The Rise of Henry Morcar Page 13

  It seemed that Winnie had been about to pay one of her regular visits to the Sycamores and stay there for tea, and in view of the shortage of bread at Hurstcote this plan was adhered to, Morcar joining her at the Sycamores after a brief visit to his mother.

  He found the house greatly changed. Mrs. Shaw had died last autumn—“I told you, Harry,” Winnie kept repeating, while her husband mildly countered with the excuse that the letter had gone astray. One of Winnie’s sisters had married and gone to live in Bradford, the younger girl had become a nurse during the war and refused to return to home life now, while her two remaining brothers had been demobilised rather earlier than Morcar, one from a regiment of Sappers and the other from the R.F.C. The three male Shaws were therefore all living at the Sycamores under the care of a working housekeeper with occasional supervision from Winnie, in what appeared to be an uncertain and uncomfortable way. It was clear to Morcar, as they sat at high tea in the dining-room, that Mr. Shaw had put pressure on Winnie to go and live, at the Sycamores, that Winnie had refused, that between Winnie and the housekeeper there was a continual and bitter feud, that judging from the appearance of the table and the quality of the cooking the feud was not altogether unjustified, and that the two younger Shaws, thus suddenly grown from negligible schoolboys into young men, did not particularly enjoy living in the unmitigated company of their father.

  “I don’t suppose they’re any more comfortable together at the mill,” thought Morcar shrewdly: “It’s time I was getting back.” He recalled how affectionately Charlie had cared for his young brothers, and resolved to look after them himself with just as great and brotherly an affection.

  “Shall I start work on Monday, then, Mr. Shaw?” he said affably. “Or would you like me to come down tomorrow morning?”

  There was a pause.

  “I don’t know that I’ve much room for you at Prospect, Harry,” said Mr. Shaw.

  “Oh, yes, you have, Father,” said Winnie at once, feeding an egg to young Harry from a spoon.

  “Nay—I don’t want to go where I’m not wanted,” drawled Morcar with an outward calm which covered anger. “I thought I’d helped to build Prospect up a bit, but if it’s viewed differently here, I can find myself another job, I don’t doubt.”

  “Oh, aye—two, I daresay,” said Mr. Shaw ironically. “We all know you, Harry—you’re the man that had two jobs in one day, at fifteen years old. But I don’t see that there’s much room for you at Prospect.”

  “If you don’t take Harry back, Father,” said Winnie fiercely, “I’ll never speak to you again. I mean it.”

  “I’m not talking about not taking him back,” said Mr. Shaw irritably. “I simply say there isn’t much room for him. He can come, and welcome, if he likes; but it’ll have to be at a less salary than he had before and there isn’t much prospect of advancement. I’ve still two sons to provide for, bear in mind.”

  “There was room for him when Charlie was here,” threw out Winnie sarcastically.

  “Charlie isn’t here now,” said Mr. Shaw.

  There was a pause.

  “We should be glad to have Harry, Father,” muttered the ex-Sapper, Hubert.

  “Well, I’ll expect you on Monday as usual, Harry,” said Mr. Shaw in a milder tone.

  “I’ll come tomorrow,” said Morcar shortly.

  “You’ll do as you want, I expect—you didn’t ask me when you left, and you’ll do the same about coming back, I suppose. You didn’t once come down when you were on leave, I noticed. But come when you like. Only don’t blame me if there isn’t much to do,” said Mr. Shaw disagreeably.

  It was not a very cheering welcome to Annotsfield, reflected Morcar as he walked homewards later, Winnie silent by his side. But the sleeping child in his arms made up for everything. Besides, perhaps Mr. Shaw was right and there was really no place for him in the business. If so, he would leave and find some other post. Now that he was back in the West Riding his textile memories were returning in a flood, and he remembered the fate of many a fine business which had sunk under the weight of too many owners’ families. Anything uneconomic of that kind he despised; he did not wish to be associated with any such silly work.

  “It was grand the way you stood up for me to your father, Winnie,” he observed soberly: “But it may be he’s right and there’s no room for me at Prospect.”

  “Your place is at Prospect,” said Winnie hardly.

