Archibald Cronin - The Stars Look Down

There was a dead silence When David sat down, a silence which was at once undecided and intense. The House, in spite of itself, was impressed. Then Bebbington, in a voice of cool detachment, threw out the words:

“The hon. Member for Sleescale Borough evidently believes that this Government can nationalise the mines with the same facility as he takes out a dog licence.”

A ripple went over the House, uncomfortable, uncertain. Then came the Hon. Basil Eastman’s historic sally. The hon. Member, a young Tory back-bencher from the Shires, who spent his rare visits to the House in a state of hereditary coma, had one rare parliamentary qualification which endeared him to his party. He could make animal noises to perfection. And now, roused from his habitual lethargy by the mention of the word dog, he sat up in his seat and yelped suddenly in imitation of a startled hound. The House started, held its breath, then tittered. The titter grew, swelled to a laugh. The House roared with delighted laughter. Several Members rose, the question was put, the Committee divided. It was a happy ending to a crisis. As the members poured into the division lobby, quite unnoticed David passed out of the House.

He walked into St. James’s Park. He walked rapidly as though towards some fixed destination with his head slightly advanced and his eyes staring a long way in front of him. He was quite unconscious of being in the Park, he was conscious only of his defeat.

He felt neither humiliation nor mortification in his defeat, but simply a great sadness which pressed upon him like a weight and bore him down. Bebbington’s final sneer gave him no pain, Eastman’s derision and the laughter of the House left no rancour. His thoughts were projected out with himself as though towards some point at a far distance where they centralised and fused in a light of sadness, and the sadness was not for himself.

He came out of the Park at the Admiralty Arch for he had, unconsciously, walked round by the Mall, and here the noise of traffic broke through his far, fixed sadness. He stood for a moment staring at the rush of life, men and women hurrying and hurrying, taxis and omnibuses and cars streaming before his eyes, streaming in the one-way traffic, racing and accelerating and hooting, as though each one amongst them were trying desperately to be first. They cut in and squeezed past one another, and took to the last inch every advantage they could take, and they all went the same way. In a circle.

He gazed and the pain deepened in his sad eyes. The mad swift rush became for him the symbol of the life of men, the one-way traffic of man’s life. On and on; on and on; always in the same direction; and each man for himself.

He studied the faces of the hurrying men and women and it seemed that each wore a queer intentness, as if each face were absorbed by the intimate and special life behind the face and by nothing else. This man was absorbed by money, this other by food, and the next by women. The first had taken fifty pounds from some other man on the Stock Exchange that afternoon and he was pleased, the second reviewed the mental images of lobster and pâté and asparagus and puzzled his brain as to which would gratify him the most, while the third balanced in his mind his chances of seducing his partner’s wife, who had smiled at him in a significant manner at dinner on the previous night.

The terrible thought struck David that each man in this vast hurrying stream of life was living for his own interest, for his own satisfaction, for his own welfare, for himself. Each man was conscious only of himself, and the lives of other men stood merely as the adjuncts of his own existence — they did not matter, it was he who mattered, he, the man himself. The lives of all other men mattered only in so far as they affected the man’s own happiness, and the man would sacrifice the happiness and the lives of other men, cheat and swindle, exterminate and annihilate, for the sake of his own welfare, his own interest, for the sake of himself.

The thought crushed David; he turned from it and from the mad circling rush of the traffic. Abruptly he walked away. He went up the Haymarket. In the Haymarket at the corner of Panton Street some men were singing in the street, a group of four men, he could see that they were miners. They stood facing each other, all young men, and all bent together with their foreheads nearly touching. They sang a song in Welsh. They were young Welsh miners and they were destitute — singing in the streets while all the wealth and luxury of London rolled past them.

The song finished, and one of the men held out a box. Yes, he was a miner, David saw. He was well shaved and his clothing though poor and ill assorted was clean — as though he wanted to keep himself up and not let himself go down into those depths which waited for him. David could see the tiny blue pit scars on his clean well-shaven face. David put a shilling in the box. The man thanked him without obsequiousness and with an even greater sadness. David thought, has that shilling helped more than all my work and striving and speaking in the last five years?

He walked on slowly towards the Piccadilly tube.

He crossed over to the tube, took his ticket and got into the next train. Sitting opposite was a workman reading the evening paper, reading an account of David’s speech which was already in the late editions. The man read slowly with the paper folded very small while the train thundered through the dark reverberating tunnels of the underground. David had a great impulse to ask the man what he thought about the speech. But he did not ask.

At Battersea Station David left the train and walked towards Blount Street. He felt tired as he let himself into No. 33, and he ascended the worn carpeted stairs with a certain relief. But Mrs. Tucker stopped him before he had gone half-way up. He turned to face her as she spoke from the open door of her sitting-room below.

“Dr. Barras was on the telephone,” she said. “She rang up several times but wouldn’t leave a message.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Tucker,” he said.

“She said to ring up whenever you came in.”

“Very well.”

He imagined Hilda had rung up to condole with him, and while he was grateful he was not yet in the mood for her condolences. But Mrs. Tucker persisted:

“I promised Dr. Barras you’d ring up the minute you came in.”

“Oh, very well,” he said again and he turned to the telephone which was on the half landing behind him. As he called Hilda’s number he heard the satisfied click of Mrs. Tucker’s door.

He was some time in getting Hilda’s number but the moment he got through Hilda answered. There was one second of ringing tone and then Hilda’s voice. Hilda had been sitting at the ’phone, waiting.

“Hello, Hilda, is that you?” He could not help his voice being dull and tired.

“David,” she said, “I’ve been trying to get you all the afternoon.”

“Yes?”

“I want to see you, now, at once.”

He hesitated.

“I’m sorry, Hilda, I’m rather tired just now; would you mind very much…”

“You must,” she broke in. “It’s important. Now.”

There was a silence.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I can’t say, oh, I can’t say over the wire.” A pause. “But it’s your wife.”

“What!”

“Yes.”

He stood with the receiver in his hand galvanised out of his tiredness, his inertia, everything.

“Jenny,” he said, as if to himself.

“Yes,” she repeated.

There was another momentary silence, then speaking rapidly, almost incoherently:

“You’ve seen Jenny. Where is she? Tell me, Hilda. Do you know where Jenny is?”

“Yes, I know.” Hilda’s voice came back and stirred him anew.