Theirs Was The Kingdom (22 page)

He paused, still regarding the boy with an expression that reminded Giles, improbably, of his last glimpse of the talkative young Welshman he had met at the door of the House of Commons. “You’re an odd one and no mistake. Do you think we’ll make a schoolteacher out of you?” He leaned forward, and Giles saw now that he was addressing him man to man for the first time, almost as though he had been discussing a choice of regiments with Alex. “Seriously, what would you
like
to work towards? Anything in my line of country?”

And the boy replied carefully, “I don’t think so, sir. Not unless you wish it, that is. I think I’d like…” and he stopped.

“Speak up,” Adam said, sharply. “I won’t erupt. Most fathers in trade take it for granted their sons will pick up where they leave off, but I’ll tell you something I wouldn’t tell your brothers. Not yet anyway. Nobody who isn’t dedicated to commerce the way I am can make a success of it. What would you
like
to do with your life, allowing for the certainty you’ll change your mind in a year or so?”

“I think I should like to help speed things up a bit, sir. That… what was it… ‘inevitable’ something…?”

“Inevitability of gradualness.”

“Yes, sir, I see what you mean, of course, about revolutions and riots, but we really ought to get on with it a bit faster, shouldn’t we? I mean, make laws against throwing those Farthings out, sending them to separate workhouses, and giving those Welsh quarrymen Mr. George told me about a big enough wage to stop them risking being sent to prison for poaching local rabbits.”

His father must have looked quite blank at this so Giles went on, hurriedly, to explain the gist of the conversation he had with the young Welshman when he visited Westminster. As he spoke, however, he saw the twinkle return to his father’s eye, so that he faltered, concluding, “Oh, I daresay it sounds vague, sir…”

But Adam exclaimed, thumping his leg, “Not a bit vague for a lad your age! It’s more than your sister Stella or your brother Alex could have put into words at eighteen, much less thirteen. That new school of yours seems to suit you. Well, now, here’s my advice for what it’s worth. Follow that Welshman’s advice and read everything that interests you and when you’ve read it think about it, and try and put your thoughts on paper some time. I’d be interested to read ’em, and so would your mother. Looks to me as if we’ve got a real radical in our family after all, and maybe it’s time—for, as I told you, I’m only half one. Here, what the devil am I doing gossiping to you by the hour? I’ve got a county schedule to work out by lunch time,” and he stood up and lunged off with the atlas under his arm, leaving Giles to reflect that the Governor wasn’t half bad compared with most, for at least he didn’t talk down to a fellow as most governors did.

For all his passionate love affair with constitutional history, he did not consign Prodder Talbot’s poets to the attic. From time to time he still read poetry, finding he had acquired, somewhere along the line, the trick of memorising lines that caught his fancy in a way that he could never remember a method of solving sums, or a conjugation of French verbs.

His new surroundings on the edge of Exmoor helped him in this respect, for here he inhabited a countryside that seemed to him much closer to the England of Goldsmith, Wordsworth, and Gray than his native Kent, where the ancient townships were within hailing distance of one another and the fields, woods, and rivers were, for the most part, tamed, and at a cultivator’s disposal. Only a mile or so from the grey Gothic pile on the ridge, the river Bray ran between steeply angled pastures, covered with heath, sown with granite spurs, and tangled thickets of ash and sycamore crowded into the folds and river bottoms forming dark islands in a sea of green and purple moorland. In spring and summer it was a gay, companionable region, a pretty patchwork of primrose, violet, celandine, hawkweed, and foxglove. By late summer, if the season had been dry, the moor lay parched under a sky that seemed twice as tall as the skies over Kent and Berkshire. Shy, unfamiliar birds hovered there, and you could sometimes run three miles between the widely scattered farms without seeing another human being, for the homesteads about here were old and crumbling, and most of the young men and women had moved away to the west, where the land was relatively level and the soil richer.

