CHAPTER VIII—THE REGENCY
THE rigorous theory that a Hepplestall was instantly prepared at the word of command to go to the ends of the earth in the interests of the firm was, in practice, softened by expediency. They did not, for instance, recall their manager at Calcutta or Rio and expect him to fill a home berth as aptly as a man who had not spent half a lifetime in familiarizing himself with special foreign conditions; they used their man-power with discretion and humanity, and there seemed nothing harsh in expecting William Hepplestall, chief of their Manchester offices, to remove to Staithley when he became the acting Head.
William was a man who, in other circumstances, would have deserved the epithet “worthy,” perhaps with its slightly mocking significance emphasized by a capital W. A “Worthy” has solid character bounded by parochial imagination; and William rose, but only by relentless effort, to thinking in the wide-world terms of trade imposed upon the chief of Hepplestal’s Manchester warehouse. He was masterly in routine; under Sir Philip, a trusted executant of that leader’s conceptions; and since he bore his person with great dignity, he cut a figure ambassadorial, impressive, fit representative in Manchester of the Hepplestalls who took the view of that city that it was an outpost—their principal outpost—of Staithley Bridge.
Probably Sir Philip, had he been alive, would have prevented William’s promotion; but Sir Philip had died suddenly, without chance to nominate a successor who, most likely, would have been unobvious and, most certainly, the best. And even Sir Philip would have saluted ungrudgingly the spirit, humble yet resolute, in which William accepted his responsibility. The Board, weakened in personnel by the war, did, as Boards do, the obvious thing, and were very well satisfied with the wisdom of their choice.
What they did not understand, what William himself did not foresee, was that his difficulties were to be increased by the conduct of his wife. Mrs. William had failed to realize that in marrying William she married a Service. She thought she married the head of Hepplestall’s Manchester offices and that she had, as a result, her position in Manchester and her distinguished home in Alderley Edge, which is almost a rural suburb and, also, the seat of a peer. Short of living in London, to which she had vague aspirations when William retired, she was very well content with her degree; and the news that she was expected to uproot herself and to live in Staithley came as a startling assault on settled prepossessions. While she hadn’t the challenging habit of asserting that she was of Manchester and proud of it, she knew the difference between Manchester, where one could pretend one was not provincial, and Staithley, where no such pretense was possible, and it was vainly that William told her of Lady Hepplestall’s offer to leave the Hall in their favor. Sir Philip’s widow knew, if Mrs. William didn’t, what was incumbent on a Hepplestall.
“In other words, we’re to be caretakers for Rupert,” she said. “What will become of my Red Cross committee work here?”
William suggested that by using the car she need be cut off from none of her activities. “But I’m to live down there,” she said, “decentralized, in darkest Lancashire,” and she had her alternative. If the firm required this irrational sacrifice of William’s wife, he had surely his reply that he was rich enough to retire and would retire with her, to London. Her friend, Lady Duxbury, was already preparing to move to London after the war; the William Hepplestalls could move now. They were forced to move now.
“It is not a question of being rich enough to retire,” he said. “No doubt I am that; but I am an able-bodied servant of the firm. We Hepplestalls do not retire while we are capable of service.”
She had never thought him so dull a dog before; she whistled at the obligations of the Service, and she exaggerated the influence of a wife which persuades in proportion as it is ventured sparingly, seasonably, and with due regard to the example of pig-drivers who, when they would have their charges go to the left, make a feint of driving them to the right.
“Sir Ralph Duxbury is younger than you,” she argued, “and he’s retiring at the end of the war. They’re going to London to enjoy life before they’re too old.”
“Duxbury,” said William severely, “is a war-profiteer. His future plans tally with his present.”
“Oh, how can you say that of your friend?”
“I can say it of most of my friends. But you would hardly suggest that it is true of me. You would hardly put the case of a Hepplestall on all fours with the case of a Duxbury.”
She did suggest it. “But surely you are all in business to make money!”
“My dear,” he said, with dignified rebuke, “I am a Hepplestall,” and left it, without more argument, at that. He knew no cure for eyes which saw no difference between the Service and the nimble men who had thriven by the mushroom trades of temporary war-contractors. “And we go to Staithley.”
