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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "They Seek a Country," Francis Brett Young intricately weaves a narrative that explores the search for identity and belonging within the context of a post-World War I England. Set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing society, the novel employs a lyrical prose style, rich with evocative imagery and introspective characterizations. Young skillfully navigates themes of loss, hope, and the quest for a new home, capturing the essence of a generation grappling with the psychological scars of war while yearning for redemption and purpose. Francis Brett Young was not only a distinguished novelist and poet but also a physician who witnessed the devastating impacts of World War I firsthand. His personal experiences and profound empathy for human struggles profoundly influenced his writing. Young's literary career was marked by his ability to blend autobiographical elements with fictional narratives, allowing readers to resonate deeply with the emotional landscapes he portrayed. His keen observations of society's upheaval during a pivotal historical moment provide a unique lens through which to view his characters' journeys. "They Seek a Country" is a compelling read for those drawn to deeply reflective literature that addresses universal themes of displacement and the human condition. Young's novel not only chronicles individual quests for belonging but also serves as a poignant commentary on societal transformation. Readers who appreciate rich, character-driven narratives will find this book both enriching and thought-provoking. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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They Seek a Country
Table of Contents
Introduction
Balancing the intoxicating promise of a new homeland against the inescapable costs of uprooting, They Seek a Country probes how longing, risk, and responsibility converge on a contested frontier, where landscapes test bodies and beliefs, kinship both shelters and constrains, and the desire to belong generates its own conflicts, moral choices, and myths, so that the quest for freedom becomes inseparable from the burdens of settlement, the making of community requires reckonings with power and memory, and every path toward a future must negotiate the legacies of the past as surely as the distances and obstacles that stand in the travelers’ way.
Francis Brett Young’s They Seek a Country is a historical novel set in southern Africa and first published in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on the author’s gift for evoking place and the momentum of human endeavor, the book situates private lives within the outward sweep of migration and settlement. Its world is one of journeys, temporary camps, and provisional dwellings, the practical textures of frontier existence framing a broader meditation on how societies imagine themselves into being. The historical canvas remains accessible, emphasizing experience and atmosphere rather than encyclopedic detail, while the narrative’s steady causal clarity encourages reflective reading.
Without disclosing later turns, the opening movement follows a small community as it leaves established ground in search of distance from old constraints and proximity to new possibilities. The journey’s early phases foreground negotiation, improvisation, and the delicate balance between leadership and dissent, allowing the reader to inhabit choices under pressure rather than spectate from hindsight. Hardship arrives in tangible forms—weather, terrain, scarcity—and in the less visible weight of expectation and fear. Characters test loyalties and convictions amid unfamiliar country, yet the tone remains measured, attentive to nuance, and more interested in how people change together than in sensational incident.
The reading experience is shaped by patient, resonant prose that lingers on light, heat, and distances, translating topography into emotion without losing a clear, forward-moving line. Brett Young’s narrator is steady and observant, panoramic when surveying the moving column and intimate in moments of debate or quiet fatigue. The style favors long cadences and carefully chosen detail, building an atmosphere in which decisions feel both immediate and consequential. It is a humane voice—curious about motives, skeptical of simplifications, hospitable to ambivalence—that invites the reader to inhabit more than judge. The tone is sober, at times elegiac, never merely picturesque.
Major themes emerge gradually but unmistakably. Home is imagined, built, defended, and sometimes questioned, raising persistent tensions between security and openness, tradition and adaptation. Authority is tested in crises, and the difference between prudence and fear can be painfully thin. The novel explores how landscapes are read—as promise, obstacle, or moral proving ground—and how those readings shape action. It is also alert to the stories people tell to endure difficulty, and to the consequences of such stories when they harden into identity. Above all, it examines the tangled relationship between personal conscience and collective necessity that settlement repeatedly exposes.
Because the setting is a colonial frontier, the book inherits ethical complexities it does not ignore: encounters across cultural lines unfold in registers of bargaining, misunderstanding, curiosity, and threat. Readers today will recognize how power operates unevenly, and how even sympathetic intentions can miss what they most need to see. The narrative’s attention to exchange, misrecognition, and conflict offers space to consider responsibility without collapsing diverse experiences into a single verdict. That openness makes the novel a valuable site for conversations about memory, land, and belonging, encouraging a reading that is historically attentive and morally engaged while remaining faithful to the story’s immediacy.
For contemporary readers, its continuing relevance lies in the clarity with which it dramatizes migration as both hope and hazard, and community-building as a project inseparable from its ethical terms. In an age marked by displacement, strained ecologies, and polarized debates about borders and nationhood, the novel’s patient attention to consequences—intended and unintended—feels bracing rather than archaic. Its emphasis on interdependence, on the costs of certainty, and on the imaginative labor of making a home invites reflection that travels beyond its historical frame. They Seek a Country endures as a discerning meditation on freedom pursued responsibly, and on belonging earned rather than assumed.
Synopsis
They Seek a Country is Francis Brett Young’s historical novel set in nineteenth-century South Africa. It opens at the margins of the Cape Colony, where discontent with distant authority, insecurity on the frontier, and restless ambitions stir families to abandon settled farms for the interior. Young frames their departure not as a single heroic impulse but as a tangle of private needs and public pressures, evoking the early stages of what history calls the Great Trek. The tone is measured and observational, attentive to landscape and labor, while the narrative begins assembling a company of wagons whose shared journey will test loyalties and convictions.
At the center are several trekker households and a handful of figures linked to the colonial order, their perspectives alternating as the caravan forms. Farmers, artisans, and pastors weigh duty to kin against misgivings about abandoning known ground. Younger members imagine liberty and limitless pasture, while elders measure risk against memory of scarcity and loss. A pragmatic leader emerges by consent rather than decree, but authority remains fragile, constantly negotiated beside oxen and fires. Young uses these domestic scenes to anchor political abstractions, showing how ideas of independence, providence, and law take shape in disputes over routes, grazing rights, and the keeping of promises.
Once the wagons roll, the book slows into the rhythms of travel: uncoupling and fording, nursing teams of oxen, scouting for water. The landscape asserts itself as both adversary and tutor—mountains to be threaded, thornveld to be cleared, rivers that recede or rage without warning. Hard choices multiply as supplies thin and accidents exact their price. Meetings of men under canvas resolve some dilemmas, while others are deferred in the hope that the next valley will be kinder. Through these scenes, Young examines how improvisation hardens into custom, and how solidarity—so necessary to survival—must constantly be renewed amid fatigue, fear, and pride.
