James Hilton: Collected Novels (30 page)

George, reflecting what he
had
seen—the blitz raid on Mulcaster, for instance—hardly thought he would call it reason. But why argue with an old fellow who looked as if only his illusions could nourish him precariously for a few more years at most?

Wetherall went on: “Just as well I’ve kept you out of Parliament till you’ve grown sensible, George. You’ll not do so bad when your time comes.”

“Why…what…what, makes you say that?”

“George, you old twister, don’t pretend it never entered your mind before! Listen—and this
is
in confidence—I probably won’t stand at the next election. God knows when that’ll be—after the war or after I kick the bucket, whichever comes first. But I’m telling you this so you’ll be ready.”

George was suddenly aware of the peculiar truth that it
hadn’t
been on his mind, not for quite a time, and that it revisited him now as an almost strange idea, with all kinds of new angles and aspects to be considered. He said, sincerely enough: “I’m sorry you’re thinking of giving up, Sam. Over twenty years for the same constituency must be pretty near the record…”

“Yes, and it’s meant a lot of hard work, one way and another, but I don’t grudge anything I’ve done for the town, any more than you do, George. After all, it’s Browdley that made me what I am.”

George thought that was very possible.

“So when they sent me to Parliament I made up my mind I’d do the best I could for them.”

George thought that was very possible also, since during the entire period of his membership of the House, Wetherall had made only two speeches. One was about the local sewage scheme, which George had persuaded him to be for; the other was against the revision of the Anglican Prayer Book, which nothing could persuade him to be anything but against.

George said cheerfully: “Well, Sam—don’t give up yet. And I wish you’d try to fix things with the Ministry about our Children’s Home. We ought to get an extra grant for that, what with all the kids from the bombed areas we’ve taken in…”

Sometimes the cheerfulness sagged a little and George saw the future in a hard bleak flash of momentary disillusionment; but even then he was prone to diagnose his mood as due to overwork, and therefore not to be taken too seriously. The cure was usually a good night’s sleep or a chat with Wendover. The priest’s help was all the more tonic because of the fixity of their disagreements, and also because (as George once laughingly confessed) he was far too modest to suppose that he could exercise any influence in reverse; but Wendover, with equal banter, wouldn’t even concede that this was modesty. “It’s your instinct for self-preservation, George. We authoritarians keep you going. How would you know your opinions were free unless you had ours to attack?…But I’ll suggest this—that before the century ends, it may not be freedom that the world values, so much as order. Order out of chaos. A new world, George, with an old discipline.”

“Aye, but suppose that road leads to Moscow, not to Rome—what would you chaps do then?”

“I should follow my Church, of course. But why assume that the two roads are ultimately so far apart? One thing I
do
know—that if the Church so decided, it would be very easy for a Catholic to change his mind about Communism, just as Moscow could doubtless make terms with Rome for as good a reason as Constantine ever had…And what a tremendous bond that is in a chaotic world—two major disciplined forces that know their own power to enforce a decision!”

“You’ve forgotten the Standard Oil Company. That makes three.”

“Let’s say, then, forces that can command not only obedience, but willing sacrifice.”

“Which lets in Hitler. He could command all that at first. But in the end he was defeated by free men.”

“Only when they themselves learned to organize, obey, and sacrifice. And as soon as they forget that lesson there’ll be other Hitlers.”

“Aye, and as soon as we forget we’re free we’ll have Hitlers in our own ranks.”

“There’s danger in whatever we do, George…But don’t misunderstand me…I’m not pleading a cause.”

“Well, I
am
—and millions are fighting for it too! Today’s my future—like theirs—and what happens by the end of the century doesn’t give us much comfort—”

“Nor me either. It’s merely that I’m content to let wiser men shape events that can’t yet be properly foreseen. Whereas you have to settle the whole destiny of mankind here and now to satisfy an itching conscience. Quite a handicap!”

“I’d do better if I didn’t think for myself, is that what you mean? Maybe I would—depends on who did the thinking for me. But I want to
choose
who…see? And that’s democracy—even for a little fellow.”

