Philip’s “first real letter,” so he called it, came on the day of Mr. Sempack’s departure for England. There had been an “arrived safe” telegram from London and a pencil scrawl of affectionate “rubbidge” so he put it, with various endearments and secret and particular names, that he had posted in Paris. That was just carrying on. But this she felt was something momentous. It came while she was resting on her bed, through sheer laziness, and she felt its importance so much that for a time she could not open it. It was a fat letter, a full letter, it was over the two ounces, fivepence ha’penny worth of letter, and inside there was going to be something — something she had never had before — Philip mentally, all out, according to his promise. She was going to learn fresh and important things about him. She was going to scrutinise his mental quality as she had never done before.
What sort of a letter was it going to be? She had a shadow of fear in her mind. Things said can be forgotten. Or you recall the manner and edit and rearrange the not too happy words. Things written hammer at the eye and repeat themselves inexorably. Written clumsiness becomes monstrous clumsy. So far she had never had anything more from Philip than a note. His notes were good, queer in their phrasing but with an odd way of conveying tenderness. . . . Philip would be Philip. She took courage and tore open the distended envelope.
She found half a dozen fascicles each pinned together. It was neither like a letter nor like a proper manuscript, but it was like Philip. The paper was of various sorts, some of it from their house in South Street, some from the Reform Club, some from Brooks’ and some ruled foolscap of unknown origin carefully torn into half-sheets so as to pack comfortably with the spread out notepaper. Somewhere he had got hold of a blue pencil and numbered the fascicles with large numbers, one, two, three and so forth, emphasised by a circle. The fascicle numbered one, was
“General Instructions for a little Cynner to read these Lubrications.”
Lucubrations?
Then this touching design and appeal:
Be merciful
“My dearest Cynthia, wife,” it went on, “I find it pretty hard to set down all my impressions of things here. Which is all the more reason I suppose why I should begin to set down my impressions. It’s hard to make it go, one, two, three, and away. I just can’t make the stuff I have to tell you flow off my pen as trained chaps like old Sempack seem able to do. Whatever he has to say seems to begin at one place and go right through to an end, missing nothing by the way. I’ve been reading in some of his books. In fact I’ve been reading him no end. People talk about ‘writing’ and I’ve always thought before it meant purple patches and lovely words, but this sort of thing also is writing; driving ten topics in a team together — and getting somewhere, getting through doors and narrow places and home to where you want to go. I seem to begin at half a dozen places and it is only after a time that one finds that this joins up with that. I’ve made half a dozen starts and here most of them are.
“This is a sort of student’s notebook. I’ve helped it out with diagrams and here and there pictures seem to have got themselves in when I wasn’t looking. But it is a multiplex affair here. Here in England I mean — not in this letter. An imbrolio. It isn’t a straight story. You take Part numbered Two and then Three and so on in the order of the numbers, and I think at the end you’ll get the hang of what I’m thinking all right. Forgive some of the spelling, and all the heavy lumpish way of putting things. If I do much of this sort of thing I shall have to take lessons from Sempack and Bertrand Russell, how to be clear if complex. As you said, we’ve got to know each other — even if it hurts. So I’ve done my best. I don’t think I’ve struck any attitudes.
“If you despise me over this stuff — well, it had to be. Better than not knowing each other. Better than that. Truly. Dear Cynthia, my Friend. All you said to me about being truly near, mind more than body, went to my heart. Both.”
That was the substance of Part One. Followed a sort of index and a few remarks about each part, that were simply preparatory matter. Rather businesslike preparatory matter. He must have written that index after all the rest was done.
She held Part One in her hand and thought for some moments. Queer! This wasn’t her Philip; the Philip she had known for a wonderful year. But it was not inharmonious with her Philip. It was an extension of him, the wider Philip. It was at once a little strange and more intimate. It was very honest; that was the first thing about it. And it had a quality of strength. It was extraordinary that a man who had been as close to her as he had been, with such warmth and laughter and delight, should still betray so plainly a maidenly bashfulness over the nakedness of his prose and the poverty of his spelling. Bodies one can strip in half a minute. Now — and he knew it — he was revealing his mind.