Beyond the imagined empty spaces, the trekkers encounter established communities with their own sovereignties, routes, and sacred geographies. Negotiations unfold through interpreters and gifts, shaped as much by misunderstanding as by intent. Small exchanges—salt for grain, grazing for service—create tenuous trust, yet rumors of raids and reprisals circulate, and the spectrum between diplomacy and violence proves narrow. Young presents these meetings without romantic sheen, attentive to competing claims to land and the asymmetries of power. The caravan’s leaders must choose when to parley, when to fortify, and when to move on, decisions that expose moral anxieties alongside tactical calculations.
Meanwhile, imperial authority is not wholly left behind. Messengers, traders, and missionaries bring news of new proclamations and shifting boundaries, reminding the travelers that edicts can overtake distance. Disputes that began as quarrels with magistrates reappear as arguments among the trekkers themselves, rehearsing the language of warrants, title, and allegiance. Young threads in the perspective of officials who see the migration as both a challenge to order and a chance to extend it under new terms. The moving settlement becomes a legal riddle: whose law governs a camp that makes its own courts, yet depends on the reputations, currencies, and networks of the colony?
As the caravan reaches country that seems to answer their hope—arable slopes, defensible passes, river frontage—the narrative tightens around the attempt to fix a foothold. Surveying and covenant-making begin, but unresolved grievances fracture consensus. An external shock forces a reckoning, pressing families to choose between consolidation and renewed migration. Young stages the ensuing crisis as both ordeal and revelation, foregrounding the strain on marriages, friendships, and the uneasy compact between faith and necessity. The outcome remains carefully balanced: whatever is secured must be paid for, and whatever is lost will be recast into the stories the community tells about its purpose.
By closing on the threshold of foundation rather than the spectacle of triumph, the novel underscores its abiding concerns: how nations are imagined on the move, how landscapes are conscripted into memory, and how principle can be eroded by the work of staying alive. They Seek a Country thus reads as both an adventure of settlement and a meditation on its costs, attentive to voices that do not agree on what is owed or to whom. Its enduring resonance lies in the way it illuminates contested beginnings, inviting reflection on belonging, possession, and the narratives that later generations inherit.
Historical Context
Francis Brett Young’s They Seek a Country is a historical novel set in southern Africa during the era of the Great Trek (c. 1836–1854), when Dutch-speaking farmers left the British-ruled Cape Colony to settle the interior. Published in the late 1930s, near the centenary commemorations of the Trek in 1938, the book situates its characters amid the political, legal, and environmental pressures that propelled migration across the Drakensberg into Natal and the Highveld. By grounding its narrative in documented frontier conditions and institutions, the novel examines how competing claims to land and authority shaped settler ambitions and tested imperial assumptions.
The Cape Colony in the 1820s–1830s was administered by British governors and magistracies that increasingly imposed English language and legal procedure over Roman-Dutch foundations. Key reforms included Ordinance 50 (1828), which granted free movement and legal rights to Khoikhoi, and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, implemented in 1834 with an apprenticeship period ending in 1838. Compensation for emancipated slaves was payable in London, aggravating settler resentment. Alongside the arrival of the 1820 Settlers in the eastern frontier, these measures altered labor, land use, and status. The novel reflects such transformations by tracing how policy shifts unsettle households and loyalties.
Frontier conflict also shaped decisions to move. The Sixth Frontier War of 1834–1835, fought between the Cape Colony and Xhosa polities along the Fish and Keiskamma rivers, devastated farms and underscored the fragility of the frontier. Governor Benjamin d’Urban’s short-lived annexation of Queen Adelaide Province was reversed by London, signaling imperial ambivalence about expansion and defense costs. Trekboers relied on commando systems and laagers for protection, yet faced chronic insecurity and market disruptions. By situating characters within this contested borderland, the novel evokes the anxieties and calculations that encouraged mobile pastoralists to seek autonomy beyond the colony’s administrative reach.
The Great Trek unfolded amid wider upheavals known as the mfecane/difaqane, early nineteenth-century disruptions that reshaped regional power. The Zulu kingdom consolidated under Shaka and later Dingane; the Ndebele under Mzilikazi moved northward; and Moshoeshoe I forged a Sotho polity at Thaba Bosiu. These transformations displaced communities, reoriented trade, and created new militarized states. Voortrekker parties entering the interior encountered established African polities, negotiating passage, grazing rights, and security, and sometimes fighting for survival. The novel places settler itineraries within this broader landscape, countering myths of empty spaces by acknowledging preexisting sovereignties and the fraught diplomacy of movement.
From 1836, organized trek parties with ox-wagons crossed the Drakensberg into the interior, some seeking Natal’s pasturelands. Leaders associated with the movement included Piet Retief and Andries Pretorius, and the Voortrekkers’ defensive laagers and covenantal rhetoric became enduring symbols. The 1838 Battle of Blood River against the Zulu kingdom and the short-lived Natalia Republic (proclaimed in 1839, annexed by Britain in 1843) framed settler aspirations and setbacks. In using such milestones as background orientation rather than plot revelation, the novel invokes widely known episodes to explore faith, endurance, and political purpose without divulging character-specific outcomes.
Beyond Natal, Voortrekker communities consolidated north and west of the Vaal and Orange rivers. Britain recognized the independence of the South African Republic (Transvaal) by the Sand River Convention in 1852 and the Orange Free State by the Bloemfontein (Orange River) Convention in 1854. Institutions such as volksraad assemblies, commando obligations, and Dutch Reformed Church congregations structured public life. The book situates personal destinies within these emergent republic frameworks, showing how collective decision-making, militia service, and religious authority informed law, belonging, and land claims in the interior after the initial migrations had created semi-stable polities.
Mission and commerce linked settlers and African communities. London Missionary Society and Wesleyan stations mediated disputes, educated converts, and criticized abuses, while traders moved ivory, cattle, and textiles across the interior. Humanitarian campaigning in Britain influenced colonial policy, yet settler labor demands and autonomy goals often clashed with missionary advocacy and African rights. Linguistic brokerage, marriage alliances, and customary law further complicated contact zones. The novel draws on this documented web of intermediaries and interests to depict how persuasion, translation, and conscience operated alongside force, suggesting that frontiers were negotiated arenas shaped as much by discourse as by arms.
Written by an English novelist and published in the interwar decades, the work appeared as Afrikaner commemorations of the Great Trek (notably the 1938 centenary ox-wagon procession) elevated pioneer memory in South Africa. At the same time, British audiences were reappraising empire’s costs and responsibilities. By dramatizing settler resolve, indigenous statecraft, and the ambiguities of British rule, the novel positions foundational myths against verifiable events and institutions. Its historical canvas encourages readers to weigh nation-making narratives against displacement, legal reform, and contested sovereignty, offering a tempered reflection rather than triumphalist endorsement of the era.
