The Rise of Henry Morcar Read online

  “Don’t worry so, my darling. It’s nothing. … It will pass.”

  “No, it won’t. It’s my fault.”

  “How do you make that out?” said Morcar in a tone of fond derision.

  “It’s—what we’ve done. We’ve sinned, we’ve indulged in unlawful pleasure, we’ve followed the devices and desires of our own hearts,” murmured Christina. “This is the payment.”

  “Nonsense! That’s old-fashioned superstitious rubbish,” said Morcar uneasily. “I believe in cause and effect, not in providential interference.”

  “So do I. If I’m estranged from my husband, how can I expect Jenny to love her father, or Edward to understand his daughter?”

  “I haven’t noticed much estrangement,” said Morcar, with a bitterness he knew to be unjust but could not control.

  “Oh, Harry! I love you and I don’t love Edward. That is enough,” said Christina.

  “Listen, Chrissie. Jenny and her father disagree in their principles, not in their affection. Jenny’s principles are right and Harington’s are wrong.”

  “Yes, I agree there,” said Christina with a sigh.

  “And principles come before affection.”

  “That’s what I said,” murmured Christina, giving him a strange anguished look.

  Harington came into the room. “She seems calmer now,” he said in a self-satisfied tone. “What are you two looking so serious about?”

  “We’re discussing the relative importance of principles and affections,” said Morcar drily.

  “What a couple of bromide merchants you are!” was Harington’s cheerful comment.

  34. Mustard Gas

  As Morcar put his car in the Stanney Royd garage he saw that there were lights in the downstairs windows; presumably his mother was waiting up for him. He sighed, for he was feeling depressed by the incidents of the evening, and considered whether to put his head into the room just to greet her and then withdraw at once on the plea of work to be done. But he was hungry and remembered pleasurably the decanter, the syphon, the sandwiches which awaited him; besides, he had hardly seen his mother this week and he supposed it was dull for the old girl. He sniffed, hung up his coat in the downstairs cloakroom and went into the lounge. Mrs. Morcar, neat and fresh in a grey silk dress with a lace front, wearing her black velvet neck-ribbon tied in a coquettish bow at one side, sat erect in a high-backed armchair beside a bright fire. As usual, she had a piece of embroidery in her hand.

  “Well, Mother,” said Morcar, kissing her.

  “You’ve brought a gust of cold air in with you, Harry,” Mrs. Morcar reproved him.

  “Well, it’s a cold night; it’s November,” Morcar excused himself in a mild filial tone. “Any messages for me?”

  “David Oldroyd rang up to say he can’t dine tomorrow; it’s one of his training nights.”

  “Ah,” said Morcar thoughtfully. He poured himself some whisky, noting with amusement that his mother gave the depth of the golden liquid in the glass a stern appraising glance.

  “What is he training for?” asked Mrs. Morcar.

  “He’s joined the Territorials,” replied her son.

  He was well aware of the significance of his mother’s emphasis on the pronoun, but did not wish to respond to it; he munched sandwiches in silence and looked at the fire.

  “Well, Harry!” exclaimed Mrs. Morcar at length in an impatient tone. “Is that all you’re going to say? Aren’t you going to tell me anything about the class?”

  Morcar sighed. He described how he had parked his car beside Annotsfield Town Hall, had found the appropriate side entrance, had read the notice To A.R.P. Class, Room 27 and had found Room 27 after some wandering along echoing stone corridors. He described the instructor, a St. John’s Ambulance man, very neat and dapper, with a genteel accent and a toothbrush moustache, who proved to be Annotsfield’s best hairdresser; he described the twenty-five pupils in the class—a mixed bunch of men drawn from various income levels. One or two of them he knew socially; one turned out to be the Syke Mills foreman, Nathan; one was a chapel-keeper’s son whom Mrs. Morcar knew, the lame son. After the first shock of seeing each other there, Morcar and Nathan grinned at each other, and found themselves sitting together in a double desk. They were all provided with notebooks and pencils; the hairdresser dictated notes to them hard for a couple of hours. He had a blackboard and wrote on it very rapidly and legibly, with various coloured chalks. It seemed that he had been a member of the voluntary St. John’s Ambulance’ Association for years—it was his hobby—and had recently taken a special gas instruction course. He rapped out chemical terms very briskly; Morcar and Nathan found them difficult to spell, but helped each other out when possible. The instructor had on the desk in front of him a small wooden box fitted with pigeonholes, in each of which stood a tiny gas tube containing liquid gas. Towards the end of the class the tubes had been handed round and each pupil had been invited to take a very brief sniff, so that they might learn to recognise the various gases by their smell. Nathan’s ginger quiff almost stood on end at this suggestion and Morcar himself had gaped a little, but they both sniffed manfully. Phosgene smelled like musty hay, lewisite like geranium, mustard gas like garlic. At this point Morcar stopped abruptly.