  “Well, we shall see,” said Morcar, as he unlatched the Hurstcote gate and stood aside to let her enter. “No business can stand too many households living out of it—it isn’t sense.”

  “Then let Eric go out,” said Winnie. “He wasn’t in it before and he hates working for Father.”

  “He’s your brother.”

  “You’re my husband.”

  Morcar involuntarily let out a snort of laughter, for her remark, so loving in word, was in tone so snappish as to amount to an angry retort.

  “What are you laughing at?” said Winnie, quivering with fury. She inserted her key and opened the front door. “Father has a duty to provide for me too, I suppose?”

  “I’ll provide for you,” said Morcar, vexed. He spoke rather more irritably than he meant because he did not altogether relish being let into his own house with Winnie’s latchkey.

  Winnie switched on the light and they found themselves in the tiny hall.

  “Besides, we have to think of the boy,” said Winnie. She bent towards little Harry, removed his hat and made to take him from Morcar’s arms. “I’ll take him straight up to bed.”

  “I’ll carry him for you.”

  “No, give him to me. You ought to think of him, Harry, before you talk of leaving Prospect,” said Winnie in a virtuous reproving tone.

  “I am thinking of him!” shouted Morcar, suddenly losing his temper. “Who else do you suppose I’m thinking of?”

  “Not of me, certainly,” said Winnie disagreeably.

  “I don’t want him to have to go through what I went through when I first went to business,” panted Morcar, turning from her and carrying the child upstairs.

  “He won’t—he’ll be in his grandfather’s business,” said Winnie angrily, following.

  “If there’s room for him. But suppose there isn’t? Your brothers will marry and have sons too. I don’t want my son to be a poor relation. I want Harry to have a business of his own to go into when he grows up, and if I’ve got to make one for him, I shall have to start soon and build it up. There isn’t room to build much at Prospect, and your father’s that obstinate—if he’s made up his mind not to make me a partner, he never will. You’ll have to trust me to decide, love,” said Morcar, regaining his good temper as he looked down at the round flushed cheek, the long fair lashes, the peaceful forehead and fair silky hair of the sleeping child. He turned to his wife as they reached the top of the stairs. “I’ll go to Prospect and stay a month or two to look round, but you must trust me to do the best for Harry.”

  “Why should I?” screamed Winnie suddenly. “He isn’t yours.”

  Morcar gaped at her.

  “What do you mean, Winnie?” he whispered at length.

  “He’s not your son!” cried Winnie madly. “He’s not your child! Don’t you understand? He’s not your child!”

  For a moment Morcar gazed at his wife in horror. Then thrusting the child into her arms, he rushed from the house.

  IV. Fall

  18. Metamorphosis

  A FEW hours later Morcar came to himself to find he was standing at the edge of a remote bluff on Marthwaite Moor. A landscape of singular beauty lay before him: a vast amphitheatre where three great slopes interlocked, sweeping majestically down to the streams far out of sight below. Tonight the turbulent masses of rock and heather lay frozen into black and silver beneath a cloudless sky lit by a clear full moon.

  The calm silver light, the perfect stillness, the silence, mocked him; he could have borne the torment of his heart better, he thought, in storm and rain. Ev
en nature was out of sympathy with him, even Marthwaite Moor thought he was a fool for his pains. A fool, a fool, a simple, soft, silly credulous fool! He remembered his engagement and marriage—how Winnie had forced it, hurried it on. He remembered also that she had said: I always loved you, Harry—and laughed in self-derision. He had believed that? He had been flattered by that? He remembered Winnie’s eagerness to have a house of her own—an eagerness with which he had softly, sentimentally, sympathised. A home of her own— to conceal her lover, her bastard child, from the eyes of her family, of course. Morcar laughed aloud, and the echoes of this cynical and raucous mirth rolled away among the rocks. Who was her lover, he wondered? Which face at the tennis club, in the Army, was reproduced in Baby Harry? He spared a moment of unselfish grief for the child, a gentle and affectionate being, guiltless, whom he could have loved. If Winnie had only held her tongue, thought Morcar cynically, as she did on my other visits, during the war—if she had only held her tongue I should never have known and I should have loved that kid like a son. Who was his father? Which other part of Morcar’s life had that treachery blasted?