They Seek a Country
PREFACE
This long book is the first-fruits of more than twenty years’ thought and research and meditation. The work of which They Seek a Country is part suggested itself to me originally at the beginning of 1916 when I became, by sheer chance, a humble member of the British Expeditionary Force in East Africa. We were sailing north from Durban to Mombasa in the liner Armadale Castle[1], which had been stripped of most of its contents (with the exception of its livestock) and had become a cruiser. During that voyage, I found myself seated in the officers’ mess—or ward-room, as it was then called—between a brother-officer of the R.A.M.C., my friend Robert Dolbey, and a Boer cavalryman, Major Brink, who later, I believe, became Chief-of-Staff to the Union Defence Force.
Both of them had fought in the Boer War, on different sides. When they discovered this, they immediately began talking across me, recalling the various engagements at which they had been present, the terrain of these remembered fights and the mistakes which had been made by the leaders on either side. The strange form of this comradeship-in-arms and the friendliness of the discussion appealed strongly to my novelist’s imagination. It was, indeed, a remarkable thing that these two men, who only fifteen years before, had been devoted to a mutual destruction, should be sailing northward to fight side by side in a savage land against a common enemy; and the spectacle set me thinking on the miracle by which, in so short a time, that hazardous experiment, the Union of South Africa, had justified the political vision that conceived it. On H.M.S. Armadale Castle, at that moment, there were, probably a thousand men, Afrikanders of Dutch and English origin, united not only by the ideals they had volunteered to defend, but also by a personal comradeship in which the bitter memories of racial and political conflict had been forgotten. This grey ship, with its cargo of men of both races, many of whom would never return, appeared to me symbolical of that miracle. I was witnessing, it seemed to me, the Birth of a Nation.
An impressive theme—and one which not merely challenged me as an artist but appealed to me as a man who had already given a great part of his heart to South Africa. General Smuts has declared that I am, by nature, an “African”; and even as I write these words, the nostalgia I feel for that fierce and lovely continent, almost persuades me that he is right. All through the East African campaign, which may someday be realized as one of the most heroic achievements of the Great War, my mind continued to dwell on this subject. When the war was over, I returned to South Africa and spent a year there, saturating myself in the “atmosphere” of the country and absorbing as much of its history as my mind could hold.
Yet, when I began to plan the work in detail, I felt so doubtful of my knowledge and of my powers that I shrank from writing it. For seventeen years, during which I produced the long series of Mercian novels, I continued to brood over a mass of rebellious material which I still found it impossible to see in perspective and with the detachment that I deemed necessary for the treatment of such a huge theme. At last, in 1937, twenty-one years after the birth of the idea, I made a final pilgrimage in which I followed the Voortrekkers step by step from the Cape to the Limpopo; and in the following year I began the composition of this, the first movement of what I had begun to think of as my “African Symphony.”
Every book that a serious artist writes is, in some degree, an Act of Faith; and this book (or series of books), the most ambitious I have ever attempted, is, for what it is worth, my own contribution to a cause in which I believe most fervently: the Unity of the South African People. The subject is one which bristles with thorns as fiercely as the scrub of the Low Veld. At every step one is compelled to “wait-a-bit.” The whole history of South Africa is beset with tangles and thickets of distrust, misunderstanding, prejudice, and (reasonably) bitter memories—so densely that, at times, it is difficult to see the wood for the trees. But I have tried to drive a straight path through these impediments; to maintain an open mind and to understand, as well as an alien may, the conflicting motives which have confused—and sometimes stained with the blood of honest men—this page of history, keeping always in view, however discouraged and bewildered, the great end towards which South Africa is gradually and inevitably moving, the high destiny of the land and the folk which, after my own, I love best on earth.
I have tried, and am still trying, to be fair. If I fail, as most likely I may, it will not be for want of good will. That is why, in this preface, I want to express my profound gratitude for the encouragement I have received from hundreds of correspondents in South Africa, irrespective of race and politics, whose letters have fortified me in the performance of this perilous task by suggesting that a mere work of fiction, written by an outsider, may, perhaps, after all, contribute a little towards a better understanding between Dutch and English Afrikanders. I am grateful, above all, to my old chief, friend and comrade-in-arms, General Smuts, who has declared his approval of the work of one of his former subalterns.
In this part of the ambitious scheme, indeed, my task qua historical novelist (as Rhodes would have put it) has been fairly easy, for the period is so remote that none of the protagonists are alive. In the second volume, The City of Gold, I have had to deal with matters more contentious, including the Jameson Raid, which put back the clock twenty years. In the third volume, as yet unwritten, I shall have to deal with the Second Boer War, and with such embarrassing subjects as Concentration Camps. That is a formidable prospect from which bolder men than myself might well shrink; but, even if I fail in the task I have set myself, I know I shall never regret the twenty years of study and thought I have devoted to it; for I still believe in the greatness of South Africa’s destiny, and hold an unshaken faith in the future of the land and the people I love.
BOOK ONE
FOG OVER ENGLAND
They Seek a Country
CHAPTER ONE
AUTUMN JOURNEY
On the first day of October in the year eighteen hundred and thirty-six, fog lay over England. Though fog was the island’s natural portion in winter, its inhabitants felt that they had some cause for resentment when the infliction arrived so early; but that summer had been wetter than any in living memory. In June roving thunder-storms had laid the ripening grass. In July rains that seemed as if they would never cease had soaked the cut hay till the swathes lay blackened and rotted. By the end of August corn stood sprouting in the ear, and common folk, who had to think first of their stomachs, shook their heads; for scarcity, they knew, made a speculator’s paradise, and the price of wheat, which had fallen from five pounds ten in the Year of Waterloo to less than half that figure in the Year of Reform, was certain to rise. Bitter cold in the air; in men’s hearts an equal bitterness: for the Reform Bill was Law—and yet the millennium had not come. And the winter, too, old men said, was like to be cruel cold as well as hungry; for the hedges were heavily berried with hips and haws—God having more thought for the birds of the air than Lord Melbourne had for the people. In September the farmers scraped together the remnants of ruined harvest, none was left for gleaners; and now, as the first Arctic draughts crept insensibly over the sodden land, the raw, moisture-laden air turned to a mist so dense that even in broad daylight men must grope their way as blindly as if it were already dark, or sit sulkily by their firesides waiting for rain to disperse it or for wind to blow it away. For three days and nights England lay fog-bound, utterly obscured by a blanket of white vapour, uniform and unsullied save where the smoke of hidden cities flawed its sunlit surface with yellowish stains like spills on a soiled tablecloth, or where the summits of wolds, moorlands and mountains, emerging triumphantly, pierced the unsubstantial stuff with high peaks and ridges that lay glittering with the first snow. But these no men, save, perhaps, lonely shepherds, saw.
