Southampton Row - Anne Perry [78]
“Yes.” She nodded, her body stiff, her face pale. “Of course I did.” She took a breath as if to say something more, then changed her mind and offered him tea, which he did not accept. He would have liked to accept—he was tired and thirsty, hungry also if he thought about it—but there was too much emotion between them, too much knowledge for it to be comfortable. He thanked her again and took his leave.
That evening Pitt telephoned Jack’s political offices to find out where he was going to speak, and on being informed of the place, he set out to join him, first to listen, feel the political temper of the crowd, then maybe to judge from it more accurately what Aubrey Serracold faced.
And he admitted he was also increasingly concerned for Jack himself. It was going to be a far closer election than last time. Many Liberals could lose their seats.
He arrived as some two or three hundred people were gathering, mostly men from the nearby factories, but also a good number of women, dressed in drab skirts and blouses grained with the sweat and dirt of hard work. Some were even as young as fourteen or fifteen, others with skins so tired and gaunt, bodies so shapeless, that it was hard to tell how old they were. They might have been the sixty that they looked, but Pitt knew very well it was more likely they were still under forty, just exhausted and poorly fed. Many of them would have borne too many children, and the best would have been given to them, and to the men.
There was a low murmur of impatience, a couple of catcalls. More people drifted in. Half a dozen left, grumbling loudly.
Pitt shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He tried to overhear conversations. What did these people think, what did they want? Did anything make any difference to the way they voted, except to a handful of them? Jack had been a good constituency member, but did they realize that? His majority was not large. On a wave of Liberal success he would have had no cause to worry, but this was an election even Gladstone did not wholly desire to win. He fought it from passion and instinct, and because he had always fought, but his reasoning mind was not in it.
There was a sudden flurry of attention and Pitt looked up. Jack had arrived and was walking through the crowd, clasping people by the hand, men and women alike, even one or two of the children. Then he climbed onto the tail of a cart which had been drawn up to form a makeshift platform for him, and began to speak.
Almost immediately he was heckled. A semibald man in a brown coat waved his arm and demanded to know how many hours a day he worked. There was a roar of laughter and more catcalls.
“Well, if I don’t get returned to the House, I’ll be out of work!” Jack called back at him. “And the answer will be none!”
Now the laughter was directed the other way—humor, not jeering. There followed immediately an argument about the working week. Voices grew harsher and the underlying anger had an ugly edge. Someone threw a stone, but it went yards wide and clattered off the warehouse wall and rolled away.
Looking at Jack’s face, handsome and easy-natured as it seemed to be, Pitt could see he was holding his temper with an effort. A few years ago he might not even have tried.
“Vote for the Tories,” Jack offered with an expansive gesture. “If you think they’ll give it to you.”
There were curses and hoots and whistles of derision.
“None of yer’s any good!” a scrawny woman yelled, her lips drawn back from broken teeth. “All yer do is bleed us fer taxes and tie us up in laws no one understands.”
And so it continued for another half hour. Slowly, Jack’s patience and occasional banter began to win over more of them, but Pitt could see in the growing tension in his face and the tiredness of his body the effort it cost him. An hour later, dusty, exhausted and hot from the press of the crowd and the stale, clinging air of the dockside, he climbed down from the cart and Pitt caught up with him as he walked towards