Part 12

"Stanning said, 'I had the luck to buy that in a pawnshop in Blackhampton long after he was dead, and if I had had a boy of my own I should like him to have kept it as an heirloom, but as I have not I want you to take it, Auntie, because I know you'll appreciate it.' Somehow, I could tell from the way he spoke that he was done. I hadn't the heart to refuse it, although I hadn't a boy or a girl of my own neither." A huskiness in the Corporal's throat made it hard to go on for a moment. "'I'm only thirty-nine,' he said, 'and all the best is in me. I don't fancy having my light put out like this in a wet bog, but it's got to come, my dear. I hate to think that sometime to-morrow I shall be as if I had never been.' 'Not you,' I said. 'You're sickening for the fever.' But I couldn't move him. He'd got the hoo-doo. 'No use talking about it,' he said, 'but you and I'll never have that day's fishing in Corfield Weir. I should like you to have seen my cottage up at Dibley. It's got the ghost of that old boy.' He put his hand on the watch, Mother, just like this. 'If there is a heaven for dead painters, and I doubt it, I'd like to sit in John Torrington's corner on his right hand. You see, I've learned all sorts of things, living in his house. I was getting to know the lights on the Sharrow and the feel of the clouds--in all the great Torringtons the clouds feel like velvet--and he was going to show me the way to handle sunlight--I've already been twice across to New York to see "An Afternoon in July in the Valley of the Sharrow," the most wonderful thing of its kind in existence. You get the view from my cottage--his cottage--at Dibley. I should like you to have seen it, Auntie. And then I should like to have taken you across to New York to show you what old John made of it. Fancy having to go all the way to New York to look at it. So like us to be caught on the hop, in the things that really matter.' I give you my word, Mother, he raised a laugh even then, but of a sudden his voice went all queer-like. 'However,' he said, 'there's a Mind in this that knows more than we do.' Then the lad began to shiver just as if he had the ague. And the next day, about the same time, or mayhap the perishin' old sun had gone a bit more west, I had to go out across No Man's Land to bring him in ... what there was left of him."

The Corporal ended his strange story as if after all it didn't much matter. He was quite impersonal, but Melia sat beside him shivering at the look in his eyes. Never before had the veil been torn aside in this way. She was a dull soul, fettered heavily by her limitations, but sitting there in the growing dusk it came on her almost with horror that in all those long years it was the first peep she had had behind the scenes of his mind. She hadn't realized the kind of man he was. More than once she had cast it in his face that he was an idle shack-about. Somehow, there had been nothing to give her the key to him; and now, miraculously as it seemed, it had come to her, it was too late.

She had the key to him now. But the sands were running out in fate's hour glass. She couldn't bear to look at his thin gray face as the light fell on it, nor at his strange eyes fixed on the padlocked gate of the cottage opposite. Of a sudden the watch slipped from her shaking hands, and fell lightly in a little brake of thistles by the end of the bench on which they sat.

Cautiously and carefully he picked it out. "Take care on it, Mother," he said softly as he put it again in her hands. "I wish we'd a little boy as could have had it. However, we've not. There was once a George Hollis who was an artist; I showed you that picture of his, "The Glade above Corfield," the other day; Jim said it was a good one. John Torrington one time was his pupil. Don't suppose he was any relation but it's the same name."

Melia put the watch in the pretty leather bag he had insisted on buying for her. And then she said with a horrible clutch in her throat: "Bill, promise! You'll come back ... won't you?"

His eyes didn't move.

"I'll be that lonely."

He sighed softly like a child who is very tired. "I'll do what I can, Mother." The voice was gentleness itself. "I can't do more."

She didn't know ... she didn't realize ... what ... she ... was....

XXXII

They sat hand in hand on the bench by the duck pond until the shadows began to lengthen along the valley of the Sharrow. For quite a long time they didn't speak, but at last their reverie was broken by the sight of a dusty figure with a sack on its back shambling along the road towards them. It was the village postman.