Over no part of the land did the fog cling and settle more densely than in the valley of Severn where the cliffs of Cotswold and Malvern rose sharply, defining the limits of that ancient firth. Here summer floods had saturated the stiff marls to the depths where the cold clay subsoil held water. The Hirondelle coach, whose ranking team of four normally covered the hundred and thirty-six miles from Cheltenham to Liverpool in nine hours and a half, was held up at Worcester. Three times on the Evesham turnpike, where mists rising from the swollen Avon thickened the air, the Hirondelle had pulled up to give aid to ditched transport-wagons top-heavy with pockets of hops. When, two hours behind time, the guard slid on the drags and the coach screeched slowly down the hill into Worcester, where the new gas-lamps stretched away in a wan procession, their bleared haloes vaguely indicating the line of the empty High Street but giving little more light than the candle-points flickering like will-o’-the-wisps behind steamed shop-windows, there rose in the hearts of its pair of lonely passengers a feeling of escape and relief.
At the “Star and Garter” Hotel in the Foregate the coach came to a halt and these comrades in distress dismounted. One was a haggard gentleman, with a long, cadaverous face and a skinny nose from which a dewdrop depended, who moved gingerly, as though his limbs were frozen to brittleness. The other, a short, stout, bustling fellow, in a brown beaver hat, with shrewd, humorous eyes, a ruddy complexion, and a figure that strained the buttons of his caped and waisted melton surcoat, jumped out with an air of impatience and accosted the driver.
“How long do you give us to thaw?” he asked briskly.
The man slewed round sullenly. His face, blotched with cold, was ill-humoured, and globules of condensed fog spangled his tousled flaxen wig. One would have guessed he was drunk.
“How long?” he repeated. “That’s a fine question to ask, sir! I can tell you I’ve had a bellyful! You don’t catch me taking the road again afore I can see where I’m going. One thing’s certain sure: my cattle and me are stabled in Worcester this night!”
The stout gentleman grunted. “Provoking ... damnition provoking! Is there any other coach, do you know, running north to Kidderminster? I happen to be in a hurry. Time means money to me.”
“I know naught about no coaches but mine,” the man answered surlily. “Other coaches are none of my business, nor answering questions. If you want information you’ld better ask inside. Mr. Collins will tell you all you want, behappen. Come on, Joe, give us a hand!”
The stout gentleman entered the inn and called for the landlord. A flustered fat man in an apron and shirt-sleeves appeared and tried to be polite.
“We’re all at sixes and sevens,” he said. “The fog’s lying thicker up north. I’ve five coach-loads of passengers shot in on me unexpected and my wife abed, poor creature, with a heavy cold on the chest, you know what that means, sir. Kidderminster? You’ll never get there this day, I can tell you that. There’s coaches held up all along the road, and I can’t say I blame them. If you care to make yourself comfortable in the Assembly Room, I’ll let you know the minute there seems any hope.”
“I must get to Grafton Lovett this evening,” the traveller persisted.
“Grafton Lovett? But that’s nearer Worcester than Kidderminster, and well off the road.”
“I am well acquainted with Grafton Lovett. I’m a friend of Colonel Abberley’s.”
“A friend of Squire Abberley’s?” The landlord’s tone changed. “Well, I shall have to see what I can do for you in that case. Any friend of Squire Abberley is welcome in this house. I might find somebody willing to drive you to Grafton—that is, if you don’t mind paying for it.”
“I’m willing to pay anything in reason. But I’m in a hurry. I have parliamentary business waiting for me in London.”
“Indeed ...” The landlord was impressed. “If I might know your name, sir ...”
“Vizard. Mortimer Vizard. I’m Colonel Abberley’s lawyer.”
“Then if you’ll oblige by stepping this way, sir, I’ll do my best for you.”
He led Mr. Vizard upstairs and along a creaking passage that smelt of must and fog and stale beer, then ceremoniously threw open the door of a long, dim, barn-like chamber with a vast spread of uncarpeted floor and a high ceiling suspended from which the lights of six candles shone pitifully through the all-pervading fog. At either end of it stood a fireplace crammed with a brisk fire of sulphurous Staffordshire coal; and around these, in two huddled semi-circles, were clustered the unfortunate six coach-loads of wayfarers who shared Mr. Vizard’s fate. In spite of the landlord’s ceremonious introduction nobody made room for him. They sat there dazed with the fatalistic apathy of two parties of shipwrecked sailors, distrustful of each other and victims of a stupor that made them all dumb. Since there was no chair unoccupied, Mr. Vizard contented himself with a brisk prowling to and fro over the echoing boards of the icy space between the two fireplaces and hoped for the best.
For a quarter of an hour he paced impatiently to and fro, his portfolio under his arm, or gazed hopelessly through the windows into the fog that was so dense that he could not even discern the houses over the street, taking the watch from his fob occasionally and examining it under the candles to check the incredible slowness of the passage of time. At the end of this period the landlord reappeared. Out of respect to Colonel Abberley’s friend he had removed his apron and put on a coat. As he entered the two clusters of castaways sprang to their feet simultaneously, each man hoping that the coach in which he had been travelling was about to start.
“Mr. Vizard, sir!” he called.
Mr. Vizard hurried to the door.
“I’ve done it,” the landlord whispered, “I’ve got a conveyance. You’re in luck, sir. There’s not many folk that’ld care to poke their noses out of doors for love or money this day, though the roads in these parts are safe enough, generally speaking—which is more than I could have sworn to, mind you, a few years since, when the rick-burning and machine-breaking was on and a lot of odd characters hanging about and waiting to take their chance. It wasn’t harm they was meaning, not even then: only a parcel of ‘Brummagem Radicals[2]’ got stirring them up and setting fools’ minds again’ their own interest. All that country folk need—and I speak as one country-born, sir—is a steady hand: the sort of treatment gentlemen like Squire Abberley gives them: a-driving them on the snaffle, but letting them know that you’ve got the ribbons in one hand and the whip in t’other. I fancy you mentioned, sir, that you were a Parliament gentleman? Well, this Malt Tax, now ...”
“You say you have got me a chaise?” Mr. Vizard said smoothly, interrupting the spate.
“To be sure, sir. The thought of that there damned Malt Tax put it out of my head. Not exactly a chaise, sir. I found a chap in our tap-room, Jim Hollies by name, with a dray of cider-casks going to Mr. Ombersley’s at Chaddesbourne. It won’t be not more than a mile or so out of his way to drop you at Grafton; and though he’ll go slow, slow is sure, if you take my meaning, and the slower the better on such a day as this and with Jim a bit bosky.”