With the coming of autumn the woods slipping down the steep hillsides turned guinea yellow, plum purple, and, here and there, russet, as though stained with old blood. The school buildings put on their evening mantle of violet vapour even before the tea bell brought the boys trooping into the covered playground from the football field. The entire establishment, that smelled of boiled greens in high summer and damp cloth under the spring drizzle, seemed to smell of chrysanthemums and dead-leaf bonfires.

Full winter he had yet to experience up here but he judged it would be a time of tearing winds and flurries of sleet hurling showers of Exmoor-tempered darts against the windows of Big School, where the boys gathered between tea and prep around a fireplace burning a mixture of logs and pungent peat. For all its austerity and remoteness, it had a magic of its own that could absorb you if you let it, and didn’t hanker after the creature comforts of more civilised places.

The school itself was barely twenty years old but the locale was as old as time, the tiny East Buckland churchyard coming closer to Gray’s Stoke Poges than any churchyard about Tryst, whereas the hills and valleys they crossed in the bi-weekly runs might not have been traversed since the day the earth cooled, leaving the countryside as seamed and flawed and crinkled as a twice-baked apple. He felt at home here, as he had never felt at Mellingham, or even at Tryst, where the surrounding countryside was trim and settled, worked over by fifty generations of gardeners, every one an advocate of the regimented bloom and the trim half-moon bed. It was a place to work, a place to think, and above all a place to put a keen edge on one’s appetite. By the end of his second term, Giles had put on almost a stone and grown, or so his mother told him, an inch and a quarter in eight months.

He had developed in other ways, but Henrietta, who could spare him little enough time now that yet another baby had arrived in the last week of October, took no heed of this, whereas Adam kept his observations to himself. Adam made time, however, to write a jocular fortnightly letter about the hubbub surrounding the political issues of the day, notably his old friend General Roberts’s march to Cabul and Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign that was setting a new style, so Adam said, in Parliamentary elections and would doubtless have Giles’s approval, for “it was likely to speed things up a bit.”

It was on account of this last exchange that Adam felt obliged, in the first days of the New Year, to grant Giles’s request to stay overnight in London in order to attend one of Gladstone’s monster rallies at Exeter Hall.

Adam, although interested in overall Imperial trends, had never wasted time attending political meetings, having decided long since that one was more likely to come at the heart of an issue by reading and reflecting on newspaper accounts rather than by subjecting oneself to blasts of platform oratory. Thus he had gone through life without ever hearing Gladstone or Disraeli address a public meeting. Having been beguiled into attending one by his son, Adam found himself enjoying it more than he had anticipated, largely because the boy’s enthusiasm was as infectious as measles.

It began quietly enough, with twelve hundred people jammed shoulder to shoulder, listening attentively to a succession of preliminary speakers—“warm-up men” as Adam informed his son, adding that this was a type the political and boxing fraternities had in common, providing they could coax a Titan into the ring. Having satisfied himself, however, that Giles was impressed by what they had to say about Irish Home Rule, the disastrous errors and injustices of the Zulu War, the extending franchise bill, and various other inflammable topics, Adam surrendered himself to the atmosphere of moral self-righteousness that hovered above the meeting like a cloud of incense. By the time the last warm-up man had said his piece, he actually caught himself murmuring “Hear, hear” when the speaker described the battle of Isandlwana, and the vindication of Lord Chelmsford at Ulundi, as “a needless blood-letting, an outrage against the noble savage by a Christian nation turned pirate.” He wondered, privately, what Giles would make of that now that his brother had returned from the piratical affray, with heady tales of the defence of Rorke’s Drift, but his reflections were cut short by a sustained rumbling sound, like a shipload of cabin trunks being trundled down a long flight of stone steps. The distant roar soon enlarged itself into a storm that became, within seconds, a tempest, so that it was with some surprise he identified the cause of the uproar with a movement of the platform. Curtains parted to allow the great man to advance to the centre of the dais and bask, for some five minutes, in the hysterical adulation of his supporters.

