They Come Back
Whittingham Street, N., had benefited by the war. The long vista of its windows flush with the pavement was decent with curtains of a cleanness unwonted before the cataclysm. There were strange dots of reflected sunlight from brass door-handles and knockers that were polished. These things were symbols of the newly realised importance of Whittingham Street’s inhabitants in the scheme of society, an importance which, swiftly translated into self-esteem, expressed itself with a uniformity natural to life in a mean street. That house was poor indeed which did not possess its gramophone. The womenfolk were curiously predominant to those who remembered the old-time loungers at the corner “pubs,” and that womenfolk, disdainful of the feathers of the long ago, was arrayed in startlingly smart, well-emphasized, cheap copies of the latest fashions, oddly incongruous with the tall, smoke-vomiting chimneys of Messrs. Hathaway’s great factory which closed the vista of the street. The sparseness of the men, immediately remarked, received a solemn significance from the flag-hung shrine on the wall of the Council School. The children who played in front of it—paper helmet, tin-can drum and wooden sword—were vividly cognizant that this was a time of War.
It was evening, and from the great gates of Messrs. Hathaway’s factory poured a ceaseless stream of women. But not this evening did that stream flow down the street with its usual swift and uninterrupted course. There were checks in it—obstacles of groups that talked excitedly and forgot to progress—while others in eager haste eddied round them. On the high wall by the gate, a bill-poster was covering a “War Savings” placard with another of different meaning. A black cloud of smoke drifted away from the tall chimneys and was not reinforced other than by faint and lessening wisps.
A young woman, one of those whose urgent haste trifled not with talk, hurried down the street, stopped before one of the neatest house-fronts, tremblingly thrust a key into the latch, opened and ran breathlessly upstairs.
A grey-haired old woman rose from a wooden chair by the side of a cradle in a clean and modestly furnished room. At the entrance of her daughter-in-law she laid a finger on her lips and looked warningly to the infant. Then remarking an obvious distress, she changed colour.
“What’s the matter, Ann?” she whispered, shaking with a sudden alarm. She had to steady herself by the support of the table. “Not—Jim?”
The young woman shook her head, controlled her panting breath.
“Hathaway’s!” she brought out. “Closing down!”
The elder stared speechlessly for a moment, then seated herself with that blank mute resignation of the aged poor, long disillusioned of any title to good fortune. The fingers of her unshapely hands twined and untwined themselves tensely in her lap.
“Don’t you hear, mother?” said the young woman irritably. “Hathaway’s are closing down!”
“Oh, dear!” the old woman raised a face that was strained with imminent tears. “I knew it ’ud never last—I knew it ’ud never last!”
“What we shall do, ’Eaven knows!” said Ann, viciously accenting the sole possible fount of knowledge. “They’re all closing down—all of ’em, all round!” Her gesture, as she unpinned her hat and put it, with an excess of energy, on the table, testified to the completeness of the closed horizon. She stood looking at the sleeping child, her brows bent, her mouth troubled. Then suddenly she flung herself on her knees and buried her head in the old woman’s lap, shaking with sobs.
“Oh, I did so want to keep it nice for Jim when ’e comes back! I did! I did! All we’ve got together. And now it’ll all go—bit by bit! And I’ve worked so ’ard—so very ’ard! An’ ’e’ll never see, never know ’ow nice it was! Oh—mother!” She could utter no more words, only inarticulate sounds.
The old woman soothed her, stroking her hair.
“There, dear! there, dear! Don’t take on! It’ll all come right. I can go out again an’ do a bit of cleanin’. I daresay Mrs. Smith’ll take me on again. I ain’t done no work for a long while—sitting ’ere eatin’ your bread—I’ve ’ad a nice rest, I ’ave—I’m quite strong again now. We’ll both get somethin’, you see, dear!”
The young woman raised herself.
“No!—No!—No!—You shan’t work any more!” She turned her head wearily. “I can’t make it out. What’s happening? Why are they all shutting down like this?”
The old woman looked at her stupidly. The remote causes which made or unmade her unimportant existence were beyond her comprehension.
“What’s that?” cried Ann, jumping to her feet. “What’s ’e calling?”
The raucous shout of a newsvendor floated up from the street. Ann listened for a moment—and then, after a hurried search for a halfpenny in her purse, dashed out of the door and down the stairs.
