James Hilton: Collected Novels by James Hilton
The Member for Browdley duly applied for the Chiltern Hundreds; the writ for the by-election was issued; George was selected as his party’s candidate, and the campaign opened in the summer of the following year. George’s opponent was a rich local manufacturer who had made a fortune during the war and declined to entertain the notion that this was in any way less than his deserts. His party’s majority at the coupon election just after the Armistice had been large, but already there were signs of a change in the national mood, especially in the industrial areas, and it was generally agreed that George had a chance if he would put up a fight for it. And there certainly seemed no one likelier or better able to do so.
When George looked back on his life from later years, it was this period—those few weeks and months—that shone conspicuously, because upon Livia, always unpredictable, pregnancy seemed to confer such deep contentment. George then realized the power she had over him, for immediately he felt freed for effort just when effort was most needed. Never did he work harder than during that election campaign; every morning, after a few necessary jobs in the newspaper office, he would leave for a whole day of canvassing, meetings at street corners and factory gates, culminating in some “monster rally” in the evening that would send him home tired but still exhilarated, long after midnight. Usually Livia would then have a meal awaiting him, which he would gulp down avidly while he told her of the manifold triumphs of the day. In her own way she seemed to share his enthusiasm, if only on account of what could happen after his victory, for it was already planned that they would rent a house in some inner London suburb—Chelsea, perhaps—where she could live with her baby while George made a name for himself in Parliament. Who could set limits to such a future? Well, the electorate of Browdley could; and that, of course, sent him out in the morning to work harder than ever, with Livia still in bed and himself strangely refreshed after no more than a few hours of snatched sleep. He had never been so happy, had never felt so physically enriched, or so alert mentally. Things that had seemed a little wrong between him and Livia just after their marriage had worked themselves right—or something had happened, anyway; perhaps it was just that they had needed time to get properly used to each other.
One thing, naturally, had to be postponed for a while—his studies for the university degree. But of course he could pursue them just as easily—nay, more so—in London later on. And it would be an added pride to put B.A. after his name when he could already put M.P.
Gradually during those busy weeks Browdley’s long rows of drab four-roomed houses took on splashes of color from election cards in most of the windows—George’s colors were yellow, his opponent’s blue. The latter’s slogan was “Put Wetherall In and Keep Higher Taxes Out.” George, however, struck a less mercenary note. “A Vote for Boswell Is a Vote for Your Children’s Future,” proclaimed his cards, banners, and posters.
(George would remember that one day.)
But he really meant it. He told the voters of Browdley exactly what he intended to do if they should choose him to represent them; he mixed the dream and the business in a way that was something rather new to the town, and could be both praised and attacked as such. He had plans, not merely promises, for slum clearance, education, medical insurance, and relief of unemployment; and (to redress the balance, as it were) he had visions, not merely opinions, about international trade, India, the League of Nations, currency, and world peace. He was eager, cheerful, spontaneous, sincere, and a little naïve. He battled his opponent trenchantly, yet with rough-spun humor that took away most of the sting; it was another of George’s special techniques, and he had already become rather expert at it. “I don’t like to hear Mr. Wetherall attacked because he made a lot of money during the war,” he would say. “Let’s be fair to the man—he couldn’t help it. (Laughter.) It wasn’t his brains that did it. (Laughter.) He didn’t even have to try to do it. (More laughter.) The money just came rolling in, because we hadn’t got the laws or the taxes to stop it. So don’t blame poor Mr. Wetherall. Blame the laws and the tax system of this country that enabled one man to become half a millionaire while others had to fight in the trenches for a shilling a day. And let’s get things changed so that it can’t happen again. (Cheers.) But of course you mustn’t expect Mr. Wetherall to vote for any such change. After all, why should he? (Laughter.)…” And so on. Political prophets tipped George as the winner, but whether or not, Browdley had certainly never enjoyed a more bracing political contest.