And then the drawing. She had never suspected him of skill, but there was skill in the way he got what he wanted to express over to her. The figure of himself, a little oafish and anxious. And herself. He didn’t spare her littleness. And yet plainly he couldn’t draw — as she judged drawing. There were several other drawings. . . .
She glanced at Part Three. But these looked more like the figures one scribbles on blotting paper. Perhaps it would be plainer when she came to them in order.
She took up Part Two which was entitled:
“General Observations on the General Strike.
“Firstly, I am disposed to call this General Strike the Silliest Thing in the History of England. I don’t know whether I would stick to that. What old Muzzleton used to get red in the nose working us up about, what he used to call ‘Our Island Story,’ is full of dam silly things. But this is a monstrous dam silly affair, my Cynthia. It is a tangle of false issues from beginning to end. So silly one can’t take sides. One is left gibbering helplessly as the silly affair unrolls itself.
“Imagine a procession of armoured cars and tanks going through the dear old East End of London to protect vans of food-stuffs nobody has the least idea of touching. After the strikers have guaranteed a food supply! A sort of Lord Mayor’s day crowd of sightseers and chaps like old Bullace in tin helmets — you know, helmets against shrapnel!! stern and solum. If presently they began to throw pots of shrapnel out of the East End top windows, old Bullace’s little bit of brains will be as safe as safe.
“Then imagine a labour movement which imagines it is appealling to the general public against the goverment. Which nevertheless has called out all the printers and stopped the newspapers! As the goverment has seized its own one paper, I mean the labour paper, and monopolises, the goverment does, the wireless, the labour movement is making its appeal inaudibly. As a consequence that side of the dispute has become almost invisible. You see police and soldiers and all that, but all you see or hear of the strike side is that it isn’t there. The engineers and the railway men and the printers aren’t there. Just a bit of speaking at a corner or a handbill put in your hand. Pickets lurking. A gap. Silence.”
Mrs. Rylands pulled up abruptly, went back from the beginning of the next sentence, scrutinised a word. It was “goverment.” And down the sheet and over, she found it repeated. And what did it matter if he did take the “n” out of government, so long as his head was clear?
“The strike stopped all the buses, trams, trains, etc., etc. The streets are full morning and evening of a quite cheerful (so far) crowd of clerks, shop people and suchlike walking to business or walking home, getting casual pick-ups from passing motor cars. General disposition to treat it as a lark. Thanks chiefly to the weather. Most buses are off the streets. Some are being run by volunteers and they go anyhow, anywhere and anybody rides. They get their windows broken a bit and there is often a bobby by the driver. Some have wire over their windows and one or two I saw with a motor car full of special constables going in front of them. Convoy. There is a story of some being burnt but I can’t find out if that is true. The voice of the gearbox is heard in the land and the young gentlemen volunteers don’t bother much about collecting fares. For some unknown reason most of them have come to the job in plus fours. Pirate buses having the time of their lives. Disposition of crowds to collect at central positions and stand about and stare. Police and soldiers in quantity lurking darkly up back streets, ready aye ready for trouble that never comes, and feeling I think rather fools. They seem uneasy when you go and look at them. What are they all waiting for? They’ve sworn-in quantities of special constables and I’ve had a row with Uncle Robert on that score, because I won’t be sworn-in and set an example. All his men-servants have been sworn-in and are on the streets with armlets and truncheons. The specials just walk about, trying to avoid being followed by little boys; harmless earnest middle-class chaps they are for the most part.
“As might be expected Winston has gone clean off his head. He hasn’t been as happy since he crawled on his belly and helped snipe in Sidney Street. Whatever anyone else may think, Winston believes he is fighting a tremendous revolution and holding it down, fist and jaw. He careers about staring, inactive, gaping, crowded London, looking for barricades. I wish I could throw one for him.”
In the margin Mr. Philip had eked out his prose with a second illustration.
Winston doing Everything
“The goverment has taken over the Morning Post office and machinery and made Winston edit a sort of emergency goverment rag called the British Gazette. Baldwin’s idea seems to be to get the little devil as far away from machine guns as possible and keep him busy. Considerable task. His paper is the most lop-sided rag you ever. It would be a disgrace to any goverment. The first number is all for the suppression of Trade unions, a most desperate attempt to provoke them to the fighting pitch.