If it was a matter of capitulations, he had his own to make in his disappearance from Manchester, his familiar scene. The Head of Hepplestalls made no half-and-half business of it, dividing his days between the mills, the Manchester office and the Manchester Exchange. He left others to cut a figure on ‘Change and to hold court in the offices. His place was at the source, at the mills, a standard-bearer of the cotton trade, a manufacturer first and a salesman and distributor only by proxy. It meant, for William, the change in the habits of half a lifetime, the end of his pleasant Cheshire County associations at Alderley, the end of his lunches in his club in Manchester, and, so far, he could have sympathized with Gertrude if only she hadn’t, by the violence of her expression, driven him hotly to resent her view.
She called it “darkest Lancashire”—Staithley, the Staithley of the Hepplestalls! “Caretakers for Rupert!” There was truth in that, though the caretaking, by reason of the war and because when the war ended Rupert had still to begin at the beginning, would last ten years and (confound Gertrude), couldn’t she see what it meant to William that he was going to live and to have his children live in Staithley Hall where he had spent his boyhood? Caretakers! They were all caretakers, they were all trustees. Above all, he, William, was Head of Hepple-stall’s and his wife had so little appreciation of the glory that was his as to be captious about the trivial offsets.
The responsibility, heaven knew, was heavy enough without Gertrude’s adding to it this galling burden of her discontent, but, though she submitted, it was never gracefully. She went to Staithley determined that their time there should be short, that she would lose no opportunity to press for his retirement; but she had learned the need of subtlety. She had found her William a malleable husband, but there were hard places in the softest men and here was one of them not to be negotiated easily or hurriedly, but by a gentle tactfulness. Perhaps she knew, better than he knew himself, that there was no granite in him.
She reminded him, not every day or every week, but sufficiently often to show that she did not relent, of her hatred of Staithley. She had the wisdom not to criticize the Hall—indeed she couldn’t, even when she flogged resentment, disrelish that aging place of mellow beauty—but, “If it were anywhere but at Staithley!” she cried with wearying monotony, and in a score of ways she made dissatisfaction rankle. It was a fact in their lives which she intended to turn into a factor.
She made a minor counter of Rupert’s marriage to a musical comedy actress. “I’m caretaker for a slut,” she said, and when, after the war, William was indulgent about Rupert who was demobilized and yet did not come to Staithley, her fury was uncontrolled. “He has had no honeymoon and no holiday,” said William. “Both are due to him before he comes here.”
“Here,” she said, “to the Hall, to turn me out of the only thing that made Staithley tolerable. You expect me to live in a villa in Staithley?”
“The Hall is Rupert’s. If he were a bachelor, he would no doubt ask us to stay on. As he is married, we must find other quarters.”
“But not in Staithley. William, say it shall not be in Staithley.”
“It must.”
“I’m evicted for that slut! Have you no more thought for your wife than to humiliate me like that?”
“There is no humiliation, Gertrude. And, I expect, no need to think of this at all yet. Rupert deserves a long holiday.”
“Keeping me on tenterhooks, never knowing from one day to the next when I shall get orders to quit. And, all the time we could do the reasonable thing. We could leave Staithley and go to London.”
“We shall not leave Staithley,” he said. “Staithley is the home of the Head of Hepplestall’s.”
“The homeless Head,” she taunted, and he did, in fact, almost as much as she, resent the implications of Rupert’s marriage. It had been suave living at the Hall, peopled with memories of his race and, important point, affording room for a man to escape into from his wife. Certainly he had been dull about Rupert’s marriage, he hadn’t sufficiently perceived that he must leave the Hall to live elsewhere in Staithley. “A villa in Staithley,” Gertrude put it, and truly he supposed that he must live in a house which would be correctly described as a villa. He couldn’t expect the associations of the Hall, but he wanted scope in a Staithley home in which to flee from Gertrude, and looked ahead with a sense of weariness to the long period of Rupert’s noviciate. Then, and not till then, he might chant his “Nunc dîmittis” he might retire and go, as Gertrude wished, to London, but not before then. Certainly not before then.
But war disintegrates. William was wrong in thinking that he had to pit his tenacity and his sense of duty only against Gertrude. The end of the war and its immediate sequel were to blow a shrewd side-wind upon his resolution to endure.
