“You will not! You’ll get out of this town and out of this borough.”
“If that’s the way you see it. I suppose with some help I could go elsewhere. I thought that’s what you wanted to see me about.”
“Oh, so you’ve come for money? What’s become of the money our Dad left you?”
“You’d never understand, Sam. Sometimes we play for pretty high stakes in the company I’ve been keeping.”
“Gambling?”
“Sam, if there’s gambling among the guests, there’ll be gambling among the servants. A matter of pride, almost, to keep up the tone of society. I’ve never been lucky with the cards or the dice.”
“And you expect me to bail you out, is it?”
“Now look, Sam; let’s drop all this Chapel talk and come to the horses. When our Dad died, you got the business, as well as half the money, isn’t it?”
“And I got the care, and I got our Mam – your Mam more than mine, look you – and I’ve had to graft hard to make what I have grow with the times.”
“Oh, we all know about that. Do you know, Sam, that they talk about you at the Castle? Listen – I’ve even heard his lordship himself say to an unlucky player, ‘Perhaps you could arrange a loan with our Mayor; he’s a very warm man.’ A joke, of course, but a joke with truth behind it. Everybody knows about you, and the railways, and the shops. You could buy and sell one or more of our county gentry, I dare say. So don’t come it over me about money. I’m prepared to listen to reason.”
“And what’s reason today, boyo? You’ve a plan, I can tell. Let’s stop all this foolery. What will you take to get out and never be seen here again?”
“Of course, I’ve been thinking of my future. Now, Sam, it would suit me very well to have a little public house. Lots of us, when we leave service, go into the public line.”
“A pub, is it? What pub? I can see in your eye that you have a pub in mind.”
“As luck has it, there’s a very nice pub down the road a few miles. Enough miles to suit you, I think. You’ve heard of The Aleppo Merchant, at Carno? It can be had.”
“The Aleppo Merchant? That’s no pub! That’s a country hotel, and quite a fancy one. And a fancy price, I’ll be bound.”
“It takes a few guests. For the fishing, you know. A very decent little place.”
“How much?”
“Ah, now we’re talking. The Aleppo Merchant, and a little over to settle some of my debts, and a trifle to see me set up there would run you – Oh, call it twenty-five hundred.”
“Twenty – five – hundred – pounds!”
“Better make it guineas, while you’re at it. When we play at the Castle, we always make it guineas.”
“That’s more than three times what you had from our Dad!”
“Money has lost value, as I’m sure you know. I’m being as conservative as I can.”
“Yes – Conservative – you rotten, evil Tory turncoat! Conservative is what you are – a Tory. Oh, if our Mam knew of this!”
“Don’t tell her, Sam. You’ve always taken very good care of our Mam, bless her old heart. I give you that.”
Samuel has turned grey in the face, for reasons he knows, but which are happily unknown to Thomas. Wearily – he puts it on a little, for he is a Welshman, and such domestic histrionics come readily to him – Samuel sits at the Mayor’s desk, and takes a cheque-book from a locked drawer, and in his careful, round, tradesman’s hand he draws a cheque, and tosses it across to his brother.
“Thanks, Sam. Good of you, I’m sure. I’ll draw this in the morning, if that’s convenient.”
It is convenient. Indeed, it is desirable. If the Mayor has to buy off his profligate brother, he has no insuperable objection to Trallwm knowing about it, and banks are leaky, however much they pretend otherwise. Trallwm will know that he has done the painful, but handsome, thing. It will do no harm whatever to his reputation. The story will have a slightly different colour than Samuel puts on it, for the bankers know – as Samuel does not – that Thomas has a very nice little nest-egg; his inheritance intact, and the avails of twenty years of bowing and keeping his mouth shut. These are cynical considerations, but very human, and I, the looker-on, understand them perfectly.
“Thanks, Sam. Done like a brother. And now – good friends, is it?”
Thomas has risen, and holds out his hand to the Mayor. The Mayor is reluctant to take it.
“You won’t let me go without a handshake, Sam. Blood’s thicker than water.”
