And your world falls apart,
Do not pity yourself, I implore you.
No, up with your chin,
Meet bad luck with a grin,
And try this infallible trick:
It never will fail you,
Whatever may ail you –
DO SOMETHING FOR SOMEBODY QUICK!
OH –
Do something for somebody quick,
It will banish your cares in a tick
Don’t fret about you
There’s a Good Deed to do –
DO SOMETHING FOR SOMEBODY QUICK!
Janet pounds the galumphing, two-four tune out of the senile Broadwood, bobbing her head and smiling as she sings, a pattern of Methodist goodness. And she practises the lesson she teaches. She thinks as little of self as a human creature can do – which, as everything has to be seen from the watch-tower of self, and as every action is a demonstration of self, is not as great a victory as the dear soul hopes it is.
Oh, if only John Jethro were not a man of such determined spirit and firm opinions! He attends the Wesleyan Chapel, of course, for everyone must go somewhere on a Sunday, but he goes in a contumacious spirit. He sits in the Gilmartin pew with folded arms and a look of bottled-up contradiction on his face. It is clear that he disagrees with everything the minister is saying, and can face him down with information out of the advanced books he reads. The story of the Creation is all nonsense; Darwin has put paid to that. When Moses saw the Burning Bush any jackass knows that what Moses saw was an oil-gusher on fire, and what he heard came straight out of Moses’ Tory head. How can sensible people in the last decade of the nineteenth century believe such stuff?
When a powerful evangelist – none other than the redoubtable Gipsy Smith – comes to the Chapel to preach a series of week-night sermons to strengthen the faith of the already faithful, John Jethro causes a scandal. On the last night of his mission the evangelist urges all those who feel themselves to be Saved to stand, and there is a rush and a rustle as everybody stands, and many sob in the joy of their zeal. But John Jethro remains seated as if he were a figure moulded in lead. His sister and his wife tremble for him. Polly, unwieldy as she now is, is nevertheless on her feet, weeping for her uncontrite husband. Afterward, at a light supper above the tailor’s shop, he explains his position. How can a man be saved who has no intimation that he has ever been lost? Is he not a portion of the grand process of Evolution, which wastes nothing? If there is a God, Darwin has given Him a new meaning. He refuses to run with the crowd, has no wish to give offence, but cannot submit to manifest nonsense. God does not wish John Jethro Jenkins to be saved, but to be expended to the uttermost of his possibilities.
Walter secretly half agrees with him, but he has stood up among the saved because he is a man of peace, and hates rows. Walter’s God is still the merciful God of John Wesley, about whom wrangles like this are needless and unseemly. Walter’s God is the God of a man who, without knowing it, is a Romantic.
(19)
WALTER’S ROMANTICISM expresses itself in politics. He is a determined, but not an obstreperous or contentious, Liberal and his god on this earth is Mr. Gladstone. A portrait of Gladstone hangs in the little sitting-room on the wall beside the engraving of John Wesley that has come down in the family from Wesley Gilmartin, once the pot-boy of the inn at Dinas Mawddwy. An election is near, and Walter longs with his whole soul to see the return of Stuart Rendel, the Liberal candidate who contests the seat against the candidate of the powerful, ancient and formidable Williams-Wynn family. John Jethro, of course, is on every platform that will accept him, to speak in the Liberal cause. But he is too vehement, too rancorous, and is almost a liability to his party. It is Walter who takes determined action.
He has a cousin – in what degree it is difficult to say, but within the nine degrees – who is what is called at the time a colourman. That is to say, he deals in paints, which he mixes himself and applies wherever they are wanted with assurances that they will last a lifetime. To this cousin, Ned Thomas, Walter confides his great scheme, and Ned is delighted to assist, for it is directly in his line of work. Thus, after they have all seen their families to bed and said evening prayers in the manner of the time, with Tom Evans, another cousin, Walter and his cronies creep out into the darkness of a Sunday night, and work a transformation in Trallwm. They wear old clothes, and have blackened their faces with soot. With the hardest-drying red paint that Ned Thomas can mix, they paint “Vote for Rendel” on every pavement in the town in gigantic letters.