  “And is that all you learned?” demanded Mrs. Morcar, disappointed.

  “More or less,” said Morcar.

  “But what did you take notes about?” demanded Mrs. Morcar.

  Morcar was silent. He turned over in his mind the information he had imbibed that evening and tried to find some which. could safely be imparted to the dignified, bright-eyed, innocent old lady before him. But he could find none. He simply could not bring himself to tell her that every single droplet of gas spray would cause a burn the size of a shilling, and that these gases could be sprayed from an aeroplane flying so high as to be barely visible, carrying a couple of tanks holding twelve gallons apiece. Lung irritant was deadly—lethal, said the instructor with unction; it made you cough and choke, you felt nausea, vomiting, pain in the chest. After a short time these symptoms wore off and you felt well—but this period was particularly dangerous. Lung irritant patients were stretcher cases from the start. Mustard gas of course was very much worse; Morcar had written down in neat tabular form ten reasons for the pre-eminence of mustard. Mustard was a blister gas. The instructor had passed round a few photographs showing the kind of blisters induced by mustard. They were horrifying, nauseating. His mother would not sleep a wink if he described them. She would have nightmares if he so much as hinted at these achievements of twentieth-century civilisation. He was not sure that he could sleep many winks himself.

  “It’s too bad!” exclaimed Mrs. Morcar, suddenly bursting into angry tears. “You never tell me anything, Harry. I might as well not live with you, for all the notice you take of me. Here I am stuck out here in Stanney Royd away from all my friends and you never tell me anything.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother,” said Morcar soothingly. “But it was all so horrible, you know.”

  “You’re so reserved, Harry,” scolded his mother. “You’ve always been so reserved, so stolid. I can’t think why you don’t confide in me more fully.”

  Unfortunately this called before Morcar’s mind a vision of his mother’s face if he told her all the things about his life which she did not know, and he smiled ruefully. It was a tactical error. Mrs. Morcar interpreted the smile as one of insult and derision; she gave an angry sob, bundled up her embroidery and swept out of the room.

  Morcar sat on for a while, his feet stretched to the blaze, thinking. It was impossible that he should ever reveal the horrors of gas warfare to his mother; it was his duty to protect her from the knowledge even if his uncommunicativeness caused her another kind of pain. Next week the A.R.P. class was to deal with types of gas masks, he understood; they would be less horrible and he must remember to describe them all to Mrs. Morcar. Tomorrow at four o’clock he was to take his driving test; he had volunteered as an ambulance driv
er and must show his abilities on a large lorry; that too could safely be described to his mother. If war came—and he was pretty sure it would; when Hitler had digested Czechoslovakia he would be ready for his next meal—if war came he meant to be out in the streets, right in the thick of it, doing a useful job as he had done last time. It seemed strange that he should be too old to fight—he, Harry Morcar, whose body was still so completely strong, tough and virile. But an ambulance driver would be useful. Or perhaps he would become an Air Raid Warden. Whichever was the more useful, the more dangerous. Somebody cool and tough would be needed if there were mustard gas about; that was certain. Mustard. Ten reasons for the pre-eminance of mustard. Mustard was very persistent, mustard was soluble in fats and soaked into human tissue, mustard was very stable, very penetrative, not easily detected, had a cumulative action, had a delayed action. Respirators protected eyes and lungs but left other parts of the body vulnerable, to mustard.

  “That’s only eight,” thought Morcar uneasily, ransacking his memory. “It’s not so easy to learn at forty-nine as it is at nineteen. This A.R.P. business is going to be a damned nuisance,” he thought, as he went out to the cloakroom to extract his notebook from the pocket of his coat. “A night every week for the class, and mugging the stuff up in between.”

  An hour later when he went up to bed he was sorry to see light still streaming from beneath his mother’s door. He sighed, knocked and went in.