Among the Welsh it certainly is. Thick as tar. Samuel grasps his brother’s hand, and it is from his eyes that the tears begin to flow.
Thomas carefully folds the cheque into his pocket-book and goes, with the soft tread of a footman.
(12)
THE MAYOR sits long at his table. He needs no Bible to fuel his reflections, for Holy Writ is deep in his flesh and bone. “The wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt.” Isaiah said it all. But did not John say: “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?”
A clincher, that one. Oh, hard – hard to be a Christian in such a puzzling world. For God, who made the world, and his Son, seem to have been at odds on many important points.
Samuel’s pride is that of a successful Radical politician, and a man of growing substance. He owns not only his profitable tailor’s shop, but a fine farm, called Gungrog Hall. It is not a “hall” in the sense that the homes of the county gentry are “halls,” but it is much above a tradesman’s residence, and he owns it outright; he is no man’s tenant. It is here that he indulges a lifelong interest in fine horses, which may also be fast horses, and a man who owns fast horses likes to see them win races.
Horse-racing, however, is for men whose knowledge and subtlety is of a different order from that of a successful tradesman, and Samuel has the tendency of wealthy men to think that he knows other men’s trades as well as he knows his own. Is a man who enters a fine horse in local races – sometimes as far distant as Shrewsbury – to refuse to back his own horse, and back it substantially? Betting is, of course, dead against Wesleyan principle, and Samuel is discreet in his betting, but bet he does, because he convinces himself that it is not gambling, but a particular sort of investment. And who is a better judge of a horse’s ability than the man who has bred it from excellent stock, and seen it trained by Jockey Jones, who is now in his employ?
Jockey Jones is not a Wesleyan. He is not anything of that sort. He was bred and his character was formed up a Trallwm shut, and his favourite place of resort is a local slum called, appropriately, Puzzle Square. Jockey Jones does very well out of the races by taking care that Samuel’s horses do not win, or win only enough to divert suspicion. So Samuel loses and loses, and in time Gungrog Hall is heavily and secretly mortgaged to discreet men in Shrewsbury, and Samuel turns too often to the Mansion House and to brandy and seltzer. His friends there know well enough that Jockey Jones is a scoundrel, but they have all the discretion – if that is what you like to call it – of the Welsh, and they say nothing to Samuel. Nor would he thank them if they did. So they whisper that the Mayor is getting into deep water.
Samuel is still a man of rectitude, and it is this which at last brings him down, and brings Gungrog Hall under the auctioneer’s hammer, along with the horses. It even endangers the tailor’s shop, but does not quite destroy it, because Samuel has been so long-headed as to make his older son, Walter, a partner with a half-share. But half a share in the tailor’s shop cannot save Samuel. The shadow darkens toward night when Samuel backs a note for a fellow deacon at the Chapel, one Llewellyn Thomas, a grocer and provisioner in a very large way. Much too large a way, it proves, for the note is a big one, and Llewellyn Thomas is saved from bankruptcy only by this act of trust and Samuel’s lifelong principle that a man must never turn his back on a friend. So the bankruptcy falls on Samuel, who meets the note without a whimper, and is ruined. Oh, Heraclitus;
and Oh, John Wesley!
(13)
BANKRUPTCY! The hobgoblin, the obliterating shadow of the commercial world of Samuel’s day! For in those days a man could be bankrupt but once; there were no second chances, no histories of repeated bankruptcies. It all happens within a few months. Samuel retires to a cramped life in the premises over the tailor’s shop, and the black day approaches when he must, in the local phrase, “go up the Town Hall steps” and be formally declared a bankrupt.
Of course desolation and want do not face him, for Walter would do whatever lay in his limited power to make his father’s final years as comfortable as possible. Samuel does not face life in the Forden Union Workhouse, the dreaded “workus” with which children and all improvident persons are threatened. But he has been a great man in his world, and now he faces disgrace deeper even than that brought on by Thomas.
Thus it is that he takes to his bed, and two days before he is to mount those dreadful steps to face his fellow magistrates, Samuel has a very quiet heart attack, and is found dead by his son. Dead of disgrace, which was, and still is, often a fatal misfortune. Fate has once again worked out her old, old plot, which is fresh and desolating to every new victim.