She reappeared after a bare minute, brandishing the newspaper, wild-eyed, panting.
“Mother! Mother!” She could not wait to enter the door before commencing her news. “It’s Peace! Peace!” She struggled with the unfolded paper, crushed it together again, searching eagerly for the magic headlines. “Here it is! Listen!” The old woman, equally all trembling eagerness, was standing at her side, pawing vaguely at the arm which held the newspaper. Ann read out the great news. “‘The wild rumours current during the past few days have received a startling confirmation. It is announced that an armistice has been signed on all the fronts. This undoubtedly means a general Peace. The end of the war has come.’ Mother! it’s all over! it’s all over—and Jim’ll be coming back! Oh, I can’t ’ardly believe it! It’s all over! Oh, thank God—thank God!”
“All over! My Jim! Safe and sound! Oh,” the old woman commenced that sniffling weep common to the aged and the young. “I can’t ’elp it, Ann—I can’t ’elp it!—I must cry!”
Ann dashed down the newspaper and flung her arms round the old woman in a close embrace. “Mother! Mother! I never was so”—and here a sob checked her speech also—“so ’appy in my life!” Face against face, the tears of the two women mingled—tears not of grief but of emotion for which there was no expression. Somewhere down the street church bells were ringing in joyous peal on peal. It might have been merely a coincidence of practice, but to the two women whose simple souls beat close together, in a swoon of intense feeling that obliterated the sharp outlines of environment, this happy rioting of the bells seemed a holy blessing on the moment.
“Oh, Ann dear, Ann dear,” said the old woman, looking up. “What a thanksgiving it’ll be for all the poor anxious women!”
“Oh, we’re very lucky—we’re very lucky. Jim’ll be coming back. Think of it, mother!”
They kissed one another as if each were kissing the man who would come back as son and husband.
“We’ve got to keep it for ’im,” said Ann. “All the little ’ome. An’ ’e’ll soon be back to work for us an’ the baby, an’ we shan’t never be parted any more! Oh, mother, think of the poor women who won’t ’ave no one to come back to ’em! When they see ’em marching by! Oh—we’re lucky, we’re very lucky!”
The old woman stood staring out of the window in vague thought, her eye caught by the vivid red of the flags on the War Shrine.
“It’ll be a different world, Ann, when they all come back,” she said. “Them what ’ave been left be’ind all through will find lots missing what they look for. And them what come back won’t come back the same. It’ll never be the same again, any of it; let’s ’ope it’ll be better.”
They were coming back. The Mother-City of the Empire woke, silent of traffic, decked for a day that knew no sufficient parallel, the day when the thousands of her sons—those who had gone in their ones and twos, their single battalions—should march back from vast adventure in the full majesty of their corporate soldier-life. The London Divisions were coming back from the War, were marching for the last time at full strength. And the London streets were tunnels of gay flags, walled with black masses of citizens kept clear from the sanded roadways. From every steeple the bells tossed out their exuberant rejoicing. In every breast of the millions there congregated was a surge of emotion that exhaled in one sustained murmur of the gladness for which there are no words but which fills the eyes and chokes the throat.
They were coming! The thrilling blare of instruments of brass; the heart-stirring tap and roll and beat of the drums; the intoxicating rhythmic swinging lilt and crash; the brave gay runs of melody, sublimely simple, that bring the tears; the solid, even tramp of thousands who march as one—and the leading files were passing in a storm of cheers, a madness of waving hands. For the last time they passed shoulder to shoulder in the familiar ranks, marching as they had marched for all the years of exile, marching as they had marched down the fatal roads to Loos and Gommecourt, Guillemont and all those rubble heaps where the bravest and the dearest of the greatest city of the world died for the fragment of a village and for England. Rifles at the slope, bare bayonets asserting the ancient privileges that they had won, O so dearly, the right to flaunt, the heavy weather-stained pack on the sturdy shoulders, the steel helmets awry with the tilt of long-familiar use, the brown strong faces gleaming with their smiles—so they marched, not any more under the thunder of the guns, but in a frenzy of voices where the madly rioting bells were lost.
