The Stars Look Down (73 page)

Unaccountably, he felt hurt; her incomprehensible withdrawal, coming on top of his friendliness, his effort to take her out of herself, wounded him. He dropped the subject completely and withdrew into himself. When they entered the house, refusing her offer to get him some supper, he said good night at once, and went straight to his room.

Harry Nugent arrived next day. Nugent was fond of Whitley Bay; he swore there was no air in the world like Whitley air; whenever he could snatch a week-end he came to get a lungful of the wonderful air. He put up at the Waverley and David met him there at three o’clock.

Although it was so early in the afternoon, they had tea in the lounge without delay. Nugent was responsible; he was a great tea drinker, he drank endless cups of tea, he would make anything an excuse for a cup of tea. It didn’t suit him either, aggravating the dyspepsia from which he habitually suffered. Nugent was physically a delicate man: his bony, ungainly figure and sallow, emaciated face bespoke a constitution ill-adapted to a life of strain. He suffered greatly and often from minor, unromantic maladies—once, for instance, he had endured six months’ agony from fistula. But he never complained, never coddled himself, never gave up. He was so absurdly and humanly grateful, too, for the lesser joys of life—a cigarette, a cup of tea, a week-end at Whitley Bay or an afternoon at Kennington Oval. Nugent was above everything a human man; his smile expressed it, quietly forming on his ugly face, a smile which always seemed boyish because of the slight gap between his front teeth. He smiled now, at David, over this third cup.

“Well, I suppose I may as well go straight to the point.”

“You usually do,” David said.

Nugent lit a cigarette, and held it between his nicotine-stained fingers, tapping in the loose tobacco with a sudden seriousness.

“You did know, David, that Chris Stapleton was ill,” he said at length. “Ay, and he turns out to be worse, poor fellow, than any of us thought. He went under an operation at the Freemasons’ Hospital last week, internal trouble—you can guess what that means. I saw him yesterday. He’s unconscious and sinking fast.” He contemplated the glowing
end of his cigarette. There was a long silence, then Nugent added: “There’ll be a bye-election at Sleescale next month.”

A sudden wild emotion rose in David’s breast and leaped, like a pang of fear, into his eyes. There was another silence.

Nugent gazed across at him and nodded.

“That’s right, David,” he said. “I’ve been in touch with the local executive. There’s no question as to who they want. You’ll be nominated in the usual way.”

David could not believe it. He stared back at Nugent, inarticulate, overcome. Then his eyes clouded suddenly and he could not see Nugent any more.

The first person David met on his return to Sleescale was James Ramage. That Monday morning he had come up from Whitley Bay to Tynecastle with Annie and Sammy and seen them on the train for home. Then he had hurried to Edgeley to put in a full day’s work at the Institute. It was seven o’clock in the evening when he came out of Sleescale Station and almost collided with Ramage, who was walking towards the news-stall for a late edition.

Ramage stopped dead in the middle of the passage-way and David saw from his face that he knew. On the Sunday night Stapleton had died in the Freemasons’ Hospital and there had been a significant paragraph in this morning’s
Tynecastle Herald
.

“Well, well,” Ramage said, very sneering, pretending to be highly amused. “So we’re goin’ to have a try for parleyment, I hear?”

With the most exasperating amiability he could command David answered:

“That’s right, Mr. Ramage!”

“Huh! And you think you’ll get in?”

“Yes, I hope so,” David agreed, maddeningly.

Ramage stopped trying to appear amused. His big red face turned redder than before. He clenched one hand and banged it vehemently into the palm of the other.

“Not if I can help it. No, by God, no, not if I can help it. We don’t want no blasted agitators to represent this borough.”

David watched Ramage’s distorted face almost with curiosity, the hatred there was so openly displayed. He had forced Ramage to supply sound meat to the hospital, fought him over his abominable slaughter-house, his insanitary tenements behind Quay Street. He had, altogether, tried to induce James Ramage to do a great deal of good. And James Ramage could have killed him for it. Very curious.

He said quietly, without rancour:

“Naturally you’ll support your own candidate.”

“You bet your life, I will,” Ramage exploded. “We’ll swamp you at the polls, we’ll wipe you out, we’ll make you the laughin’ stock of Tyneside…” He choked, seeking more violent expletives, then with a final incoherence in his throat he swung round and walked furiously away.

