The Rise of Henry Morcar Page 9

  There were times, indeed, when Morcar wondered how on earth Mr. Shaw had managed to conduct business at all, never name to do so with any degree of success, for he soon discovered that he himself knew a very great deal more than Mr. Shaw about textiles, while Charlie was much more capable than his father at letters, accounts and soothing customers. But Morcar perceived after a time that Mr. Shaw had one extremely important talent; he knew what the public would like, and was often able to guess what customers would want before they knew themselves that they wanted it. Morcar observed the operation of this talent thoughtfully. He did not possess it himself, he feared; on the other hand, it was barely possible to judge whether he had it, or to develop it, since he never came into contact with customers.

  Charlie, it appeared, was a superb salesman. He was honest, tactful and sincerely sympathetic because he understood the customer’s point of view; his voice, his manners, his appearance were pleasant and gentlemanly without being so “upper-class” as to irritate solid West Riding merchants. He told good stories, but not till the serious business of the interview was over, and he never capped a customer’s joke. He had left school at seventeen and gone into the mill without any technical instruction, so he knew little of textile theory and nothing of economics, but he was always a quick learner and under Morcar’s coaching he soon became knowledgeable about textiles.

  After a rather uncomfortable and muddled year, at the end of which Charlie and Morcar were privately both relieved to find that the balance in the bank was about the same as in previous years, Prospect settled into a steady routine which offered a fair certainty of reasonable profit. Then Morcar hit on a very charming small dice check design in a range of soft colours which found real favour for ladies’ wear; this became the Prospect speciality, and the firm rapidly prospered. It became, in fact, one of those neat, compact, reliable, profitable little family businesses over which harassed men saddled with large sprawling concerns shake their heads enviously. Now that their fortunes had taken this upward turn, the young men urged Mr. Shaw to smarten the mill up a bit and he was by no means unwilling; the premises were repainted inside and out in a tasteful green, the letterheads were altered to please Charlie; a lot of junk was cleared out of the office, a couple of girls with typewriters were installed and the furniture modernised. Mr. Shaw was so jubilant that he positively increased Morcar’s salary twice without being asked, and on a third occasion when asked yielded after the minimum of grumbling.

  All three men worked hard. Mr. Shaw had a daemonic energy when he chose and selected his periods of indolence wisely. The two young men took it in turn to go to the mill before breakfast, they stayed late, they discussed their plans when they met at the weekend; altogether they took Prospect seriously. During the height of the check boom Harry even occasionally let himself into the mill on Sunday afternoon—though he dared not confess this Sabbath-breaking to his mother—to tidy up a few pressing problems ready for Monday. But the work was light to him after the toils of the previous five years, especially after his Technical College courses finished. (Mr. Shaw jeered at him for continuing these so long, but though desperately weary before the end Harry stuck to them till he passed out a fully qualified student.) It seemed to him then that he had been presented with a gift of boundless leisure, and he turned happily to the enjoyments to which his youth entitled him.

  Charlie and Winnie Shaw belonged to a lawn tennis club; Morcar joined it too. In the summer evenings and on Saturday, in flannels of spotless white he careered cheerfully over the green sward in the sunshine. Nobody’s white buckskin boots were more consistently, purely white than Morcar’s; he cleaned them every night and stood them on his window-sill to dry. Charlie’s were white too, but then it was Winnie who applied the caked white to Charlie’s boots and sent his flannels to the cleaner’s. Winnie herself, in a long white piqué skirt, a white blouse with a stiff collar and a knotted silk tie, white shoes and white stockings, looked extremely neat and trim. They all three played quite a good game and were sensible people, so they soon found themselves in positions of responsibility in the club. Winnie was a member of the ladies’ committee which superintended the teas on Saturdays and match days; the two young men both sat on selection and dance committees. The joy of being elected, by ballot of one’s fellow-clubsmen, was quite immense.

  Charlie soon became one of the best players in the club, swift, stylish, original; he was elected captain of the team, and he and Morcar formed the first match couple. Morcar’s steady persistence often retrieved them from defeat, but it was Charlie always who played the winning strokes. The two Shaws also made an admirable mixed couple. But Winnie and Morcar did not play well together. To Morcar, Winnie seemed always to be in places on the court where she ought not to be; he was surprised and perplexed when they crashed into each other and missed the flying white ball. He said nothing about it but mildly pondered. Winnie, on the other hand, told Morcar he was never in the place where he ought to be—she looked round, she said, expecting a partner, and beheld a vacuum. She grew quite hot about it; this surprised Morcar, for Winnie when playing with her brother was a good loser, joking over their mistakes sardonically. Eventually it was agreed that if Morcar and Winnie played together they quarrelled. A succession of young female partners introduced to him by Winnie therefore flitted past Morcar’s eyes; he could remember nothing of them save that they were in white, with puffed-out fair hair, and giggled often. One felt pleasantly protective, however, when playing with them, and giggling on a summer evening was agreeable.