Battalion by battalion—all the glorious names, London’s own—the London Scottish, first in the fray in the long ago, the Queen’s Westminsters, the Kensingtons, the London Rifle Brigade, the H.A.C., the numberless battalions of the London Regiment—they came, each with its aura of the deathless dead. They came from the interminable purgatory of the endless trenches, terminated at last, from the unimaginable inferno of Hill 60, from the hopeless dying of May the Ninth, from the fierce hopes, the bitter strife of Loos, from the massacre of Gommecourt and the bloody fights of Guillemont, of Vimy Ridge, of Messines, of a thousand places that were humble and are henceforth names of splendour. Miraculously strong, happy, pregnant with vivid life they emerged from that distant whelm of peril. And the eyes that had looked so long at death in the bare fields pocked hideously with the disease of war, looked up now at the ranked tall buildings, so familiar and yet so strange, so impressively permanent after timeless æons of destruction. Behind those windows—could it be?—they had sat at desk through months and years. Between them and that past was a curtain of fire, of emotions that had transformed, of the intensity of life which has persisted in the face of death. And rank by rank, battalion after battalion, swinging with powerful stride, they marched back into the past that had seemed for ever gone.
And those who watched the level ranks flowing in their endless stream, cheering with throats now incapable of aught but the inarticulate cry, perceiving them mistily through a blur of tears, saw more than the men who marched, treading once again the asphalt of the London streets. They saw the ghosts of ranks, doubling—more than doubling—the ranks of living men, the ghosts of those who had looked as these looked, brown-faced, strong-limbed, the incarnation of living will, and were now no more than the wind blowing over the desolate countrysides where they had ceased to be. Yet were they present, the men who had died that England might live. The stir of their souls was in the skirling pipes, the wail and feverish beat of the fifes and drums, the maddening purposeful blare and thud of the brass bands. They looked out of the eyes of those who marched—the soul unconquerable, the living spirit of the English race. And a divine afflatus swept over the waving, cheering crowds, swept them to a wilder intoxication. One, whose faculty of speech was not yet overwhelmed, cried: “Three cheers for the boys who are left behind! Hurrah! Hurrah!——” and could not finish. And a woman who stood, tensely pallid, staring at the so-familiar badges of the troops who passed, stared at utter strangeness, and fell as dead.
The next battalion followed on, singing, carrying on a tune caught up far back along the route, the farewell song of Kitchener’s Army of 1915, sung now as an instinctive antistrophe to that old chorale when they had marched to war:
“Keep the home fires burning,
While your hearts are yearning,
Though your lads are far away, they dream of home,
There’s a silver lining
Through the dark cloud shining,
Turn your dark clouds inside out
Till the boys come home.”
They passed in a roar of voices that drowned the band.
So the long, long columns of the London Divisions tramped through the heart of the Mother-City, under the fluttering of countless flags, under the surge and resurge of joy-bells from every steeple, under great banners that proclaimed the gratitude of the city. Rank after rank they lifted their eyes to the laurel-green inscription that spanned the street at Temple Bar: “Shall We Forget?—Never!”
Rank by rank they passed under the promise—the thousands of men welded in the fires of war to a wondrous miracle of collective soul—passed onward for the last time as one living unit, ere they should lay down their arms, fall out—and disperse, individuals that were fragments of a sacred memory, the shreds of a battle-flag distributed.
Sir Thomas Jackson Hathaway, Kt., Alderman of the City of London, looked along the masculine faces, spaced with the interstices of the departed ladies, of the little dinner-party of intimate friends, and then again to the brown keen visage of his son. He pushed along the decanter—he was old-fashioned and made a virtue of it—“Fill up, Harry, my boy—I’ve been looking after the cellar while you’ve been away—there’s more of it.” He laughed a little at the mirth of his implied suggestion that there might possibly be a shortage in the cellars of Sir Thomas Hathaway. And his guests laughed a little in courtesy.
“We’ve kept the flag flying here also, my boy,” said the big, heavily jovial host, puffing hugely at his cigar and then taking it from his mouth to examine it with a superfluously critical eye. “You’ll find things as well—better, than when you left. You don’t mind, gentlemen, this little talk of shop? After all, we’re all friends together, and most of us have some small interest in the little business, ha! ha!” The guests were, in fact, Sir Thomas Hathaway’s co-directors in the large enterprises he controlled. He continued: “Better I may say, for we have been very conservative—we’ve looked to the younger generation away fighting our battles for us—and we’ve built up a reserve fund that a few years ago we shouldn’t have dreamed of. You’ve come back to a first-class concern, Harry, my boy. Here’s to it!” He raised and drained his glass, setting a followed example to his guests.