  In this hour of frightful disillusion it was not only his relation with Winnie which floundered in filthy and putrid mud such as he had seen in Flanders; his whole life seemed to crack across its surface, to gape, to reveal obscene and squalid truths below. That old scene with the Prospect Mills weights, for instance—he now believed Mr. Shaw had known of the unstamped light weight’s presence, had been a party even to its use against unsuspecting customers. That explained, thought Morcar with a knowing smile, his sudden anger against the lad who revealed the weight to the Inspector. Again, Mr. Shaw’s unexpectedly affable agreement to Morcar’s departure to the Oldroyds’—Morcar thought he understood it now. Mr. Shaw had had Morcar trained at somebody else’s expense, securing his services again just when, and only when, they became of value. The plan had probably been in his mind the whole time. Mr. Shaw’s protest, that very night— was it only that night? It seemed a century ago—that he saw no place at Prospect Mills for Morcar, what was it but an attempt to get him at a cheaper price? Morcar had been a fool all his life, a credulous gaping fool, a fool whom others laughed at, whom cleverer men bought and sold while he received nothing. No, he was not altogether a fool, argued Morcar; he had his captaincy, won by merit, he had his medal. A medal for bringing in a dead man, retorted the new Morcar; a medal for an act unproductive of good to God or man, useless, stupid, sterile. I shan’t hang such a medal on my watch-chain. And what was the whole war indeed but insensate, useless? He felt a savage scorn for his uniform, his ribbon; he wanted to throw it off, to tear it up, to burn it. He remembered that he had civilian clothes at his mother’s house, and swung round at once to make for them.

  He found that he stood in a waste of rock and heather from which no discernible path seemed to lead; but what of that, thought Morcar contemptuously; far to the left, across a confluence of two distant valleys, a narrow thread of white hinted at the road which crossed the Pennine pass at the level of the Ire Valley; he could orientate himself by that; such a small matter as being lost in the middle of Marthwaite Moor would not now trouble him. For it seemed to him as if the shock of Winnie’s betrayal had peeled a thick layer of protective fat from his brain, so that the raw nerves, apt for perception as for suffering, lay exposed to every wind that blew. In the old life Morcar had been slow, placid, mild; nobody now would be more rapid in perception, more critical, more ruthless than he. He pushed swiftly through the tough black wiry stems of the heather, the rusty fronds of last year’s bracken, avoided the rocks and the hollows with a light quick step, gained the upper road and hurried down towards Hurst.

  The little suburb slept; the pubs, the chapels, the shops, the houses, all were quiet and dark, doors shut, blinds drawn. Morcar glanced at his luminous watch, relic of trench warfare; the hands showed between two and three. From consideration less for his mother than for the scandal it might start—“I shall need all the reputation I’ve got,” thought Morcar, setting his teeth— he did not knock on his mother’s door. He had not been a soldier four years for nothing, he reflected, drawing out his knife; he forced back the trumpery catch, lifted the window easily and climbed into the living-room almost without a sound. Flinging off his khaki tunic, he lay down on the sofa and tried to sleep.

  He had been through so many emotions that day that he was exhausted and slept heavily till the sound of workers’ footsteps in the street outside woke him with a start. It was not yet quite daylight. He lay still for a moment and the full realisation of what had happened swept over him.

  “There are two ways of taking this sort of thing,” he said to himself. “Bend or stiffen. The soft or the hard. I shall take the hard.”

  A new epoch of his life began from that moment.

  He rose, lit the fire, washed, went upstairs and looked out some civilian clothes. Then remembering that Mrs. Morcar used to keep a set of his father’s old-fashioned razors, he went into her room to find them. Not hitting upon the right drawer immediately, he raised the blind, and Mrs. Morcar awoke. She peered at him, frightened. The old Morcar would have soothed, explained, apologised, but the new Morcar coldly stated his errand, accepted his mother’s direction—“How old she looks without her teeth,” he thought brutally—and carried the razors downstairs without further words.

  His mother soon followed, dressed with her usual neatness but looking scared and pale.