“I met Mornington at the Club; he is mixed up with the Morning Post somehow and he says the office is simply congested with young Tories who have fancied themselves as writers for years. For them it’s perfect Heaven. They’ve collared most of the Morning Post paper; they are grabbing all The Times paper pro bono Winstono. The Times still puts out a little sheet but they say it will have to stop in a week or ten days — in favour of Winston’s splutter. That seems to me nearly the maddest thing of all. The Labour people have had their own Daily Herald suppressed. Instead they are trying and failing to go a peg below Winston with a sort of bulletin newsheet called the British Worker. But Winston has a scheme for stealing their paper supply, raiding their office and breaking them up in the name of the British Constitution. Like undergraduates at election time. Isn’t it all bottomlessly silly? Most of the papers seem to be handing out something, a half-sheet or suchlike just to say ‘Jack’s alive,’ and you happen upon it and buy it by chance. Fellows try and sell you typewritten stuff with the latest from the broadcasting for sixpence or a shilling, and here and there you see bulletins stuck up outside churches and town halls. In the west end they display Winston’s British Gazette in the smart shop windows. I suppose their plate glass insurance covers risks like that. But perhaps they realise there isn’t much risk.
“I just go along the streets talking to people in the character of an intelligent young man from New Zealand. I say I don’t rightly understand what the strike is about and ask them to explain. I get a different story each time. ’Who is striking?’ ‘Oh!’ they say, ‘It’s a general strike!’ ‘Are you?’ I ask. ‘No fear!’ Some of them say it is in sympathy with the miners. But they never know the rights and wrongs about the miners. Very few of them know if the miners have struck or whether it is a lock-out. They don’t know which is the pig-headest, the miners or the mine-owners, and yet you’d think they would be curious about that. And the whole country is disorganised, no papers, no trains, no trams, and, this morning, no taxis. Post offices are still going on, but the labour people talk of bringing out what they call their second line. That will stop letters, telegrams, gas and electric light and power, it seems. If the second line really comes out — which Hind says is rather doubtful. So if I am swallowed up by silence all of a sudden you will know it is the second line you have to blame. Unless Winston happens to have got hold of a machine gun and shot me suddenly in the back.
“But I don’t think that will happen while he has ink and paper. Don’t you worry about that.
“Well, there’s some features of this General Strike. Not a bit like a revolution. Far more as if a new sort of day not quite a weekday and not quite a Good Friday had happened. I don’t know whether what I have told you will make any sort of picture for you. There are foreign reporters in London and probably you will get it in the French papers or the Paris edition of the New York Herald. The essence of it is, miners locked out, transport workers of all sorts striking, printers striking, Winston probably certifiable but no doctors can get near him to do it, soldiers and police going about with loaded guns looking for a Revolution that isn’t there, Jix inciting the police to be violent at the least provocation, and the general public, like me, agape. All London agape. And over it all this for a Prime Minister —
Trusty old Baldwin keeps on doing nuffin
“Here endeth Part Two.”
The third fascicle was headed:
“What Labour thinks it is doing.
“Here, my dear Cynthia, I am going to set down what I can make out of how this strike came about. It is a queer history, but you can check it back and fill it out in details by the newspaper files I marked for you before I left Casa Terragena. This muddle has been tangling itself up for years. These are matter the Rylands family, branch as well as root (which is for current purposes Uncle Robert) ought to have some ideas about.
“After the war, you must understand, to go back to beginnings, Great Britain had a boom time for coal. It had a little boom in 1919. Then there was dislocation and trouble turning on de-control after the war and bringing men back from the army, problems of men taken on and so on. There was a Royal Commission and a very startling report called the Sankey Report, pointing out how wastefully British coal was won and proposing ‘Nationalisation,’ and that was followed by a strike — I think the year after. But it was possible to fix fairly good wages for the men just then. All Europe wanted coal, the French coal regions were all devastated area and Poincaré danced into the Ruhr and put that supply out of gear too. English coal prices mounted, wages mounted, we got in thousands of fresh miners from the agricultural workers over and above the war drift to the mines. There was a time when coal stood at ￡4 a ton. I mean we were selling it at that. Not for long of course. Even when it fell back below 40/- it was still a big price for us. Exports rose to huge figures. The miners and the coal-owners purred together and nobody bothered about Sankey and nationalisation. Say the top of ‘23.