“You mean the fellow is drunk?” Mr. Vizard enquired with alarm.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, sir, not drunk. He’s had about as much as a weak-headed chap can carry comfortable. But drunk or dry, Jim knows his way home right enough; and even if he didn’t you can be certain his horses do. Wonderful knowledgeable creatures horses be. I’d sooner trust them than most men in a fog like this.”
“And what do I give this fellow?” Mr. Vizard asked cautiously.
“That rests with you, sir. But if you choose to take my advice you’ll not overpay him. A carter’s wage is round about ten shillings a week. If you spoil these chaps they gets saucy in no time.”
In front of the inn the Chaddesbourne dray stood waiting. It was, in fact, a bulky wain with four enormous mud-caked wheels, piled high with hogsheads and drawn by two shaggy-fetlocked plough-horses. Jim Hollies himself showed a stunted, misshapen figure enveloped in sacking that covered his head with a cowl from beneath which, withdrawn like those of a hedgehog, two small, bright, bloodshot eyes blinked at his fare distrustfully. Mr. Vizard regarded the vehicle and its sub-human driver with equal distaste; but it seemed he had no choice in the matter, so, lifting his coat-skirts, he set his neatly-shod foot on a spoke of the near forward wheel and hauled himself on to the fog-damp sacking at Jim Hollies’s side. The landlord, bowing obsequiously, wished him a pleasant journey, and with a heavy rumbling and a squeaking of wheels the wagon rolled forward.
At the end of the Foregate, a hundred yards from the inn, the last gas-lamp winked its good-bye. For another two hundred the ghosts of tall houses defined the street. At this point, with a bump and a convulsive lurch, the unsprung wagon passed from the city’s paved road on to the country highway. A phantasmal turnpike-keeper threw wide his gate and waved them on. The empty road was so deeply rutted and so beset with puddled pits and crevasses that the wagon, for all its weight, rolled from side to side like a ship in a heavy sea. Mr. Vizard, still clutching his portfolio, was hard put-to to keep his seat, and the fog grew so thick that he could no longer see the leader’s ears. Slow as the horses were, he wished they were even slower. Remembering the hop-wagons ditched on the Evesham road, he was prepared at any moment to find himself flung into the invisible hedgerow. Mr. Vizard regretted his separation from the Hirondelle’s buoyant springs. He regretted equally the proximity of Jim Hollies, who, accustomed, no doubt, and adapting himself automatically in his sleep to this riotous type of locomotion, swayed sideways with each lurch and leaned, with the most neighbourly abandon, against Mr. Vizard’s shoulder, inflicting on his town-bred nostrils an all too rustic aroma of byre and midden. There hung also upon the air a strong odour of pomace or cider, though how much of this was exhaled from Jim Hollies’s person and how much arose from the hogsheads and the heaps of empty sacks in which bruised and rotten apples had been stored, Mr. Vizard could not decide. In any case, what with the continued jolting and swaying and the cold which, gradually ascending from his feet, was approaching the more delicate area vulnerable to his hereditary enemy lumbago, he soon reached a stage of suffering and of apprehension so numbing to the sensibility that he almost ceased to feel or to care what happened. Indeed, despite his appearance of drunken stupor, Jim Hollies’s hedgehog-eyes were more keenly aware than he judged; for suddenly, with an alarming precipitance which made Mr. Vizard fear an encounter with footpads or desperate poachers or even highwaymen, he leapt from his seat and seizing the leader’s bridle led the horses right-handed down a steep pitch of lane that deserted the high road and then through a swollen water-splash, and then, urging them onward with agonized, inarticulate cries, up an even steeper and apparently endless hillside, at the summit of which Mr. Vizard, to his amazement, emerged into a new and relatively fogless air in which an avenue of elms, invisible a moment before, towered like gigantic spectres above and on either side, discovering, through the end of the tunnel their leafy masses enclosed, a range of bright windows enclosed in the sombre shape of a huge stone house with a pillared portico and pediment which he recognized, almost incredulously, as his journey’s destination.
CHAPTER TWO
CONVERSATION PIECE
Within an hour Mr. Vizard’s congealed blood was beginning to thaw and expand. Though used to the ostentatious entertainment of aldermen and nabobs, and the luxury of their suburban mansions, he could still be thrilled to find himself received in the company and in the homes of landed gentry, the owners of wide acres (there was no possession like land) and the sole repository, in these degenerate days, of those traditions of the ancient regime that were the cause of his country’s greatness. Their condition was one to which he himself aspired; and his host, Colonel Abberley, a near spiritual kinsman of Sir Roger de Coverley[4], his favourite hero in fiction, was as perfect a representative of the type as could be imagined: a little, dry gentleman, with the obvious cut of an old soldier, whose studiously formal manners, combined with his un-selfconscious rusticity (and profanity) of speech, made him a veritable museum-piece. The rest of the cosy company of four was perfectly in keeping and might have been proposed as a conversation piece for Mr. Zoffany. There was the sister of his host, who had long been a widower, Miss Lavinia Abberley, whose antique graces and equally her attire made her nearer to the subjects of eighteenth-century canvases than to the frothy ladies of Regency society. There was also, as there should be in every properly regulated country house, a parson: no mere appanage or dependant, but a man of birth and breeding, a mature younger son of the neighbouring family of Ombersley whose lineage was almost (but not quite) as ancient as Colonel Abberley’s own, who could take his part in polite conversation and drink his bottle of wine like a man of the world.
Mr. Vizard smiled contentedly. It was almost worth while to have undergone the uncertainties, discomforts and privations of the last twenty hours for the sake of relishing more richly these contrasting luxuries: the elegance of that spacious dining-room over whose plaster ceiling the candles threw shadows that seemed, as one threw back one’s head, to bring the circling rout of opulent nymphs and rude satyrs to life; the warmth of the enormous wood fire that glowed so red and flared so eagerly; the deft movements, around the oval of lucent mahogany, of men-servants in bottle-green breeches and coats with claret facings; the benevolent scrutiny of authentic family portraits, which, having none of his own, he always found exhilarating; and, above all perhaps, the milky excellence of the claret with which this admirable meal of plump roast pheasant had been graced. Mr. Vizard felt not merely in tune with his surroundings but pleased with himself.
“And now,” Colonel Abberley said, “your news, sir!”
Mr. Vizard smiled and nodded. “The good news first. Allow me to congratulate you, sir. Our little Enclosure Bill[3] will receive the Royal Assent. I think I may flatter myself, with your permission, that, for a private measure, the affair was managed with unusual smoothness and expedition: two readings without a word of discussion in three weeks. Upstairs, the Committee wasted no time. Your good friends in Parliament, Mr. Ombersley and Mr. Sheldon, were invaluable. Three commissioners are appointed: your cousin, Lord D’Abitot; our reverend friend here, representing the tithe-owners, and Mr. Thomas Collins, who, of course, is one of your tenants.”
