ADAM—LAND WORKER.

Otago Witness, Issue 4039, 11 August 1931, Page 74

ADAM—LAND WORKER.

Bv

W. E. Gunn.

Tlie young man peered over the wall of the embankment at the sleek, dark water below him, then across to where a black barge in ominous silence rode down the river’s dusky highway. Just as silently he, too, would be borne along. For there at the foot of the steps he would slip in; there Where the lamps cast strange, fantastic shadows and the water looked less cold. ’I here would b 6 no sound, for his bones were light, so light and bare of flesh you could almost hear them knock together. as, leaning against the wall, he shivered and hugged his worn coat closer. What would it feel like when the water closed over his head and pushed him under? Would his whole life unroll itself in vivid panorama as he sank? Not that there was anything to unroll, he reflected.

He had not even killed anyone in the Great War. For he had been only nine when, clutching sister Jean’s hand, he had heard his father’s name read out on the first Armistice Day; and when mother died in his fourteenth year. Jean’s husband had taken him on to the farm. There he had remained ever since, until six months ago, when, with the farm mortgaged up to the hilt, and times so bad, Jean was hard put to it to feed her own man and kids, let alone him. His thoughts had been turned then to newspaper reporting, for Adam was a bookish ’ad, with hankerings after verse and the like. Many a telling couplet he had scribbled on the barn walls to while away m idle hour. There also in lantern-lit evenings he had told with many a graphic touch his stories —old Bible tales mostly—to the stragglers and school chilIren of those parts. Standing on the bus step, he had waved good-bye to them that fine morning when, with shorthand certificate and introduction to a London editor all complete, and a few pounds tucked away in the secret pocket Jean had made him. he had started off. At the Inis stopping-place beyond the village he had found the out-of-works gathered to give him a last cheer. “ Let’s hear tell, lad, when ye get the job, and we’ll a’ be after ye quick enough.” Aye, it was those fellows who would most miss him and his stories —stories he could now no longer remember the sense of. He pictured the lads now as dusk fell, furtively eyeing the warm chimney seats within the cottages, wondering if before the workers came in they might venture near and hold out their useless blue hands to the blaze. Slouching along dirty unkept lanes all day, or ■ leaning against dykes, with your belly empty, and your head fogged with angry resentments and hatreds, was a cheerless business.

As a policeman touched him on the shoulder and he automatically moved on, Adam wondered whether his old mates were still at their endless, hopeless questionings. Sometimes when sitting round the stick fire in the barn they had been lifted out of the fearful shadow of- their own bitter-' ness for an hour byn big idea. “Tell them this plan o’ ours in London. Adam,” they had shouted eagerly. But the meaning had almost gone from, the remembered phrases, which Adam now muttered mechanically as slinking along he avoided instinctively the lamps’ prying beams. Months of starvation and

desperate searching had dulled his brain, and* for many days now only vague images had oppressed it. Garrets of odorous gloom, wherein flies’ carcasses swung from cobwebs as from gibbets; seas of dirty brick without beginning or end, miles of grim, shut doors, or dreary pavement stretches worn by endless pacings. There were the faces of the workless, too, and these were the worst of all. , Droves of grey seeking faces that never found; and pale lips that mouthed persistently their eternal apologetic plea. Last night as he lay huddled on the sloping floor of the Church; shelter, his nightmare meanings and tossings disturbed the heavy sleep of his fellowderelicts. “ Hold your tongue,” growled an old sailor, whose shoulder blades pushed their way into Adam’s chest. “ Seems to me, lad, If that’s the way ye feel about things, ye’d best take your troubles to Father Thames.” With a grim chuckle, squeezing himself upright he had turned his dolorous eyes upon the mass of human wreckage that lay about them. “ He’ll settle them quiet enough, and then ye’ll be feared o’ nothing more. . . . Aye, a man needs to be full-fed and warm for to fight fears and fancies like yours, mate.” ¥ * * Now, as he stood by Westminster Bridge, Adam remembered the sailor’s woyds. From the darkening sky and' whirling clouds that raced over the Clock Tower his restless gaze returned to the icy water’s sinister gleam. Hunger he had ceased to feel. Hunger he would never know again. But cold remained. And cold made men afraid. Crouching by the parapet he knew it was warmth that gave courage. It was always warmth men craved for before aught else. And Big Ben as he boomed the hour above his head seemed grimly to emphasise the fact. Yet in the lad’s famished heart, before the relentless sound died on the air, there suddenly lit a spark of desire.

