The Rise of Henry Morcar Page 32

  “I don’t see why you should take it so calmly for granted,” he began. “You told me a lie once—”

  “Oh!” screamed Winnie violently, pointing.

  Morcar turned to the window; a soldier in khaki, dirty, dishevelled, without cap or rifle, was fumbling at the gate. A torn service respirator hanging limply from his shoulder impeded his efforts. As Morcar looked, the little wooden gate swung abruptly open, destroying the leaning soldier’s balance; he staggered and fell on the asphalt path.

  Morcar hurried from the house, but Winnie, her arms outstretched, ran ahead of him with all the speed of anguished love. She dropped on her knees beside the young man in the path.

  “Cecil!” she cried. “Oh, Cecil!” She put her arms about his body, tried ineffectually to turn him to a more comfortable position, supported his head against her knee. “Cecil!” she cried again, rocking him in her arms.

  “I’m all right, Mother,” whispered the soldier.

  Morcar had now reached the pair. He put his hands beneath the soldier’s armpits and raised him to his feet; drawing one of the young man’s arms over his own shoulder and gripping him round the waist, he supported him into the house. Once within the door, he felt the weight on his muscles double; Cecil’s feet dragged; he had fainted. Morcar lowered his son carefully to the settee. He thought of him now without reservation as his son, for in spite of the grime, the tousled hair, the unshaven chin, the slack mouth, the expression of fear stamped on the unconscious features, it was almost exactly his own face Morcar looked into—not his face as it was now, but as it had been, say when Charlie died. Cecil’s eyelids fluttered for a moment, revealing mild brown eyes.

  “I thought his eyes were the same colour as mine,” said Morcar in a whisper.

  “Babies’ eyes change colour,” replied Winnie in the same tone.

  Morcar laid his hand on the young man’s forehead; it was dry and burning.

  “He’s ill,” he said. “We’d best get him up to bed.”

  He grasped Cecil beneath the arms again, and instructing Winnie to support his feet, used his strength to carry the boy upstairs. Winnie, her face contorted into a mask of anxious grief, uttered small fluttering sounds of concern as they went—“Cecil! Oh! He’s ill! Cecil!”—and hung over her son as he lay on the bed. Morcar sent her for hot-water-bottles, while he undressed the boy. Cecil had a fine strong body, he discovered; he was taller than his father, more like Charlie than Morcar in figure, but had Morcar’s solid shoulders. As Morcar began to draw his stained shirt over his head Cecil feebly put out a hand to stop him and gazed up anxiously into his father’s eyes.

  “I can’t stay here,” he muttered hoarsely. “I’m just on my way to report. It’s as quick by Hurst Bank as up the valley road, you know.”

  Morcar promised soothingly to notify his whereabouts to the report centre at once and drive him there as soon as he was fit to be moved, and Cecil sank back, relieved. Morcar continued his self-imposed task, his heart torn by anger and grief. Cecil’s speech had struck him painfully. The young man’s accent was rough, his tones slow and grating. The expression on his face was ingenuous and perplexed. He did not look or sound in the least like Edwin Harington or David Oldroyd. “If only he’s honest I don’t mind,” Morcar told himself, minding bitterly the while: “But the Shaws have had him all these years.”

  Winnie came into the room at a quick stumbling run, carrying hot-water-bottles wrapped in towels. She bent over Cecil murmuring soothing words, put the bottles to his feet, adjusted his pillows, smoothed back his tumbled fair hair and gently kissed his forehead. Cecil’s eyes did not open, but his face relaxed into an expression of content and ease. In spite of the hideous green dress which hurt the eyes in this brilliant sunshine, in spite of the too-bright apron, the frizzed hair, the lined face damp now with sweat as a result of shock and hurry, as she stooped over her son Winnie seemed to Morcar to symbolise a noble motherhood. He left mother and son together and went to the telephone. He summoned his own doctor urgently, ascertained the proper military authorities and notified them of Cecil’s whereabouts, giving Mr. Shaw’s name as the owner of Hurstcote and omitting his relationship to Cecil, so that the story sounded simply as if Cecil had fainted on a stranger’s threshold and been taken into the house from mere humanity. He also tracked down his chauffeur and sent him to Prospect Mills to fetch Mr. Shaw.