On Monday morning – a fair-day when the town will be full – there is outrage in every Tory heart. Nothing has been painted on any private wall or building, so nobody has a clear cause for action, but the principal Justice of the Peace hastily assembles four trustworthy citizens to decide what must be done. One of these pillars of society is Walter Gilmartin, and he agrees with the magistrate and the others that this is a very serious matter indeed. An outrage, in fact. His indignation, as might be expected from Walter, is tempered with practicality, and it is his suggestion that a group of out-of-work men be assembled and outfitted with brushes and solvent (vinegar is the best they can think of) to cleanse the streets. And so it is. But Ned Thomas’s paint is not to be scrubbed away, and all that market-day the sweating scrubbers scrub, and Tory partisans urge them to scrub harder, until the whole town reeks of vinegar, and by afternoon the whole town is dissolved in laughter. A novelty has crept into the solemn business of politics and it finds a welcome. Someone has shown ingenuity and spirit. The impertinent message will not yield, and when voting-day comes Stuart Rendel is elected by a margin which is rather less than 250 votes, but a margin nevertheless, and Castle influence, and Williams-Wynn influence, has been shaken once again.
Nobody ever discovers who the culprits were, and it is not until long after the Gilmartin family has removed to Canada that Walter ever confesses to his sons that he was at the root of the great scandal. Even Janet does not know, for it is not the sort of thing one tells a woman. Twenty years later, when Trallwm has long been a Liberal borough, traces of red paint may still be seen on some of the quieter streets.
(20)
WHY DID THE Gilmartins emigrate to Canada? It is John Jethro Jenkins who goes first. He needs to go to those coalfields in which he has sunk quite a lot of other people’s money, to find out why nothing is happening there. He never reaches them, but go to Canada he does, and discovers a new land in which his rhetorical powers and his unquenchable optimism are badly needed. For a time – it is merely to fill in while he looks about him – he accepts (as he puts it) a minor post in a lawyer’s office, and is so delighted by all the prospects that lie before him that at last he sends for Polly and the six children and somehow Walter finds the money for their passage, in the humblest accommodation any ship affords. It is not a lot of money, for the children travel at a very low price and the littlest ones travel free, but it is not easily found among the profits of the failing tailor’s shop.
Failing it is, and Walter knows it, but what is he to do? It is not that business is bad; it is much as it has long been. It is payment that is bad, for the depression does not lift, and money is very slow. Even the county families, which have always paid up about once a year, are now forgetful, and Walter hates to dun them. It seems such an ugly thing to do. That he, a stalwart of the Liberal cause, should send dunning letters to highly respected landowners of the Liberal persuasion is something that goes painfully against the grain with him. That he, who knows Latin and Greek and does mathematical puzzles as a recreation, should come down to such a pass is more than he can stomach.
Meanwhile until the blessed day when John Jethro sends for them, there are the Jenkinses. “The Jenkins tribe,” as Rhodri calls them, and is rebuked by Lance. While John Jethro is looking about him in the new land the Jenkinses are still in Walter’s house, where Polly regards herself as a guest; she suckles little Eden, the baby, and, as she says, it takes a lot out of her. She reads novels
of an improving sort and The Leisure Hour, while Janet and Liz Duckett do all that is necessary for thirteen people. Of course the Gilmartin girls help as much as they can, but they are schoolgirls, and have work of their own.
As for Rhodri, he enjoys all the delights of boyhood. Mr. Timothy Hiles has now sold his school to Mr. Anthony Jones, M.A., and Tony Jones is chiefly interested in playing the flute and dreaming of Miss Guenevere Gwilt, a local beauty who will have a very respectable inheritance when she marries. To delight Miss Gwilt – and other guests, of course – Tony gets up tableaux at Christmas, in which Rhodri figures as Queen Elizabeth the First and, with his red hair, augmented by a few “switches” and “fronts,” is thought to be an amazing reincarnation of the great queen. Education is gnawed by the death-watch beetle of aestheticism under the rule of Tony Jones.