  Mrs. Morcar’s room was in his opinion hideous, for she had brought all her old solid Victorian furniture with her from Hurst Road and it clashed horribly with the Jacobean style of the house, but if she was comfortable he was satisfied. He noted with pleasure that the inset radiator was glowing and the light above the bed well-placed. Mrs. Morcar in a blue woollen bed-jacket of her own design was sitting up in bed, busy with some fine white embroidery in a small frame. Her quick uneven strokes as she plucked the needle from the taut linen revealed her agitation. She looked so small and spirited, and so defenceless against phenomena of the mustard gas kind, that Morcar was touched; he pushed back the blue eiderdown—it shocked Mrs. Morcar’s frugal eye to see anyone plump themselves down on a satin eiderdown—and sat down at her side on the bed.

  “Now, Mother,” he said in his kindest tone: “Calm down and go to sleep.”

  Mrs. Morcar gave a slight toss of her head, which was enclosed in a neat grey net to match her hair, and said nothing. Morcar, eyeing the frame, saw that she was embroidering his initials on a cambric handkerchief. The monogram, one of her own design, was shapely and pleasing.

  “I’m sorry if I grieved you,” said Morcar.

  Mrs. Morcar, turning tear-filled eyes on his, suddenly dropped her needlework, took up his hand and pressed it against her withered but still soft cheek, then turning it over softly kissed the palm. Morcar was deeply moved, yet at the bottom of his heart deeply angered too. It was the first time in his life—at any rate since he outgrew infancy and could remember—that his mother had so openly shown him her affection. If she had done that once, just once, in his childhood, he thought there would have been confidence between them. If she had done that just once, he thought he might have told her the truth about Winnie on that morning after they had parted for ever; the young man would have received his mother’s counsel, he would have acted differently, his life would not now have been the inextricable tangle it had become. The exclamation: “You’re twenty years too late!” rose to his lips, but he repressed it. He sighed, forced a smile and said nothing.

  “You’ve been a good son to me, Harry,” wailed Mrs. Morcar tearfully.

  “Now, Mother!” urged her son, embarrassed.

  “But Harry dear,” faltered Mrs. Morcar: “You’ve not been a good husband and father.”

  Morcar sprang to his feet. “Mother, don’t speak to me of that!”

  “I must, Harry.”

  “Mother, leave it alone.”

  “I can’t, Harry. Look. Look at this. I’ve been wanting to show it to you a long time, but you’re so reserved.” She took a folded newspaper from the table at her bedside.

  Morcar took it from her hand. For a wild fleeting moment the hope crossed his mind that Winnie had died. But he saw nothing of the kind in the square of newsprint his mothered offered him. He unfolded the paper and glanced at the top; it was a copy of the Annotsfield Record bearing a July date of 1938, the current year.

  “What do you want me to look at?” he said roughly.

  Mrs. Morcar refolded the paper to show a paragraph headed Technical College Successes. Her trembling wrinkled finger moved down the lines. Textiles: Fourth year Course, he read: C. H. Morcar. A violent anguish stabbed his heart; his whole body seemed to wince, to shudder, to be ready to dissolve.

  “Your son. My grandson, Harry,” quavered Mrs. Morcar. “You see, he goes to the Technical just as you did.”

  “I see he’s only passed third-class,” said Morcar hoarsely.

  “He’s at Prospect Mills,” quavered Mrs. Morcar. “He oughtn’t to be in that horrid dark place with Mr. Shaw, Harry, he ought to be at Syke Mills.”

  “Never!” exclaimed Morcar with passion.

  “Harry, I want to see him.”

  “You can’t see him here.”

  “When I lived in Hurst Road I used to see him about, quite often. He always spoke to me. But here I never see him.”

  The maddening thought of Winnie’s derision of his mother’s interest in a grandson not her own stung Morcar.

  “In another minute I shall tell her the truth,” he thought savagely. “And why not? Why take the blame? Why spare her? Why spare Winnie?” He took a breath and began: “Mother.” But then the thought flashed across his mind: “The truth would blister worse than mustard.” He bit his lip and turned away.

  “You must do as you like, Mother,” he said. “But for my sake, don’t approach Winnie, and don’t have the lad here.”

  35. Marching as to War

  The next pictures in Morcar’s mind were those of defensive preparations for war. He remembered the events of 1939 by his own preparations, for they marched with those of England—or possibly, thought Morcar, sometimes a trifle in advance.

  In March Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia and Morcar passed his anti-gas examination. He felt a fool writing answers on lined foolscap sheets for a couple of hours, and still more of a fool sitting like a schoolboy in front of a uniformed police inspector meekly naming the defects in an imperfect gas respirator and stating the necessary strength of cleansing formalin solutions. Still, he passed; Nathan also passed.