  By this time the doctor had arrived; he pronounced that Cecil had a touch of pneumonia—“soaked to the skin boarding a boat off Dunkirk, I expect,” said the doctor—and must not be moved. Morcar suggested a night nurse; the doctor said it was almost impossible to find a free nurse at this moment and he could not undertake to attempt it, but he gave Morcar the addresses of several private nurses and nursing homes. Meanwhile Mrs. Morcar could probably manage.

  “Yes, I can manage,” said Winnie eagerly.

  The doctor gave instructions for treatment and hurried away. “He’ll pull through—he’s young and strong—just needs careful nursing—keep him quiet and warm,” he said on the doorstep. Morcar telephoned five addresses, learned two or three more, put in a trunk call, secured an elderly private nurse and promised to fetch her from a country home that afternoon, then returned to his son’s bedside.

  He glanced round Cecil’s room as he entered. It had little character or taste. Cheap light-coloured furniture, perfectly clean but a good deal battered; a highly floral eiderdown in cheap sateen; a small hanging bookcase partly filled by a few battered school-stories and a couple of paper-backed thrillers; on the mantelpiece a studio photograph of Winnie, coloured, in a brown satin dress and two rows of very artificial pearls, and a snapshot of a pale landscape with a white house in the distance, which Morcar guessed to be the home of whichever it was of the Shaw boys who had gone to South Africa. Between these, in the place of honour, a used cricket-ball rested on a small black stand bearing a silver label. Morcar bent to read the inscription; it recorded that C. H. Morcar had taken ten wickets for a total of ten, in a match between Annotsfield College and a certain north-country public school, in June 1931. Morcar smiled, and turned towards his son with a slightly less painful feeling round his heart.

  Winnie was seated beside the bed, her hands tightly clasped, directing on Cecil a fixed gaze of anxious loving care. As Morcar approached she turned and looked up at him.

  “Harry, I’ll divorce you if you want,” she said, her words tumbling over each other in her haste to utter them: “There are new laws now, I daresay it won’t be so difficult—I’ll divorce you, I’ll do anything you want, Harry, if you’ll only look after him, look after Cecil.”

  Morcar exclaimed.

  “Listen, Winnie,” he said. He stooped down, took hold of her shoulders, turned her to face him. “Tell me the truth, now. Why did you keep the boy away from me all these years?”

  “I wanted him for myself. I never had anybody for myself after Charlie died. Cecil loves me. You didn’t, Harry,” panted Winnie, looking away from him. “I was lonely. You never loved me. You never loved me, did you, Harry?”

  Morcar sighed. “No,” he said gravely at length, releasing her arms. “No. I’m afraid I didn’t, love. I’m sorry, Winnie.”

  “Never mind,” said Winnie brightly, though tears sprang in her red-rimmed eyes. “That’s all over now. I’ll divorce you, Harry, I’ll do anything you want—if you’ll promise me to look after Cecil.”

  “I promise,” said Morcar.

  41. Alone

  Nathan coughed and looked at his watch. “Shall we turn on t’wireless?” he suggested.

  England lay under the threat of invasion. Warned by the dreadful fate of Holland and Belgium, the British Government were taking precautions against parachutists. Every road, every village, must be guarded; all open spaces must be watched by patrols. Concrete road blocks were to be made, barbed wire to twine round them provided; road signs were to be obliterated, maps withdrawn from circulation. Leaflets were being printed instructing householders what to do in
case invasion came. The hills and dales of the West Riding were too steep and confused to be suitable for hostile aircraft landings, but their stretches of wild moorland, remote from the eyes but near the sites of towns, were ideal for paratroops and must be watched. Morcar was so busy with details of L.D.V. organisation, with indenting for weapons, with arranging training, with discussing sites and enrolling new members, that there were days when he had barely time to eat or sleep, and entered Syke Mills only at odd moments for hurried conferences with Nathan. This was such a day; he had driven himself away from Stanney Royd on L.D.V. business before seven that morning without even seeing a newspaper, and had been on the rush ever since. Accordingly he welcomed Nathan’s reminder cordially.