Walter does not complain. His hopes are set on his older son, Lancelot, who is doing great things at Walter’s old school and, though it costs him more than he can afford, Walter is determined that Lancelot shall not miss his chance in life, as he did. Lancelot shall figure brilliantly in the examination results and shall go to a university. No deathbed promise shall ruin him, as it has ruined Walter. Already, as a schoolboy, Lance is developing the remote politeness, the immovability, and the gooseberry eye of the Civil Servant.
Can it be managed? Walter’s situation is becoming desperate. The domestic hullabaloo attendant on the birth of little Eden has told heavily upon him. Polly, a natural mother, is certainly not a compliant one, and her labour is long and clamorous, and is followed by a number of disobliging circumstances; teetotal as she is, she must have porter – the best – to get her milk going, taking it strictly as medicine, with much protestation; she must have quiet in the house, and Elaine and Maude and Rhodri must be sent to Cousin Gringley’s for a fortnight, where they speculate ignorantly about what awful goings-on are attendant on the birth of a child; Polly’s appetite, always hearty, must nevertheless be “tempted” with dainties from the butcher and the pastrycook. Polly is what anthropologists might call an earth-mother, and so far as she can manage it, the whole earth comes under her domination when she adds to its population. And somehow it all costs more money than anyone might suppose.
Janet knows that things are bad, but not how very bad, and she prays that Walter may yet get his head above water. Polly reads aloud the exuberant letters that John Jethro sends every week from Canada. Letters written small, and then “crossed” in the economical style of the day, so that they are to be read only with difficulty. In every one of them John Jethro urges Walter to bring his family to Canada. There is a temporary lull, it seems, in the need for coal, but time will take care of that; other opportunities abound and a man of Walter’s abilities will find his feet in a fortnight, and prosper greatly.
Is the fine, winey air of Canada working with deceptive charm on John Jethro’s affected lungs? He grows lyrical as he writes of the new land.
(21)
NOT WITHOUT effect. Walter sees, as he puts it to himself, the handwriting on the wall. The biblical phrase is not comforting. MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN: Thou art weighed in the balance and art found wanting. Yes, indeed: wanting several hundred utterly unobtainable pounds. God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. This, it appears, is God’s reward for a man who has been faithful to a promise given to his dying mother. We must not dispute His will. Thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians. Certainly this will be so very soon, for the Medes and the Persians of Trallwm, themselves hard-pressed for money, will force the action that will get them at least some of what is owing to them. In short, bankruptcy impends. After that disgrace, repeating and compounding the disgrace of Samuel, might the new land offer something of balm for a hurt man?
Walter confides in Janet, and as always she is hopeful.
“Oh, my dear, if Canada does little for us, it might be a wonderful place of opportunity for the boys,” she says, as they lie in their cramped bed above the shop.
For the boys, of course. I know that it is not the fashion of these Victorians to trouble too much about the fate of the girls. Elaine and Maude will do what all good girls do; they will marry good men, like Walter, and live happily, even if in pinched circumstances, forever after.
The parents suppose that their secret is inviolable, but they have reckoned without Rhodri, who is already, at the age of fourteen, long-headed as his father has never been. Rhodri knows that his father has already made the first moves toward that awful journey up the Town Hall steps, and has declared whatever he has that may go to his creditors. Innocent Walter, honest Walter, thinks it must be every penny, the uttermost farthing. But not Rhodri, and he goes to work as soon as the declaration has been made. He knows it has been done, for the boys who go to school with him have heard it spoken of by their parents. The bankruptcy will not come like a bolt of lightning. Walter is too well respected, and his fellow-townsmen are too compassionate, to move rapidly.
That is why Rhodri absents himself from Tony Jones’s slack-twisted school on market-days, and darts to and fro among the crowds, confronting farmers who owe for two, four, and even six suits of clothes, saying, “Excuse me Mr. Thomas (Mr. Jones, Mr. Williams, Mr. Griffiths, or whoever it may be), Mr. Walter Gilmartin would like a word with you, sir, before evening, if it’s convenient.” And the debtors, knowing very well what is in the wind, quite often do have that word with Mr. Walter Gilmartin, and pay something, though never all, of what they owe. They are not treacherous or defaulting men, though they are close with money, when they have it.
