Sleep in Peace (58 page)

“If only Edward were here,” said Mr. Hinchliffe, biting his moustache and throwing a gloomy, harassed glance at Ludo.

All eyes were, indeed, turned on Ludo, who, now in his early thirties, was the obvious person to take hold of the reins slipping from his father's hands, and steer the firm to safety, prosperity, and a new economic system. But Ludo seemed quite unconscious of this need and this opportunity; he continued to do his duty in a sober, plodding way, very honestly and conscientiously, but he never offered any suggestions as to general policy, even when he was formally consulted. During the coal strike, he ran about the county picking up odd bits of coal, in a shrewd and resourceful manner, but during the textile strike the following year over a proposed reduction in wages, he seemed not to share his father's anguished worry, but played golf with a quiet mind. Moreover, whenever the directors' salaries were reduced, which presently became necessary rather frequently, Ludo reduced his contribution
to the Blackshaw household each time by the precise amount of the salary reduction. Gwen was furious.

“I can't think what Spencer does with his money,” she grumbled. “A bachelor with no responsibilities. Many men even keep a household on less than he has now. Frederick and I and Geoffrey lived on less. It's mean of him. It's not as if he amused himself much either,” she continued irritably. “There aren't many dances now. Really I can't think what Spencer does with his money.”

Laura, remembering the thick envelope she had posted to Ashworth, thought that for her part she might perhaps guess; but she kept her own counsel, and Gwen continued to inveigh against her brother's parsimony. As time went on and the slump grew worse, and more and more looms fell idle at Blackshaw Mills, Gwen and Mr. Armistead grew more and more bitter about Ludo.

“I'm surrounded by fools!” Mr. Armistead often exclaimed petulantly when, returning from Leeds or Bradford, exhausted by the day's worries, he threw himself into his chair. “I've nobody I can talk to, nobody I can consult, nobody who knows anything or takes any responsibility. You might as well talk to a parson as to Henry Hinchliffe. It's sickening. It's really sickening.” At this point Ludo perhaps walked mildly into the room, and Mr. Armistead snapped at him: “Well? Did you ring up about that shafting and tell them it's faulty and we won't pay for it?”

“Oh yes. I told them,” said Ludo in a sarcastic tone.

“Well?” said Mr. Armistead impatiently. “What did they say?”

“Oh, they think they won the War,” said Ludo.

Mr. Armistead with an angry sigh retired behind his newspaper.

“Madeline, put a footstool for Grandpa's leg,” commanded Gwen, to show her sympathy.

“Really I think it's too bad of Ludo,” argued Gwen distressfully whenever she and Laura were alone. “Why doesn't he help
Papa? Why doesn't he talk to the spinners? Why doesn't he go to the bank? Instead of letting poor Papa struggle with it all. What will happen to us all if Blackshaw Mills go down, Laura?” wept Gwen. “I don't feel as though I could face it all again! And Geoffrey just beginning his education! What will happen to my five hundred pounds? Ludo ought to talk to the men; he ought to
make
them take less money. Can't they see that if they don't take less wages, the mill will fail? And then where will they all be? Out of work!”

Laura sighed, and went on with her drawing. She was now making a small but steady income out of her art; her half-time work in Carr Vale had been put on a permanent basis, and she was able to place one or two illustrated articles every month in the Yorkshire journals. She was eager to make a regular contribution to the household expenses from her funds, but Gwen; illogically though generously in view of her complaints about Ludo, would not allow this; “Wait till things get worse,” she said pessimistically: “you may be very thankful for a little nest egg one of these days.” Laura had an exasperated feeling that Gwen did not believe in the reality of money earned by art; however, for the moment she acquiesced, helping with unobtrusive useful presents for the children as opportunity allowed.

“They ought to give up that absurd profit-sharing scheme,” continued Gwen. “I was always against it. If Ludo had any sense, any strength of mind, he would back up Papa and make them give it up. Mr. Hinchliffe is so obstinate, he's like a mule. If only Ludo would tell them straight out what he thinks! He seems to be afraid of Mr. Hinchliffe,” lamented Gwen in a tone of perplexed surprise: “It seems so strange.”

