Sleep in Peace (57 page)

After the evening meal Laura went up to sit with Ludo; she took her drawing-board with her, for there were long gaps in any conversation with Ludo,; and now that she had given up the attempt to do anything serious with her work for the present, the family found it quite entertaining. She talked to Ludo in a superficial way about the afternoon's babies; it was not possible to tell very much of them at home, for medical details always made Ludo squirm, while Gwen thought them improper. As Laura talked she drew, and what she felt about the clinic, about Awe Bank, about the present economic system, and the taboo on these subjects in Blackshaw House, came out in her work. She drew with a kind of compassionate ferocity the prams standing outside the clinic door, the tongue-tied child on the doctor's knee, the scales, the baby who had gained weight kicking resentfully, one which had lost lying still and looking pathetically grateful and meek.
“Scenes dela Vie de Province”
sardonically thought Laura, who had been reading rather widely of late: “Number one, Child Welfare Clinic.” She was just beginning to reflect: “Why, it's almost an illustrated article,” when Ludo spoke.

“Laura,” he said in an odd tone.

“What is it?” said Laura, startled.

“I want you to do something for me,” said Ludo. He drew from beneath his pillow a letter; it was thick, and crackled. “I want you to post this for me to-morrow,” he said. “Send it by registered post. Don't mention it to anyone—just post it. As I shan't be out for a day or two, you see,” he concluded in an apologetic tone.

Laura of course accepted the commission and put the letter at once into her handbag; making a suitable excuse to Gwen, she took it to the General Post Office in Hudley early next morning. It was far from Laura's principles to examine the address on another
person's letter, and she handed in Ludo's envelope without any notion of its destination; but as the clerk passed her the receipt she involuntarily, out of mere habit, glanced at the tiny flimsy scrap of paper. The name of the town, written in capital letters, leapt out at her; it was Ashworth.

Laura exclaimed. She gave the receipt to Ludo folded, without a word, then resumed her clinic drawings, in a mood of savage perplexity and indignation. People shall
see
what
Hudley
is
like
, she thought, drawing with a bolder realism than she had ever hitherto attempted.

The acceptance of Laura's clinic drawings by one of the Yorkshire weekly papers seemed to start a new and much more hopeful phase for her; for soon after their appearance the Annotsfield Literary and Scientific Society wrote to ask her if she would give them a lecture on sketching, and Mr. Quarmby to say that the assistant who ran the Carr Vale branch of the School of Art had had a nervous breakdown, and would Laura help him out for the few weeks remaining of the term. (Garr Vale was a neighbouring urban district at the foot of a long steep hill.) Either of these letters would have supplied Laura with joy sufficient for a month, but as it chanced they both lay on the breakfast table on the same morning. The family were impressed by the Annotsfield letter, for the Annotsfield Lit. and Sci., as it was familiarly called, had a high local reputation. Their reactions differed, however, about Carr Vale.

“How absurd!” said Gwen. “A school at Carr Vale! Imagine Laura teaching all sorts of dirty little children in Carr Vale!”

Laura opened her lips to defend the Carr Vale students from this imputation, but before she had time to speak Mr. Armistead said hurriedly:

“I think Laura had better get hold of as much money as she can—she may need it.”

His astounded daughters gaped at him.

“But, Papa,” began Gwen.

“With this E.P.D., and one thing and another,” threw out Mr. Armistead in a worried, uneasy tone, “really I don't know what textiles are coming to. Sit up, Geoffrey, and hold your spoon properly.”

This unusual attack on Geoffrey, who was the apple of his grandfather's eye, convinced Gwen and Laura that something serious was wrong with Mr. Armistead, and as soon as he had left the room to prepare to go to the mill, they turned to Ludo.

“What
is
E.P.D., Spencer?” asked Gwen.

“Excess Profits tax—to pay for the War,” said Ludo.

“I thought Germany was going to pay for the War,” said Gwen.

“A lot of people thought that,” said Ludo sardonically. “But, Ludo,” argued Laura, “I should have thought there would be no
excess
profits in a profit-sharing scheme?”

“Father hasn't finished paying up his income-tax for the War years yet,” said Ludo.

“But why not?” gasped Laura.

“Well—at the moment he hasn't the money,” said Ludo gruffly.