“Rhodri, I will not have this. It’s not honest and you know it’s not honest. I can’t explain why – not just at present – but in time you will learn that all my money, wherever it comes from, must be put into a certain fund. I am not in a position to collect debts at present. You disgrace me by what you are doing.”
“Pater, it’s the law, and if the law thinks it’s honest, why invent scruples? Anything you can get now doesn’t have to go into that fund you speak of. It’s yours fair and square. Do be prudent, Pater, and don’t think you have to go farther than the law insists.”
The truth of the matter is never admitted between them, and Walter reluctantly acts on the advice of his long-headed son, though nothing in the world would make him say so. Advice goes down the generations, not backward from son to father.
So, at last, there is a little money, and places for Lance and Rhodri are taken in the steerage of a ship bound from Liverpool to Montreal. Walter, and Janet, and the girls, will follow later, when they can. The money, when it is all in, will just get the Gilmartin family to Canada after the hateful disgrace that follows mounting the Town Hall steps. That day has been set, and nothing can change it.
Godliness begets Industry: Industry begets Wealth. But how – by Who’s doing – does bankruptcy come into the story? Perhaps Heraclitus might have had something to say about that.
(22)
I LAST SEE the boys on the deck of the S.S. Vancouver. It is the least amount of deck made available to any passengers aboard ship, because it is for steerage passengers. Lance is looking pale and the cold eyes of the embryo Civil Servant are moist.
“I say, Lance, have you got yours safe?”
“Have I got my what, safe?”
“Your fiver. You know, the money. The Mater sewed it into your coat, didn’t she?”
“I’m going to have to use some of it. Sixpence, I expect. Everything on these boats is expensive. But I’ve got to have some ginger ale. I don’t feel at all well.”
“Oh, buck up. Think about Canada.”
“What can I think? I don’t know anything about Canada.”
“Well think of that poster at the station. You know, the one with the huge man in smart breeches looking out over a field of wheat.”
“I don’t remember it.”
“You must. You couldn’t forget it. Huge field. Bigger than the whole of the Home Farm at the Castle. Just one field. That’s Ca
nada. It’ll be ripping, you’ll see.”
IV
The Master Builder
AM I AT LAST catching the drift of this film festival which seems to be devised entirely for me? Am I stupid not to have understood that, whatever Allard Going may see and write about for The Colonial Advocate, I am seeing something wholly personal? Unless I am entirely out of my mind, this is something which sets before me the core of my ancestral experience, captured, as a film captures experience, in a narrative that is coherent as what we call real life can never be. But why? Is this what happens to people when they are dead? I cannot tell. I only know that it is happening to me, and the Gages and the red-haired Gilmartins, whom I had known only as names and whom I had dismissed as long dead, seem to have life; and indeed seem to have done much that I may be proud of – I, who had never thought about ancestors, or expected to be proud of ancestors, while I was living.
This morning, therefore, on the third day of the Festival, I am a lively spirit as I find my way to the cinema that has been reserved for these old films, these jewels from the history of that art which is so much of our time and so generally taken for granted, and so roundly trounced by intellectuals like Going because it does not adopt the wholly serious line he would decree for it if it lay in his power. Going is deeply suspicious of popular entertainment. He wants it to be – no, not educational, and certainly not uplifting, but what he calls “significant,” by which he means full of dainties for such rare souls as himself. What is Going to see this morning?
Apparently it is a real gem, rescued from oblivion by some Norwegian archivist. It is to be a film version of Ibsen’s The Master Builder, made in 1939 by the playwright’s grandson Tancred, and thought to have been lost in the Hitler War and at last seeing the light. I look forward to it, for the play was a favourite of mine when I was able to have favourite plays, and I am thrilled when the first moments of Bygmester Solness flash on the screen, and translations in messy white type appear at the bottom of the pictures. But of course I am not to see it, except in occasional stolen glances, and these become less frequent as I am caught up in the film which is only for me, which is also called The Master Builder, in which the actors – if they are actors – speak in English.