Captain Hathaway had been toying with a match on the tablecloth. He looked up—quiet and thoughtful, his face clean-cut and aristocratic by contrast with the heavy opulence of his sire.
“You don’t anticipate Labour trouble, then, father?”
Sir Thomas Hathaway laughed, a guffaw, and crashed his hand on the table.
“Labour troubles, my boy! You need have no fear on that score. We’re going to teach Labour a lesson. We haven’t built up our reserve for nothing.—not only ourselves, but all the houses in the trade. For long enough we’ve been dictated to by Labour—and now, by God, we’re going to crush it! Do you know what’s coming, my boy? Have you thought about it? There’s going to be the biggest flood of Labour chucked on the market that the world has ever known. All of ’em fightin’—fightin’ for jobs! And the trade, Harry, my boy, is going to lock out! We’re closed down now, and we shan’t open again till our own good time. How long d’you think the Union funds’ll last? We’ll bust ’em—bust ’em for ever and a day. And when we open our shops again to Labour—it’ll be on our own terms! Here, fill up, gentlemen, I can vouch for this wine—cost me a sinful price it did. We’ll bust ’em, my lad, so that never again in our time shall we hear a word of Labour trouble.” He gulped the glassful of his sinfully costly wine.
Captain Hathaway glanced round the table at the somewhat flushed, semi-senile features of his father’s guests and partners. They were one and all nodding their heads in varying emphasis of approbation. He got up.
“Well, father, I don’t think we’ll discuss it now. Suppose we join the ladies?”
In the high drawing-room, softly lit with diffused radiance from the ceiling, draped with precious modern hangings that were genuine and spaced out with expensive antique paintings that were not, furnished with the luxury of a wealth too utterly complete in its overwhelming newness to allow imagination its leap across an artistic restraint, the ladies purred, or cooed in careful falsetto, as they awaited the entrance of the males. At a grand piano, slightly removed, a young woman with a delicately refined face played softly to herself—in a quiet ecstasy of gladness for which this was the only satisfying expression.
Captain Hathaway, entering with his father’s guests, came straight across to her, and she looked up, smiling, into her husband’s face as though he had come in response to a murmured summoning spell. She ceased and leaned back her head against him as he stood close behind her.
“Oh, Harry,” she said, “it’s so lovely to have you again—for always, always!” Her eyes half closed and her bosom heaved as she drank in an intoxicating realization of his definite return, sketched to herself a delicious little swoon.
“My dear!” he murmured. “It’s good! Home—home for always with my beloved!”
She clutched at his hand, and for a moment, while the loud-voiced crowd vanished, they were secret lovers, snatched up to dizzy heights, intensely thrilling with an exquisite community, eyes looking into eyes and seeing more than human brain can translate of transcendent vision. She released him and bowed forward suddenly with a little gulp, striking, with trembling hands, vague chords on the piano.
“Now, Ethel, my dear,” came the crass boom of her father-in-law’s voice, “when you’ve finished your spooning, let’s have something jolly. What about that bit out of ‘Not a Word to the Wife!’ Tra-la-la-la-la!” He sketched a hideous caricature of blatant banality. “We’re all jolly to-night—none of your mooning sentiment, but jolly. Eh, ladies and gentlemen?—properly jolly for Harry’s first night back.”
Ethel got up from the piano, coupling an allegation of another’s superior capacity with an invitation to perform, an invitation smirkingly accepted.
The slangy crash and bang alternating with hyper-emphasized sentimentality of the current tune was a cover under which Ethel Hathaway retreated to happy intimacy with her husband. Not for long was she allowed it. The very-consciously best-looking of the co-directors’ wives sidled up and subsided into the adjacent chair. She yearned up into Captain Hathaway’s face, while she cooed deprecation of her intrusion to his wife.
“But I do so want to hear how Captain Hathaway earned his Military Cross! Of course, I read all about it in the papers—but then—they’re so bald, aren’t they? One misses, what shall I say?—the human touch of heroism.”