All traces of cynicism deserted him then, for there was absolutely no denying that he was confronted, not by a professional politician, but A Presence likely to regard a moment’s inattention as blasphemy. Great, thunderous cadences emerged from the lips; the bright, unwinking eye held him rigid in its beam, a beam that had the power to isolate every one of those upturned faces and convey a curious impression of nakedness, as though Gladstone was addressing not one meeting but twelve hundred meetings held in as many sound-proofed cubicles.

It was extraordinary, Adam thought, how defenceless one was against the compelling logic and booming oratory of the spellbinder. Somehow, despite an acute awareness of personal vulnerability, one knew it was a spell, but a spell capable of suspending reason and checking any attempt to weigh the content of successive declarations, words, and phrases, each of which hit the audience like a jet of scalding water, so that one might as well have challenged the tablets of Sinai as the edicts flung the length of Exeter Hall.

His theme, Adam had noted, had been advertised as “the power and potentiality of a fully enfranchised electorate” and had promised, he thought, to be insufferably dull to a boy not yet fourteen. A swift glance at Giles, however, told him how wrong he had been to take this for granted and make no allowance for the impact of an orator buttressed by an unshakable conviction that every word he uttered was put into his mouth by Jehovah, whose vessel he was.

If Adam and everyone else in the great hall were spellbound, then Giles was hypnotised as effectively as an African primitive at the feet of a paramount witchdoctor. He sat with his small body thrust forward, hands gripping chair-arms, elbows slightly out-thrust, and shoulders braced, as though crouched at the starting line of a race upon which his life depended. The deluge of words from the platform seemed to sweep over the boy like Atlantic rollers but it was manifestly clear that, far from being stunned by them, he welcomed the drenching as the most enriching experience of his life.

“…We cannot reckon upon the clergy of the established Church either in England or Scotland… We cannot reckon upon the wealth of the shires, nor upon the wealth of the country…” The rhetoric belched from the man like a succession of crashing broadsides, overturning everything between cannon-mouth and target. “…In the main these powers are
against us…
we must set them down as our most determined foes! But, gentlemen…
gentlemen…
above
all
these things,
behind
all these things, THERE IS THE NATION ITSELF, and this great trial of strength with justice and true, unsullied pride as the inheritors of the great democratic tradition as its prize, is proceeding
before
the nation! The nation is a hard power to rouse but when roused harder still and more hopeless to resist!”

It occurred to Adam then, a mere fleeting thought skimming over the surface of the flood, that this man was not really speaking of the nation at all. He spoke for no one but himself, but this was more than enough. No party, no coalition of parties, not Crown, nor Lords, nor consortium of privilege could hope to resist such a force for long. They must, inevitably, be engulfed and sent flying, so that at length all England, all Britain—and, ultimately, he supposed, all parts of the world where British interests prevailed—must be Gladstonised, even as Giles was Gladstonised where he sat straining forward in his seat resolved not to miss a syllable of the oration, or a single gesture that accompanied them.

Even the tempest of applause that followed Gladstone’s withdrawal to the semicircle of seats, where sat the stupefied officials and warm-up men, could not top the majesty of the speech itself. As they rose—and knots of fussy, resetted stewards began to dart up and down the aisles, ushering the bemused audience into the street—the rolling echoes of Gladstone’s broadsides continued to reverberate, so that Adam, one arm on his son’s elbow, had to make a conscious effort to manoeuvre his artificial leg round the angle of the bench-end, as though awakened from a trance and not sure where he was or which direction he should take.

In the street it seemed banal to make a comment, so they walked briskly along the gas-lit pavements, each coming to terms with the tremendous experience, each preoccupied with striking a bargain between the reality and the fantasy of the splendid occasion. It was only when, somewhere around the Haymarket, Adam hailed a hansom, and they had hoisted themselves into the snug interior, that Adam was able to say, “Well, Giles…?”

And Giles replied in the voice of someone who had been a witness to some astounding natural convulsion, “It’s… like… like
Moses…
That bit where he comes down from Sinai with the tablets… What I mean is, you
have
to listen… You
have
to obey!”