Above the clock he saw, as it flashed through the darkness, the white fire of a beacon light. In early days—he remembered—he had made a'drawing of the House of Commons lamp for his sister. “ It’s my lighthouse, Jean,” he had written. “It gives me hope when things are black. They say it used to shine westward only, but now its rays stream all ways, for rich and poor alike.” And before London had swallowed his dreams, s on many a bitter night it had beckoned him to the warmth and security within. Now as he crossed the street, and from habit picked from the pavement a glowing cigarette end to place between his lips, he made up his mind. For already the thought of the warm cushioned seat, the solace of the glowing heat issuing behind Itis knees, had quickened his thin blood. Later, when the lamp went out, he would return to the river and keep his tryst. And the comfortable policeman at St. Stephen’s Porch who one minute later looked down on the pinched flushed face and urgent eyes, which without speech be. sought his clemency, hesitated before shaking his head. A big unemployment debate and fierce party fight in progress precluded any chance of the ticketless public gaining the gallery. Yet no doubt the fellow only wanted warmth and rest, and why shouldn’t he have it when it was over him and his like that tonight the members within were contending?

But as his penetrative regard took in the gaping boots and unshaven chin of the Scots country lad who a few months ago used to greet him so bravely, he again paused. Then, as a sudden shout of “ Division ” rang out from behind, he swiftly motioned him in. And to the familiar sound of shrill bells, scurrying cries, and banging doors, Adam stumbled along to his old seat by the honest Hampden’s side. Even the nasal voices murmuring from beyond the statue was one he had frequently heard on that selfsame seat Dimly he recognised the running commentary on life in general and the House in particular with which this philosopher—an inveterate frequenter of St. Stephen’s Hall—was wont to regale the waiting public. “ What I say is, instead of three parties scrapping as to who’s most to blame —and meanwhile good lives being wasted by the thousand—they’d best all pull together like they did in the war.- . . . See that tall bent chap passing with the soft hat squashed up in his hand? That’s one of the world’s peacemakers, that is, . . . Wonder if it ever strikes him that this unemployment business is perhaps a darned sight worse for the world in the long run than even the wars he’s out to stop? ... More knowledge of the human heart, more rubbing of shoulders with the out-of-works, is what these clever debating chaps stuck up on their platforms, need. But four square meals a day and plenty outlet for your energy often stand like a brick wall between them and fellows like that one round the corner there ”

To the insistent tones drifting towards him, Adam, huddled behind the statue, now paid little heed. In obscure fashion his surroundings were rapidly slipping from his vision, but gradually out of the labouring and confusion of his sense there crept upon him a mysterious serenity that knew no. fear. The stone he had leaned forward on to ease, the pain in his chest was no longer a lifeless block. For suddenly to the fading senses it had become the sunwarmed w'all of the old church at home.

From his window scat he saw the birds outsid.e fluttering softly in trees alight with -spring, and in his ear sounded the preacher’s voice speaking ancient reassuring words, “ There the. wicked cease from troubling; there the weary be at rest.” * ¥ ¥ The phlegmatic calm of the policeman was disturbed as he bent over the silent, outstretched- form and turned to the light the gaunt young face. “ Nothing but a bundle of bones.* Died of starvation,” he muttered to the doorkeeper as they carried their light burden down the steps to the waiting ambulance. With a sharp note of finality the door slammed. And as the motor swiftly turned the corner of the street, through all the vast corridors of the Palace of Westminster there echoed the nightly cry, “Who goes home?”—Weekly Scotsman.