The Rise of Henry Morcar Read online

  “I don’t want to take advantage of your kindness Mr. Shaw so I’ve got myself a job at Oldroyds’,” he announced breathlessly in a loud shrill tone, then waited for the thunderbolt to fall.

  The Shaws’ heads all flew round towards him, then flew round towards Mr. Shaw, as if actuated by clockwork. Charlie’s face was white, Mrs. Shaw’s elongated with horror, Winnie’s round and smiling impishly. Morcar turned his eyes, with theirs, towards the head of Prospect Mills. He surprised a strange expression on his late employer’s face; a look which he would almost have believed favouring and friendly had not that been quite unbelievable.

  “It’s very kind of you but I don’t want to go where I’m not—needed,” said Morcar.

  “Upon my word!” began Mr. Shaw. (“Here it comes,” thought Morcar.) “Upon my word,” continued Mr. Shaw in a surprisingly mild tone: “You know your own mind very clearly, Harry, for a lad of fifteen.”

  “He’s almost sixteen, Father,” put in Charlie loyally.

  “It’s not everybody has two jobs on their first day in business. But I won’t stand in your light,” continued Mr. Shaw in the same benign strain. “If you want to go to Oldroyds’, go, and good luck go with you.” He gave Morcar a friendly dismissing nod and applied himself to his redcurrant tart.

  Astonished and disconcerted, but yet infinitely relieved, Morcar got himself out of the kitchen and stumbled up the steps. He heard a chair pushed back in the room he had left and hoped it was Charlie’s; sure enough by the time he had reached the front porch Charlie had caught him up.

  “It won’t make any difference, Charlie, will it?” said Morcar, staring at the handlebars of his bike. “To us, I mean?”

  “Don’t be so daft, Morcar!” exploded Charlie in a furious tone. “How could it make any difference to us? Surely you know by this time what I think of Father? You’ve found him out too, that’s all. You did right to leave. He was always jealous of your father, and he’d take it out on you.”

  “Jealous of father!” pondered Morcar, astonished. “But why is he so kind about my leaving, then?”

  “Nay, I don’t know. He’s got some idea at the back of his mind, I don’t doubt,” said Charlie disgustedly. “You’re well out of it.”

  Since Morcar thought this too, he could find nothing to say of a consoling nature. In silence he mounted his machine.

  “Come to tea on Saturday,” called Charlie as he rode off.

  “Will he—will it be all right?” cried Morcar, brightening.

  “Yes—Mother said so. Meet me at half-past two at the end of the road.”

  All this had taken a good deal of time, and when Harry rushed into Number 102 shouting: “Quick, Mother! I have to be there at two,” Mrs. Morcar had been waiting dinner for her son long enough to raise her anxiety to a considerable pitch.

  “Wherever have you been, Harry? The dinner’s ruined,” she cried severely, seizing an oven-cloth and whisking out the stew. It was so clearly not ruined that her tone became milder as she added: “I don’t suppose Mr. Shaw will mind you being a few minutes late.”

  “I’m not at Shaws’ any more,” said Harry promptly.

  Mrs. Morcar blanched. “What have you been doing, love?” she wailed.

  “I’ve left and gone to Oldroyds’. Mr. Shaw didn’t really want me,” explained her son.

  “Oh, Harry! Don’t begin to be wild and difficult just because your poor father’s left us,” implored Mrs. Morcar. “You must go back to Mr. Shaw and apologise, this afternoon.”

  “I won’t go where I’m not wanted,” said Morcar, setting his jaw stubbornly. “Mr. Shaw agrees I shall leave, and I’ve got a job at Oldroyds’.”

  “What sort of a job?” wailed his mother. “What sort of a chance have you in a big place like that? You’ll have no opportunity for advancement, you’ll be an errand boy all your life.”

  “There’s no opportunity for me in Shaws’.”

  “There’s more there than anywhere else, love, I’m afraid you’ll find.”

  “I won’t go anywhere to be called a nuisance.”

  “A nuisance?” shrilled Mrs. Morcar. Her face twitched; crying: “Oh, Fred, Fred!” she burst into passionate tears. She sobbed for a long time, while her son ate his dinner stolidly.

  “There’s no need to cry, Mother,” he said at last, exasperated by her continued weeping. “I’ve got a job at Oldroyds’ and I’m to be there by two. Mr. Oldroyd gave me the job himself, and told me to go to the Technical and learn to be a designer.”