"Who's bought the cottage opposite?" the Corporal asked.

"Zur?" said the postman.

The Corporal repeated his question.

"They do sey, zur," said the postman in slow, impressive Doric, "the Mayor o' Blackhampton has bought it."

"What--Alderman Munt?" The voice of the Corporal was full of dismay.

"The Mayor o' Blackhampton, zur. Come here the other day in a motey car to look at it. Large big genelman in a white hat."

The heart of the Corporal sank. What the hell had he, of all people, to go buying it for! Somehow the postman had shattered the queer sad little world in which they sat. A feeling of desperation came suddenly upon the Corporal. He rose abruptly from the bench. "Come on, Mother," he said, "if we don't get along we'll be late for supper."

"Don't want no supper, Bill."

But the Corporal was firm.

"I'd like to stop here all night," Melia said as she rose limply from the bench. "I'd like to stop here forever."

That was the desire uppermost in the Corporal also, but it would not do to admit it.

Down the road, hand in hand, like two children out late, they trudged in the gathering dusk to Corfield. It was a perfect evening. Just a little ahead was one faint star; over to the left in the noble line of woods that overlooked the river they could hear the nightingale. Once they stopped and held their breaths to listen. They saw the rabbits dart from among the ferns at their feet and run before them along the white road. The evening pressed ever closer upon them as they marched slowly on, until, at a turn in the road, Corfield with its fruit orchards came into view.

It was a long trek home but they were in no hurry to get there. By the time they had come to the old stone bridge which spanned the broad river and united the country with the town it was quite dark and the lamps of the city were shining in the distance.

Midway across the bridge they stopped to take one last look at the Sharrow gleaming down its valley. Since the afternoon this mighty symbol which from earliest childhood had dominated their every recollection seemed to have gained in power, in magic and in mystery.

XXXIII

The hard and difficult months wore on. Summer passed to autumn; Europe was locked in the most terrible conflict the world had ever seen, but there was no sign of a decision.

Like Britain herself, Blackhampton was in the war to the last man and the last shilling. From the moment the plunge had been taken the conscience and the will of this brotherhood of free peoples had been in grim unison behind the action of its government. The war was no affair of sections or of classes; the issue was so clear that there was no ground for misunderstanding it.

For years it had been freely declared that Britain was past her zenith, that disintegration had already begun, that England herself was enervated with prosperity. At the outset the enemy in making war had counted on the fact too confidently. Britain would not dare to enter the struggle, she who was suffering from fatty degeneration of the soul, or if in the end she was driven into the whirlpool in spite of herself she would prove a broken reed in this strife for human freedom.

These were dangerous heresies, even for a race of supermen, and nowhere in the oldest of free communities was the task of dispelling it undertaken more vigorously than in Blackhampton. As its archives bore witness it had a long and proud record. No matter what great national movement had been afoot in the past, Blackhampton, the central city of England, geographically speaking, had invariably reacted to it with force and urgency.

Among the many virile men who strove to meet a supreme occasion, none deserved better of his country, or of his fellow citizens than Mr. Josiah Munt. He was of a type suited beyond all others to deal with the more obvious needs of a time that called for the unsparing use of every energy; he had a genius of a plain, practical, ruthless kind; he was the incarnation of "carry on" and "get things done."

From the first hour he took off his coat and buckled to. He worked like a leviathan. No day was too long for him, no labor too arduous; his methods were rough and now and again the clatter he made was a little out of proportion to the amount of weight he pulled in the boat. His life had been one of limited opportunity, but he had a knack of seeing the thing to be done and of doing it. People soon began to realize that he was the right man in the right place, and that as a driving force he was a great asset to the city of Blackhampton.

The war was about fifteen months' old when Alderman Munt was chosen mayor of Blackhampton. He took up an office that was by no means a sinecure at a very critical moment. But it was soon clear that a wise choice had been made; a certain Britishness of character of the right bulldog breed did much to keep a population of two hundred and eighty-six thousand souls "up to the collar." Somehow, the rude force and the native honesty of the man appealed to the popular imagination; if a prophet is ever honored in his own country it is in time of war.