“Ay, Tom Collins is all right,” Colonel Abberley said. “I can answer for him.”
Mr. Vizard bowed and smirked in agreement. “The three commissioners,” he went on, “will now proceed to meet, receive claims and publish an award. There is a provision that two of them constitute a quorum: so there is really no reason why your cousin and Mr. Ombersley should not settle most things between you to your own satisfaction without calling on Mr. Collins to intervene. Indeed”—Mr. Vizard generously replenished his wine-glass—“from what I have seen of the maps and know of the nature of the land, I think that you, sir, and this gentleman’s brother, will have added to your properties two tidy little estates of more than eight hundred acres apiece as the result of a remarkably modest expenditure.”
“That is by no means the way, if I may say so,” the parson broke in, “in which Colonel Abberley and my brother look at this Enclosure. What they want—and what all right-thinking people want—is to improve the land and eliminate wasteful husbandry for the good of the nation. As things are, sir, the energy of the community is going to waste and the morals of my parishioners are suffering. In looking after a brood of goslings, a few rotten sheep, a skeleton of a cow or a mangy horse, these fellows with rights of commonage lose more than they might have gained by an honest day’s work and, what is far worse, acquire the habit of independence and idleness. God did not create the earth, sir, to lie waste for feeding geese, but to be cultivated by man in the sweat of his brow.”
“Of course, sir, of course,” Mr. Vizard said smoothly, “we are all of the same opinion. Unfortunately, some of the labouring poor fail to realize that it is better to work for a steady two shillings a day for a benevolent employer than to pick up a miserable and uncertain living in that way. The Reform agitation and the last Revolution in France have gone to their heads. To-day everyone talks of ‘rights’ and nobody of ‘duties.’ More than one Enclosure Bill has lately been wrecked by misguided sentimentality. The whole country is suffering from an epidemic of morbid sensibility. All this fussing and fuming over the Slave Trade, for instance. To abolish slavery in England was all very well. We are a Christian nation, sir, and should be above reproach. But to lug in the Cape of Good Hope and the West Indian possessions, where heathens are in the majority, is not only unnecessary but foolish. In tropical climes the slave is not a luxury but a necessity. The West Indies, I’m told, will rebel, and none can blame them. Why, even in England members of Parliament allow their reason to be swayed by the sentiments of their constituents. In the case of this little Enclosure Act of ours, I don’t mind telling you, we had an anxious moment in committee when one of your self-constituted village Hampdens bobbed up and claimed to be heard.”
“A man from my parish? Impossible!” Mr. Ombersley was shocked.
Colonel Abberley laughed. “Control your feelings, George. Mr. Vizard says it’s all over. But I think I can guess whom you mean. Was the fellow’s name Oakley?”
“John Oakley, sir. That was the name.”
“I know the fellow quite well, and I’ve had my eye on him. He’s the grandson, and heir-at-law I suppose, of old Joe Barley whom you buried two years ago, George. He was born and bred over Dulston way, where all bad things come from, and brought up as a nail-maker. When Joe Barley died, this fellow gave up his calling and came to settle down here and loaf in the old man’s cottage—you know that very well, or ought to—on the edge of the common.”
“I remember Joe Barley quite well: a most respectful old man,” the parson grumbled; “but this other fellow ...”
“Oblige me by passing the port, George. Another glass, Mr. Vizard. I hope the wine’s to your taste, it’s the year of Coruña. This other fellow is anything but respectful: a regular ‘Brummagem Radical,’ as we call them down here. But if the Bill’s through I reckon we shall soon see the last of him, and a damned good riddance. His ‘rights,’ as he chooses to call them, are squatter’s rights. The cottage was thrown up—you can hardly call it a building—about eighteen years ago, just before I succeeded.”
“And encroachments of less than twenty years’ date,” Mr. Vizard put in, “have no standing whatever nor any claims when it comes to redistribution. The commissioners can pull this man’s house down to-morrow if they see fit.”
“As they assuredly shall see fit,” Mr. Ombersley muttered. “I don’t want any Methodists putting ideas into my parishioners’ heads!”
“Behold the Church Militant, Mr. Vizard! None the less, I agree with him. The sooner a saucy fellow like this Oakley is brought to his senses the better. As soon as his house is pulled down there will be no difficulty in clearing him out. My parish officer will refuse him a certificate and send him back to his radical friends in Dulston before he does any more harm. These factory-workers will be the ruin of us. The overseer mentioned to me the other day that this fellow actually talked of starting an evening school! What does a labourer who works twelve hours a day for his daily bread want with learning to read? And what will he read when he’s learnt? I can tell you, sir: that damned devil Cobbett’s Political Register! As a matter of fact,” the Colonel went on, “these ‘encroachments,’ as you lawyers call them, are the curse of agriculture. People have the idea that if they can manage to run up a roof and get a fire burning between sunrise and sunset they can stay there till doomsday. I’m afraid that those who have lived in their hovels for more than twenty years may be able to claim an allotment in place of their common rights. That is so, Mr. Vizard?”
“That is so ... unfortunately.”
“But the others will have to go and go double quick, and the first I clear off my common will be Master Oakley. How did the fellow strike you?”
Mr. Vizard deliberated. “On the surface, sir, I must admit, he struck me as a personable young man, tall and dark, one might almost say handsome: much above his station in bearing and dress, if you take my meaning, with considerable powers of expression and force of character which, if properly directed and disciplined ...”
“Ah, there you have it!” Colonel Abberley broke in. “Discipline! That is what this age lacks, sir. But what can you expect when the Court itself sets the Nation such a humiliating example? If I had a fellow like that in my regiment for eighteen months, I could make a man of him. What this unhappy country needs is another war! But if once I start that hare I shall never finish. What had Oakley to say for himself?”
“An oration, sir: a harangue; a positive philippic! Of course, like all fellows of his kind, our village Hampden could never keep to his point, and showed pitiable ignorance of the law. Yet the man has passion and fervour, and spoke as though he were used to it.”
“Used to ranting in his conventicles, no doubt. Every Methodist learns to do that,” Mr. Ombersley said contemptuously.
“Perhaps, sir. I found myself interested, all the same. It is my business, as a lawyer, to see both sides in other people’s cases if I only see one in my own; and if Oakley failed to make out a case for himself—he admitted, hands down, that the squatter’s standing was doubtful—he drew an affecting picture—ay, I’ll go so far as that—of the general results of enclosure on the commoners in your parish.”
“The general results, sir, are obvious,” Colonel Abberley said sharply; “they will be to improve the common land several hundred per cent and ensure its being cultivated tidily, without waste. The men who formerly worked for themselves haphazard and struggled to live from hand to mouth, will now work for me or Ombersley’s brother or Tom Collins for a regular and generous wage. Why, sir, in England, in these days the labouring poor are pampered, sir, positively pampered!”
