Sleep in Peace (61 page)

“Oh, well! We shall manage.”

For Gwen in real adversity was altogether admirable, and the whole Armistead family loved each other better, under this common strain, than they had ever done before. They took the greatest delight in making small sacrifices for each other; Ludo, smiling all over his kindly face, brought home some tiny unexpected treat, a box of cigarettes or a few pennyworth of chocolates, for his sisters; while Gwen and Laura conspired to screw out a few shillings to buy him a birthday present of gloves. When Laura by chance had a drawing unexpectedly accepted, or received a cheque unexpectedly large for previous work, the two sisters fell joyously into each other's arms, and planned at once what could be done for Madeline, Papa and Ludo with the money.

For in these strange circumstances Laura found herself the only person in the family with ready money to spare. Her Carr Vale salary went, of course, at once into the household expenses, along with most of Ludo's and practically all Mr. Armistead's; it was now counted on there, necessary, arranged for. But her earnings from original work were quite incalculable, and could not be relied upon for the household scheme; they formed, therefore, a delicious fund from which the Armisteads could draw unexpected enjoyment. The thought that this book-jacket, if accepted, could be regarded as one sleeve and the collar of Madeline's new winter coat, or that this thumbnail sketch would take them all to the pictures next week, did not lend inspiration, but it certainly lent industry, to Laura's pencil.

But presently this joy changed, and became at once a worry and a deep satisfaction; for things grew so very bad at the mill that Mr. Armistead drew almost nothing from it at all, and, though all the Armisteads pretended that this was not so, the house could not have been carried on without, and indeed practically depended on, the contributions of Frederick and Laura.

“And how wrong that is from the nation's point of view,” thought Laura.
“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, when
art
accumulates and
industries
decay.”

She was unutterably thankful, not to say proud, however, that her art, once so rejected and despised, was now able to be, if not the headstone of the corner, at least a substantial item, a solid brick, in the family edifice. Frederick had found her a good agent, who was really very successful in disposing of her work; she produced book-jackets, Christmas cards, illustrated articles, jokes for the cheaper humorous papers, comic strips for children's magazines. Her Marlowe drawings, which she occasionally encountered in her portfolio as she turned everything over in the frantic search for an idea, now made her laugh; they were so pretentious, ingenuous and altogether feeble; she felt a tenderly amused pity for the Laura who had drawn those. Meanwhile, those little devils with the volume of magic, if pepped up into agreeable sprites, might do for a design for a book-plate; Laura set to work on the notion promptly. Once when the family finances were particularly low, she even printed display tickets for a jeweller's shop window; it tickled her humour to be printing about diamond rings worth £250, when she was passionately in need of the guinea she would earn by doing a hundred such tickets, to pay for the extraction of one of Gwen's teeth and some new woollen underclothes. Ludo, coming upon her at this work, was also tickled; he sat down and began to copy the inscriptions on a piece of paper, and presently in a humble deprecating way pushed the strip over to Laura, without saying anything.

“Why, they're splendid, Ludo!” exclaimed Laura, with perfect truth. “Look here—would you like to do these while I get on with this
Fireworks
article?”

Ludo, his velvet eyes beaming with joy, said that he would; and thenceforward he printed tickets whenever there was any work of the kind available.

Fired by this activity, Gwen decided that she too would like to
earn. Her needlework was so exquisite that there should surely be no difficulty in placing it, provided some other person could make the necessary business arrangements. Laura wrote, made enquiries, sent samples, and procured a few reasonably lucrative orders for her sister, who set to work, delighted. But Gwen was not able to adapt herself to the demands of a market; she could not understand that dates must be adhered to and instructions followed. She improved on her orders, delayed work if she did not like it, and left letters unanswered; the resulting severity of the firm's communications upset her greatly, she found it exaggerated and unreasonable, and even wept. Indeed in one way and another the family found Gwen's attempts at commercialising her gift so trying that they all begged her to desist; the whole maintenance and comfort of the house, urged Laura, lay on Gwen's shoulders, she administered the family's finances, it rested with her to keep them out of debt; surely that was a sufficient contribution. Gwen agreed, but went about for a few days looking flat and disappointed. Then she suddenly grew cheerful—she had found another plan. She could give lessons in the new Contract Bridge, which was puzzling so many women. This too proved unsuccessful. Gwen was a brilliant card-player, but seemed to play by instinct only, as it were unconsciously; she could not impart her lore. Besides, Hudley had little money at present for such luxuries as Bridge lessons.