During his mayoralty Josiah Munt came to occupy a place in the minds of his own people that none could have predicted. When the grim hour struck which altered the face of the world and changed the whole aspect of human society few could have been found to say a word in favor of the proprietor of the Duke of Wellington. He had begun low down, in a common part of the town; and, although there was really nothing against him, his name was never in specially good odor, perhaps for the reason that he bore obvious marks of his origin and because the curves of his mind were too broad for him to care very much about concealing them. In the general opinion he had been a very "lucky" man, financially successful beyond his merits, and for that reason arrogant. But in the throes of the upheaval preconceived ideas were soon shed if they did not happen to square with the facts; and it took considerably less than a year for Josiah to prove to his fellow townsmen that the goddess Fortune is not always the capricious fool she has the name of being.

Even in the stress of a terribly strenuous twelve months the Mayor of Blackhampton, like the wise man he was, insisted upon taking his annual fortnight's holiday at Bridlington. He had not missed his annual fortnight at Bridlington once in the last thirty years. It did him so much good, he was able to work so much the better for it afterwards, that, as he informed Mr. Aylett the Town Clerk, on the eve of departure in the second week of August, "it would take more than the likes o' the Kaiser to keep him from the seaside."

Like a giant refreshed the Mayor returned to his civic duties at the end of the month. His leisure at Bridlington had been enlivened by the company of the Mayoress, by Mrs. Doctor Cockburn and her two children, and also by Miss Gertrude Preston, who for quite a number of years now had helped to beguile the tedium of her brother-in-law's annual rest cure.

As soon as the Mayor returned to the scene of his labors he found there was one very important question he would have to decide. In his absence the City fathers had met several times to discuss the matter of his successor and had come, in some cases perhaps reluctantly, to the conclusion that none but himself could be his peer. According to the aldermanic roster, Mr. Limpenny the maltster was next in office, but that wise man was the first to own that he had not the driving power, or the breadth of appeal of the present mayor.

In ordinary times that would not have mattered, but the times were very far from ordinary. War was making still sterner demands, week by week, upon every man and woman in the country. Blackhampton had done much, as every town in England had, but its temporal directors felt that no effort must be relaxed, and that it was ever increasingly their duty "to keep it up to the collar." And Josiah Munt now filled the popular mind.

The very qualities which in the gentler days, not so long ago, had aroused antagonism were at a premium now. For superfine people the Mayor was a full-blooded representative of a distressing type, but it was now the reign of King Demos: all over the island from Westminster itself to the parish hall of Little Pedlington-in-the-Pound the Josiah Munts of the earth had come at last by their own. On every public platform and in every newspaper was to be found a Josiah Munt haranguing the natives at the top of his voice, thereby guaranteeing his political vision and his mental capacity. King Demos is not a rose born to blush unseen; he knows everything about everything and he is not ashamed to say so. With a fraction of his colossal mind he can conduct the most delicate and far-reaching military operations, involving millions of men, and countless tons of machinery to which even a Napoleon or a Clausewitz might be expected to give his undivided attention; with another he is able to insure that the five million dogs of the island, mainly untaxed, shall continue to pollute the unscavengered streets of its most populous cities; with another he is able to devise a Ministry of Health; with another he can pick his way through the maze of world politics, and recast the map of Europe and Asia on a basis to endure until the crack of doom; with yet another he can devise a new handle for the parish pump.

King Demos is indeed a bright fellow. And in Mr. Josiah Munt he found an ideal representative. Happily for Blackhampton, although there were places of even greater importance who in this respect were not so well off, he was a man of rude honesty. He said what he meant and he meant what he said; he was no believer in graft, he did not willfully mislead; he was not a seeker of cheap applause; and in matters of the public purse he had a certain amount of public conscience. As Mr. Aylett the town clerk said in the course of a private conversation with Mr. Druce the chairman of the Finance Committee, "His worship is not everybody's pretty boy, but just now we are lucky to have him and we ought to be thankful that he is the clean potato."