“Oh, no doubt, no doubt! ...” Mr. Vizard bowed to the storm. “I am merely defining this young man’s thesis which, naturally, did not dwell on what the commoner stood to gain but on what he would lose. First the pride of feeling he had something of his own: his own cottage, his own patch of soil, his own cow, his own geese or what not. Then his rights: the right to cut fern and to glean and to gather manure and firewood ...”
“And scare every pheasant of mine within a mile of the common! You might add the right to poach and the right to pilfer! Ask my head-gamekeeper, Ballance.”
“Mr. Oakley, I hardly need say, did not mention these. But shall I go on?”
“Ay, go on, go on,” Abberley grunted.
“As a result of this, he suggested, the ejected commoner would have no incentive to thrift or decency. ‘Go to any ale-house,’ he said, ‘in any parish lately enclosed, and you will see for yourself the origin of poverty and poor-rates. For whom are men to be sober, for whom are they to save? For the parish? If they are diligent, will they get leave to build a cottage? If they are sober, will they get land for a cow and milk for their children? If they are frugal, will they get half an acre of land to plant potatoes and leave to cut fuel? You say they will have wages from the farmers to pay for these things. Two-and-threepence a day, if they’re lucky! If they pay for their food, what can the belly spare for the back? You offer them no motives for decency, gentlemen,’ he says, ‘you take their land and you give them nothing in return but a parish officer and a workhouse. What reason have they to care for anything but a pot of beer? It helps them to forget.’ ”
Parson Ombersley wagged his head. “I am inclined to think for my own part that even ale is less pernicious than tea. It is excessive tea-drinking that frays the nerves of these unfortunate people and makes them pernickety. As for the practice of gleaning to which you referred: in spite of the oft-quoted warrant of Scripture I have long been convinced that it should be stopped. Any custom that throws together uneducated people of opposite sexes whose carnal passions are apt to be ill-controlled is demoralizing.”
Colonel Abberley, brushing aside these reflections, rose impatiently.
“We have heard all this stuff—Oakley’s stuff, not yours, George—before. It is the sort of reward any public-spirited landowner must expect to receive. Happily for all of us, it weighed no more heavily with the Committee of Parliament than it does with me. Our Bill has gone through, and no talk will alter it now. What is more, there’s no time to be wasted if we are to break up any quantity of land and sow winter wheat this autumn. You and I, George, will have to get busy to-morrow. I’ll send Collins word to meet us.”
Mr. Vizard smiled. “Mr. Collins, I feel sure, will be at your service, sir. The Act allows each commissioner two guineas a day.”
“All the more reason for getting the business settled,” Colonel Abberley went on. “What about the other encroachments, Mr. Vizard? I should like to see the last of them.”
“Any cottage of more than twenty years’ standing carries with it a right to a certain allotment of land but no right to the common. But the cottager, mind you, must pay his share of the legal costs of enclosure and fence his allotment. Speaking from my own experience, I think you are likely to find that most of your cottagers will be only too glad to sell you their land and relieve themselves of legal responsibility. They don’t understand it. Offer them five pounds an acre. That is about the usual figure, and by far the most satisfactory way of dealing with the matter.”
“Five pounds an acre.... Well, it’s worth more than that to me. I can buy in the lot for less than two hundred pounds. And what about Oakley? That fellow’s insolence sticks in my gizzard still; but I have to keep on the right side of the law all the same.”
“Your position in his case is perfectly clear, sir: he has no claim whatever.”
“I can eject him and do what I like with the house he is living in?”
“Whatever you like.”
“In that case, I’ll see that damned hovel pulled down to-morrow. Suppose we join Miss Abberley?” Colonel Abberley moved to the window and gazed out. “The fog’s thicker than ever,” he said. “I never knew the like of it. And I had hoped to take our visitor to shoot a pheasant to-morrow....”
CHAPTER THREE
BLACK SLAVERY
The great three days’ fog had not throttled and shrouded the land on the day when John Oakley left London and started on the long tramp homeward to Grafton Lovett. He left the stony capital with a heavy heart and a bitter feeling of failure, far different from the enthusiasms with which he had approached it a week before. That visit had marked the first impact of grim actuality on an ardent spirit which, up till now, had been nurtured on dreams and had little acquaintance with reality outside the narrow limits of his own upbringing; and the shock sharply administered to his belief in human justice, together with an increasingly unpalatable sense of his own insignificance and impotence, made him equally humble and hurt and hotly rebellious.
He had been born and bred, as Colonel Abberley was informed, in the sooty borough of Dulston, a conglomeration of mean dwellings, foundries and workshops incongruously encircling the ruins of a feudal fortress, which the fierce draught of the industrial revolution had lately fanned into fervent life: a centre of hot volcanic activity fed by the fuel feverishly dug from the vast coalfield that surrounded and throttled it in the smoke of its monstrous combustion. His mother, an innocent pink-and-white country girl exiled in service at an ale-house in Sedgebury, had loved and married her first courter, a nail-maker who lived and plied his sweated trade in a domestic forge built on to the back of a cottage of smoke-grimed brick indistinguishable from twenty others in the same sordid row.
The life into which Oakley had been born, and which, as a child, he took for granted, was one of unceasing labour amid conditions of brutal savagery and bitter privation. Sixteen hours a day and more his parents toiled in their cramped and sooty cavern forging nails for the iron-shod hooves of the great Duke’s victorious cavalry. Twenty thousand horseshoe-nails a week Oakley’s father forged, each nail struck twenty-five times with the two-pound hammer: five million one hundred and sixty-eight thousand hammer-strokes of the sinewy spark-scarred forearm—and, as a result of this labour, the nail-maker’s grudging pittance of eight shillings a week. In the first ten years of his life, John Oakley’s ears never knew peace from the thud and tinkle of hammers; his eyes knew no respite from the spectacle of toil. His father and mother were more like machines than human beings. The moment they ceased working they ate what they could and flung themselves down on the bed they shared with him and slept; when they woke, they ate greedily again and worked till their eyes or their muscles failed them. In the strict economy of this inhuman labour even the strength of a child might count by helping to tip the nice balance between subsistence and actual starvation. Mere hunger was taken as a matter of course[1q]. So, as soon as his baby intelligence grew sufficient to grasp the working of that elementary mechanism, the child’s frail arms were set to the monotonous task of blowing the bellows that breathed on the forge’s gleed. That was a proud day when, six years old and perched on a box to reach the lever, he first set his hand to it, but it was not long before what had seemed an adventure became a slavery. Sometimes his mind wandered; sometimes he fell asleep; and the gleed went black and his father would swear at him fiercely but not unkindly. More than once, overcome by heat or fumes he grew giddy and fainted. Then his mother would run to him, smothering him with anxious tears and kisses. It was a shame, she said, to work the child to death; she would rather work longer herself, she protested, and wear her fingers to the bone; but her husband told her roughly not to be soft and asked her where she thought the next dinner was coming from.