Election day dawned unseasonably windy and wet, which was his first item of bad luck, for the other side had more cars to take voters to and from the polling stations. He left his house for the central committee rooms at an early hour and was kept busy all day with routine matters; meanwhile, as the rain increased, his spirit sank a little. His agent, Jim Saunders, was already giving him revised last-minute opinions that it would be “a damned near thing.”
Polling closed at eight o’clock, and an hour later the count began in the Town Hall. George paced up and down amongst the green-baize-covered trestle tables, keeping his eyes on the mounting piles of ballot papers; his opponent was absent, preferring to spend the anxious hours more convivially in a hotel room across the street. The atmosphere in the Town Hall became tenser as it also grew thicker with tobacco smoke and the smell of wet mackintoshes.
Towards midnight most of the ballot boxes had been brought in from outlying districts and half the count was over, with George leading by a narrow margin. Watching the proceedings, he found it hard to realize that his fate lay in those slips of paper—his own fate and Livia’s. And then, whimsically, he thought of his election slogan—“A Vote for Boswell Is a Vote for Your Children’s Future.” It was a vote for his children’s future, anyhow, he reflected.
By midnight he knew what his fate was, for the last few ballot boxes, drawn from the suburban fringe where mostly professional and retired people lived, had contained a heavy preponderance of votes for Wetherall. The final figures were not even close enough to justify a recount; George had lost the election by a hundred and forty-eight.
As in a trance he received the impact of the news and went through the ritual prescribed for defeated candidates on such occasions. He stepped out on the balcony to make a short speech to his supporters, congratulated and shook hands with the victor, seconded a vote of thanks to the returning officer; it was all over by one o’clock in the morning, and the rain had not stopped.
As he was leaving the Town Hall Jim Saunders handed him a throw-away leaflet printed in the opposition colors that had been given eleventh-hour circulation throughout the town.
George scanned it over and shrugged more indifferently than he felt. “Poor stuff, Jim. And not even true. I’ll bet it’s not libelous, though.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that. But there’s a good many voters it may have influenced.”
It was an artfully worded suggestion that George had secured a municipal appointment for his wife—concealing the all-important fact that he had not even met her till after she took the job.
“It’s the sort of thing that swings voters,” Saunders went on. “Shouldn’t wonder if you’d have been in but for this.”
“I doubt it, Jim…” And all the way home George kept telling himself that he doubted it.
Not till he turned the corner of Market Street and saw the familiar printing office (now plastered, and how ironically, with adjurations to “Vote for Boswell”) did he contemplate the really worst penalty of failure, and that was having to tell Livia. He wondered if she would already have heard.
When he entered the house he waited to hear her voice, but only Becky came up to him rather forlornly; and then he saw a note on the table. It told him she had had to call the doctor early that evening and had been sent to the hospital.
An hour later he sat at her bedside, realizing that for a new and far happier reason this was one of the memorable days of his life. His child was born—prematurely, but thrivingly—a boy. And as he looked first
“I didn’t want you to come earlier,” she said weakly. “I wouldn’t let them tell you because I knew you’d be busy…
Is it over yet?”
“Why…don’t you know?” He realized afterwards that he had doubtless been left the job of breaking the bad news gently, but it seemed so trivial then that he answered outright and almost casually: “Aye, it’s all over. I lost. By a hundred and forty-eight.”
“You lost?” He was still so happy that the look of disappointment on her face startled him, especially when she added: “No luck, George. I said so, didn’t I?”
“Luck? Why, isn’t this luck?” And he pointed to the child.
Of course his own personal disappointment returned, though he knew he would not have felt it so keenly but for hers. She had, and always had, that curious capacity to weight or lift his mood with her own, to give him peace or no-peace at will. In his own mind the loss of the election need not have been tragic; after all, he was still young, and there would be other chances—possibly within a short time. But she made it seem tragic by the way she regarded it, and he, as if in defense of Browdley against this attitude, plunged anew into work for the town.