“You’re not a little fellow, George. You’re a very shrewd dictator who made up his mind years ago to have his own way in Browdley—and you
have
had it, against a big majority who’ve been either against your ideas or indifferent to them—and the methods by which you’ve succeeded have been slyness, smartness, blarney, importunity, intrigue, compromise, a certain amount of downright trickery, and a vast amount of personal charm! But you prefer to call it democracy!”

By the time they reached that kind of point in argument George was usually in a good humor and his normal cheerfulness renewed.

He never realized the majestic and in some ways rather terrifying alchemy of English life so much as when he attended official conferences in London. He had been attending them for years, until now they were something rather like routine, but he always remembered his first one—when, as a young man just elected to the Browdley Council, he had been sent as its delegate to a consultation with high officials of one of the Whitehall ministries. Because the government in power was of the opposite political party to his own he had expected to be frostily received and was full of carefully rehearsed truculence that evaporated at the first calm, polite, and curiously impersonal meeting with people whom he had thought of as his enemies. But it had left him baffled afterwards. “Talk about raising the standard of revolution!” he had reported, when he got back to Browdley. “It was hard enough to make anyone raise a couple of eyebrows!” Was it possible that London did not know what a potentially dangerous man he was? Or did not care? Or both knew and cared, yet was imbued with some classic spirit that would only return cool civility for warm antagonism? After he had attended half a dozen more such conferences, George’s bafflement lessened, not because he had entirely solved the problem, but because he had come to terms with it; it was as peculiar, yet could seem as normal, as the normally peculiar smell of the London tubes.

By now, of course, he was not baffled at all. Whenever he visited the ministries on business he met important men who knew him, who called him George, who took him to lunch and kidded him good-humoredly about his being teetotal.

The war years had only continued, with some intensification, the natural process of all the years; and when, as sometimes happened, George spent half a day at the House of Commons, he found himself surrounded by a platoon of ex-firebrands who held official positions. “Too bad you aren’t here, George,” he had often been told. “You’d have been at least an undersecretary by now.”

“But then I wouldn’t have been Mayor of Browdley,” answered George, seeking to console himself from force of habit, yet no longer really needing to. He liked London; but to be a stranger to it, even a familiar stranger, kept him alive to that same majestic and rather terrifying alchemy of English life, as slow and sure and relentless almost as the grinding of the mills of God.

That it had helped to save England after Dunkirk and during the blitz autumn of 1940, George thought very probable.

For then its virtue had shown like good bones under the flesh—especially its abiding combination of firmness and benignity, so that the same machine of government could jail a baronet for a rationing offense and organize the distribution to small children of Mickey Mouse gas masks. Nothing was too small, and no one too great, to be beyond the range of that cool-headed but never cold-hearted survey. And George, administering Browdley, had tried to generate something of that dual mood in microcosm.

And yet…whenever he went to London he felt the strength of Browdley in him, rebelling against certain things.

One morning, walking briskly along Whitehall after a meeting with officials, George ran into a man named Sprigge whom he had first met years before on the Terrace of the House of Commons. George was pleased to be remembered, and willingly accepted the other’s invitation to have lunch at a near-by club. They talked about the war and politics; Sprigge said that since their previous meeting he had lived a good deal in China and the Malay States, getting out just in time after Pearl Harbor. It was natural then for George to ask, with an air of casualness, if he had ever come across the Winslows.

“You mean Jeff Winslow, brother of Lord Winslow?”

“Aye, that’s him.”

“Knew him well, my dear chap. Often dined at his house. Good parties he used to give—not so starchy as the really official ones, because, as he used to say, he wasn’t really official. You see, he was attached to the Sultan of Somewhere-or-other, and that made a difference. The lady next to you at dinner might be an Italian spy or an Egyptian princess or a Japanese snake-charmer—used to be fun finding out…Was he a friend of yours—Winslow?”

George answered: “Not—er—exactly, but I knew his father slightly—and I’ve also met his son.”

