The Romance of His Life Part 8

"Where did you leave her?" asked Michael.

"In mid-Atlantic. We kept to the highway. It was her own fault. I warned her not to loop the loop with that old barge of hers, but she would try and do it. She was fastened in all right. I saw to that, but her stuff was loose, and you should have seen all her fish and kettles and the electric cooker shooting out one after another into the deep. It was in trying to grab something that she lost control, and fell, barge and all after her crockery into the sea. I circled round--that is why I am a quarter-of-an-hour late--till I sighted one of the patrol toddling up, old Granny Queen Elizabeth it was. Catherine wirelessed to me that she was all right, and would start again as soon as she was dry and had had a cigarette, so I came on."

Catherine arrived an hour later, full of apologies about the lost crockery, and the electric cooker, and was at once put into a hot bath by her mother and sent to bed.

After the arrival of his grandchildren John spent more and more of his time in the clearing in the wood. He shrank instinctively from the sense of movement and life in the house, and his sole prop, Serena, seemed unable to be so constantly with him as before.

He was never tired of gazing at the gracious lines of the landscape.

Perhaps he loved that particular place because he had sat there with his wife on their last afternoon together, perhaps also because, in a world where all seemed changed, that alone, save for the cloud on the horizon, was unchanged. He was at home there.

Jack took a deep and inquisitive interest in his grandfather which made him often stroll up the hill to smoke a pipe on the bench near him.

Sometimes John pretended to be asleep when he heard his grandson's whistle on the path below him. He was bewildered by this handsome, quick-witted, c.o.c.ksure, bearded young man who it seemed was already at twenty-three a promising Fatigue Eliminator, and might presently become a Simplyfier. His grand-daughter, Catherine, he had not yet seen, as she was in quarantine owing to a cold, and the Catarrh Inspector had only to-day p.r.o.nounced her free from infection.

"You sleep a great deal, Grandfather," said Jack, coming so suddenly into view that John had not time to close his eyes. "Don't you find so much sleep tends to r.e.t.a.r.d cerebral activity?"

"I don't happen to possess cerebral, or any other form of activity,"

said John, coldly.

"Do you mean you wish er--to resume the reins? Father and I were talking of it last night. Everything he has is yours, you know, by law."

John shook his head, and looked at his powerless hands.

"Reins are not for me," he said.

"Well, in my opinion, grandfather," said Jack, with approval, not wholly devoid of patronage, "you're right. A great deal of water has pa.s.sed under the bridge since your day."

"This clearing in the wood is the same," John said. "That is why I like it, and my old home looks just the same--from here."

There was a moment's silence while Jack lit his pipe.

John suddenly said, "I put in the electric light. My father never would hear of it, but I did it."

He thought it was just as well that his magnificent grandson should know that he had done something when he held the reins.

"That is one of the many things I have been wis.h.i.+ng to discuss with you, grandfather. You installed electric light in the house and stables and garage, but there was power enough to light a town. While you were doing it, why didn't you light the church and the village as well?"

"I never thought of it."

"But it must have made you very uncomfortable to feel you had not shared the benefit of it with the community. The village lies at your very gates. You must have hated the feeling that you had lit yourself up, and left them in the dark. It was essential, absolutely essential for your workers' well-being that they should have light. Even in your day the more intelligent among the agricultural labourers were beginning to migrate to the towns. We only got them back by better conditions in lighting and housing, and facilities for movement and amus.e.m.e.nt."

"Electric light in cottages was unheard of in my time," said John. "It never entered my head."

"Just so," said Jack. "That seems so odd, so incomprehensible to us unless we can seize the feudal point of view. You confirm the cla.s.sics on the subject. I have questioned numbers of very old men who were in their prime before the war like you, grandfather, but I have not found their opinions as definite as yours, because they have insensibly got all their edges worn off so to speak by lifelong contact with the two younger generations. Your unique experience is most interesting. Never entered your head. There you have the feudal system in a nutsh.e.l.l. No sense of communal life at all. I'll make a note of it--I'm compiling a treatise on the subject. You were against female suffrage, too, I remember. I've been reading up your record. You voted several times against it."

"I did. I consider woman's sphere is in the home."

"Just so. That was the point of view, and there is a lot to say for it considering the hash women made of power when first they got it, though not so enormous a hash as the Labour Party. You know, I suppose, we've had three Labour Governments since the great war?"

