The Stars Look Down (85 page)

O God, groaned David, how long must this go on? He thought of the burning of the Neptune, an act of sabotage, in itself an inexcusable madness, yet solely expressive of the mutiny of the miners against their fate. His very soul flamed with passionate resentment as one hypocritical phrase after another dripped from the lips of the wily Stone. He glanced swiftly at Nugent who sat beside him, his face covered with his hand. Nugent felt this as deeply as he; but Nugent had greater resignation, a sort of fatalism which caused him to bow more easily before the inevitable. He could not bend like that. Never, never. He must speak, he must. In an agony of purpose he strove for calmness, for composure, for courage. As Stone at last meandered to the end of his peroration, beaming upon the House, and sat down, David sprang to his feet.

He waited, tense, immobile; he caught the Speaker’s eye. He drew a long breath that entered his chest slowly, painfully, and seemed to flow through all his body in a great wave of resolution. At that instant he determined to make one great despairing effort, to pit the strength of his lifelong purpose against the Bill. Another breath. Command came to him, command and courage. He began slowly, almost impersonally, with such a deadly sincerity that, after the bombast of the previous speaker, the attention of the House was immediately riveted upon him.

“I have been listening to the Debate for the entire afternoon. I wish with all my heart I could share the admiration of my hon. Friends for this Bill.” A silence. “But while I have been listening to their polished phrases I could not refrain from thinking of the men to whom the hon. Member who has preceded me has so poetically referred. This House knows that on several occasions I have directed its attention
towards the distress in the mining areas of this country. I have on more than one occasion invited the hon. Member to accompany me to my own constituency to see with his own eyes the terrible and hopeless despair which stalks the streets there. To see the derelict men, women whose hearts are broken, little children with starvation written on their faces. If the hon. Member had accepted my invitation I imagine he would have gasped in a kind of wonder: ‘How on earth do these people live?” The answer is that they do not live. They exist. They exist in a broken and demoralised condition, bearing a burden which is the more insufferable because it falls heaviest upon the weak and the young. Hon Members will no doubt rise and tell me that I am wallowing in exaggerated sentiment. Let me refer them to the reports of school medical officers in these districts, in my own district, where they will find full and ample confirmation of the facts. Children suffering from lack of clothing, children without boots, children far under average weight, children certified as subnormal because of lack of nourishment. Lack of nourishment! Perhaps hon. Members have sufficient intelligence to understand the meaning of that polite euphemism. Recently, at the opening of this parliament, we had again the opportunity of witnessing all the splendour, pomp and pageantry which, my hon. Friends will assure me, bespeaks the greatness of our nation. Did any of my hon. Friends contrast it, for one second, with the beggary, poverty, misery and penury which exists within the greatness of that nation? Perhaps I do this House a grave injustice.” A note of bitter indignation now crept into the voice. “On two occasions I have heard an hon. Member rise with the suggestion that the House ‘put round the hat’ to alleviate the suffering in these mining areas. Could anything be more infamous? Worn to the point of exhaustion as they are, these people do not want your charity. They want justice! This Bill gives them no justice. It is lip service, it is hypocrisy. Does not this House realise that the coal-mining industry by its very nature is different from all other industries? It is unique. It is not merely the process of getting coal. It is the basic industry which provides the raw material for half the prosperous industries of this country. And the men who produce this unique and vital commodity at the risk of their lives are kept in penury and misery, employed at a wage which would be insufficient to pay the cigar bills of certain hon. Members of this House.
Does any Member of this House honestly believe that this inadequate and hypocritical Bill will finally save the industry? If so I challenge him to come forward. Our present mining system has grown haphazard—not as the result of economic causes—but because of historic and personal causes. As has been said, it is planned not for geological, but for genealogical reasons. Do my hon. Friends realise that we are the only important coal-producing country in the world where there is no national communal control over the mineral itself? Two Royal Commissions have emphatically recommended the Nationalisation of minerals in order that the Sate might reorganise the coalfields on modem scientific lines. This present Government, before it came into office, pledged itself to nationalise the mines. And how does it now redeem that pledge? By continuing the chaos, seeking blindly for an outlet through the old competitive system, applying the stranglehold of restricted production, reducing output instead of widening markets, subsidising discarded mines to keep them closed, turning the working class, the wealth producers of this country, on to the streets in hundreds and thousands. I warn this House that you may continue for a short time in that way but the end inevitably is the degradation of the workman and the ruin of the nation as a whole.” His voice rose. “You cannot get more blood from the veins of the miners to revitalise the industry. Their veins are shrunken white. Wages of beggary and conditions of famine have existed in the mining districts ever since the war, when the hon. Member who preceded me kept telling the country we had only to kill sufficient Germans to live in peace and prosperity till the end of our days. Let this house take heed. It cannot condemn the mining community to further years of misery.” He paused again, and his tone turned persuasive, almost pleading. “This proposed Bill by its very nature admits the failure of the individual pit in the face of competition by the great combines. Does not this, of itself, state conclusively the case for a nationally owned industry? The House cannot be blind to the fact that there has been prepared a great nationally owned scheme to eliminate waste, work at the highest efficiency, reduce costs and prices, and to stimulate high-power consumption. Why has the Labour Government of this country ignored this integration in favour of a shadowy capitalistic amalgamation? Why has not the Government boldly said: ‘We are going once and for all
to clean up the mess left by our predecessors. We are going to end for ever the system which has landed us into this chaos. We are going to take over on behalf of the nation the mining industry and run it for the welfare of this country’?” A final silence, then David’s voice rose to his highest pitch of passionate entreaty. “I appeal to the House in the name of honour and conscience to examine the case I have put before it. And before the House divides I appeal especially to my colleagues in this Government. I implore them not to betray the men and the movement which put them here. I implore them to reconsider their position, to throw out this palliative measure, to implement their pledge and bring in a straight Bill of Nationalisation. If and when we are defeated on the floor of this House we will go to the country for a mandate. In the name of humanity, I beg you, I entreat you to seek this mandate armed with that glorious defeat.”