  “A designer!” exclaimed Mrs. Morcar, startled. In spite of herself she was rather taken by this idea, which marched so closely with her own talents. She looked up and began slowly to wipe her eyes. “But how shall we manage, Harry?” she said in a tremulous tone. “We can’t afford for you to study any more, you’ve got to go to work at once.”

  “I’m going to work!” shouted Harry. “I’m going now—it’s ten to two.” Immediately ashamed of shouting at his mother, he hung his head and muttered: “We shall manage all right.”

  By pedalling furiously all the way down Hurst Bank at the risk of his neck, he reached Irebridge at two o’clock. He was passed from hand to hand till his suspense was almost intolerable, but by two-thirty-five he was inside a small light upper room in the main block of Syke Mills, giving an indignant affirmative to the Oldroyds’ head designer, Mr. Lucas, who asked him—imagine!—whether he had ever been in a mill or seen a loom before.

  9. Design

  The period which followed was reckoned by Morcar as one of the happiest in his life; it was a period of grinding work, but of growing knowledge and expanding fortune.

  He rose at five and reached Syke Mills by six, stayed in Irebridge all day and ate his teacake in the large room outside the three chief designers’ doors. He left the mill at half-past five in the evening, rushed home for high tea, and was at the Annotsfield Technical College by seven-fifteen, three nights in the week. Two, sometimes three, other nights each week he sat at the table in Number 102, doing homework; Saturday night and Sunday afternoon were reserved for Charlie. Sunday morning he took his mother to Chapel, but his evening attendances dropped during this period, for the burden of his homework was so heavy that it often required Sunday evening hours to clear it off. He had put himself down for the full six-year course in textiles and was learning spinning and weaving, both theoretically and by tending the machines housed in the basement of the College. He also learned textile chemistry and physics, calculation and drawing. By the end of the third year, if he passed his examinations satisfactorily, he would reach the tuition in design. His wage packet contained seven shillings and sixpence a week for his first six months at Syke Mills; after that to his pride and joy it rose to ten shillings. Luckily the fees at the Technical College, designed to attract just such boys as he, were very small, amounting to only a few shillings yearly. But the price of the textbooks presented a real problem.

  His mother and he lived on the tiny remnants of his father’s savings, the few shillings he brought home and what his mother earned by teaching sewing classes and selling raw materials or finished embroideries. His mother, of course, also kept the house spotlessly clean and cooked and laundered and sewed for her son and herself. She even repaired Harry’s suits and coats, tailoring and pressing them expertly, so that he always looked spruce and well groomed.

  Morcar loved his job. He loved Mr. Lucas’s room, in which every item had reference to his chosen profession. The long wide desk by the windows which gave a north light, the neat weighing-scales in their glass-case, the twist-tester atop, the chart of Oldroyd “standard makes” hanging from the wall, the stack of copies of The Wool Record in the corner, the black-covered board heaped with coloured skeins, the innumerable sharp pencils and small oval labels, the roll of blue point-paper, the long strips of cloth cut from the centre of new ranges which hung on a string in Mr. Lucas’s locked cupboard—all these seemed to him immensely thrilling and romantic; each morning when he saw them a
fresh his heart leaped and he smiled with pleasure. The very cushion on Mr. Lucas’s chair was covered in Oldroyd cloth. One of Morcar’s first tasks was to re-cover this cushion.

  “Where shall I find some cloth?” asked Morcar.

  “There’s plenty about,” replied Mr. Lucas sardonically.

  Considering the five hundred thousand yards which Oldroyds’ turned out every year, this was not an exaggeration, but it did not solve Morcar’s problem. “Try the pattern-room,” advised one of the assistants. Morcar set off without securing clear directions for the route—a mistake he never repeated—and found himself lost, on the ground floor and in the wool-combing department. The lad he asked the way teased him with contradictory directions, thinking a newcomer fair game. Without any conscious desire on his part that it should do so, Morcar’s right hand flew out to a large three-pronged iron fork which leaned against the nearby wall.

  “Give me a straight answer,” he begged affably, raising and aiming the fork. “Mr. Lucas is waiting.”

  The men around laughed at the discomfiture of the lad, who sniffed angrily, then laughed himself and gave simple and correct directions. They always nodded to each other afterwards when Morcar passed by on one of his many errands.

  For at first Morcar’s task was simply to “run and fetch” for Mr. Lucas. Mr. Lucas, spare, grey-haired, baldish, in his late fifties, was an austere and dignified man, as befitted the head designer of a firm like Oldroyds, for the designs of a fancy worsted manufacturing firm are its life-blood. The welfare of the Oldroyds and their thousand employees with all their families depended, of course, Morcar admitted, on the skill and industry employed in every department, but he liked to think it depended chiefly on the ability of Mr. Lucas and his staff to produce fifty thousand new, interesting and tasteful designs each season—a hundred thousand in a year—for customers to choose from. Ten pattern looms existed to try out Mr. Lucas’s designs. The difference between a range which took the merchants’ fancy and a range which did not was many thousands of pounds’ worth of orders.