Laura listened sadly, responding as little as she could. Every word which Gwen said about Ludo was true; he was timid, evasive, and lacking in initiative, and the fact that he was so might very well prove the ruin of Blackshaw Mills. But whose fault is it? clamoured Laura silently; who made Ludo afraid? She remembered
Gwen's incessant nagging of Ludo as a child; she remembered the terrible incident of the cab-horse knees; she remembered Mr. Armistead's irritability towards Ludo when the boy was late, his threat to whip him with a stick. Who had deprived Ludo of the modest self-confidence which is every living being's birthright? Precisely those who are most in need of it now, thought Laura.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay;
or, to put the matter in a modern form, actions inevitably bring their own punishment, their own reward.
Whatsoever ye sow, that shall ye reap
. Sow an over-scolded child, and you reap an inhibited neurotic. Laura was deeply sorry for Mr. Armistead and Gwen, who sought support in this crisis where they might most naturally expect it, and found it not; but she could not help feeling that it was a just retribution. And its effects would in their turn bring their own retribution. She perceived that in the Armistead family she herself was disgracefully ignorant, Gwen selfish, and Ludo afraid; of the Hinchliffes Edward was dead, Frederick exiled, Grace cut off from her full life; what could you expect from such a generation?

Pretty much what you received, thought Laura; the older generation still in major control; an old-fashioned system of production and distribution, utterly inadequate to the needs and ideals of the day, neither courage nor knowledge to change it, and a threatened general strike.

Laura's anxiety over this threatened development was somewhat eased, on Sunday, May 3rd, by the discovery that Mr. Garvin had devoted his centre page article to a discussion of William Wordsworth; but on Monday she began to feel that the hopes of Mr. Garvin and herself were not well-founded, for the newspapers all announced that the nation was in grave peril, negotiations about the miners' wages which were the origin of the dispute had been broken off by the Government because of alleged “overt acts” on the part of the T.U.C., and the general strike in sympathy with the miners had been called for that night. “Perhaps
we shall have a revolution,” thought Laura, but though she was exhilarated by the prospect of a revolution and the installation of a new and juster social order, she found she did not at all want the strife and disorder of a general strike. Ludo went out hastily and bought a wireless set, the first the Armisteads had owned, and they all sat Ground at 11.15, “listening-in” to the announcement that further parleys between Government and T.U.C. had broken down.

Next morning before breakfast, it seemed to Laura, as she sat up in her attic, working, that the world was curiously hushed; she heard no trains, no trams, and only one or two half-hearted buzzers. Mr. Armistead could hardly be persuaded to drink a cup of tea before rushing off to the mill to see whether he had any workpeople left or not; Ludo—who really might, thought Laura, vexed, have gone up to the mill before breakfast to see what was happening; he had been out somewhere alone—accompanied him. Hardly had they left the house when Mr. Hinchliffe's working housekeeper, a sensible, elderly Yorkshirewoman, telephoned to say that Mr. Hinchliffe was behaving very strangely, and would someone please come to him at once. He had forbidden her to send for the doctor. When Laura gave this message to Gwen such a look of distaste and repugnance came over the face of Mr. Hinchliffe's daughter-in-law that Laura perforce offered to go herself; as it chanced she was free that morning.

“Yes, you go, Laura,” agreed Gwen. “If he's really ill, has a doctor and goes to bed, I mean, of course I'll come; but if it's only that he's upset about the strike, you'll do better for him than I could.”

This was quite true, and Laura hurried off to Cromwell Place.

She found Mr. Hinchliffe pacing up and down the dining-room of Number 11, talking aloud to himself in a strange, excited tone. His eyes were large and bright, his hand, when he gave it to Laura, dry and burning. The housekeeper, showing
Laura in, urged again, in her kindly Yorkshire tones, that he should have a doctor.

“Nonsense, woman!” thundered Mr. Hinchliffe, turning on her. With his disordered hair and bristling moustache, he looked like an ailing lion. “You talk of a doctor in this day of national calamity! It's not doctors we want; it's preachers, prophets. Prophets!” he shouted, fixing his feverish stare now on Laura, now on the housekeeper, and addressing them in an oratorical tone. “A new era has begun; we have fought to a finish the war to finish war; a new era has begun of peace on earth and goodwill towards men. It remains to us to implement those ideals of righteousness and brotherhood which, which, which,” he stammered piteously, “which are no secessary if we are to avoid industrial strife.” He gave Laura a suspicious look, as if to see how she took the collapse of his sentence. “No secessary,” he repeated. “No, so necessary. That's it. So necessary, Laura.”

“Do sit down and rest, Mr. Hinchliffe,” said Laura in a calm, friendly tone, taking his arm. “Rest and talk to me a little.”

“Rest!” cried Mr. Hinchliffe, throwing off her hand. “Why should I rest? I'm ready to go about my Father's business. Edward would say the same.”