The great delusion of the war was that its end would be peace. William was encouraged by that delusion to wrestle with the war-problems of his business: the shortage of raw cotton, the leaping costs of production, the shortage of shipping. The home trade was good beyond precedent, it almost seemed that the higher the price the greater the demand; but the home market, at its most voracious, took only a minor part of Hepplestall’s output. Turkey was an enemy; India, China and South America followed warily the upward trend of prices, expecting the end of the war to bring a sudden fall, and, also, were difficult of access by reason of the transport shortage. In spite of the military service act, in spite of their woolen dyeing, and of every device that William and the Board could contrive to keep the great mills active, there was unemployment at Hepplestall’s. Cotton was rationed in Lancashire and Hepplestall’s quota of the common stock was insufficient to keep their spindles at work. The situation was met adequately by the Cotton Control Board and the Unions and by the substitution of corporate spirit for individualism; by high wages; by a pool of fines imposed on those who worked more spindles and took more cotton than their due; and ends were met all round, but, however different the case of the munition trades, cotton was no beneficiary of the war.
The year 1919 brought a great and a dangerous reaction. It was seen by the foreign markets that their expectations of a spectacular fall in prices were not to be realized, and, for a time, buyers scrambled to supply, at any price, cotton goods to countries starved of cotton practically throughout the war. William looked back to his father’s time when the margin of profit on a pound of yarn had been reckoned by an eighth or a farthing: it was now sixpence or more, and he trembled for the cotton trade. Such margins had the febrile unhealthiness of an overheated forcing-house. He hadn’t expected peace to duplicate for him the conditions of 1913, but these profits, current in 1919, expressed for him the hazards of the peace. There was a madness in the very air, and a frenzy of speculation resulted from this rebound of the cotton trade from war-depression to extreme buoyancy. The profits were notorious, and Labor could not be expected to remain without its share of the loot. That was reasonable enough, but William had no faith in the boom’s lasting and knew the difficulty of persuading Labor to accept reduction when the tight times came. Meanwhile, certainly, Labor had a sound case for a large advance in wages, even though wages had steadily risen throughout the war. William wondered if any helmsman of Hepple-stall’s had ever faced such anxious times as these; the very appearance of prosperity, deceptive and fleeting as he held it to be, was incalculable menace. In spite of himself, he was a profiteer—not a war, but an as-a-result-of-the-war profiteer—and both hated and feared it. This was not peace but pyrotechny; they were up like a rocket and he feared to come down like the stick.
Lancashire was turned into a speculator’s cockpit and cotton mill shares were changing hands sometimes at ten times their nominal value. The point, especially, was the prohibitive cost of building, so that existing mills had monopoly valuations. The general anticipation, which William did not share, was that a world hunger for cotton goods would sustain the boom for four or five years; there was plenty of war-made wealth ready for investment, and the cotton trade appeared a promising field for high and quick returns.
So much money was there and so attractive did cotton trade prospects appear that the local speculator began to be outbidden very greatly to his patriotic annoyance. The annoyance, indeed, was more than patriotic or parochial, it was sensible. A highly technical trade can be run to advantage only when its controllers have not only full technical knowledge, but full knowledge of local characteristics and prejudices, and Lancashire was, historically, self-supporting with its finance as well as its trade under Lancashire direction. From its brutal origins to its present comparatively humane organization, its struggles and its achievements had been its own.
The interests of the financier are financial; one-eyed, short-sighted, parasitic interests. Steam and the factory system fell like a blight on Lancashire, but they had in them the elements of progress of a kind; they worked out, outrageously, in the course of a century to a balance where the power was not exclusively the employers’. The object of the London financiers who now perceived in Lancashire a fruitful field was to buy up mills, run them under managers for the first years of the boom, then, before new mills could be built, to show amazing profits and to unload on the guileless public before the boom collapsed. It was a raid purely in financial interests and opposed to the permanent interests of Lancashire, which would be left to bear, in a new era of distress, the burdens imposed by over-capitalization. To the financier, Lancashire was a counter in whose future he had no interest after he had floated his companies and got out with his profits. And he collected mills like so many tricks in his game.
The owners were fraudulent trustees to sell even under temptation of such prices as were offered? Well, many did not sell, and for others there was the excuse, besides natural greed, of war-weariness. They had the feeling that here was security offered them, ease after years of strain; it was a sauve qui peut and the devil take the hindmost. They were men who hadn’t been in business for their health and were offered golden opportunity to retire from business. They had been, perhaps, a little jealous of others who had made strictly war wealth, and this was their chance to get hold, at second hand, of a share of those war profits. There was the example of others... there would be stressful times ahead for the cotton trade... Labor upheavals... it was good to be out of it all, with one’s money gently in the Funds.