  In summer, too, there was the joy of cricket. Sometimes when the weather was fine and Mr. Shaw in an expansive mood, he would allow his traveller and his works manager an afternoon off together to watch Yorkshire playing some other county (inferior of course in their opinion) at Bradford. The train ambled through the winding green valleys and puffed up sombre hills and stopped at the special cricket-ground station, which confirmed its identity by a painted decoration of bat and wickets, with a red ball far too large in proportion. Then the indolent lounging hours on the open wooden benches, the white-flannelled figures on the pitch with famous names, the delicious “chock” of bat on ball, the graceful swift athletic action, the excitement of the mounting score competing with the flying minutes, the long, long discussions of famous innings, of slow bowlers’ hat-tricks, of difficult umpires’ decisions. Winnie made them sandwiches for lunch and sometimes accompanied them, looking fresh and summery in a thin frock of mauve-figured voile and a large white hat; but Winnie found cricket rather slow and was apt to make audible mordant comments on the batsmen which embarrassed her brother and Morcar.

  In the winter came the delights of subscription dances. At first the tennis-club gave “flannel” dances, at which the young people wore tennis attire to spare their pockets, but one or two of superior social standing began to turn up in formal evening dress, and the following year it was generally agreed to drop the idea of summer clothes at winter functions. When Harry first broached the project of a dress suit at home, Mrs. Morcar brought out his father’s evening suit and offered to modify it to fit him. But it was far too narrow across the shoulders; besides, the cut was definitely old-fashioned.

  “I shall have to have one of my own, Mother,” apologised Harry.

  “Well, Harry, you deserve one,” said Mrs. Morcar with a sudden sprightly staunchness. “And you can afford it.”

  Harry was responsible for supervising the decorations at this dance, being chairman of the decoration sub-committee; the arrangements of the palms in the pots, the pink and silver design on the programmes, the flowers on the supper-tables to match, were all considered most successful and charming—a good background, too, for the frocks of the gigglers.

  Charlie of course was a brilliant dancer, Morcar modestly competent. Winnie was too restless to make Morcar a comfortable dance-partner; full of verve and go, she waltzed him round faster than he intended and pushed and pulled him vehemently through round dances. In spite of this the
y danced a good deal together; she was Charlie’s sister, he was Charlie’s friend. Morcar took a mild revenge on her by swinging her completely off her feet whenever the Lancers gave him the opportunity. Winnie was slight in build, light in weight; a lift of Morcar’s powerful arms sent her flying helplessly through the air. He could not quite make out whether she liked to be taken off her feet or no; for his part he rather enjoyed doing it and continued the practice. She had a certain evening frock, pale blue satin with an overskirt of flowered ninon, which billowed wildly on these occasions; it became a family joke, expected, licensed, for Morcar to give this frock a gleeful sideways glance as he stood before her writing his name on her programme.

  “Now, Harry,” Winnie adminished him: “You’d better not take any Lancers.”

  Of course he took a couple. As the relevant figure of the dance approached, he solemnly unbuttoned his white kid gloves (leaving them on his hands, however) lest the necessary muscular effort should tear the buttonholes. Winnie at once became uneasy.

  “Now, Harry,” she urged, turning up to him her perky little face and gleaming hazel eyes: “Don’t let us have any nonsense about taking me off my feet tonight, if you please.”

  “I’m not making any promises,” replied Morcar mildly, smiling.

  The music started; the circles formed; in a moment Winnie was flying shrieking through the air, supported only by Morcar’s arm grasping her. Afterwards, restored to earth, she scolded him while patting her hair, retrieving hairpins, settling her ruffled frock. When they were all children together, reflected Morcar, Winnie seemed far older than Charlie or himself because there was a twelvemonth between them; now he was quite on her level and unafraid of her sharp witticisms.

  This was because he was a successful business man now, no doubt. That year he had made rather a hit with an attractive “step” pattern showing zig-zag lines of colour, and Mr. Shaw had murmured something about a possible partnership. True, he had immediately qualified his offer by relegating it to some indefinite period in the future, but the offer had at least been mentioned, and Charlie would not allow it to be forgotten. Morcar felt he was really doing well. Only that night, before he came out to the dance, he had been urging his mother again, as he often did nowadays, to move into a better house, or get some woman to help her with the housework, or give up some of her sewing classes. She could afford to take life easier now that her son was doing so well. Mrs. Morcar as usual refused his suggestions.

  “I don’t want you to spend your money on me, Harry,” she said. “You must save it for when you want to get married.”

  “Married? Me?” said Harry, laughing. “That won’t happen for a while.”

