, having said that, I reminded myself that it was only the middle-class that had
ever
been free—had ever gone anywhere, so it was only they who suffered. I was very philosophic—but strangely preoccupied.

    As I went along the carriage-corridor I was thinking of that middle-class. And I was still thinking of the middle-class as the cough called me away from it. I looked up. I saw the working class.

    These railway-carriage
tête-à-têtes
in the first-class carriages of English trains can be rather disagreeable; and as the train left the station it was still a
tête-à-tête.
There are fewer people every day who travel first class in England. Some Englishmen in such a situation bury their countenances in a copy of
The Financial Times
or
The Economist,
or look coldly out of the window; make it quite plain that they object to conversation and will pull the alarm-chain if you compel them to do so by remarking that it is warm for the time of year. This man in front of me, however, looked at me fixedly. I did not need, therefore, to examine him furtively. I looked in his eyes and found them grey, self-satisfied, and aggressive. I noticed that his head was rather narrow, of an English pink—that he was probably approaching forty. What a man
wears
is no longer, in England, any indication of his economic status. It is not a classless society yet, but it is a uniformly shabby one.

    I did not like this face but I thought I had better break the ice.

    “England is becoming the rat-catcher of Europe,” I said.

    He gave a frosty, superior smile.

    “I was obliged,” I continued, “to call in the Ratin Company. We are infested with mice. The Ratin representative informed me that Ratin flew an outfit over to Reikjavik last week, at the request of the Icelandic government. They get many such summonses from abroad. It appears that we have ten times as many rats and mice here as formerly. So the ship cannot be sinking, can it?”

    “There are plenty of rats still in this country,” he observed disagreeably.

    “And mice—who think they are rats and behave as such,” I told him. “You would never have thought that
ours
were mere mice.”

    I knew that I could say nothing to this individual that he would not be superior about, even scornful. The train was a non-stop to Oxford. What was he doing at Oxford, or was he “a commercial”? In the days when there were classes he would have belonged to some section of the working class. His aggressiveness might be on account of that, alone it would not account however for his smouldering alertness.

    “Are you at Oxford?” I asked him.

    “Yes. I’m an undergraduate,” he informed me (as if to say “any objection?”).

    “Ah,” I looked mildly at his watch-chain. No doubt demobbed late and rewarded for his martial watchfulness in the Azores or in Madras by a University education, like so many others—as they said two years ago that half the undergraduates were “old married men” and that Oxford was full of perambulators and the screams of children-in-arms.

    “I see you have the
Unesco
book,
Human Rights.
” He pointed at my book, which I had placed on the seat at my side.

    “I bought it yesterday,” I answered. “It interests me.”

    “Does it?” immediately he said, in a tone that left no doubt as to his feelings about this publication. But he never left one in doubt as to his feelings about anything, and they were invariably strong and intensely disagreeable.

    “Yes.” I reaffirmed my interest.

    “I can’t see how anyone can find it interesting,” he proceeded—for it was a subject that evidently interested him.

    “Why?” I enquired, smiling.

    “I can’t see how a lot of lies can interest anybody.”

    “You think it gives an untruthful or misleading account of the problem of ‘human rights’?”

    “Untruthful!” He gave a grating little cackle. “It gives no account at all. It is anti-Soviet propaganda, that is all.”

    “It surprises me that you should say that. The views on the subject of human rights of exponents of all schools of thought, from the communist to the liberal, are to be found there.”

    “No they aren’t!” he said with some violence.

    “You feel that the communist philosophy is unfairly reported?”

    “I am not a communist,” he said indifferently—as if he was tired of saying it: “just fair-minded. If there is a war I and my friends will be asked to fight the Russians, that’s all.”

    Like other classes of men, communists are not uniformly agreeable or disagreeable. But since the stalinist doctrine is absolutist, and has its roots sunk deep and fast in an ethic—an angry ethic—naturally in conversation stalinists are, on the whole, apt to be intolerant and tough. For communism a sensible man must have mixed feelings. He must feel respect. He can only abhor its brutality—but he must concede that a great deal that occurs in our Western societies is implicity of great brutality too. He may regard its moral indignation as phoney: but he must recognize that horror at the wickedness of others is not a communist monopoly. He may ask “Are they such children as they act and talk?”—but he must allow that to see things with the eyes of a child is very popular, too, with us. And so on and so on. Such good sense may seem to lack force. But good sense has nothing to do with force or power. That is its beauty.

    I looked over at my fellow traveller to Oxford as one must at a human squib or obstreperous toy one has been handed, and would gladly put down. But he was a walking idea with which one has to come to terms—or the earth will blow up.