And Finance goes stealthily to work: it was not at first apparent, even to sellers, that behind the nominal buyers were non-Lancashire financiers. There was no immediate apprehension of the objects; nobody took quick alarm. Labor, especially the Oldham spinners, had cotton shares to sell and took a profit with the rest. They started a special share exchange in Oldham: it was open through the Christmas holidays and on New Year’s Day of 1920. That speaks more than volumes for the dementia of that boom. Working on New Year’s Day in Oldham! What was the use of being sentimentally annoyed at being outbidden by a Londoner, even if you perceived he was a Londoner, when the congenital idiot offered ten pounds for a pound share on which you had only paid up five shillings?
Appetite grew by what it fed on and Finance ceased to be satisfied with acquiring small mills whose names, at any rate, were unknown to the outside investor. Hepplestall’s was different, Hepplestall’s was known to every shopkeeper and every housewife in the land. It was, in the opinion of Finance, only a question of price; and prices did not cow Finance.
William sat in the office of the Hepplestalls with a letter before him which was Finance’s opening gambit in the game. It was addressed to him personally, marked “private and confidential,” by a London firm of chartered accountants whose national eminence left no doubt of the serious intentions of their clients.
Which of us does not know the fearful joy of mental flirtation with crime? William, restraining his first sound impulse to tear up the letter and to put its fragments where they properly belonged, in the waste-paper basket, persuaded himself that his motive was simple curiosity. It had nothing to do with Gertrude, nor with her impatience of Rupert who was prolonging a holiday into a habit, and who, if he made no signal that her reign in Staithley Hall must end, made no signal, either, that his training for the Service must begin. By this time, William had, distinctly, his puzzled misgivings about Rupert, but he hadn’t quite reached the point of seeing in Rupert’s absence and his uncommunicativeness a deliberate challenge to the Service. He attributed to thoughtlessness an absence which was thoughtful.
He had at first no other idea than to calculate what fabulous figure would, in existing circumstances, be justly demanded for Hepplestall’s on the ridiculous hypothesis of Hepplestall’s being for sale. There was surely no harm on a slack morning in a little theoretic financial exercise of that kind. There wasn’t; but, for all that, he went about the collecting of data, alone in his office under the pictured eyes of bygone Hepplestalls, with the furtive air of a criminal.
For insurance purposes, in view of post-war values, they had recently had a professional valuation made of the mills, machinery, office and warehouse buildings in Staithley and Manchester. Providential, William thought, meaning, of course, no more than that he need not waste more than an hour or so in satisfying his natural curiosity. It was, he asserted, defiantly daring the gaze of the Founder on the wall, natural to be curious.
He had the valuation for insurance before him now: he applied the multiplication table to reach an estimate of the market value. He meditated goodwill. Guiltily he attempted to capitalize the name of Hepplestall’s, and it made him feel less guilty to capitalize it in seven figures. The total result was so large that, notwithstanding the national eminence of the chartered accountants whose letter was in his pocket, he felt justified in regarding his proceedings as completely extravagant.
So he might just as well amuse himself further. He might, for instance, refresh his memory of the distribution of Hepplestall’s shares, and he might turn up the articles of association and see if that document, usually so comprehensive, had anticipated this unlikeliest of all improbabilities, a sale of Hepplestall’s: and what emerged from his investigation was the fact that if he and Rupert voted, on their joint holdings of shares, for a sale at a legally summoned general meeting of Hepplestall’s shareholders, a sale would be authorized. He and Rupert! William found himself sweating violently. It was impure, obscene nightmare, but style his communings what he would, the pass was there and he and Rupert had the power to sell it.
He rose and paced the room. War disintegrates, but not to this degree, not to the degree of dissipating the tradition of the Hepplestalls. He, the Head, the Chief Trustee, had meditated treachery, but only (he faced the portraits reassuringly), only speculatively, only in pursuit of a train of thought started by an impertinent letter, which he had not torn up. No, he had not torn it up, he had preserved it as laughable proof of the insensibility to finer issues of these financial people. He would show it to his brothers or to Rupert: it would become quite a family jest.