Mrs. Hathaway caught her husband’s eye and forbade the instant flight.
“Tell Mrs. Jameson all about it, Harry,” she commanded coolly. There was something in the tone which rendered Mrs. Jameson’s extorted confidence quite worthless.
“There’s little to tell,” said Captain Hathaway. “The fellow who really earned anything there was to get—and, I’m glad to say, got the D.C.M.—was one of my men, a chap named Jim Swain. He used to be in our employment, Ethel, by the way. It was a pretty tight corner and I got practically left alone—all the other fellows knocked out—and this chap Swain came up with a bag of bombs—jolly plucky thing, for there didn’t seem a dog’s chance—and we chucked the bombs at the Hun till he didn’t dare raise his head. After a bit, some of another company came up and we consolidated that bit of trench. That’s all there was to it.”
“Oh, how splendid!” Mrs. Jameson enthused vaguely. “Leadership is everything, isn’t it?”
“When you’ve got something to lead, Mrs. Jameson. One couldn’t have better stuff than my men—they’re magnificent. They’re the nation—and now they’re coming back they’ve got to be treated like the men they are and not like soulless machinery.” He wound up on a note of fierce protest against something not obvious to his hearers.
“Now, Harry,” said his wife, “don’t inflict your theories on Mrs. Jameson. We both of us positively refuse to be sympathetic with the working class, don’t we, Mrs. Jameson?” She laughed lightly. “The working class is just as selfish as any other.”
A wave of collective chatter from an approaching group engulfed this conversation.
Late that night Sir Thomas Hathaway sat alone with his son.
“Now, Harry, my lad,” he said. “You’re going to take Ethel away for a three months’ holiday. You’ve jolly well earned it, both of you. And, when you come back, you’ll be head of Hathaway and Company. I’ve done my bit and I’m going to rest. My interest in the business is now being transferred into your name. That’s my little present to you, my boy, by way of showing that I’m proud of you. And I know that you’ll keep up the fine old traditions of the house, eh?”
The curtains had disappeared from the windows of Whittingham Street. The brass of the doors had lost its polish. The women who had tripped along in an earnest display of finery were replaced by blowsy unkempt females who stood at the doors and gossiped. Once more the corners emphasized by the sordid public-houses were the idling-ground of groups of men, more numerous, shabbier even than of old. But these men had not the shiftless look of their predecessors. In their faces, thin and white, was a hardness which was odd in an urban population. In the eyes which followed the progress of a stranger up the street was a dangerous glare. The flags of the War Shrine had disappeared; its gilt-inscribed panel was dingy and splashed with mud. At the far end of the street the great chimneys of Hathaway’s works stuck up, clean of smoke, into a clear sky. The massive entrance gates were a closed wall across the vista.
In the little room to which Jim Swain had returned—after the days unnumbered of life in the open trenches, wet dykes in the winter, and in summer dusty sunken avenues where death struck suddenly in the glare; after the countless nights of clear stars rising to a wondrous infinity of multitude and distance above the dark bank of parapet—Ann bent over a soap-box cradle where a child whimpered in faint misery. The room was utterly bare of any furniture save the poor substitutes of a number of packing-cases of various sizes. The little home which Jim had established, which Ann had worked so passionately to improve, was a home no longer. It was merely a squalid shelter for squalid human animals.
Ann, on her knees by the child, looked up to the three figures in the centre of the room, her attention suddenly challenged by the clash of angry voices.
A tall man, fierce, with a shock of untidy hair falling on a narrow brow, a vivid red tie overwhelming the soft collar which kept it in place, was pointing a quivering finger at her husband’s breast.
“You call yourself the leader of these men,” he was saying, in a rage of scorn, “and you flaunt that scrap of coloured rag—you advertise your pride that you helped the bourgeois to fight his war! Take it off, man—fling it down and trample on it! The red on it is the blood of your fellow-workers!”
“Aye, that’s just what it is, Laurence,” said the ex-soldier with equal anger. “And I am proud of it. I’m proud that I did my bit for England—for England’s ours, too, as well as the capitalists’, and the war was our war, the war of the crowd of us—and we went out and risked our lives while you and your cowardly kind stayed at home and helped the enemy all you could. That’s your patriotism! And now to hear you talk one would think England was an enemy country! I tell you it’s our country as much as anybody’s and our war that we fought for it! The red on this medal ribbon is the red of the blood of the chaps that died for it if you like—and I’m mighty proud to wear it. And, by God, Laurence, while I’m the leader of these poor chaps I won’t have any traitor talk—is that clear?”