Foremost was his plan to stir some civic spirit among the richer citizens. There were no millionaires, but a few who were well off, and one was Richard Felsby, partner of Livia’s father and grandfather in the days when the firm had been Channing and Felsby. George had never been able to understand what exactly the trouble was between Livia and the old man, perhaps a family feud of some kind, certainly no concern of his own; and since Richard was over eighty, ailing, a bachelor, and the owner of some land on Browdley’s outskirts that would make a fine municipal park if given to the town, George called on him one evening—quite prepared to be kicked out unceremoniously, but unwilling to neglect even a hundred-to-one chance.
Richard Felsby, dressing-gowned, nightcapped, and from a bedroom armchair, astonished him by saying, during their first minute of conversation: “Let’s not waste time, Boswell…When ye married Livia, ye married a problem, and it’s not a bit of use comin’ to me about it.”
“But—” George protested, and then let the old man have his say, since the saying might be of interest.
“And neither of ye need think ye’re going to get a penny o’ my money, because I’m leavin’ it all to Sarah.”
George did not even know who Sarah was, and perhaps his look showed it, for Richard went on: “Sarah looked after Livia and her mother and father and grandmother and grandfather for the best part of sixty years…and where’d ye think she’d be now but for me?…Why, in the workhouse. That’s all Livia cared. I know the woman’s stone-deaf and cranky and no beauty either, but she deserved better than to be left stranded when Livia ran off to marry you.”
“I never knew that,” George gasped.
“Aye, and I don’t suppose ye know a good many other things. But it’s the truth, and ye can tell her so. Sarah gets my money, and if ye’ve come to talk me into anything else it’s not a bit of use.”
George then felt that his simplest disclaimer was to tell the old man frankly what he had come for, and now it was the latter’s turn to be astonished. It had clearly never occurred to him that he owed anything to the town, and George’s suggestion that he did so aroused a host of vaguely associated antagonisms—to mollycoddling and spoon-feeding and high taxes and socialist agitators and what not. But the odd thing was that as the interview proceeded, Richard Felsby found himself rather liking George personally. (He was not the first to fall under that spell, or the last either.) And when George rose to go, he grunted: “It’s all a pack of nonsense, Boswell. This boom that’s on now isn’t going to last, and when it’s over Browdley’ll need jobs, not parks.”
“So you won’t let go any of that land, Mr. Felsby?”
“Not a yard, except at a fair price…But ye can stay and have a drink, if ye like.”
“Thanks, but I don’t drink.”
“Just as well, because the drink ye’d have got here is tea…I’ve often caught chaps that way. To my mind it’s a misuse of the word that it should only apply to alcohol…So ye’re a teetotaler, eh?”
George nodded.
“Teetotal family?”
“Not all of ’em. My Uncle Joe drank plenty.”
“The black sheep?”
“Maybe, but I liked him better than some of the white ones.”
“Ye did?…Sit down, lad, and what about a cup?” George accepted, and then had a chance to verify that Sarah was indeed as had been described. Meanwhile Richard Felsby, who had enjoyed no such congenial human contact since the death of his best friend, Dr. Whiteside, made the most of the occasion and became almost garrulous. He admitted that he wasn’t a big “giver” (George had known this already), but when he did give, he said he liked to suit his own ideas—as when, for instance, he had offered an annual prize to the Browdley Grammar School for the boy who achieved “the best all-around lack of distinction.” “It was the prize I’d have won myself when I was there,” he chuckled asthmatically, “but they wouldn’t even let me offer it.” It appeared, too, that sometimes he amused himself by sending checks for small sums to people momentarily headlined in the news—the farmer who refused to let a fashionable Hunt cross his fields, the postman’s wife with her second set of triplets, and so on. “I reckon ye think I’m a queer sort of chap,” he added, after these confessions.
“Aye,” answered George, unconsciously giving his voice a riper Browdley burr to match the other’s. “Ye’re queer enough. And I suppose ye think I’m queer for wanting Browdley to have a park?”