  “Aye, do,” he cried. “Perhaps we shall hear by now what France has decided.”

  “Nay—we heard that on t’last bulletin, Mr. Morcar,” said Nathan stolidly. “France has asked for an Armistice.”

  “Oh,” said Morcar flatly. He felt a tide of blood rushing to the surface of his body. France! Gone! France! We shall be invaded in a week, thought Morcar. Well! Let ’em come, damn them! Aloud he said in a mild tone: “So we’re alone in the fight now, seemingly.”

  “Aye—the others have all gone down,” said Nathan.

  There was a pause.

  “Well—we know where we are now, anyway,” said Morcar.

  “That’s right,” agreed Nathan, nodding. He stretched out his hand and turned the knob of the neat wall radio which Morcar had installed in the Syke Mills office, without further comment.

  “Nathan takes it very well, I must say,” thought Morcar admiringly.

  42. Patrol at Dawn

  “It’s going to be cold up here in the winter, if it’s like this now,” thought Morcar, stamping his feet.

  It was just before dawn on a day of September 1940, and Morcar was doing duty at one of the posts manned by the Ire Valley battalion of the Home Guard, as the L.D.V. was now called. The blackness of the night was slowly lifting into a sombre indigo blue, and Morcar began to be able to discern the features of the wide and massive landscape about him. The post, a small stone building with a loopholed protective wall across the entrance, stood high in the Pennines, just below the brow of a long rocky ridge, from which immense sweeps of tough grass and black stones rolled down to a main road far below. On either side at a distance of a hundred yards or so stood a circular erection of blackened brick, from each of which waved continually a short white plume of bitter smoke—a cold breeze brought the smoke to Morcar’s nostrils. now and made him cough. Across a broad valley another such white plume oozed into the dark. These marked smoke-vents, airholes to the long railway tunnel crawling deep through the Pennines beneath Morcar’s feet.

  By one of those ironies to which those are subject who live their lives in one circumscribed region, this Home Guard post faced, across many miles of rolling moorland, the rocky bluff on which Morcar had stood on the night he parted from Winnie in his youth, so that a visit to the post recalled that night to him always. He thought of that night now as the outline of the distant ledge came slowly into view against the northern sky. But that old anguish had gone from his mind like a drawn tooth, leaving perhaps a dull ache, a void, behind. For did he really wish that the incidents of that night had never happened? Did he wish his separation from Winnie had never taken place? Did he wish he had lived a narrow quiet life with Winnie and Cecil? Did he wish he had never met Christina? No; bad as some of it was, wasted as some of his capacities, many of his years, had been, he preferred his life as he had lived it to what it would have been if he lived with Winnie. Did he wish he had never married Winnie? Ah, that was a different matter; he wished that hard enough. But he no longer resented upon Winnie the actions which sprang from her contorted, convoluted love. The tragedy of their lives was not altogether her fault, as it was not his; the social pressures of the age had been too strong for them. “Poor children!” Christina had said when she heard the story; this was what Morcar thought whenever he stood in this Home Guard post now.

  The sun rose; the sky brightened from indigo to royal, then suddenly turned pale and clear; light poured over the vast landscape, revealing the high massive ridges, the long slopes, the gulley of the infant Ire, the black rocks, the dark heather seamed by velvety peat, the tough dun-coloured grass tossing restlessly in the wind, the stretches of russet bracken, the dark grey road. There was not a parachute in sight.

  “Well, they haven’t come to-night,” thought Morcar cheerfully.