“Your country!” the other laughed bitterly. “What right have you got to a ha’porth of it?—you, who are being chucked out into the street—you, who haven’t even the right to demand work and earn your bread! Bah! Militarism has rotted the soul of you!”
“It taught me to know a true man when I see him, anyway, Laurence—and you’re none o’ that kind! You, poisoning the minds of starving men——”
“And who keeps ’em starving? Who prevents ’em from helping themselves in the nearest baker’s shop——”
“Now, lads—now, lads!” intervened the third man, a thick-set fellow in black coat and turned-up trousers over yellow boots. A smug self-confidence was native to his podgy countenance, was the complement of the cunning, scheming eyes. “There’s no use quarrelling. What we’ve got to do is to ’elp each other—we working-men. The Union’s bust, Jim, an’ that’s the fact of it—an’ if Mr. Laurence’s organization ’ere can’t give us a ’and—well, I don’t know what’ll happen. This last trick of ‘Athaway’s, chucking the whole street out o’ doors, fairly puts the lid on it!”
There was silence in the room and Jim glanced round at the haggard visage of his wife, bending, with tears on her cheeks, over the whimpering child.
“Yes, look!” said the tall man. “That’s what you fought for, my lad!”
Jim did not reply. He pressed his hand to his brow as though his brain reeled. The Trade Union leader tried to profit by his silence.
“We’re properly up against it—there’s no dodging it. Mind you, Jim, I think there’s a lot of reason in what Mr. Laurence says.”
Ann stood up quickly and faced her husband.
“Jim!” she said, and her voice was firm though her chest heaved with weakness. “You’ll do what’s right—whatever ’appens!”
Laurence spoke again.
“We’re perfectly ready to help—but this is the last time of offering. You know the terms. You’re responsible for a good many hundreds of starving families, Swain—they mayn’t listen to you much longer, don’t forget——”
He was interrupted by fierce shouts in the street below, the reiterated blasts of a motor-horn, the crash of broken glass, a whir of machinery and yet fiercer shouts. All three rushed to the window. Below them a motor-car was stationary in the midst of a surging mob. The chauffeur lay senseless amid the debris of a shattered wind-screen. In the rear seat a youngish man was defending himself vigorously against the rain of blows showered on him by the mob which clambered on to the vehicle.
“My God! Captain Hathaway!” Even as Jim shouted he had turned to dash down the stairs.
He flung himself into the fierce mob as once before he had rushed at the knot of Germans with bombs poised to throw, his captain an imminent victim. Old instincts surged to supremacy—he fought his way blindly to the car in a blur of blows. A second later he had dragged a dazed man into the entrance of the house, had slammed the door.
“Come on, sir—come upstairs and sit down.” Jim forgot for the moment the wretched room to which he invited him. He was living in a memory of the trench days where he had sometimes dreamed that his beloved captain might on some incredible occasion sit at tea with them in a nice little home and tell Ann that her husband had been a good soldier. Half supporting him, he pushed him into the apartment, pulled a box out for him to sit on.
“Here you are, sir. Take it easy for a minute. You’ll soon be all right.”
Captain Hathaway put his hand to a damp forehead, looked stupidly at the blood on it, and then, still dazed, stared at his rescuer.
“What?—Swain?” He smiled faintly. “For the second time, eh?”
“Yes, sir—I’m glad to say!”
The tall man picked up his soft hat, glaring from Jim to the employer he had rescued.
“Come on, Bruxby,” he said, in a voice quivering with anger. “There’s nothing more for us here—the man’s a d—d scab!”
Jim listened to the heavy feet of the pair of them tramping down the staircase.
Captain Hathaway looked around him, then took a deep breath and stood up.
“I’m all right again now. It’s all come back to me. Swain,” he put his hand on the man’s shoulder, “will you believe me when I say I quite understand—and that’s it a shame, a d—d shame! I’ve been away. I couldn’t do anything till now.” He looked at the woman by the cradle, held out his hand. “This is Mrs. Swain?” She stood staring at him, making no responsive movement. “Look here, I want to help—here”—his hand dived into his pocket, fished up a bundle of notes—“why, you’re starving, woman!” He thrust them into her hand and she let them fall on the floor.