  Two days later Mr. Chamberlain observed at Birmingham that there was one thing he would not sacrifice for peace, and that was liberty.

  “He’s coming round to my way of thinking,” said Morcar.

  “Aye—getting quite bold,” replied Nathan.

  The two were standing outside the improvised gas chamber, waiting for their test. They put on their Civilian Duty Respirators, tested them with care, entered the hut. Nothing whatever happened and Morcar felt jolly. Then the instructor gave the signal to remove the masks. The pastille burning in the corner gave off only a mild tear gas, but Morcar suddenly foresaw damage to his eyes, his nose, his lungs—it took all his courage to await the signal for departure; he longed to dash immediately from the room.

  “I don’t know as I want to do that again in a hurry,” remarked Nathan soberly as he removed his mask and smoothed up his front curl.

  “Same here,” said Morcar.

  Hitter annexed a chunk of Lithuania—a country which Morcar had to look up on the map—and sent forces to East Prussia which presently began to seep over into Danzig. Morcar drove a lorry in his gas mask, drove a lorry up and down the steep twisted streets of the West Riding in a practice blackout, lifted patients on to stretchers in a practice raid.

  The following week Mr. Chamberlain announced that Britain would go to the support of Poland if her independence were threatened, and Morcar began a special “rush” course, three nig
hts a week, in First Aid. He wrestled with anatomy; Mrs. Morcar was required to hear him recite the names of bones and the position of major pressure-points; he bandaged everyone in range, not unskilfully, and argued the respective merits of large and St. Johns arm-slings with Nathan.

  In April Mussolini annexed Albania and President Roosevelt sent a message to the totalitarian powers urging them to declare that they would not make armed attack upon any of a long list of countries which he named.

  “Seems to be a good sort of chap, this Roosevelt,” said Nathan.

  “Aye—for an American,” said Morcar.

  “Perhaps we shan’t need all this after all,” went on Nathan, as they sat waiting their turn to have their rendering of a bandaged femur judged at the practical examination.

  “I shouldn’t like to bet on it,” said Morcar.

  Britain established a Ministry of Supply and introduced a Conscription Act; Morcar was asked to become Chief Air Raid Warden for Stanney village and district. He accepted, and with a good deal of hard work established the necessary posts and personnel.

  Hitler laughed at Roosevelt’s speech and said that Danzig must be reunited with Germany. Morcar and Nathan inspected the Syke Mills basements and decided which to strengthen for an air-raid shelter. Morcar employed an architect to draw up the plans.

  In May, Germany and Italy signed a political and military alliance. Britain guaranteed the independence of various small nations and signed a treaty with Turkey. Morcar bought up several thousand yards of lining material and had it dyed black.

  In June and July, Great Britain tried to sign a pact with Soviet Russia, while German “volunteers” oozed thickly into Danzig. Morcar built his air-raid shelters, and strengthened a cellar at Stanney Royd.

  During the last few months Morcar had seen very little of David Oldroyd, for though they were both busy on defence work, their tasks were different owing to the difference in their age. When Morcar caught an occasional glimpse of him he noticed that the boy looked wretched. He was not altogether surprised at this, for he knew that Harington was doing his best to keep Jenny and David apart. The barrister did not indulge in an open break but strove to undermine the friendship insidiously; he did not forbid David his home, but forebore to invite him to it, which in view of the distance between Yorkshire and London, Yorkshire and Oxford, had much the same effect. But Morcar could not feel very troubled about the young lovers. With Christina and himself on their side, they had powerful allies; they were very young; after all Harington could not prevent Jenny’s marriage when she came of age if she were really determined about it; Old Mill was (he understood from many indirect indications) doing very nicely; and Harington was essentially a coward as well as a bully in personal relations. Still obstinately persisting in his view that Hitler’s appetite could be appeased by the chunks of Europe he successively swallowed, Harington intended to go abroad for his summer vacation, but Morcar opposed this so emphatically, refused so entirely to set foot across the Channel, to approach the lair and place his head in the mouth of the wolf, that Harington was shaken and reluctantly consented to remain in England. To please Jenny it had been arranged that the family should spend a week at the Malvern Festival after their time at the sea. Morcar was so busy rushing off all possible exports with one hand so that they might escape the hazards of war, and turning over to the manufacture of khaki with the other, that he could not be absent from Annotsfield for long, but he joined them for a few days at Malvern.