Fresh and desolating to me, too. Me, the patient looker-on. I weep, in my ghostly way, for Samuel, because he is my great-great-grandfather, of whom I knew nothing but his name, but whose dark red hair is mine also. It does not matter that he was really nobody very much – just a man who did well in a small, distant town that I have never seen, and met ruin because he was puffed up, and stupid, and loyal, and good, according to his lights; like me, I now understand. There is no such thing as a person who is “nobody very much.” Everybody is an agonist in one of Fate’s time-worn games on the earth, and winning or losing is not what it seems to be in the judgement of others, but as judged by the player himself.
So Samuel passes, leaving a mess behind him, and nobody to clear up the mess but his elder son Walter, who is not the man to do it.
I know something of Walter, for a passage of that Concurrent Action, of which this director seems fond, and which crowds so much I need to know into the screen in an astonishingly economical manner, has shown me his boyhood and young manhood, his downfall and his marriage.
(14)
WALTER WAS the clever boy, and David was the popular, merry boy. Walter was devout and studious and went away to a good boarding-school – not one of England’s great public schools, but a place devoted to the Welsh Wesleyan interest – where he won prize after prize, and showed uncommon promise in mathematics. He organized prayer meetings among the more devout boys, and was exemplary in his religious observance and his truly Wesleyan examination of his conscience. He was a stoutly built boy, whose uncommonly thick legs won him the nickname of Gate Posts. It was clear enough where Walter was going. Like all devout boys he had a spell of wanting to be a preacher, but he quickly put that aside and set his sights on the Civil Service. There is always a place in the Civil Service for a good mathematician, and Walter was also something of a linguist; he spoke Welsh and English from infancy, and to be born bilingual is a great start on Latin and Greek, which he absorbed almost without thinking. The Treasury, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, all seemed within his grasp, and when at last he won a scholarship to Oxford, the thing was virtually assured.
Fate sees it otherwise. Walter is just eighteen when his mother falls ill, and is about to die. She summons him to her bedside.
“Walter, dearest boy,” she says; “I want you to promise me never to leave your father. He needs you. He is not as strong a man as everybody thinks. And you know that David is a great disappointment. Your father needs a stout staff to lean on. Give me your promise, my dear.”
Walter kneels by the bed and gives his promise, for who can hesitate when a mother lies so near to death? And that, in a great many important ways, is the finish of Walter. He prays to be given the strength to do what he has promised, to be a staff and a strength, and within a fortnight his mother is dead.
Truly, David is a great disappointment. He has learned the fine points of the tailoring in London, and he is a good cutter, but he spoils a lot of fine cloth because he is never entirely sober. Samuel is sure that responsibility will quiet him, and he sets David up in his own tailoring shop in Machynlleth, where David becomes a great support to the local pubs. Yes, and even to the refreshment room at the local railway station, for in Wales there were no pubs open on Sunday, but a bona fide traveller could have a drink at the station. So I see David, a roly-poly red-headed rascal, lurking beside the railway track, an empty portmanteau in his hand, whenever the two Sunday trains are due at Machynlleth; as the train arrives, he runs down the track, climbs the barrier to the station area, and dashes into the refreshment room, as bona fide a traveller as ever was seen. Of course the girl at the counter knows him and knows what he is up to, but she is a large-hearted, understanding sort of girl, as barmaids often are. It is not long before the tailor’s shop closes its doors, and David returns to his father, a prodigal son, for whom Samuel prepares the thinnest and poorest of calves. More like a black sheep, say the Trallwm wags.
Of course that just man Samuel cannot give David his own shop and ignore the dutiful Walter, so he makes over a half-share in his Trallwm shop, which is henceforth Gilmartin and Son. But Walter is no tailor. He is dutiful, but his heart yearns toward the Treasury in London. When Samuel dies, a broken-hearted man, Walter has that part of the shop that the creditors do not devour, and the humiliation that comes with David.