“I want work, Captain Hathaway—not charity,” said Ann, shaking with temptation resisted.
The ex-officer turned to his man.
“Swain,” he said. “I haven’t been blind to all this—but, believe me, I couldn’t do anything till now. I want to talk to you. Will you listen to me?”
It was some time later when Captain Hathaway (who had already seen his chauffeur into a police ambulance while Jim harangued the crowd into sullenness) drove his car down to the great gates of Hathaway’s works. Jim Swain, the men’s leader, sat by his side.
In the long boardroom, with its thick Turkey carpet, its heavy mahogany furniture, its framed photographs of former directors, the controllers of Hathaway’s and its linked houses sat already at the council-table. The air was heavy with cigar smoke when Captain Hathaway entered.
“Sorry I’m late, gentlemen—no,—a little accident—I’m quite all right—nothing at all serious,” so he responded to the queries evoked by his cut forehead as he sat down.
His father rose, pompous, full-cheeked, settling his pince-nez with one hand, while he gathered together a little sheaf of papers with the other.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “to-day I have to communicate to you officially what I think all of you know privately—a communication which (hem!) marks another epoch in the successful history of the house of Hathaway. I have transferred to my son, Captain Hathaway—who has not unsuccessfully graduated in the stern business of war—(Hear, hear!)—my controlling interest in all the enterprises of which hitherto I have been the head. I propose—and I believe you will second me in this—that Captain Hathaway be duly elected to the board as managing director.” (It would have been difficult for the audience to have disputed this had they wished. There was a unanimous “Hear, hear!”) Sir Thomas Hathaway passed a bulky envelope across to his son. “Here, Harry, I give you all the deeds of transfer, duly executed and dated as from yesterday. You are now the head of Hathaway and Company!” There was a faint sketch of a cheer from the fat old gentlemen round the table.
“Now, gentlemen,” continued the retiring chief, “before I sit down, I should like to give you some account of my stewardship. I think we all of us perceived in the circumstances of the present time an opportunity to settle, once and for all, our score with Labour. That opportunity has not been neglected. All the factories controlled by us, in agreement with the other houses in the trade—which have most loyally backed our action—have been shut down. The date of their reopening has not yet been decided upon, but I may tell you this, gentlemen, the Trade Union with which we have had so much trouble in the past is bankrupt. We are entitled to industrial peace, on our own terms—but the terms which we have offered, and which were not ungenerous in the circumstances after safeguarding our interests, have been stubbornly rejected by the men’s leader—the man Swain. This left us no alternative but to put on the screw—and we have replied by serving notices of ejection on all those of our ex-employees who are behindhand in their rent. I think you will agree with me that in this we have the fullest justice on our side! (Hear, hear!) And now, gentlemen, I retire from my managing directorship and make way for my son, in the fullest confidence that he will maintain and extend the great and honourable traditions of this business.”
Captain Hathaway stood up. His face was strangely pale and set.
“Gentlemen, you have listened to my father’s remarks. They represent accurately the theory of our past relationship between ourselves and our employees. (Hear, hear!) But, gentlemen, I want to bring home to you that it is a theory quite impossible to maintain at the present day! In accepting the leadership of this house, I am fully conscious of my responsibilities—responsibilities not only to you who have financial interests in the business, but to those who live by the employment we offer them and to the State which makes it possible for them to work and for ourselves to derive profit from that work. From this day, gentlemen, and for so long as I am head of this firm, our relations with our employees are on a different basis. The factories will reopen to-morrow—at the old Trade Union rates, excepting where the new rates I have offered to the men are more remunerative to them. The policy of the firm is reversed!”
Captain Hathaway, in all his experience of war, had never felt the need of all his courage so much as in making this announcement—which, to himself, sounded brutally bald.
One of the directors rose, banging nervously upon the table with his fist, and shaking with rage.
“By God!” he said, “I never thought Tom Hathaway’s boy would be a traitor!”
Sir Thomas Hathaway half rose, and sat down again—looking as though he were going to faint.
Another of the directors stood up.
“Has our new managing director any other harmless little proposals to make?” he asked, in bitter sarcasm.
