Archibald Cronin - The Stars Look Down

When Richard came out of The Hewer’s Rest the rain had ceased and the sky broken. The bright sun, striking across the steaming waste of the Snook, glittered into his eyes and hurt them, but through the blinding brightness he made out the headstocks of the Neptune rising in a kind of celestial glory. The Neptune, his Neptune, the Neptune of Richard Barras. He struck across the Snook.

The journey across the Snook was a strange and dreadful journey. Richard Barras was not conscious of the journey. His feet stumbled amongst the sodden hummocks and slushy runnels of the troubled land. His feet betrayed him and threw him mercilessly. He crawled and climbed. He floundered like a strange amphibian. But he knew nothing. He did not feel it when he fell, nor when he got up and fell again. His body was dead, his mind was dead, but his spirit soared in a great live purpose. The Neptune, the Neptune pit, the glory of those rising headstocks of the Neptune drew his spirit and held it. The rest was a mere vague nightmare.

But he did not reach the Neptune pit. Half-way across the Snook he fell and did not rise. His face beneath its crust of mud was ashen, his lips dry and blue, his breath coming in a quick stertor. There was no electricity now. The electricity was gone, leaving his body flaccid; but the hammering was bad again, the hammering was worse. It beat and beat inside his head and tried to burst again. Feebly he tried to rise. Then the hammer in Richard’s head struck one final blow. He fell forward and did not move. The last rays of the setting sun, striking across the charred headstocks of the pit, lit up the troubled land and found him there, quite dead. His lifeless hand, stretched forwards, grasped a handful of dirt.

It was the day of the Third Reading of the Mines Bill, which had now reached the Report Stage, skilfully whittled away and studded with Opposition Amendments. At this moment an amendment in the name of the hon. member for Keston, Mr. St. Clair Boone, was under consideration. Mr. St. Clair Boone, with admirable legal precision, had formally begged to move that in line 3 of clause 7 before the word “appointed” there should be inserted the word “duly.” For over three hours a bland discussion had resulted on this quibble, affording ample opportunity for the Government and its adherents in the Opposition to eulogise the Bill.

Seated with folded arms and expressionless face David listened to the debate. One after another the Government henchmen rose to enumerate the difficulties with which the Government was faced and the extraordinary efforts the Government were making, and would continue to make, to overcome them. Burning with indignation, David listened — speeches by Dudgeon, Bebbington, Hume and Cleghorn, every word an expression of compromise, of procrastination. His ear, trained by experience and attuned by his present emotion, caught the inflection in every phrase — the latent apology, the sedulous intention to make the best of a bad job. Seated there, cold yet burning, David waited to catch the Speaker’s eye. He must speak. Impossible to sit passively under this betrayal. Was it for this he had worked, fought, dedicated his life? As he waited, all his exertion in those last years came before him: his humble beginning in the Federation office, his struggle through the welter of local politics, his long and unremitting effort through these last years — striving, drudging, putting all his soul into the work. And to what purpose if this futile measure, this repudiation of every pledge, this travesty of justice, marked the consummation of it all!

He raised his head abruptly, filled with a fury of determination, fixing the present speaker with a dilated eye. It was Stone who now stood on his feet, old Eustace Stone who had begun as a Radical, switched to the Liberal ticket and then, in the war, blossomed once and for all in true Tory colours. Stone, a master of political casuistry, cunning as an old fox, was extolling the Bill in the hope of a peerage in the next honours list. All his life Stone had hungered for a peerage, and now he sniffed it like a luxurious bunch of grapes lowered inch by inch until it hung almost within reach of his snapping jaws. In an effort to extend his popularity, he flung bouquets right and left, striking a flowery and declamatory note. His thesis was the nobility of the miner, which he artfully developed to discredit all arguments that the Bill might provoke further disaffection amongst the men. “Who in this House,” he proclaimed sonorously, “will dare to declare that the veriest shadow of disloyalty lurks in the heart of the British miner? In this connection no fitter words were ever spoken than those so poetically uttered by the Rt. Hon. Member for Carnarvon Boroughs. Indeed I crave the indulgence of this House to quote the memorable lines.” He pursed his lips roundly and recited: “‘I have seen the miner as a worker and there is none better. I have seen him as a politician and there is none sounder. I have seen him as a singer and there is no sweeter. I have seen him as a footballer and he is a terror. But in all capacities he is loyal and earnest and courageous…’”

O God, groaned David, how long must this go on? He thought of the burning of the Neptune, an act of sabotage, in itself an inexcusable madness, yet solely expressive of the mutiny of the miners against their fate. His very soul flamed with passionate resentment as one hypocritical phrase after another dripped from the lips of the wily Stone. He glanced swiftly at Nugent who sat beside him, his face covered with his hand. Nugent felt this as deeply as he; but Nugent had greater resignation, a sort of fatalism which caused him to bow more easily before the inevitable. He could not bend like that. Never, never. He must speak, he must. In an agony of purpose he strove for calmness, for composure, for courage. As Stone at last meandered to the end of his peroration, beaming upon the House, and sat down, David sprang to his feet.