To Rupert? Indeed he ought to show it first to Rupert, the future Head. He could, jokingly, good-humoredly, use it as a lever to make Rupert conscious of his responsibilities, he could say “if you don’t come quickly, there’ll be no Hepplestall’s for you to come to. Look at this letter. You and I, between us, have controlling interest; we could sell the firm, and the rest of the Board could not effectively prevent us. I’m joking, of course. That sort of thing isn’t in the tradition of the Hepplestalls. And, by the way, speaking of the tradition, when are we to expect you amongst us?”
Something like that; not a bit a business letter, not serious; genial and avuncular; but there was, manifestly, a Rupert affair, and this impudent inquiry of the eminent chartered accountants was the very means to bring the affair to a head. The boy was exceeding the license allowed even to one who had been in the war from the beginning; it was nearly a year since his demobilization.
William thought that his letter would seem more friendly if he addressed it from the Hall and looked in his desk for notepaper. He seemed to have run out of the supply of private notepaper he kept in his desk; then the spinning manager interrupted him. He put the letter in his pocket again: he would write to Rupert after lunch at the Hall.
He was busy for some time with the spinning manager, and went home convinced that the only serious thought he had ever had about the letter in his pocket was of its opportuneness in the matter of Rupert. It was nothing beyond a plausible excuse for writing to Rupert essentially on another subject and the figures in his note-book were not a traitor’s secret but the meaningless result of a middle-aged gentleman’s mental gymnastics.
He lunched alone with Gertrude and, “I’m writing to Rupert to-day,” he said incautiously.
“Oh?” She bristled. “Why?”
He perceived and regretted his incaution. It was indiscreet to say that his object was to urge Rupert to Staithley when that coming could only mean Gertrude’s going from the Hall. “Oh,” he said, “I’ve to send on a letter which will amuse him.” He had decided that the only use of that letter was humorous; it was a jest, questionable in taste but illustrative of the times and therefore to be mentioned in the family and preserved as a curiosity amongst the papers of the firm. And if it were going to be a family diversion, who had better right than William’s wife to be the first to enjoy it with him? She had unreal grievances enough without his adding to them the real grievance of his denying her the right to laugh at those harlequin accountants who so grotesquely misapprehended Hepplestall’s. “This is the letter,” he said, passing it across to her, expecting, actually, that she would smile.
She did not smile. “I see,” she said, and, in fact, saw very well. Women’s incomprehension of business has been exaggerated. “Why, to arrive at the figure they ask for would take weeks of work.”
“I got at it roughly in half an hour this morning,” he boasted.
“And sent it to them?” she asked quickly.
“Oh dear, no. I was only doing it as a matter of curiosity. If I sent them my result, I should frighten them.”
“They must expect something big, though. Shan’t you reply at all or are you consulting Rupert first?”
“I’d hardly say ‘consult,’” he said. “I’m sending it him as I show it you—as a joke. I shall point out to him, as a form, that he and I between us have a controlling share interest. I shall jest about our powers. It’s an opportunity of making Rupert awake to his responsibilities.”
“Yes,” said Gertrude, “I see. And you know best, dear.” She was dangerously uncombative, arranging her mental notes that, though he derided the letter, he had prepared an estimate and that he was writing to Rupert who, with William, could take decisive action. By way purely of showing him how little seriously she took it, she changed the subject.
“I heard from Connie Duxbury this morning,” she said.
“Not the most desirable of your acquaintances, I think,” said William.
“Oh, my dear. Sir Ralph’s a member of Parliament now.”
“It isn’t a certificate of respectability.”
She looked thoughtfully at him, as he rose and went into the library to write to Rupert, with the careful, anxious gaze of a wife who sees in her husband the symptoms of ill-health. She wished to leave Staithley for her own sake, but decidedly it was for William’s sake as well. In Manchester, if he had not been advanced, if (for instance) his play at Bridge was circumspect while hers was dashing, he had been broadminded. She remembered that he had spoken of Sir Ralph as a profiteer, but had admitted that most of their friends were profiteers. Staithley, already, was narrowing William, in months. What would it not do for him in years? She must get him out of Staithley before it was too late.