“But I don't understand,” began Laura.

“Nobody does,” snapped Ludo. “It's those fools in Parliament —they don't know anything about business.”

He rose and went out.

“I shall take the Carr Vale job, Gwen,” said Laura.

“Yes, I suppose you'd better,” said Gwen in a puzzled tone. “Just when Geoffrey's beginning his education, too!” she added bitterly.

Accordingly Laura, bright-eyed with delight but hollow within with fear, went down to Carr Vale Secondary School, where the art classes were held, that very afternoon, and supervised a mixed dozen of students busy with Art Subjects. To breathe again the familiar atmosphere of an Art School was delicious, and it was amazing how obvious were the mistakes of these boys and girls, and how easy she found it to correct them. For the first few days Laura was completely happy; she felt thoroughly useful and responsible,
and conducted her little classes with a good deal of dignity, as well as earnest care. Then one afternoon Mr. Quarmby turned up unexpectedly. It was very foggy, the lights were all on, the schoolroom felt enclosed, Laura was seated at a desk explaining to an extremely timid and backward lad how to memorise the Facts of the Structure. She did not hear Mr. Quarmby's entry, and not till she laid down her pencil and rose, severe, grave, very much the teacher, did she see him. Then she blushed and started, and reverted promptly to the pupil. Mr. Quarmby seemed amused as he drew her aside to ask how she was managing.

“I hope I remembered your explanation of the Facts of the Structure properly,” said Laura blushing.

“I don't think I ever used that expression, did I?” smiled Mr. Quarmby.

At home that night Laura was so subdued that Ludo forbore to tease her as usual about her “students”. Surely Mr. Quarmby must remember the Facts of the Structure! Surely he could not be unconscious of his own pet phrase! Laura thought he had taken that mode of hinting to her that she was teaching on quite the wrong lines; she lived in dread of receiving a polite dismissal, and meanwhile examined her defects as a teacher very carefully. She saw that while she loved to explain, to instruct, to teach, she was much more useful to the backward students than to the promising ones; she seemed to know instinctively how to cheer, to encourage, to support all those who were oppressed by the sense of their inferiority, but for the able students she had little message. Indeed, if by chance one of the backward lads or girls suddenly took a step forward, as soon as their feet were in the right path Laura lost interest in them. This was not the way for the Carr Vale branch to gain scholarships and appear successful; it was not, probably, the proper way to teach at all. Laura strove to remedy it, and conscientiously divided her time equally between good and bad; but she knew her fault, and was ready to acquiesce humbly in her replacement. Then one day Laura, just
upon entering the room, heard one of her students say to another: “Never mind.” The words were in quotation marks, and her own prompt appearance was the signal for an embarrassed giggle. “Is that my pet phrase?” thought Laura. “I suppose it is!” And she began to understand that Mr. Quarmby might really be ignorant of his Facts of the Structure. At any rate, when the term ended Laura was asked to continue after the holidays; she was delighted, not only because she loved the work, but because, now, she had a real use for the salary.

For the Armistead finances were following the same downward, distressing, and to Laura incomprehensible, course as they had taken when she was a young child—the difference being that Mr. Armistead was now twenty years older, and by so much the less resilient, less able to cope with difficulty. Laura tried in vain to see why Blackshaw Mills, for the last few years so brilliantly prosperous, should now in peace-time be in such stormy seas. She gathered from the newspapers that thd price of wool had dropped at the Australian wool sales—but what on earth had that to do with it, mused Laura. She understood better that the foreign and colonial markets on which her father had relied were now all gone or very seriously decreased; deprived of English cloth for four years, these overseas people had—very sensibly, Laura could not help thinking—learned how to make it for themselves. It seemed that, wool having dropped in value, cloth had dropped in value; Laura could not see why this mattered—if Messrs. Armistead and Hinchliffe paid less for wool, naturally they sold the finished product for less, but surely the percentage of profit would be the same?

“There's a wages bill, silly,” said Ludo uneasily when she questioned him. “Besides, they're repudiating contracts.”

“Who?” demanded Laura.

“Everyone,” said Ludo. “So of course we have to do, too. We pay differences, you see.”