“And as a result of that you’re sort of interested in the middleman, eh?”

“That’s it,” George agreed. And then, to steer the conversation very gently: “I remember his father expected so much of his career.”

“Well, he was a brilliant fellow—no doubt about that.” Sprigge paused, then added: “Wasted, though, the way things turned out.”

“Wasted?”

“Perhaps that’s too strong a word. But he’d have done well in the regular Diplomatic if he’d stayed in it…and also if…well, anyhow, perhaps it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t. Not
altogether
his fault.”

George said nothing.

“Of course I’m only repeating things I’ve heard—but there was said to have been some scandal about his wife—an earlier divorce or something. And then other matters…later…well, one shouldn’t gossip.”

“Did you meet the boy?”

Sprigge shook his head. “He was at school in England. I suppose he’s of age now to be in the fighting somewhere.”

“Aye,” said George thoughtfully. He would have liked Sprigge to go on chattering, but just then a fellow club member said “hello” in passing and Sprigge insisted on making an introduction—Henry Millbay, the name was, which to George seemed familiar though he could not exactly place it. Millbay shook hands, declined a drink, and regarded George with a certain friendly shrewdness while, to restart the conversation, Sprigge went on: “We were just talking about Jeff Winslow—the one who was in Malaya…Boswell knows the family…Ever meet him out there, Millbay?”

Millbay shook his head, and the subject was dropped.

Half an hour later, after talk that would have been more agreeable had he not been thinking of other things all the time, George remembered an appointment and took his leave; but in the club lobby, as he was retrieving his hat and coat, Millbay overtook him. “I’m a busy man too,” he commented, with just the slightest derogatory implication that Sprigge was less so. “Wonder if we’re going in the same direction?”

They found they were not; nevertheless Millbay kept George chatting for several minutes on the pavement outside. Presently he said: “I didn’t want to talk much in front of Sprigge, who’s the biggest male gossip in London, but he said you knew the Winslows—Jeff Winslow…”

“I didn’t actually know
him,
” George answered.

Millbay’s glance quickened. “Oh, you mean you knew
her
?”

George experienced again, and for the first time in years, that old sensation of a fist grasping his insides. “Aye, but a long while ago.”

“Rather remarkable woman.”

“Aye.”

“She’s just home from a Jap prison camp in Hong Kong. I saw her the other day.” Something in George’s face made Millbay add: “Part of my job, you know, to interview repatriates. The idea is to get information about the enemy. They all knew plenty, but it was mostly horrors…Of course
her
story was particularly interesting to me because I’d known her and her husband before the war…Remarkable woman.”

“Aye.”

“Even if I hadn’t known that already I’d have thought so after interviewing some of the other women. They said she looked after English and American children in the prison camp. Seems to have been so bloody fearless that even the Japs let her have her own way as often as not. Anyhow, she got the kids extra food and medicines when nobody else could.”

“What about her husband?”

“She didn’t know. Nobody knows. After the first few months the Japs took to separating the men from the women and shipped the men to another camp—some said in Japan itself. Incidentally, she needn’t have been interned in the first place—there was a chance for some of the women to get away, but she insisted on staying with Jeff. At the Foreign Office we’re still pressing inquiries about him, but so far without luck, and it’s hard to be optimistic.”

George then asked, so softly that he had to repeat the question: “Do you know anything about the boy?”

“He was in the R.A.F. and got smashed in one of the Berlin raids. I think he’s discharged now, and up at Cambridge. The mother’s staying at the family place in the country.” Millbay paused as if to give George time to realize where the conversation stood again, but George, though realizing it, said nothing. Presently Millbay smiled and added: “I’ve told you a lot—now you tell me something. What do you think of her?”

“Of…
her
?”

“Yes. Of Livia Winslow.”

The utterance of the name made George stammer: “I—I thought she was what you called her—
remarkable.
”

“Did you know her at all well?”

“Aye, pretty well…but years ago, as I said.”

“Then maybe you can answer one specific question: was she—er—when you knew her—politically—er—reliable?”