“Oh, to blazes with the park—are we on that again?…I hear ye’ve got a baby.”
George nodded. “A boy.”
“Let’s hope it takes after you, then. Because I’ll tell ye this, Boswell, the Channings are queerer than you and me combined…Must ye go?”
“Getting late,” said George, with a smile.
“Drop in again some time.”
“Aye…but I won’t promise not to mention that park.”
George did not tell Livia about his visit, because he felt it would not please her, however well he could justify it. And a few weeks later he visited Richard again, partly in case there was any change of mind about the park, but chiefly because he was passing the house and was touched by a sudden vision of the old man’s loneliness in that upstairs room with no one to talk to but a deaf servant. A moment later, having acted on impulse, he was touched again by the evident warmth of Richard’s welcome.
“Sit down, lad, and make yourself at home…See this?” And he waved, of all things, a check he had been busy writing. “I’m givin’ it away for charity…Doesn’t it make your mouth water?”
George laughed, while Richard went on to explain that he was sending it to a man he did not know, but whose name and address had appeared in that morning’s paper—some fellow who had grown a hollyhock taller than his house. “Mebbe ye’ll drop it in the post for me when ye go, Boswell. He’ll get a nice surprise when he opens my letter tomorrow…Well, what are ye starin’ at me for? D’ye think I’m daft? Or don’t ye like hollyhocks taller than houses?”
“I like ’em all right,” answered George, “and houses too. I’ll count it as one of your better benefactions. Why didn’t ye make it a bit more, though? What’s a pound from you?”
Whereat Richard enjoyed the best laugh he had had in years, for despite his reputation for being tight with money, no one had dared to hint it to his face until George, in sheer naïveté, stumbled into doing so. But it made such an instant hit that George was never quite sure afterwards whether he kept it up out of candor or to give the old man more fun.
For he formed quite a habit of dropping in to see Felsby, whose house was not far from the Town Hall. The visits did not have to be long ones, and George enjoyed th
“The trouble with you, George, is that ye think too much of yourself. I always thought ye did, ever since ye got on the Council. I’ve sacked hundreds of better men than you for a tenth of the things ye’ve said to me tonight.”
“Aye,” retorted George. “And ye’d sack me too, if I was an employee of yours. But I’m not. My father was, though, for the best part of a lifetime. Or the worse part, whichever way ye look at it.”
That sort of thing…
(George reflected afterwards that the old man must like it, or he would get offended; but then it occurred to him that he would have got offended already if he had thought that George really meant what he said, but he doubtless supposed he didn’t. Yet George did, in a way, and knowing this found himself up against a familiar dilemma: that to say what you mean without ever offending people is usually to say what you mean without making them believe you mean what you say—and what was the use of that? Well, maybe some use, sometimes. For, as a victim expressed his side of it once: “George tells you what a bastard you are, and you laugh, and then after he’s gone you suddenly say to yourself—‘Of course, George was only joking—it’s a good job he doesn’t really know I am a bit of a bastard!’ ”)
Richard was frank enough also. He once said: “George, I’m sorry for ye, married to a Channing. Her father was no good, and her mother wasn’t much better, and the life she lived up at Stoneclough that last year before he died—well, it was no Sunday School picnic, believe me.”
It was impossible to resent this, in its context, yet George felt impelled to answer defensively: “Oh, Livia’s all right”—before curiosity made him add: “She had a bad time, you mean?”
Richard Felsby said impressively: “There’s only one man who could have told you—and that’s Dr. Whiteside, and he’s dead. He never told me, for that matter—but I knew how he felt, because I remember what he said when he got news of her father’s death—‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘for everybody’s sake.’ …Well, well—maybe that’s more than I should have passed on. But I’ll tell ye this, George—the Channing blood’s had a streak of moonshine in it lately. That’s what made me leave the firm. I found I was getting too sensible for it.”