  “I’ll have breakfast with you, Mother,” said Morcar, shaving.

  “Harry,” began Mrs. Morcar piteously, folding and refolding a towel she held in her hand.

  “Winnie and I have finished with each other, Mother,” said Morcar.

  “Oh, Harry!”

  “That’s all there is to it; there’s no more to be said. So don’t try to say anything,” said Morcar.

  “She was never the girl for you, Harry,” mourned Mrs. Morcar. “I always knew it. I didn’t want you to go into business with the Shaws, on that account. You should have had someone softer. But it’s too late for all that, Harry,” she said in a firmer tone. She came close to him and laid her left hand on his arm. Morcar found himself peculiarly susceptible to wedding-rings on women’s hands, and winced.

  “Yes, it’s too late,” he said.

  “Far too late,” said his mother with dignity. “Winnie’s your wife and the mother of your child, Harry, and you have a duty to her.”

  Morcar exclaimed, then bit off the exclamation before it was completed. The full implications of his situation rushed upon him. He saw that he had to decide at once what line he meant to take about Winnie. Was he to attempt a divorce? He could not see himself publicly accusing Charlie’s sister of adultery. Besides, it was all so long ago. The child was more than two years old. He had “condoned” Winnie’s betrayal technically, he supposed, for all that time. Or if that was perhaps not the legal view, and a divorce remained possible, what evidence could he procure? And how procure it? Who was the child’s father? Some fellow who was in Annotsfield round about the new year in 1916, Morcar calculated bitterly. If Charlie had not been killed the year before, none of this would have happened, he reflected, cursing himself again for allowing Charlie to spring up above the lip of the crater. Who would know Winnie’s lover besides Winnie? Could he endure to confront her with the demand for his name? Would she ever yield it? It seemed clear to him now that Winnie had sought his protection in marriage because her lover either could not or would not give her his own. He’s probably rotting in a shell-hole by now, anyway, reflected Morcar. The shell-hole brought Charlie back again, and Morcar knew with certainty that he could not in public or in private accuse Charlie’s sister. He decided at once upon silence.

  “Winnie and I will never live together again, Mother,” he said. “I can’t go into it all, but there it is. It’s settled.”

  “But little Harry, love?” pleaded his mother.

  “It’s all finished and done with, Mother,” said Morcar, wipin
g his razor.

  His mother, her pale face fallen into deep lines of perplexity and distress, slowly moved away, and with a long tremulous sigh began to fill the kettle.

  As they sat at breakfast together a knock sounded on the door. Mrs. Morcar’s face lighted with hope, her son’s became correspondingly more sombre.

  “Come in!” called Morcar.

  The sneck of the latch lifted, and there entered a shabby tousled lad in his teens with a nervous look.

  “Mr. Henry Morcar?” he piped. “Mr. Shaw told me to come up from Prospect to you with a message. He telephoned.”

  “Aye. Well?” said Morcar.

  “Mr. Shaw says: You need not trouble to come to the mill any more,” said the boy, repeating the words in a parrot tone to show their authenticity, very clear and conscientious.

  “Thanks,” said Morcar drily. On an impulse he felt in his pocket and gave the lad a sixpenny piece. The boy’s eyebrows twitched in astonishment, then as he withdrew he involuntarily gave a smile of pleasure. Mrs. Morcar burst into tears.

  “If you’ve done wrong in France, Harry, all the same Winnie should forgive you,” she wailed.

  “It’s not a question of forgiveness.”

  “She’s your wife,” mourned Mrs. Morcar, sobbing. “But you never should have married her.”

  “It’s no use crying over spilt milk, Mother,” said Morcar at length. “We own this house, don’t we?”

  Mrs. Morcar, startled, raised a tear-flushed face. “Yes.”

  “Where are the title-deeds?”

  “They’re upstairs,” faltered Mrs. Morcar. “Why?”

  “Mother, you’ll have to lend them to me,” said Morcar.

  “But you wouldn’t sell the house, Harry?” wailed his mother.

  “No—only borrow money on it,” said Morcar. “I’m going to set up in manufacturing on my own. Get me the deeds.”

  “But——”

  “Get me the deeds,” repeated Morcar hardly.