Seven days a week the family worked and sixteen hours at a shift; and the fogger weighed the nails with false weights and haggled over slipshod workmanship and iron wasted, and complained and bullied because more of the carefully-counted shillings were not spent at his tommy-shop.
By the time he was ten John Oakley had not learnt to read or write. A few of the neighbours’ children, whose hands could be spared, were “put out” to be kept out of mischief by an unsavoury Dame who “taught school” for threepence a week. Other children of more prosperous households attended the Common Day School or even the brand-new British School in the Sedgebury Road, the dissenters’ counterblast to the National Schools which were attached to the Established Church; but these seats of superior learning exacted more than a penny a day, and that, in a week, amounted to more than the earnings of half a day’s work: and what was the use of book-learning anyway to a boy whose whole life, in the nature of things, would be divided, like that of his father and mother, between labour and sleep—who had been born to hammer and cut and shape red-hot rods of iron till the day of his death?
By the time he was ten, moreover, John Oakley had scarcely set eyes on a blade of green grass or indeed on any living green save that of the sickly trees which, clinging to the steep on which the Castle crumbled, shook forth in spring, with helpless obstinacy, bright feeble trusses of leaf whose verdure the impalpable dust of carbon that fell from the sky soon tarnished. The town of Dulston stood at the very heart of the blighted zone, marooned in the midst of a slagged and cindery wilderness, and this was John Oakley’s world. Beyond its bricky verges, if he had only known, lay as sweet a countryside as any in England, a tangle of green hillsides and flowing streams; but the child knew nothing of these save what his mother whispered to him when warmly huddled beside him in the cold bed shaken by the vibrations of his father’s snores, she spoke of the lost paradise of her own not so very distant childhood—of a remote, unimaginable heaven that went by the musical name of Grafton Lovett where the sun, it seemed, always shone, and harsh winds never bit to the bone, and children wandered, without a care in the world, through green lanes and cowslip meadows and bluebell-sheeted coppices, and a gentle old man, his grandfather, kept a cow and hissing geese on the common.
It was for her own pleasure rather than for his that Mary Oakley indulged in this vein of soft reminiscence; but the boy who listened absorbed it eagerly with that craving for fairy tales (her stories were no more real to him) which is natural to the mind of a child. And his mother, indeed, at these times, was little more than a child herself, lying there in the great cold bed and calling on the illusions of memory to trick her into brief forgetfulness of the present misery on which, without knowing why, or even protesting, she had blindly stumbled.
“Tell me more, mam,” the child would plead when her whispers ceased. “I don’t want to go to sleep yet.”
“But we must go to sleep, my precious, or how shall we ever get to work in the morning?”
“Must folk like us do nothing but work for ever and ever?” he asked.
“We must do as God wills,” she told him, without much conviction.
“But does God ... What is God?” he demanded.
Mary Oakley was silent. This question was far too complicated to be answered at that time of night, and the spiritual ministrations of the Reverend George Ombersley had hardly equipped her to cope with it.
“Shall we ever go to Grafton Lovett and see that there cow?”
“Oh yes, I reckon we ought to go home some day,” she sighed. “And some day you’ll go to heaven, provided you’m good.”
“I’ld much liever go to Grafton Lovett,” the child asserted stubbornly.
She laughed softly. “That’s wickedness, that is ... but so would I. Now come your ways, my pretty, and go to sleep.”
There came a time when sleep was none too easy for either of them. His father slept soundly enough. When the monstrous labour of his day’s work was done and he had filled his stomach, nothing less than the trumpets of doom could have broken the rhythm of his snoring. But now, when they lay down together, the child’s mother could not sleep. No sooner were they warm in bed than a savage cough tore her. It shook him as he lay in her arms, and though a kind neighbour next door gave her syrup of horehound laced with laudanum, nothing could stay it. It was the night air, she said, that caught her breath and choked her, though the gaps of the broken window-panes were stuffed with sacking and the crevices packed with paper. Yet even in the warmth of the forge she coughed as grievously; and that, she said, was because of the dust and the acrid fumes that tickled her throat. Sometimes, at night, when her desperate hacking woke him, the child shrank from the heat of her body which burnt him like a coal. Sometimes he woke warm to feel her icy, drenched in cold sweats. Living with her constantly his father and he grew used to her coughing, and failed to notice how thin and drawn she had grown and how the torn garments hung on her like those of an unstuffed scarecrow. But the neighbours who lived in the row and saw her less frequently noticed the change, and the woman who had given her the syrup of horehound and laudanum came complaining.
“That there cough of yourn, Mrs. Oakley,” she said; “it’s time you did summat for it. It shakes the wall terrible all night and stops my man sleeping. If I was you, I should go to the chemist and see about it. And if I was your husband I shouldn’t be satisfied, that I shouldn’t. That’s a churchyard cough if ever there was one, you take my word for it.”
Mary Oakley smiled wanly. She would try all she could, she assured her, to stop coughing at night. She was always a one for tissicking in winter, she said, but when summer came round she would be as right as ninepence.
The woman shook her head. “Well, that may be,” she said, “but I don’t like the look of you, neither. You’ve lost too much flesh for my liking. You put me in mind of a sister of mine that went off in a decline.”
The heart of the listening child went cold and sick with dread. His very ignorance of death made the menacing phantom more terrible. He began to watch his mother from day to day. It was true, as the neighbour said, that her face had lost the pink and white of its country roses. It was true that she had grown thin; that by day her peaked face had a bloodless pallor; but at night, when the forge was damped down, he took heart to see her pale cheeks brightened by vivid patches of colour, her eyes sparkling, her manner enlivened by a sudden gaiety which persuaded him that all must be well and that he had no need to fear. But when summer, on which he had been waiting, came, she did not lose her cough. It was on the day of Dulston Wake, when the streets were teeming with colliers and puddlers and nailers and chain-makers who poured into them from every town, village and hamlet of all the Black Country, that suddenly, as she was laughing and coughing together, a blood-vessel gave way and drenched the brick floor of the kitchen with blood. Her husband stared at the red deluge stupidly. It was she who whispered, smiling:
“Fetch the doctor, quick, my pretty. Oh, what a mess!”
The child ran to the corner of the High Street and called the doctor, who said he would come at once. He ran home again without stopping. But too late. His mother was dead.