He waited, tense, immobile; he caught the Speaker’s eye. He drew a long breath that entered his chest slowly, painfully, and seemed to flow through all his body in a great wave of resolution. At that instant he determined to make one great despairing effort, to pit the strength of his lifelong purpose against the Bill. Another breath. Command came to him, command and courage. He began slowly, almost impersonally, with such a deadly sincerity that, after the bombast of the previous speaker, the attention of the House was immediately riveted upon him.

“I have been listening to the Debate for the entire afternoon. I wish with all my heart I could share the admiration of my hon. Friends for this Bill.” A silence. “But while I have been listening to their polished phrases I could not refrain from thinking of the men to whom the hon. Member who has preceded me has so poetically referred. This House knows that on several occasions I have directed its attention towards the distress in the mining areas of this country. I have on more than one occasion invited the hon. Member to accompany me to my own constituency to see with his own eyes the terrible and hopeless despair which stalks the streets there. To see the derelict men, women whose hearts are broken, little children with starvation written on their faces. If the hon. Member had accepted my invitation I imagine he would have gasped in a kind of wonder: ‘How on earth do these people live?” The answer is that they do not live. They exist. They exist in a broken and demoralised condition, bearing a burden which is the more insufferable because it falls heaviest upon the weak and the young. Hon Members will no doubt rise and tell me that I am wallowing in exaggerated sentiment. Let me refer them to the reports of school medical officers in these districts, in my own district, where they will find full and ample confirmation of the facts. Children suffering from lack of clothing, children without boots, children far under average weight, children certified as subnormal because of lack of nourishment. Lack of nourishment! Perhaps hon. Members have sufficient intelligence to understand the meaning of that polite euphemism. Recently, at the opening of this parliament, we had again the opportunity of witnessing all the splendour, pomp and pageantry which, my hon. Friends will assure me, bespeaks the greatness of our nation. Did any of my hon. Friends contrast it, for one second, with the beggary, poverty, misery and penury which exists within the greatness of that nation? Perhaps I do this House a grave injustice.” A note of bitter indignation now crept into the voice. “On two occasions I have heard an hon. Member rise with the suggestion that the House ‘put round the hat’ to alleviate the suffering in these mining areas. Could anything be more infamous? Worn to the point of exhaustion as they are, these people do not want your charity. They want justice! This Bill gives them no justice. It is lip service, it is hypocrisy. Does not this House realise that the coal-mining industry by its very nature is different from all other industries? It is unique. It is not merely the process of getting coal. It is the basic industry which provides the raw material for half the prosperous industries of this country. And the men who produce this unique and vital commodity at the risk of their lives are kept in penury and misery, employed at a wage which would be insufficient to pay the cigar bills of certain hon. Members of this House. Does any Member of this House honestly believe that this inadequate and hypocritical Bill will finally save the industry? If so I challenge him to come forward. Our present mining system has grown haphazard — not as the result of economic causes — but because of historic and personal causes. As has been said, it is planned not for geological, but for genealogical reasons. Do my hon. Friends realise that we are the only important coal-producing country in the world where there is no national communal control over the mineral itself? Two Royal Commissions have emphatically recommended the Nationalisation of minerals in order that the Sate might reorganise the coalfields on modem scientific lines. This present Government, before it came into office, pledged itself to nationalise the mines. And how does it now redeem that pledge? By continuing the chaos, seeking blindly for an outlet through the old competitive system, applying the stranglehold of restricted production, reducing output instead of widening markets, subsidising discarded mines to keep them closed, turning the working class, the wealth producers of this country, on to the streets in hundreds and thousands. I warn this House that you may continue for a short time in that way but the end inevitably is the degradation of the workman and the ruin of the nation as a whole.” His voice rose. “You cannot get more blood from the veins of the miners to revitalise the industry. Their veins are shrunken white. Wages of beggary and conditions of famine have existed in the mining districts ever since the war, when the hon. Member who preceded me kept telling the country we had only to kill sufficient Germans to live in peace and prosperity till the end of our days. Let this house take heed. It cannot condemn the mining community to further years of misery.” He paused again, and his tone turned persuasive, almost pleading. “This proposed Bill by its very nature admits the failure of the individual pit in the face of competition by the great combines. Does not this, of itself, state conclusively the case for a nationally owned industry? The House cannot be blind to the fact that there has been prepared a great nationally owned scheme to eliminate waste, work at the highest efficiency, reduce costs and prices, and to stimulate high-power consumption. Why has the Labour Government of this country ignored this integration in favour of a shadowy capitalistic amalgamation? Why has not the Government boldly said: ‘We are going once and for all to clean up the mess left by our predecessors. We are going to end for ever the system which has landed us into this chaos. We are going to take over on behalf of the nation the mining industry and run it for the welfare of this country’?” A final silence, then David’s voice rose to his highest pitch of passionate entreaty. “I appeal to the House in the name of honour and conscience to examine the case I have put before it. And before the House divides I appeal especially to my colleagues in this Government. I implore them not to betray the men and the movement which put them here. I implore them to reconsider their position, to throw out this palliative measure, to implement their pledge and bring in a straight Bill of Nationalisation. If and when we are defeated on the floor of this House we will go to the country for a mandate. In the name of humanity, I beg you, I entreat you to seek this mandate armed with that glorious defeat.”