David went down Freehold Street thoughtfully. He knew that Ramage’s was not the general opinion. Yet he fully appreciated what he was up against. Sleescale Borough was normally a safe enough Labour seat, but Stapleton, who had held it for the last four years, had been an oldish man, a man stricken in advance with the dreadful infirmity of cancer. At the last election which had sent in the Baldwin Government, Sleescale had wavered slightly, and Laurance Roscoe, the Conservative candidate, had reduced Stapleton’s majority to a bare 1,200. Roscoe was certain to stand again, and he was a dangerous opponent. Young, good-looking and rich, David had met him several times, a big lanky-shouldered man of thirty-four with a high forehead, extremely white teeth and an odd habit of straightening his shoulders with a jerk, correcting a tendency to stoop. He was the son of Lynton Roscoe, K.C.—now Sir Lynton and a director of Tynecastle Main Collieries. Following the family tradition, young Roscoe was a barrister on the north-eastern circuit with a fine practice; work simply flowed in to him through his father’s position and his own ability. He had got his blue for cricket at Cambridge, and in the war he had served quite romantically in the R.A.F. In fact, he was still interested in flying; he had his pilot’s licence and often flew from Heston at the week-end to his father’s country place at Morpeth. David felt it as strangely significant that the son of the man who had clashed with him so fiercely at the Inquiry should
now oppose him at the polls. Oh well, David thought with a sombre smile, the bigger they are the harder they fall.

He went into his house. Martha was at the table peering over the evening newspaper, wearing the steel-rimmed spectacles which, disdaining his suggestion of an oculist, she had recently purchased for herself at the new Woolworths. Usually Martha did not bother over the evening newspaper but Hannah Brace had flown round upon the wind to gabble out to Martha the election paragraph and Martha for once in her life had gone out and bought the paper. She stood up with a guilty air. He could see that she was astounded, confused, almost stunned. But she would not be stunned, she would not. In her dark and masterful face he could see her struggling not to be impressed. Concealing the paper she said accusingly: “You’re early back, I didn’t expect you before nine.”

But he would not let her off.

“What do you think of it, mother?”

She paused; then she said dourly:

“I don’t like it.” She went to get his supper; that was all she said.

As he ate his supper he planned ahead. A vigorous campaign—that’s what they called it, but it was not so easy to be vigorous when you were poor. Nugent had been brutally frank on the question of money: it was concession enough for David to secure the nomination. Still, he was not dismayed. His expenses could be cut; old Peter Wilson was a reasonable agent. He would hire one of the Co-operative light lorries and speak a good deal in the open, with the Town Hall for a final meeting. He smiled at Martha as she handed him a plate of stewed prunes. He knew that she knew he had never liked prunes.

“Prunes,” he said, “for a member of parliament!”

“Time enough to talk,” she answered cryptically.

Nomination took place on the 24th of August. There were only two candidates; the issue lay between David and Roscoe—a straight fight. It was a very wet day, the 24th, the rain came down in bucketfuls which meant, Roscoe jokingly remarked, that the omens were unfavourable for one of the candidates. David hoped it wasn’t him. He found Roscoe’s brimming confidence a trifle depressing. As far as he could see, the Conservative organisation was three times more efficient than his own. Peter Wilson, the scrubby little Sleescale
solicitor, made an insignificant figure beside the morning-coated Bannerman, Roscoe’s agent, imported from Tynecastle. And all this apart, the lashing rain made it very unfavourable for light-lorry eloquence. So David, feeling acutely inferior, was obliged to postpone his start. He went home and changed his damp boots.

But the next day was a day of blue sky and sunshine and David flung himself body and soul into the battle. He was at the Neptune gates when the foreshift came out, bareheaded and ready with Harry Ogle, Wicks, the checkweigher, and Bill Snow upon the lorry beside him—Cha Leeming being the volunteer driver. He made a strong, incisive speech and he made it deliberately short. He knew that the men were hungry for their dinner and he didn’t keep them long. Roscoe, who had never come out the pit hungry for his snap, might make that mistake, but he wouldn’t. The speech was a success.

David’s plank was a plain and banal plank, but it gave substantial footing none the less. Justice for the miners. They knew that short of Nationalisation justice would never come. He was fighting on that issue and nothing else. He was competent to fight on that issue. It was the expression of his lifelong faith.