David is shameless, as career-drunks often are, and on market days he is often to be seen in the street outside Gilmartin and Son, staggering among the horses and carriages as he shouts – “Look at him! Look at my brother Walter, who won’t give his only brother the price of a pint o’ beer! There’s a Christian for you!” The townsfolk turn away their eyes, and the gentry, in their carriages, are disgusted. Walter hides in the shop, in the workroom at the back, among the tailors who sit cross-legged on the “board” – the low platform on which they stitch, and iron garments on boards stretched across their knees. They do not look at Walter, but they hear David and, though they pity Walter, some mud sticks to him, as well.
(15)
WALTER’S LIFE is not all darkness. He is respected in the Chapel, and his marriage is his great strength.
He has married Janet Jenkins, a schoolmistress and the sister of John Jethro Jenkins, who is thereby Walter’s brother-in-law in double strength. Polly, Walter’s sister, has been finished, in so far as a girl of her station may be finished, at Dr. Williams’s school in Aberystwyth, and it is in that prosperous seaside town that she meets John Jethro, who is in a vague world called Import and Export, and marries him. He is sure to be a great man, for he is a scholar and a thinker, and an eloquent speaker in matters of Reform politics. John Jethro is not, however, a markedly practical man, or he would never have married Polly Gilmartin, whose sole recommendation as a wife is that she admires John Jethro extravagantly.
Janet is a bird of a wholly different feather. Not a richly coloured feather, but a glowing russet feather. She is a sufficiently good teacher, so far as she has anything to teach – reading, writing and some pretty music – but she is devout, cheerful, industrious, and she loves Walter with her whole excellent heart. Walter reciprocates, and it is their domesticity that makes it possible for him to endure the burdens of his life.
He is humble, but he cannot cringe. He is polite but he is not deferential. He hates what he has to do, because now the trade of Gilmartin and Son has shrunk until the greatest part of it is the making of liveries. As a livery-maker he has to visit the great country houses which are owned by members of the Reform Party, and measure the servants for the suits of clothes that are part of the emolument of their service.
These are not Castle liveries. No velvet coats for footmen with powdered hair, but smart outfits for men who wait at table, answer the door, and, most particularly, look after the fine horses
. The crested buttons, which are moulded in Shrewsbury, have to be ordered exactly to the last sleeve-button, because they are expensive, and a tailor must have a stock of them on hand at all times, but not too many. The butler’s striped silk waistcoat must not be striped in colours seen at any neighbouring hall. The liveries must fit, and the figures of fat coachmen, and grooms with bandy legs – for grooms are as bandy as the tailors who sit cross-legged all day on the board – and footmen who are of all shapes, but must be made to look as much alike as possible, call for the most careful measurement, and the servants can be sharp with the tailor who does not work this near miracle. So Walter must drive out to the great halls in his hired gig, and take what food is offered him in the servants’ hall, and kneel in the housekeeper’s room, measuring the arms and the inside legs, and the backs of servants who are often not very civil in the way they speak to him.
Walter regrets Oxford, regrets mathematical reckoning beyond the measuring of a footman’s leg from knee to crotch, regrets the Latin and Greek which have brought him, so it seems, to this. He never regrets the deathbed promise. Honour thy father and thy mother. Most particularly thy mother. And thy grandmother, for the old woman in Llanfair Caereinion must still be provided for, step-grandmother though she is.
Is Walter therefore a fool, I wonder? Has he not the spirit to throw up this whole miserable life and chance his luck elsewhere? But I know it is stupid to ask, for this is what has been and cannot be changed. Walter is a man of his time and a man of principle even when principle is odious. After a day among the footmen and grooms, who have a servant’s scorn for someone who serves them, there is always Janet, when he can turn the horse’s head toward home.
Of course they have children, four of them. The boys are Lancelot and Rhodri, the girls Elaine and Maude, and from these names I discern that Janet is of a romantic turn, and reads Ossian, and a modernized Malory, and especially Sir Walter Scott. She reads aloud to her children, even on Sundays, when Walter is engaged with that improving Methodist publication, The Leisure Hour. Without being aware of it, Janet gives her children’s minds a colour that persists even down to myself. Romantics all, without being fully aware of it.