"I always prophesied a Labour Government would come, and I feared it. I knew they had not sufficient education to rule. No conception of foreign policy."

"Not an atom. I agree with you. Not a sc.r.a.p. Thirty years ago most of our rulers hadn't an idea where India was, or why we must complete the trans-African railway in case we lost control of the Suez Ca.n.a.l. They actually opposed it. They nearly piloted the s.h.i.+p of State on to the rocks."

John frowned.

"Now what I want to know is," said Jack, extending two long blue stockinged legs, and enjoying himself immensely, "why instead of opposing female suffrage you did not combine to place the franchise on an educational basis, irrespective of s.e.x; the grant of the vote to be dependant on pa.s.sing certain examinations, mainly in history and geography. Or, if you were resolved to delay as much as possible the entrance of women into politics, why didn't you give better national education. You did neither. You let loose a horde of entirely ignorant and irresponsible men and women out of your national schools. You say you foresaw that a Labour Government was inevitable, but you don't seem to have made any preparation, or taken any precaution to insure its efficiency when it did come."

John was silent.

"They were also hostile men and women," continued the young man. "That was the worst of it. Were you at Lille when you were fighting in France?"

"No."

"Well, the East Lancas.h.i.+res were. They were all miners, and the thing that interested them most was the devastated mines, ruined by the Germans in their retreat. And they saw the remains of the bath houses at the pit heads. Those baths had been there before the war. Every miner could go back clean to his own home, instead of having to wash in his own kitchen. Grandfather, you owned coal-mines. Why didn't you and the other coal-owners put up baths at the pit heads? You would have liked it if _you_ had been a miner. And just think what it would have saved your wife. The English miners got them by threats after they had seen the wrecks of them in France. But why didn't the English coal-owners copy French methods, if they hadn't the imagination to think them out for themselves? Why did they only concede when they could not help it?

Reforms were wrung out of the governing cla.s.s in your day by threats and strikes. That is what, for nearly thirty years, ruined our cla.s.s with Labour when it came into power. Why didn't your generation foresee that?"

"We didn't see the danger," said John, "as you see it. Everyone can be wise after the event."

"Just so. But if you couldn't foresee the danger, why didn't you see at the time the _justice_ of their claims, men like you, grandfather, who fought for justice for the smaller nations? It seems to me, the national characteristic of the upper cla.s.ses fifty years ago must have been opposition to all change, a tendency to ignore symptoms which really were danger signals, and an undeveloped sense of justice ..., which only acted in certain grooves. The result was the uneducated came into power, embittered, without a shred of confidence in the disinterestedness of the educated. The Commonwealth--"

"The what?"

"The Commonwealth--you used to call it the Empire--nearly went upon the rocks."

Jack's young face became awed and stern and aged, as John had seen men's faces become when they charged through the mud in the dawn.

"I was in Liverpool," Jack said, "all through the Black Winter. It needn't have been. It never, never need have been if there had been justice and sympathy in England for Labour forty years before. But there was not. So they paid us back in our own coin. We had no justice from them. My G.o.d! I can't blame them."

Serena, coming quietly up the path, saw the two men looking fixedly at each other, both pallid in the soft suns.h.i.+ne. The same shadow of suffering seemed to have fallen on the beautiful young face, and on the old one.

"You must not talk any more," she said to John, casting a reproachful glance at her son. "You are over-tired."

Jack took the hint, kissed his mother's hand, and walked slowly away. He was deeply moved.

John s.h.i.+vered. A deathlike coldness was creeping over him, was laying an icy hand upon his heart. He turned to his sole comforter, Serena, watching him with limpid grieved eyes.

"Your grand-daughter, Catherine, is coming up to see you in a few minutes," she said, trying as always to guard him against surprise. "How cold your hands are, Father. I could not let her see you till she had been disinfected after her chill for fear she might give it to you."

He was not listening.

"Serena," he said feebly. "The world is not my world any longer. I am a stranger and a sojourner in it. All my landmarks are swept away. I wish I could be swept away, too."

Serena took his cold hands in hers, and held them to her breast.

"Father," she said, "unless you and countless others, all the best men of your time had given your lives for your country, we should have no country to-day. You bled for us, you kept it for us, for your son, and your son's son: and we all honour and thank you for what you have done for us."

John Damer's eyes looked full at her in a great humility.