  From Mr. Lucas Morcar learned enormously. It was no part of the designer’s duty to teach Morcar, as he sometimes drily remarked, but merely to be able to run and fetch intelligently the boy had to know something of what he was about. He learned what a range-ticket, a make-paper and a loom-card looked like and what their hieroglyphics meant; where the blue-point paper—like the graph-paper he had drawn on at school—was kept, and why some sheets had larger squares than others. He learned to weigh a square inch of cloth and test the twist of ten inches of yarn; he ran down to the colour room and got the men there to scour a few hanks of yarn for Mr. Lucas, since colours were always matched in fresh-washed yarn—Mr. Lucas was horrified to find that Harry had not known that, for to him it was a self-evident axiom accepted by all, like one of the ten commandments. He took a bit of a new range down to be scoured and dried, so that Mr. Lucas could judge of its appearance after this process; he ran between the pattern looms and the designers when anything went wrong. He tidied up the many-coloured hanks of yarn heaped on Mr. Lucas’s black-covered board after the designer had been working with them, arranging them in order of shade beneath the two threads which held them in place. Each colour had a number, so Harry need only look at their tickets to get the order right, but he liked to test himself by arranging them only by his notion of their shade first, then check their order by their numbers. He soon knew by heart the numbers of all the shades the Oldroyds usually dyed—their dyehouse was not in Syke Mills, but at a place called Old Mill down by the river Ire.

  From the first Harry did well at Syke Mills. His neat figures and clear writing pleased Mr. Lucas’s fastidious taste. Days of thought and experiment on Mr. Lucas’s part resulted often in a half-sheet of paper covered with meticulous but mysterious pencilled notes in the designer’s tiny beautiful calligraphy; presently Harry was interpreting these symbols into the statistical directions from which the quantities of yarn for warp and weft could be prepared.

  When he had been at Oldroyds’ six months, Harry went one Saturday afternoon into an optician’s in Annotsfield clutching five shillings, the savings from his weekly sixpence pocket-money, in his hand, and came out the proud possessor of a “piece glass” like Mr. Lucas’s. On Monday morning he drew the inch-square magnifying-glass from his waistcoat pocket, unfolded its cuboid frame and placed it on one of Mr. Lucas’s newest patterns. The threads of the cloth leaped up to his eye, large, distinct, hairy; at such close quarters the intricacy and beauty of the design were positively breath-taking and Harry exclaimed with pleasure. Mr. Lucas looked up.

  “Got a glass of your own, eh?” he said.

  “Why is there a rainbow round the edges?” asked Harry.

  Mr. Lucas delivered him a brief lecture on prisms and optics.

  It was shortly after this that Harry found his wages increased, and—much more important—Mr. Lucas lent him a book on textile design, which Harry studied as a treat on Saturdays and in bed on Sunday morning. At first on a torn scrap of point-paper, later on a sheet he bought for himself, Harry dissected patterns, practised the twills and stripes and diamonds given as examples in the book, and taught himself to compile those mysterious diagrams known as drafts and pegging-plans, which directed how the threads of the fabric should be set in the loom and in what order they should rise and fall. Chemistry and spinning and weaving were work to Harry, but designs—colours, drawing, patterns—were pleasure; he turned to colour and weave effects after doing his Technical homework with eager zest, as some people might turn from grammar to poetry. He observed with joy that the more he learned about complementary colours and colour ranges, the more his mother’s instinctive preferences and his own were shown to be soundly based on correct principles. By the time he reached the Technical College course on elementary textile design, he knew it all already, and by special permission attended the lectures on colour for advanced students, in its place.