Therefore, within a week of his return from Bridlington, the Mayor was met by the request of the City fathers that he should take office for another year. Josiah was flattered by the compliment, but he felt that it was not a matter he could decide offhand. "He must talk to the wife."

At dinner that evening at Strathfieldsaye, when the question was mooted, the hapless Maria was overcome. Only heaven knew, if heaven did know, how she had contrived to fill the part of a Mayoress for so many trying months. She had simply been counting the days when she could retire into that life of privacy, from which by no desire of her own had she emerged. It was too cruel that the present agony should be prolonged for another year, and although her tremulous lips dare not say so her eyes spoke for her.

"What do you say, Mother?" His worship proudly took a helping of potatoes.

Maria did not say anything.

"A compliment, you know. Limpenny's next in, but the Council is unanimous in asking me to keep on. I don't know that I want to, it's terrible work, great responsibility and it costs money; but, between you and me, I don't see who is going to do it better. Comes to that, I don't see who is going to do it as well. Limpenny's a gentleman and all that, college bred and so on, but he's not the man somehow. Give Limpenny his due, he knows that. He button-holed me this morning after the meeting of the Council. 'Mr. Mayor,' he said--Limpenny's one o' those precise think-before-you-speak sort o' people--'I do hope you'll continue in office. To my mind you're the right man in the right place.' I thought that very decent of Limpenny. Couldn't have spoken fairer, could he?"

The hapless Maria gave an audible sniff and discontinued the eating of war beef.

"Well, Mother, what do you say? The Council seems to think that I've got the half nelson on this town. So Aylett said. A bit of a wag in his way, is that Aylett. He said I'd got two hundred and eighty-six thousand people feeding from the hand. That's an exaggeration, but I see what he means; and he's a man of considerable municipal experience. Smartest town clerk in England, they tell me. 'It's all very well, Mr. Aylett,' I said, 'but I'll have to talk to the Mayoress. And I'll let you have an answer to-morrow.'"

The hapless Maria declined gooseberry fool proffered by the respectful Alice.

"Don't seem to be eating, Mother," said his worship. "Aren't you well? I expect it's the weather."

Maria thought it must be the weather; at any rate it could be nothing else.

"Want a bit more air, I think," said Josiah in the midst of a royal helping of a favorite delicacy. "Just roll back those sunblinds, Alice, and let in a bit o' daylight."

The sphinx-like Alice carried out the order.

"And open the doors a bit wider."

Alice impassively obeyed.

"Would you like a nip of brandy? The weather, I suppose. Very hot to-day. Temperature nearly a hundred this morning in the Council Chamber. We'll have some new ventilators put in there or I'll know the reason. At the best of times there's a great deal too much hot air in the Council Chamber. And when you get a hot summer on the top of it...! Alice, go and get some brandy for the Mistress."

Exit Alice.

"You'll feel better when you've had a drop of brandy. Antiquated things those ventilators at the City Hall. Aylett thinks they've been there since the time of Queen Anne. But they're not the only things I'm going to scrap if I hold office another year. There's too much flummery and red tape round about Corporation Square. Tradition is all very well but we want something practical."

Alice entered with a decanter.

"Ah, that'll put you right. A little meat for the Mistress, Alice. Never mind the soda. It'll not hurt you, Mother. Prime stuff is that and prime stuff never does harm to no one. Some I've had by me at the Duke of Wellington for many a year."

At first the Mayoress was very shy of the brandy, prime stuff though it was, but his worship was adamant, and after a moment or two of half-hearted resistance Maria seemed the better for her lord's inflexibility.

"Talkin' of the Duke of Wellington ... funny how things work out! When we went in there in '79, you and me, we little thought we should be where we are now, in the most important time in history. That reminds me. Alice, just ring up the _Tribune_ Office and give the editor my compliments and tell him I've arranged to speak to-morrow at the Gas Works at twelve o'clock and they had better send a reporter."