Laura sighed; she had a horrid conviction that Ludo did not
understand the situation himself. Oh, if we only had Edward, she thought; Edward would understand about the return to the gold standard, and why the merchants cancelled the contracts, and what contracts Messrs. Armistead and Hinchliffe had therefore to cancel, and what “differences” were. Lacking Edward, it was not possible for her to see clearly what was happening in the textile world; all Laura knew was that Mr. Armistead seemed to spend his days between the Income Tax authorities and the bank, that he cut down, first the dress allowances of Gwen and Laura, then the housekeeping allowance, that he seemed to have no spending money for himself, bought no new suits and no longer smoked long cigars; while he often gazed at Geoffrey and Madeline with a pathetically puzzled look, as if he wondered how he had become responsible for them, and what their future would be. Also, he became extremely irritable, and this began to make trouble at Blackshaw Mills. It was he who, by arrangement, had all the external affairs of the mill in his charge, while Mr. Hinchliffe and Ludo supervised the work within. To Mr. Armistead now fell the tasks, therefore, of coaxing customers and soothing the bank. Confronted every day with a dropping market, and trying to adapt himself to ever-changing conditions with his old facility, he found himself constantly dismayed in the market and criticised in the mill. Merchants who had ordered a certain number of pieces of cloth when the cloth was worth twenty-two and sixpence a yard and contracted to pay for it on that price level, now found that this very cloth, when made, would be worth only five shillings a yard; they therefore struggled to repudiate the contract by every means in their power. Their cables, they said, had been wrongly decoded; merchants nearer at hand took the view that no written contract had been made, none therefore need be kept. If Mr. Armistead took a firm line with them, they simply remarked that if he and their other manufacturer creditors forced them to pay they would go bankrupt, in which case Messrs. Armistead and Hinchliffe might whistle for their money. Faced
with these problems, Mr. Armistead followed the policy adopted by other manufacturers, and allowed the merchant to repudiate the contract, on payment of an agreed proportion of the difference between the price of the cloth when ordered and the price of the cloth to-day. It then remained for Mr. Armistead to coax the spinner from whom he had ordered the yarn to make this cloth, to let him repudiate that contract on payment of an agreed proportion of the difference between the price of the yarn when ordered and its price to-day. These “differences”, sums paid out for literally nothing, mounted so alarmingly that Mr. Armistead was quite terrified; moreover, when all was done and the loss more or less cut, there was left as a result no work for Blackshaw Mills. Mr. Armistead, returning exhausted from the necessary arrangements with merchant, spinner, bank, was met by a furious blast of criticism from Mr. Hinchliffe, who had never heard of such methods in his life and considered it his duty to oppose them sturdily now, and from the men's representatives on the factory council, who had never heard of such methods either and regarded them as a Capitalist conspiracy to defraud them of their rights.

The general resentment of the workers all over the country at the situation of falling wages and rising unemployment in which they found themselves, when they had been promised a country fit for heroes to live in, showed itself in the election of December 1923. Laura, lying awake in bed on the night of Election Day— as she was not yet quite thirty, she had not been able to record a vote—heard her father come in late from hearing election results at the Hudley Club. She called out: “How is the election going, Father?”

“All wrong,” said poor Mr. Armistead in a tone of hopeless depression. “Labour gains all over the place.”

Laura smiled gleefully to herself. “Now we shall see the new era begin!” she thought with joy. “Now the newspapers really
will
be interesting!”

These bright hopes were not fulfilled in the Labour Party's year of office either for the country in general or Laura in particular; for the slump—whether manipulated by the banks, as Grace suggested, or merely on its own impetus—proceeded to grow so much worse that the Armisteads soon had little thought for anything but their own difficulties. Mr. Armistead, who seemed to have lost heart since the election, began to discover that he was over sixty years of age, that he was exhausted by the strain of the War years, and that his right leg was very painful from the prevailing Hudley rheumatism; he shouted at the men, who with a Labour Government in power expressed themselves more freely than hitherto, and barked at Mr. Hinchliffe; and told them if they hadn't faith in him, they could go and do better themselves —nothing would give him greater pleasure, he said, than never to interview a spinner, a merchant or a banker again. At the same time he remained uneasily conscious that he was not as young as he had been, and that the younger men with whom he had to deal might very well be over-reaching him.