For indeed the whole temper of West Riding society was changed by the slump—Laura thought, very much for the better. She admired her fellow-Yorkshirewomen in adversity very heartily, and was proud to feel that she stood shoulder to shoulder with them in this great trial. The hard and rather coarse ostentation of the paulo-post-war period was no longer fashionable; candour, subdued among the older women, lively and reckless among the younger who were beginning to take their mothers' place as leaders of society, was now the order of the day. “They've had to sell their house… we've put down our car this winter… things
have gone rather badly with my cousin,” admitted the elder women, sure of a sympathetic audience since things had gone badly with everyone in Hudley; while the younger ones cried cheerfully: “Well, my dear, what will it cost? I can't decide till I know. Poor Jack simply hasn't a bean to spare just now; they don't even know whether they'll be able to keep the mill running or not. The poor lad didn't sleep a wink last night.” These young wives and mothers, the women of Laura's generation, were determined, however, {hat nothing, not even bankruptcy, should make them return to the dreary austerity of pre-war days; they would not become Victorian, even if ruined. They worked, consoled, denied themselves, made one penny fill the place of two, but put pleasure high in their scale of values, because with things so bad, as they said, if one had no pleasure to distract one's mind one worried oneself potty—or, what was worse, and their real fear, one's men worried themselves into that condition. Means must be found to keep up a little jollity somewhere, since life in general was so grim.

Indeed the life one saw in the town was grim enough. The roads decayed, for the local corporations, labouring beneath an ever-increasing burden of Poor Relief, had no money to repair them; the woodwork of shops decayed because the shopkeepers had no money to paint it; the erection of a new building was so rare a sight that everybody paused to watch if they saw it, in amaze. At the door of Blackshaw House there constantly sounded a sudden loud knock; when one opened the door, one saw a working man, shabby and diffident, who in a deprecating tone asked to see Mr. Armistead.

“Well,” hesitated Laura. Her father was, in fact, asleep; she could not bear to rouse him from the afternoon nap he needed so much, yet neither could she bear to send the unhappy man before her empty away.

“Oh, he knows me,” the man would say with a pitiful attempt at confidence, mistaking her hesitation for distrust: “I worked for him in 1920”—or 1910, or 1902, or 1894, as the case might be.

Then Laura, sighing, went and roused her father; and Mr. Armistead, with a scowl and an irritable exclamation, trailing his newspaper behind him, his glasses askew, rushed off to the back door. The moment he got there, however, his mood quite changed; he spoke to the man with the utmost kindness and they had quite a chat about old times.

“It's no use, Josiah”—or Ted, or Emmanuel, or Jim or Harry; Mr. Armistead knew them all by their Christian names—he would say: “I've no work for you. It's as much as I can do to employ myself, these days.”

The man's face fell, but he always uttered some deprecating sentence: “Well, I just thought I'd call round… no harm in asking… Mester Ludo said you weren't at t'mill.…”

“No harm at all, Josiah,” said Mr. Armistead heartily, feeling in his pocket for a coin. “Give this to your wife with my compliments, for a bit extra for Sunday dinner,” he would say, if the coin he found were sizable; if it were small: “Give this to your youngest for some parkin”—or a top, or whatever was at the moment seasonable.

The act of giving always cheered him; but presently there simply wasn't a coin in his pocket to give. And presently the men no longer came; they knew there was no work to be had, they had given up hope.

Outside the Labour Exchange the queues grew and grew. There came a year when ten thousand of Hudley's ninety thousand population were drawing unemployment insurance; at least thirty thousand persons, therefore, adults and children, were living in homes shadowed by the “dole”. Laura's route to her classes lay past the Carr Vale Labour Exchange; she was ashamed to pass by the long queues of these pale, underfed, thinly clad men each day with her own decent clothes and comparatively rosy countenance. Presently there began the bankruptcies; almost every night in the
Hudley News
, as it seemed, some firm was announced as “calling its creditors together”. The most amazingly discreditable financial
operations were often revealed by the official receiver's investigations of these bankruptcies; Laura was horrified, but Ludo viewed their perpetrators more kindly.