There was a dead silence When David sat down, a silence which was at once undecided and intense. The House, in spite of itself, was impressed. Then Bebbington, in a voice of cool detachment, threw out the words:

“The hon. Member for Sleescale Borough evidently believes that this Government can nationalise the mines with the same facility as he takes out a dog licence.”

A ripple went over the House, uncomfortable, uncertain. Then came the Hon. Basil Eastman’s historic sally. The hon. Member, a young Tory back-bencher from the Shires, who spent his rare visits to the House in a state of hereditary coma, had one rare parliamentary qualification which endeared him to his party. He could make animal noises to perfection. And now, roused from his habitual lethargy by the mention of the word dog, he sat up in his seat and yelped suddenly in imitation of a startled hound. The House started, held its breath, then tittered. The titter grew, swelled to a laugh. The House roared with delighted laughter. Several Members rose, the question was put, the Committee divided. It was a happy ending to a crisis. As the members poured into the division lobby, quite unnoticed David passed out of the House.

He walked into St. James’s Park. He walked rapidly as though towards some fixed destination with his head slightly advanced and his eyes staring a long way in front of him. He was quite unconscious of being in the Park, he was conscious only of his defeat.

He felt neither humiliation nor mortification in his defeat, but simply a great sadness which pressed upon him like a weight and bore him down. Bebbington’s final sneer gave him no pain, Eastman’s derision and the laughter of the House left no rancour. His thoughts were projected out with himself as though towards some point at a far distance where they centralised and fused in a light of sadness, and the sadness was not for himself.

He came out of the Park at the Admiralty Arch for he had, unconsciously, walked round by the Mall, and here the noise of traffic broke through his far, fixed sadness. He stood for a moment staring at the rush of life, men and women hurrying and hurrying, taxis and omnibuses and cars streaming before his eyes, streaming in the one-way traffic, racing and accelerating and hooting, as though each one amongst them were trying desperately to be first. They cut in and squeezed past one another, and took to the last inch every advantage they could take, and they all went the same way. In a circle.

He gazed and the pain deepened in his sad eyes. The mad swift rush became for him the symbol of the life of men, the one-way traffic of man’s life. On and on; on and on; always in the same direction; and each man for himself.

He studied the faces of the hurrying men and women and it seemed that each wore a queer intentness, as if each face were absorbed by the intimate and special life behind the face and by nothing else. This man was absorbed by money, this other by food, and the next by women. The first had taken fifty pounds from some other man on the Stock Exchange that afternoon and he was pleased, the second reviewed
the mental images of lobster and
pâté
and asparagus and puzzled his brain as to which would gratify him the most, while the third balanced in his mind his chances of seducing his partner’s wife, who had smiled at him in a significant manner at dinner on the previous night.

The terrible thought struck David that each man in this vast hurrying stream of life was living for his own interest, for his own satisfaction, for his own welfare, for himself. Each man was conscious only of himself, and the lives of other men stood merely as the adjuncts of his own existence—they did not matter, it was he who mattered, he, the man himself. The lives of all other men mattered only in so far as they affected the man’s own happiness, and the man would sacrifice the happiness and the lives of other men, cheat and swindle, exterminate and annihilate, for the sake of his own welfare, his own interest, for the sake of himself.

The thought crushed David; he turned from it and from the mad circling rush of the traffic. Abruptly he walked away. He went up the Haymarket. In the Haymarket at the corner of Panton Street some men were singing in the street, a group of four men, he could see that they were miners. They stood facing each other, all young men, and all bent together with their foreheads nearly touching. They sang a song in Welsh. They were young Welsh miners and they were destitute—singing in the streets while all the wealth and luxury of London rolled past them.

The song finished, and one of the men held out a box. Yes, he was a miner, David saw. He was well shaved and his clothing though poor and ill assorted was clean—as though he wanted to keep himself up and not let himself go down into those depths which waited for him. David could see the tiny blue pit scars on his clean well-shaven face. David put a shilling in the box. The man thanked him without obsequiousness and with an even greater sadness. David thought, has that shilling helped more than all my work and striving and speaking in the last five years?

He walked on slowly towards the Piccadilly tube.

He crossed over to the tube, took his ticket and got into the next train. Sitting opposite was a workman reading the evening paper, reading an account of David’s speech which was already in the late editions. The man read slowly with the paper folded very small while the train thundered through the dark reverberating tunnels of the underground.
David had a great impulse to ask the man what he thought about the speech. But he did not ask.

At Battersea Station David left the train and walked towards Blount Street. He felt tired as he let himself into No. 33, and he ascended the worn carpeted stairs with a certain relief. But Mrs. Tucker stopped him before he had gone half-way up. He turned to face her as she spoke from the open door of her sitting-room below.

“Dr. Barras was on the telephone,” she said. “She rang up several times but wouldn’t leave a message.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Tucker,” he said.

“She said to ring up whenever you came in.”

“Very well.”

He imagined Hilda had rung up to condole with him, and while he was grateful he was not yet in the mood for her condolences. But Mrs. Tucker persisted:

“I promised Dr. Barras you’d ring up the minute you came in.”

“Oh, very well,” he said again and he turned to the telephone which was on the half landing behind him. As he called Hilda’s number he heard the satisfied click of Mrs. Tucker’s door.

He was some time in getting Hilda’s number but the moment he got through Hilda answered. There was one second of ringing tone and then Hilda’s voice. Hilda had been sitting at the ’phone, waiting.

“Hello, Hilda, is that you?” He could not help his voice being dull and tired.