  Indeed he was not greatly interested in girls at this time. Even without the continual enlightenment offered by Charlie on the subject, he was fully aware of the uses to which girls could be put, but had never yet seen a girl who tempted him to think of her in that connection. It was agreeable when dancing to hold a light warm armful, agreeable to put one’s strength at a girl’s disposal, to help her carry something heavy, to offer her tennis balls with which to begin service or help her over a stile. But to retire with girls into dark corners as Charlie did, to encircle their waists and kiss them and whisper into their ears, seemed to Morcar a tedious and meaningless occupation. As for any association of a darker and more mercenary kind, Morcar thought that such possibilities existed in great cities but not in Annotsfield; in any case, the idea that he or anyone he knew might be involved with such wickedness never entered his head. The proper procedure between the sexes was as follows: One met at tennis, fell in love, got engaged for three years while one saved and began to buy a house through the Building Society, then married. Some people were known as flirts, of course. Admired by their contemporaries, they were scolded by parents from time to time but no great harm was thought of them, for Annotsfield flirtations in the second decade of the twentieth century were conducted with a decent mildness. Charlie was a flirt and liked girls, Winnie was a flirt and liked boys. Well, let them enjoy themselves. Morcar did not object, so long as he was not called upon to share their pleasures.

  These never seemed to last long with either of them. Charlie talked to him of a fresh girl almost every week and he had long since lost count of Winnie’s innumerable admirers, but neither of them seemed to be thinking of getting engaged. Morcar hoped that none of them would marry for a while yet. He was prepared to accept with solemn loyalty any girl whom Charlie chose to be his wife, and to tolerate the ass whom Winnie, with her habitual perversity, was almost certain to pick on for a husband, but he hoped the necessity would not arise for a few years yet. Marriage would break up their present way of life, complicate their present relationship, and life in this winter of 1913 seemed to him straightforward, pleasant, satisfying, just as it was.

  II. Action

  11. Call to Arms

  Time of Tension, read Morcar on a summer morning in July. Europe’s Peril. War Clouds Loom. In his rescript the Austrian Emperor recalled that Austria first exerted influence in Bosnia and Herzegovina.… Servia was never reconciled to the forcing of German and Magyar sovereignty over peoples mainly Slav in origin. Nor was Russia ever reconciled to the annexation of the two Slav states … a desire to inflict a blow on the prestige of Russia.…

  What on earth was it all about? What in heaven’s name was a rescript? Where were Bosnia and Herzegovina? Who were the Slavs?

  Morcar got his father’s old atlas down from his mother’s bedroom, spread it out on the table and went solemnly through the leading article, laying his finger on each place in the map as it was named. At the end he had received a strong impression that a large country (Austria-Hungary) was. bullying a small one of different race (Servia) just because some prince or other (Morcar had no use for foreign royalties) had been assassinated in their territory; Russia belonged to the same race as Servia and felt elder-brotherly towards her. So far some sense could be made of it, he thought; but then the paper seemed to say that Germany was supporting Austria because Germany wanted to inflict a blow on the prestige of Russia, and France supporting Russia because she feared a German victory would gain Germany too much prestige.

  “Prestige,” thought Morcar, pulling a face. “What bunkum!”

  Sir Edward Grey proposes a Conference of Ambassadors in London. Very sensible. But it is not likely to be acceptable, owing to Austria’s extreme exasperation. This is the third time in half a dozen years that Austria has mobilised against Servia, and she is determined that this shall be the last.

  “Well, upon my soul!” said Morcar. “Servia might be exasperated as well, I should say.”

  Next morning his newspaper told him that Austria had declared war on Servia and begun to fight, Russia was excited, Sir Edward Grey was still trying to localise the conflict, Germany had declined to participate in the proposed conference because she thought it offered no hope of success. Austria cannot appear before an European tribunal like a Balkan State, say the Germans.

  “Why not?” said Morcar, vexed. “Surely there should be one law for all Powers, great or small.”

  The Powers, urges Germany, being well aware that Servia deserves chastisement, should be content to stand aside.

  “Chastisement?” said Morcar, colouring. “I don’t care for that word.”

  On Thursday he learned that Russia had mobilised, but there is no suggestion of panic or craven fear amongst the British.

  “I should think not, indeed!” said Morcar impatiently.

  On Friday, the Servian capital was in flames.

  “Well, it’s a shame,” said Morcar.

  Germany had asked Russia to explain her mobilisation; Russia doubted Germany’s sincerity in making her request.

  “I’m not surprised,” said Morcar.

  The persistent unanimity of the bland responses made by Austria-Hungary and Germany to Russia’s despairing appeals for a hearing compels the unwilling conclusion that all this diplomatic effort has been merely by-play
to gain time.

  “It’s a put-up job. I could have told them that some time ago,” was Morcar’s comment.

  In England, there was to be a party truce, so that the tiresome fuss about Home Rule, for Ireland would subside for a time. LIBERAL AND LABOUR OPPOSITION TO ENTANGLEMENT: We wish to enter an emphatic protest against an attempt to make it appear that Great Britain is bound to enter the impending struggle. … An island, she can remain unmoved by the storms that may sweep over the Continent.

  “I wonder,” said Morcar thoughtfully.

  On Monday, Germany declared war on Russia. Over the weekend, German troops had already occupied Luxemburg.

  “I wish they’d leave those small countries alone. Aren’t there any treaties to protect them?” said Morcar uneasily.

  France, it seemed, was mobilising.

  “Well, you can hardly blame her, can you?” said Morcar.

  On Tuesday, it seemed Sir Edward Grey had sent a note to Germany requesting an assurance that the neutrality of Belgium would be respected.