“They're at their wits' end and don't know what to do for the best, and they keep on hoping something will turn up and make everything right,” he said.

Laura thought she saw that Mr. Armistead would have done precisely the same, if he had not been stubbornly kept to the narrow path of strict legal rectitude by the disapproving silences of Ludo; she often secretly repeated her thankfulness that Mr. Armistead was not the Hinchliffes' executor.

One of the munitions-making firms, recently so prosperous, failed, and the head of the firm committed suicide. Mr. Armistead was much upset by this news; he went to the funeral, and came back very gloomy.

“There won't be a penny for his wife and daughters,” he said.

“Well, Laura can earn her own living, Papa,” Gwen told him cheerfully, hitting at once on his real thought. “You gave her all that Art education, and now you see the result of it. And I have Frederick.”

“Frederick's a good boy—he won't let you be in a difficulty,” said Mr. Armistead uneasily.

“Of course not, Papa,” said Gwen. “And he's doing so well just now—he's been made an editor.”

The suicide was not, unfortunately, the only one in Hudley. Spinners, manufacturers, dyers, finishers, iron-founders—one by one each trade was represented in the list of those who failed in courage. Some camouflaged their exit with skill, so that their wives might successfully defraud the insurance company; some had not even the heart to do that, but left pathetic notes behind them confessing that they were too tired to carry on any more. At each of these announcements the Armisteads glanced surreptitiously, uneasily, at their father; they were all terrified lest he too should give up the struggle. He was not, they all thought,
gazing at him with eyes sharpened by dread and affection, a very strong man; he had always been restless, sensitive, nervous. If Mr. Hinchliffe, that robust and solid character, had been broken by grief and worry in 1926, could they really expect their less stable father to survive the accumulated miseries of four more years? Since the Labour Government came into power again, last May, he had seemed very disheartened. He had lost much weight of late, and with his bald crown and thinning moustache, his clothes shabby and loose across the stomach, his trailing leg, he looked alarmingly old and frail. His mind, however, seemed lively enough. Gwen usually broke these moments of fear by an allusion to Geoffrey. His grandson's name always pleased Mr. Armistead, though he sometimes chose to conceal his pleasure by snorting out a sarcastic comment on Geoffrey's extravagant ideas of life. But this very irritability cheered his children; it was natural, it was like old times.

The bankruptcies and suicides were always followed, after a brief interval, by the appearance about the town of auctioneers' posters advertising machinery for sale.
One hundred and fifty-four 76-in. reed space single-shuttle worsted coating looms
, read Laura,
four 12-in. ram
10
ft. 6 in. daylight hydraulic presses
. She shuddered. Across the Pennines, in the sister county, a county united to the West Riding by a deep similarity of work and play, of speech and land, and by a jolly athletic rivalry, they had coined a phrase for the present slump; they called it:
Lancashire under the hammer
. They meant under the hammer of the auctioneer, but Laura saw the land lying on an anvil, struck by blow on blow. The West Riding is under the hammer too, she thought, and instead of uniting all their strength, straining every sinew, to drive that hammer back, the men who form the textile trade are actually quarrelling amongst themselves, blaming one another. The men blamed the masters, the masters the men; the men repudiated each other, for she read that the trade union membership was dropping; the masters, trying to keep the price of work at a
decent level, were constantly foiled by members of their own association, who, eager to get work at all costs, furtively cut prices to a pitch where neither a decent profit nor a decent wage was payable. If only they would
see
, if only they could
perceive
themselves, thought Laura; surely if they saw themselves, surely if they saw the West Riding as it is to-day, they would not make these terrible mistakes, they would co-operate, they would perceive their deep unity, the essential brotherhood of man. Oh, if I could only discover to my brothers that they are one, thought Laura, remembering
Fraternity
and old Mr. Stone's fine phrase. Surely if they
saw
themselves, thought Laura.