"Very good, sir."

"Alice!"

Alice halted sphinx-like at the door.

"Wait a minute. I'll go myself!" Josiah plucked his table napkin out of his collar. "Nothing like doing a thing while it's fresh in your mind. And do it yourself if you want it done right. I must have a word with Parslow the editor. The jockey he sent to Jubilee Park to report the flower show didn't know his business. The most important part of the speech was left out." He laid down his table napkin and rose determinedly. "Nice thing in a time like this for the Mayor of the City not to be fully reported. I've half a mind to tell that Parslow what I think of him. Some people don't seem to know there's a war on."

Five minutes later when Josiah returned in triumph to his gooseberries he found Maria reclining on the sofa with her feet up, next the window opening on to the spacious lawns of Strathfieldsaye. The impassive but assiduous handmaid was fanning her mistress with a handkerchief.

"That's right, Alice!" Josiah sat down with an air of satisfaction. He was not indifferent to the sufferings of Maria, but of recent years she seemed to have developed a susceptibility to climatic conditions perhaps a little excessive for the wife of one who at heart was still a plain man. She had a proneness to whims and fancies now which in robuster days was lacking. He could only ascribe it to a kind of misplaced fineladyism, and he didn't quite approve it.

"I spoke pretty straight to the _Tribune_ ... to the subeditor. I said I hoped they fully realized their duty to the public and also to the Empire, but that I sometimes doubted it. He seemed a bit huffed, I thought ... but you'll see I'll be reported to-morrow all right. I'll look after your mistress, Alice. Go and get the coffee."

When Alice returned with the coffee she found the Mayor vigorously fanning the Mayoress with a table napkin, and she was peremptorily ordered "to nip upstairs for a bottle of sal volatile."

XXXIV

There was honest satisfaction in the town when it was known that the Mayor had consented to remain another year in office. Most people agreed that it was a good thing for Blackhampton. But the Mayoress took to her bed.

Could she have had her way she would never have got up again. For many years now life had been a nightmare of ever-growing duties, of ever-increasing responsibilities. Her conservative temperament resisted change. She had not wanted to leave the Duke of Wellington for the comparative luxury of Waterloo Villa, she had not wanted to leave Waterloo Villa for the defiant grandeur of Strathfieldsaye. When she was faced with a whole year as Mayoress she fully expected to die of it, and perhaps she would have died of it but for the oblique influence of Gertrude Preston; but now she was threatened with a further twelve months of the same embarrassing public grandeur she was compelled to review her attitude towards an early demise.

Maria knew that if she allowed her light to be put out Gerty had the makings of a highly qualified successor. No one was better at shaking hands with a grandee, no one had a happier knack of saying the right word at the right time; and neither the Mayor nor the Mayoress, particularly the latter, knew what they would have done without her. Gerty, in fact, had become a kind of unofficial standard bearer and henchwoman of a great man. Every piece of gossip she heard about him was faithfully reported, every paragraph that appeared in the paper was brought to his notice, she flattered him continually and made him out to be no end of a fellow; and in consequence poor Maria was bitten with such a furious jealousy that she would like to have killed her designing but indispensable step-sister.

When Maria took to her bed, the Mayor promptly requested the accomplished Gertrude to do what she could in the matter.

"Josiah, she must show Spirit." As always that was her specific for the hapless Maria, and at the request of his worship she went at once to the big bedroom, from whose large bay windows a truly noble view of the whole city and the open country beyond was to be obtained, and as Josiah himself expressed it, "proceeded to read the riot act to the Mayoress."

The Mayoress was in bed, therefore she had to take it lying down. For that matter it was her nature to take all things lying down. But in her heart she had never so deeply resented the obtrusion of Gerty as at this moment. She wanted never to get up any more, but if she didn't get up any more this meddlesome and dangerous rival would do as she liked with Josiah, and in all human probability as soon as the lawful Mayoress was decently and comfortably in her grave she would marry him.