“Then we deflated the pound, and also continental coal-winning began to recover.
“By 1924 the slump was plain in the sight to all men. Coal prices couldn’t be kept at the old level. There was trouble about wages in 1924 and a new arrangement which we owners dropped last year. Time, said the coal-owners, to take in sail. Naturally they kept mum about the stuff they’d put away during the boom years. Merely ‘business’ to do that. They just looked round for someone else to make up the current deficit, John Taxpayer was called upon, and Baldwin (a bit of a coal-owner himself) made him fork out the Coal Subsidy until he would stand it no longer. Then the coal-owners made what seemed to them the reasonable proposal that the miners should take lower wages-not a small reduction but a drop of twenty per cent, one shilling in five — work longer hours and (though this wasn’t clearly stated) a lot of them become unemployed. Obviously longer hours means fewer men.
“The reply of the miners was a most emphatic ‘No.’ I sympathise. Though as a rational creature I see that there are now more miners in Britain than can ever be employed at the boom rates or perhaps at any rates again, I see also how the miners who have settled down on the high rates feel about it. Their main representative is a man named Cook and he says ‘Not a penny off the pay; not a second on the day.’ If I had to live like a miner I should say the same. I’d rather die than come down below the present level. I have just happened upon a little book called Easingden by a man named Sinclair and it gives a flat, straightforward account of the life of a miner. I half suspect some connexion between Easingden and Edensoke, but never mind that. No frills about his story and to the best of my knowledge and belief dead true. It’s a grimy nightmare of a life. I am going to send it to you. When you read it, you will agree with me that it is intolerable to think of Englishmen — many of whom fought in the Great War to save me and you among others from the Hun — having to go a single step lower than that cramped, sordid, hopeless drudgery. Let the coal-owner, who didn’t foresee, who failed to reorganise on modern lines in his boom days, who has got a tidy pile stowed away, let him pay the racket now and not take it out of the flesh and blood of the people.
“My Lord Edensoke says what country wants work. This was meant to be a cigar but is an anachronism that came with old brandy later hard work never hurt anyone Philip tis champagne in the glass N. B. our celebrated pink
“That’s what the miner feels and partly thinks. The hoards of the successful, he thinks, ought to be the elastic pads we fall back upon in a squeeze; not the living bodies of the miners and their families.
“The miners never professed to organise business and make reserves, they thought the clever fellows were seeing to that. Their job was to hew coal. They say they didn’t suppose the clever fellows were just out to get away with profits and leave them in the lurch. So that a lot of them now are feeling decidedly Communist and would like to go out and hew at the clever fellows. I should, Cynthia, if I were a miner.
“The new Coal Commission although it is all Herbert Samuels and business men and not a Justice Sankey upon it and no one to speak for the miners, admits a lot of reasonableness in the miners’ case. But the coal-owners say in effect, ‘Not a penny out of our hoards, not a shadow of sacrifice from us!‘ They propose to knock wages down to the tune of a shilling in five and practically don’t offer to bear any equivalent hardship on their own part. I had it out — or partly had it out with Uncle Robert last night. ‘Partly,’ because he got so obviously cross that my natural respect for the head of the family made me shut up. He was all for the unreasonableness of the miners in not making any concessions. Stern and dignified and rude. Wouldn’t say what was to be done with the miners who will have to be laid off whatever concessions the poor devils make. The more concessions they make in hours, the more will get laid off. He wouldn’t say whether the shilling in five was his last word or not. And he got really vicious on the subject of Cook.
“‘At present,’ said his lordship, ‘all discussion is in abeyance. The whole social order has been struck at — and has to be defended.’ Repeated it. Raised his hand with an air of finality.
“Baldwin and Co just went from one party to the other wringing their hands or pretending to wring their hands — I’ve got something to say about that — and repeating, ‘Do please be reasonable,’ instead of taking us coal-owners by the scruff of the neck as they should have done and saying ‘Share the loss like decent men.’ If the coal-owners won’t give way, said Baldwin and Co in effect, then the miners must. Nothing was done. The coal-owners simply demanded lower wages and more work and prepared for a general lock-out if the miners didn’t knuckle under. And that is how things were between the coal-owners and the miners.