“Yes,” replied Captain Hathaway, “I propose to take powers to create a new Deferred Stock which will rank for dividend after the Ordinary Stock has received eight per cent, but which will in all circumstances carry a right to vote on the board—and this stock will be vested in the representatives of our employees, chosen by them.”
“It will never be agreed to by the men!” cried a voice.
“It is agreed to already by the men’s representatives,” replied the new chief, feeling the coolness of courage return to him as once when he had faced the mob of Germans.
The wealthiest of the directors, a man associated with other houses in the trade, rose in his turn.
“I warn you, Hathaway, that I shall dispose of my interests in this business—and I’m going to fight you to the last shilling! You’ll be broke in a year!” “All of us! All of us!” came a chorus of approval. “We’ll all fight! This is sheer madness!”
“Fight, if you will, gentlemen,” said Hathaway calmly. “It won’t pay you. I haven’t been idle these three months. I may tell you that I have contracts in my pocket that will keep us going for many months to come—more than a year. The whole world is shrieking for goods, and Germany is supplying them—capturing your markets while you commit suicide in trying to get the better of Labour. In these last months I have established agents all over the world—and I’ve got the orders! I know what the other houses have got—I know what’s open to you—you can’t fight us!—but you’ll be taken over by the Government if your obstinacy continues this unworthy industrial strife.”
There was a silence of vague-headed, angry old men who did not quite know what to say.
“And now, gentlemen,” continued Hathaway. “Let me plead for a better spirit. That great mass of human beings you coldly call Labour fought for England just as I fought for England, just as thousands and thousands of our own class fought. We’ve been together in the trenches year in year out and we’ve learnt to know each other, not as hostile abstractions, but as living men,—good men, the most of us. We learnt all sorts of things we didn’t realize before the war, but most of all we learnt—and when I say we, I mean your sons as well—that we’re all Englishmen and that we all have to play the game and stick together—officer and man. D’you think I who have watched over the comfort of my men, taught them, led them into danger and seen them unafraid, who have hungered with them, thirsted with them, gloried in them for these last long years—d’you think I can coldly condemn those men and their wives and children to starvation now? D’you think I can treat them as an enemy? I can’t. And the men who have been proud of us, their officers,—d’you think they haven’t learnt the value of leadership? They have—but not the leadership of a slave-master. In the long bitter years of strife those men have won for themselves a freedom of soul which is the life-force of a free Empire! Class-hatred! It has vanished as between officer and man. We’re all Englishmen together—and we’re going to work, share and share alike, in the new England, that, share and share alike, we fought for!” He flung open the door behind him. “Here, gentlemen, is Jim Swain, the leader of your work-people in their time of trouble. He saved my life twice—once in the trenches and got a D.C.M. when he ought to have had the V.C.—and again to-day when he set a seal of comradeship between the managing director and the employees of Hathaway’s. Together, he and I, and those we represent, are going to make our patch of England worth the lives that were spent to save it!”
There was a hush in the room, and into that hush came the strains of a military band playing a regiment to the neighbouring railway station. It played the familiar marching tune of the old days, and a flaw of wind brought masculine voices in the uplift of the chorus.
“... There’s a silver lining
Through the dark clouds shining,
Turn the dark cloud inside out,
For the boys are home!”
“They’re coming back!” cried Captain Hathaway. “Coming back in their thousands and their millions—officers and men—your sons at the head of the men they have learned to love! Comrades that can never be estranged! We’re the new generation, gentlemen—the old order has gone—never to return—we’ve come back, Swain and I, from the borders of death that has taught us how precious life may be.”
The heads, bald and florid, of that obese elder generation turned in a community of curious interest, to gaze at Swain—the man who had nerved his fellows to withstand an economic pressure they had thought irresistible and was now hailed as comrade by their own young chief.
The ex-soldier took a step forward.
“I should just like to say this, sirs—we men know what it is to have good officers—and we’ve never let ’em down. We’ve come back, officers and men, and officers like Captain Hathaway will always find their men work for them as they used to fight—for officers like him make us feel the Old Country is worth working for as it was worth fighting for. We’ve learnt to play the game—and we’ll play it so long as we have fair play. The British soldier has learnt to die rather than surrender—and the British soldier is just the British working-man.”