At the end of the first week Tom Heddon came down from Tynemouth to “say a word” for David. All David’s speeches had been studiously impersonal, for Roscoe was fighting cleanly and the air was clear of mud-slinging. But Heddon was Heddon, and although David had begged him before the meeting to be careful, Tom refused to keep the party clean. With a sour grin on his dark face he began:

“Lissen to me, you lads. There’s two candidates in this bloddy election, Roscoe and Davey Fenwick. Now lissen to me a minnit, will ye. When this Roscoe was knockin’ a ball about on a cricket-pitch at Eton and Harrow all la-de-dah in his flannelettes, with his ma and his pa and his sister standing by and clapping pretty under their bloomin’ parasols, Davey Fenwick was inbye in the Neptune, stripped to the waist, muckin’ and sweatin,’ catchin’ and pushin’ bloddy tubs of coal like we’ve all done in our bloddy time. Now answer me, lads, which of the two of them do you want to plump your bloddy vote for? The one what caught the bloddy tubs or the one what missed the bloddy ball?”

There was half an hour of this. It was rich and satisfying
and highly seasoned and it went over big. Tom Heddon said quietly to David afterwards:

“It’s poor stuff, Davey; I’m sick of it myself, but if it’s done ye any good I’m sure you’re welcome.” If Tom Heddon had been a brilliant man he might well have been contesting the seat and Tom Heddon knew that he might have been contesting the seat. Since Tom was not brilliant he could only be unselfish. But his unselfishness did not save him from moments of terrible bitterness, of private self-torture worse than the torture of the damned.

Saturday, September 21st, was the day of the election and at six o’clock on Friday the night of the 20th David addressed his final meeting in the Sleescale Town Hall. The hall was full; they were standing three deep in the passages, and around the doors, wide open for the hot night, a crowd had gathered. All David’s supporters were on the platform: Tom Heddon, Harry Ogle, Wicks, Kinch, young Brace, old Tom Ogle, Peter Wilson and Carmichael, who had come specially from Wallington to spend the week-end with David.

As David came forward to speak there was a dead silence. He stood behind the small table and the fly-blown water-bottle that no one ever drank from, and the air was so still he could hear the faint sounds of the waves lapping on the Snook. Before him were rows and rows of faces, all upturned towards him. Beyond the bright glare of the platform they had a massed, symbolic pallor, a look vaguely beseeching. Yet he could distinguish individual faces, all of them faces that he knew. In the very front row he saw Annie with still intent eyes upon him, and Pug beside her and Ned Sinclair and Tom Townley, Cha Leeming with Jack Reedy, very brooding and bitter, Woods, Slattery, and dozens and dozens more, men from the Neptune pit. He knew them, the miners, his own kind. He felt a great humility come over him, his heart filled, swelled towards them. He dropped the clichés, the political casuistry, the tub-thumping rhetoric. Dear God, help me, he thought, help me, help me. He spoke to them simply, from his very soul.

“I know most of you who are here,” he said, and his voice trembled with emotion. “Many of you worked in the Neptune pit when I worked there myself. And to-night, somehow, even if I could, I don’t feel like going into flights of
oratory before you. I look on you as my friends. I want to talk to you as friends.”

Here a voice from the back called out encouragingly:

“Go on, Davey lad, wor aal lissenin’!” There were loud cheers; then silence. He went on:

“When you think of it, the life of every man and woman in this hall is tied up in some way with the pit. You’re all miners, or the wives or sons or daughters of miners; you’re all bound to the mines. And it’s on this question of the mines, surely a very vital question to you all, that I want to talk to you to-night…”

David’s voice, rising in a passion of earnestness, echoed in the steamy hall. He felt strong, suddenly, able to hold, to convince them. He began to lay his arguments before them. He took the system of private ownership, with its frequent disregard to safety, its basis of sheer profiteering whereby the shareholder in the Company came first and the miner last of all. He passed to the question of royalties, that intolerable and immoral principle, allowing enormous sums to be taken out of a district, not because of services rendered to the community but solely on account of a monopoly given hundreds of years ago. Then quickly he placed before them the alternative system. Nationalisation! A word cried in the wilderness for years. He begged them to consider what Nationalisation meant. It meant, firstly, a unification of collieries, of management, and improved methods of production which would in turn be followed by a reorganisation of the system of coal distribution to the consumers. It meant, secondly, safe working at the pits. There were hundreds of pits all over the country, antiquated and badly equipped, where under private ownership the miner had to think of keeping his job first, and of reporting dangers or improper working last. And wages? Nationalisation meant a better wage, because the lean years in the industry would be balanced by the better years; it meant at least a
living
wage. It meant better housing, too. The State could never allow the deplorable conditions of miners’ houses which existed at present in so many districts; it could not for its own honour. This legacy of wretched housing was the result of years of greed, selfishness and apathy. The men who worked in the pits performed a public service, a dangerous public service, they should be looked upon as public servants. They only asked for human justice, the justice
that had been denied them for centuries. They asked to be the servants of the State, not the Slaves of Money…