“In a country that had honest newspapers and clear heads all this would have brought such a storm about the ears of the coal-owners that they would have met the men half-way — three quarters of the way, in a hurry. They would have sat up all night sweating apologies and drawing up more and more generous schemes to ease off the situation. And the public would have insisted on the deal. But the country never got the story plain and clear. How could it judge?
“Now here it is the General Council of the Trade unions comes in. The miners are a part of that and have raised this coal puzzle at the Congress of the Trade unions for the last two years. The General Council of the Trade unions declares, and I myself think rightly, that the attack to reduce the miners is only a preliminary to a general reduction, railway men, engineers, industrials of all sorts. Common cause. So the T.U.C. takes a hand and you get a sort of four-cornered game, (1) T.U.C., (2) miners (Cook very vocal, too vocal), (3) goverment and (4) owners. (1) and (2) are theoretically partners: (3) and (4) profess not to be — but I am afraid are. If the miners are locked out, if nothing is done, then says the T.U.C. we shall have to call out the railwaymen, transport workers, engineers, postal employees and so forth and so on. ‘That,’ says the goverment, ‘is a general strike. It isn’t an industrial dispute; it’s politics. It’s an attack on the goverment of the land.’ Says the T.U.C., ‘Damn you! Why don’t you be the goverment of the land? We aren’t going to let the miners be downed in this fashion, politics or not. Something has to be done. We don’t want a strike of this sort but if there is a miners’ lock-out, some such strike there will have to be.’
“But the T.U.C. wasn’t very resolute about all that. That’s a nasty point in my story. Not the only one. They backed up the miners but they didn’t quite back them up. Several of the Labour Leaders, chaps of the court suit and evening dress type, were running about London, weeks and weeks ago, pulling long faces and saying, ‘The extremists are forcing our hands. We don’t want the general strike. We’re perfectly peaceful snobs on the make. We are indeed. It’s an attempt at revolution; we admit it. Do something — even if it only looks like something.’ Mornington met two of them. Those were practically their words. They started out upon a series of conferences with the goverment. Conferences and more conferences. Suggestions, schemes. Running to and fro — T.U.C. at Downing Street. T.U.C. goes to the miners. To and fro. Talk about the Eleventh Hour. But in England nobody ever believes there is an Eleventh Hour until it comes. Like the war. Cook going on all the time like a musical box that can’t leave off: ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day.’ Twenty speeches a day and still at it in his sleep.
“My dear, I don’t know if you will make head or tail of this rigmarole so far. I set it down as well as I can. But try and get that situation clear — which brings things up to last week-end. Miners, inflexible; owners, inflexible. Goverment ambiguous, T.U.C. forcible feeble, rather warning about the General Strike than promising it. And doing nothing hard and strong to prepare for it. Under-prepared while the goverment was over-prepared.
“And here I must conclude my Part Three because I have already been writing about the next stage in Part Four. Go on to Part number Four.”
Mrs. Rylands did.
Part Four was headed:
“The Goverment isn’t playing straight.
“Here little Cynna comes the stuff that troubles my mind most. I don’t think Baldwin and his goverment have played a straight game. I don’t think the miners and the rank and file of the workers are getting a square deal. I think that Baldwin and Co are consciously or subconsciously on the side of the coal-owner and the profit extractor, and that they mean to let the workers down. They are making an Asset of Cook and his not listening to reason. I’ve had that smell in my nose for some time. Even at Casa Terragena. Churchill’s first number of the British Gazette stank of it. Gave the whole thing away.
“They didn’t want to prevent a General Strike. They wanted it to happen. They wanted it to happen so as to distract attention from the plain justice of the case as between miners and coal-owners. And between workers generally and employers and business speculators generally, in a world of relative shrinkage. They wanted the chance of a false issue, to readjust with labour nearer the poverty line.
“You may say that is a serious charge to make against any goverment. But consider the facts. Consider what happened last Sunday night. Probably you haven’t got the facts of Sunday night over there yet. It’s the ugliest, most inexplicable night in the record of our quiet little Baldwin. If after all ............