He sank down suddenly in his customary arm-chair, and covered his eyes with his hand.

“My head aches, my dear,” he said in a pathetic childish tone. “I don't think I shall go to the mill this morning.”

“No—it will be better for you to stay at home,” said Laura soothingly, putting an arm about his shoulders. Above his bowed head she gesticulated instructions to the housekeeper to telephone for the doctor from the house next door. The woman withdrew.

“This is news of the gravest significance in the paper this morning, Laura,” began Mr. Hinchliffe in a more normal tone, stretching out a shaking hand for the
Yorkshire Observer
lying on the table. A streamer headline in very black letters announced: LAST HOUR PEACE EFFORTS FAIL, while sub-headings such as
General
Strike in Operation, Drastic Emergency Regulations
and, most ominous of all,
Troop Movements
, alarmed the reader still more seriously. “I cannot understand,” orated Mr. Hinchliffe, emphasising his points with uplifted forefinger on the paper, “how this act of folly, which can benefit no interest but must injure all, has been permitted to be perpetrated. Throughout the dispute this Conservative Government of yours has acted in a most dilatory, I might almost say a lack-a-daisical, manner; that a rupture of negotiations should have occurred is an indication of a hopeless condition of un-intelligence on both sides.” He looked severely at Laura, who however entirely agreed. “Surely while an hour, or a portion of an hour, remained for negotiation, that margin of time should have been used in a last effort to straighten out the industrial tangle. In the view of all men of sober judgment, the Government are as much to blame for not allowing time for wiser counsels to prevail, as the Trade Union Congress for imposing this gratuitous menace on the well-being of the community.”

These flowing sentences were so much in his ordinary manner that Laura felt somewhat reassured about his health, but his next remark again alarmed her.

“I never thought I should live to see Blackshaw Mills picketed,” he cried in a queer, weak voice.

Laura exclaimed: “You've been to the mill this morning, then?”

Mr. Hinchliffe solemnly nodded. “Laura,” he said, fixing on her a strange bright stare: “I'm not at all sure I shall survive this disappointment.”

Laura, full of pity for the lonely old man, protested soothingly.

“Oh, my head, my head!” shouted Mr. Hinchliffe suddenly, springing to his feet. He paced the room with his hands clenched to his temples, then threw himself down again in his chair and shook his head so violently that the blood rushed to his lined cheeks. “It knocks so!” he cried in a raucous voice. “It's making such a noise. Can you hear it knocking inside, Laura?” he enquired pathetically.

“No, I can't, Mr. Hinchliffe,” soothed the frightened Laura. She sat beside him and attempted to stroke his hair, but he seemed not to like this caress, and shook his head impatiently.

“Strange!” said Mr. Hinchliffe with a reasonable air. “Strange! It sounds so loud to me, I can scarcely believe that you can't hear the knocking. Are you sure you don't hear it, Laura?”

“Quite sure,” soothed Laura.

To her very great relief the doctor now came in; he looked grave, and ordered Mr. Hinchliffe peremptorily to bed.

“You mustn't leave him a minute, day or night,” he said privately to Laura. “He's been going downhill for a few years now, you know; all this business worry. And he never got over his son's death in the War. I'd try to send you a nurse for the night, but I doubt if I can get one here, unless there chances to be one free in Hudley. There's no means of transport.” He added instructions about medicine.

“But what's the matter with him?” asked Laura timidly.

“Oh, heart, heart,” said the doctor vaguely. “You mustn't leave him alone. The housekeeper must sit up at night with him, or your sister. You must arrange something.”

It therefore chanced that Laura spent all the fateful days of the General Strike in the segregation of a sick-room. Transport to Carr Vale being in any case impossible, she did not attempt to attend her classes, but remained at Cromwell Place in close attendance on Mr. Hinchliffe, who, usually quite lucid, had bouts of strangeness, when he sprang up from bed if no one were there to restrain him. The nights were a protracted misery; for the unhappy man's mind then wandered. Sometimes he imagined himself lost, far from his home, and begged Laura piteously to take him back to Hudley; sometimes he went back into the past, and commanded Laura irritably to fetch his wife, or Edward. After a night or two of this the doctor pronounced a nurse essential, and managed to bring one from Bradford, in his own car. Grace and Frederick were informed of their father's illness by one of
the delayed and irregular posts, but there was not, as yet, sufficient danger to Mr. Hinchliffe to urge their presence, considering the almost insuperable difficulties of transport.