  Then all of a sudden, as it seemed between one day and the next, Harry Morcar grew up. One day he was a boy, Harry, who wore a school cap and was always growing out of his clothes, a boy who considering his age was really quite useful and promising, but still a boy. The next he was a young man, Morcar, nineteen years old, a big square-shouldered lively sensible fellow with a good taste in neckties, who shaved every morning and night and was one of the Technical’s best pupils and Mr. Lucas’s trusted assistant. In his fourth year at the Technical, he won a gold medal in the City and Guilds examination by a figured fabric of his own design and weave. The Principal of the College allowed him to telescope his fifth and sixth years’ training, and put him on to mill management and the special textile research class, exclusively. At Syke Mills, he could now map out a range almost as well as Mr. Lucas himself, and translated the head designer’s pencil notes into all the instructions needed without any supervision. When the talk turned to the prevention of curled selvedges—as it often did, for that ticklish problem was Mr. Lucas’s hobby—Morcar was not only allowed to listen without being rebuked for idleness but even occasionally to put in a word of his own, for his ideas on the subject were not at all silly, not at all negligible. One or two of his colour suggestions, too, were actually adapted by Mr. Lucas and incorporated into designs which proved very popular, though on the whole Mr. Lucas was apt to find Morcar’s colours too bright. They were tasteful though, he agreed; yes, really quite tasteful. Morcar was now earning thirty shillings a week, which Mr. Lucas told him was a really remarkable wage for such a young fellow. The truth was that Mr. Lucas was growing older and developing that curse of the bleak West Riding, rheumatism, and when he stayed away to nurse it Morcar, though of course still under the instructions of the other designers, carried out Mr. Lucas’s routine work entirely competently.

  It was just a fortnight after Morcar’s twentieth birthday when one of those pregnant incidents, one of those knots of converging circumstance, occurred which change the course of lives. On a sharp October day which had kep
t Mr. Lucas at home by the first frost of the season, the works manager came up from the private office in a hurry, asking for the head designer.

  “There’s a row on about our blue striped suitings,” he explained hurriedly. “Butterworth took a lot, do you remember? Mr. Butterworth’s here himself—he’s brought two pair of trousers—they’re all faded and patchy.”

  All the members of the designers’ office gathered together in horror; to have cloth returned was unheard-of, disgraceful, in Syke Mills whatever it might be elsewhere, and Mr. Butterworth was a merchant whose father and grandfather had dealt with Oldroyds’ all their lives—a most valued and valuable customer. Mr. Oldroyd was naturally vexed, and the heads of all the departments concerned had been sent for to explain if they could why the cloth had faded in wear. Morcar hastily took out the strip of the original pattern—dark blue with a narrow white stripe—from the string in the cupboard and collected the various papers which recorded the cloth’s career, from its design to its passage through the looms and presses a few months ago, then followed downstairs on the heels of the works manager and the second-in-command of the designers.

  “It’s a pity Lucas isn’t here,” muttered the latter. “I know nowt about that cloth—it’s a pity.”

  The procession of three entered the handsome private office in considerable trepidation. Mr. Oldroyd had a temper of his own which at that time illness was exacerbating; he knew all there was to know about cloth, was fiercely proud of the good name of Oldroyds’, and had a tongue which could be extremely cutting. They saw at once that their fears were justified and that he was ready to be thoroughly angry. He sat erect behind a huge table of gleaming mahogany, frowning, one thin hand stretched out on the table beside the unfortunate garments returned by the customer to the tailor and by the tailor to the merchant; between illness and rage his sallow face looked livid and his dark eyes were burning. Mr. Butterworth, pink, plump and silvery, sat flipping his thumbnails and gazing at the bronze horses on the mantelpiece with an air of an impartial desire to see justice done which was perfectly proper but very irritating. In the rear, by the window, jingling the keys in his pocket, leaned Mr. Oldroyd’s only son, Mr. Francis; a big tall handsome young man, a few years older than Morcar, with the clear skin which goes with reddish fair hair, and dark blue eyes. There had recently been an unpleasant scandal about Francis Oldroyd; he had married in a hurry, “because he had to,” said Annotsfield, a girl from a working family; last month their child had been born, dead and far too soon—which as Annotsfield said gave the game away properly. Annotsfield and Syke Mills took sides over Francis’s marriage; some liked him and turned an indulgent eye on a young man’s escapade; others thought the affair shocking. Amongst the latter group was Mrs. Morcar. Harry at twenty was still half in, half out of his mother’s tutelage, and regarded her views partly with respect and partly with impatience. He saw little of his employer’s son and had not set eyes on him since the scandal of the birth had broken on the public ear; he looked at him now with half hostile, half fascinated curiosity. Francis Oldroyd was wearing a beautifully tailored suit of admirable cloth, and a tie which Morcar guessed to be that of the public school he had attended. But then, Oldroyds’ had made the cloth; Morcar himself had made out the range ticket—indeed he had even had something to do with selecting the colours of the decorations—while as for a public school tie, anybody would wear one whose father could afford to buy one by paying public school fees, Morcar supposed. So he was unimpressed, and maintained a suspended judgment.