  He hummed happily to himself, and leaving the post, climbed a few yards up the hill to a point where he could see down the Ire Valley towards Annotsfield. A dirty sheep or two flounced out of his way as his heavy boots struck the rock; down in the road the first lorry of the day crawled up the hills between Lancashire and Yorkshire. From this height Morcar could see, deep down in a snug green hollow, the village of Marthwaite. Its canal was tiny but smooth and clear, the Ire running unevenly, ruffled, beside; there was the old church where David’s ancestors were buried, the new bridge and the old packhorse bridge, the row of solid little stone houses, a scattered handful of mill chimneys. The bluff of Scape Scar cut off Marthwaite from the rest of the valley, but from this great height Morcar could see over the bluff to the next village—not as far down as the canal, the river, but to the chapel gable and the mill chimneys. And so it would go on down the Ire, thought Morcar: little houses where people were quietly asleep or just waking to the toil, the fearful anxieties, of the day; little houses, large houses, mill chimneys. A deep love suddenly rushed into his heart for the West Riding, which he watched here to guard; these are my people, he thought, I must protect them, no enemy shall harm them if I can help it. His mother, Winnie, Nathan, the Jessopps, the workpeople at Syke Mills and Old Mill and all the other mills whose chimneys were now just beginning to exhale smoke; even the dog Heather; for that night they had all been in his care.

  And even as he looked, his love seemed to stretch out all over England. To the camps where David and Cecil were training. To London, where Christina and Harington, and Jenny and Fan Oldroyd, were being subjected, said the newspapers, to violent day and night raids from enemy planes. To Kent, where Canon Harington and his vicarage had perished from enemy action; a German plane, swerving away from the London defences, had crashed and the old house, the yew, the Canterbury bells, the sweet Williams, the Canon’s books, were all burned, while the old man lay buried beneath fallen masonry. To the coast, where Francis Oldroyd was engaged full time in Civil Defence—David had begged his stepmother to come north to safety, but she would not leave her husband. To the air, where as he understood G. B. Mellor was a Pilot Officer in a Spitfire, fighting for the mastery of the air in the battle of Britain. To the sea, where young Edwin Harington, out of sight, almost out of hearing, helped to bring in convoys. For that night, yes, for that night while he was on guard, the safety of all these had in some measure been in Morcar’s care. He felt that he could never again lay down that charge, that burden.

  “They’re my people and I must take care of them,” thought Morcar.

  43. Nocturne in London

  The siren sounded just as the taxi drew up at the door of the Department which enjoyed Harington’s services. Morcar felt nervous—not of possible enemy planes overhead, but lest in his lack of experience of London air-raids he should commit some naive action below the general level of London behaviour. The taxi-driver and the Ministry reception clerk, however, seemed to take no notice of the warning, and this reassured Morcar; he could play indifference as well as the next man.

  He filled up a form; the clerk telephoned; an elderly uniformed messenger led him along corridors and up steps into a small room with some of its windows boarded up, where two girls, one dark, one blonde, typed and answered the continual summons of a knot of telephones. The girls were good-looking and well dressed, with south-country accents and friendly manners; they put Morcar into a large leather chair and handed him a newspaper and i
nformed him that Mr. Harington was in conference but would see him presently. A buzzer sounded above an inner door; the elder of the two girls, the dark one, rushed into Harington’s sanctum with a notebook, rushed out again and began to telephone the Minister’s private office. The other girl typed incessantly, except when a messenger came in with an armful of large envelopes and a locked despatch box, from which she immediately drew masses of files. Red and green labels protruded from these marked URGENT; VERY URGENT; PRIORITY; and so on; Morcar read them upside down. As far as one could judge from the blonde’s conversation, high personages, people whose names one saw in the newspapers, telephoned continually demanding Mr. Harington, and were continually sidetracked to someone else of less importance. It was a new scene to Morcar and he watched it with a smiling interest; he felt like a schoolboy waiting to see a headmaster, but did not mind.

  At last he was ushered into Harington’s presence. The room was large and agreeably furnished in a spare modern style; a plain cord carpet, a large empty desk, a couple of comfortable armchairs. Some admirable modern posters of an advisory nature, issued by Harington’s Department, hung on the walls.

  “Well, my dear Harry, what can I do for you?” enquired Harington, shaking his hand. His tone was suave but his expression was fretful; it was clear he regarded Morcar’s visit as the crowning exasperation of a harassed morning. “I’m sorry I had to keep you waiting but you had no appointment.”

  Morcar began to remind Harington that, as his Department well knew, he was to visit the United States in the course of the next few weeks to assist in the export drive. At this point a concealed apparatus above the lintel hooted violently in three short blasts.

  “Is that a new type of all-clear signal?” enquired Morcar with interest.

  “No—that means imminent danger,” drawled Harington.