He was writing to Rupert; so would she write to Rupert. She would assume, and she had her shrewd idea that the assumption was correct, that Rupert’s views of Staithley marched with her own. She would paint in lurid colors a picture of life in Staithley; she would exhibit William, his furrowed brow, his whitening hair, as an awful warning; she would enlarge upon the post-war difficulties, so immensely more wearisome than in Sir Philip’s time. She would suggest that the accountants’ letter was a salvation, a means honorable and reasonable, of cutting the entail, of escaping from the Service. And she would tell him to regard her letter as confidential.
She had no doubt whatever of her success with Rupert and as to William, waverer was written all over him. Rupert’s decision would decide William, and the William Hepplestalls would go to London. There were housing troubles, but if you had money and if you took time by the forelock, trouble melted. She proceeded to take time by the forelock and wrote to Lady Duxbury to ask her to keep an eye open for a large house near her own. She whispered to her dearest Connie in the very, very strictest confidence that Hepplestall’s was going to be sold.
CHAPTER IX—MARY ARDEN’S HUSBAND
GIVE up the stage!” echoed Mr. Chown, assuming an appearance of thunderstruck amazement.
“Don’t act at me, my friend,” said Mary. “You must have had the probability in mind ever since I told you I was married.”
He had; that was the worst of women; an agent sweated blood to make a woman into a star, and the thankless creature manned and retired. But Mary had not immediately retired and he thought he had reasonable grounds for hoping that she would continue to pay him his commission for many years; a woman who married well and yet remained on the stage could surely be acting only because she liked it, and Mr. Chown had a lure to dangle before her which could hardly fail of its effect upon any actress who cared two straws for her profession.
He remembered the day when he had rung up Rossiter and had said, “Mary’s married,” and Rossiter had replied, “Right, I’ll watch her,” and, a little later, had told him “Mary will do. She can play Sans-Gêne.”
That was the bait he had for Mary. When (if ever), London tired of “Granada the Gay,” she was to play Sans-Gêne. She was to stand absolutely at the head of her profession. He reviewed musical comedy and could think of no woman’s part in all its repertoire which was so signally the blue riband of the lighter stage; and Rossiter destined it for the wear of Mary Arden!
“Listen to this, Mary. Do you know what Rossiter is doing next?”
“I’ll see it from the stalls,” she said.
“No. You’ll be it. You’ll be Sans-Gêne in ‘The Duchess of Dantzig.’ ”
“I didn’t tell you I’m retiring from the stage, did I? All I said was that it’s possible.”
“Ah!” said Chown, watching his bait at work.
“You’re wrong,” she said. “You’re wrong.”
He put his hand on hers. “Am I, Mary? Absolutely?”
“No,” she confessed, “and I’m grateful. You’ve done many things for me and this is the biggest of them all. If I stay on the stage, I’ll play it and I’ll... I’ll not make a failure. But you haven’t tempted me to stay. I’m getting mixed. I mean I’m tempted, horribly. I’ve a megaphone in my brain that’s shouting at me to damn everything and just jolly well show them what I can do with that part. But I won’t damn everything. I won’t forget the things that make it doubtful whether I’ll stay on the stage or not. I’ll give up Sans-Gêne rather than forget them, and I know as well as you do what Rossiter means by casting me for that part. He means that Mary’s right there.”
“Yes,” said Chown, “he means that.”
“It’s decent of him. We’ll be decent, too, please. We’ll tell him there’s a doubt.”
“Look here, Mary, I know you well enough to ask. Is it a baby?”
She shook her head. “Not that sort of baby,” she said, and puzzled him.
It was Rupert. In Mary’s opinion, Rupert was in danger of becoming the husband of Mary Arden, one of those deplorable hangers-on of the theater who assert a busy self-importance because they are married to somebody who is famous. He hadn’t, quite, come to that yet, but it was difficult to see what else he could assert of himself beyond his emphatic negative against going to Staithley; and she proposed very definitely that he should not come to it, either. He should not, even if she had to leave the stage, even if she must sacrifice so great, so climactic a part as Sans-Gêne.
She had not come painlessly to that opinion of him. She had not watched him since his demobilization and she had not come to her profound conviction that something was very wrong with Rupert, without feeling shame at her scrutiny and distrust of this love of hers which could disparage. At first, while he was still at the Front, she went on acting simply to drug anxiety. She acted on the stage by night and for the films by day, and later it was to see if she could not, by setting an example, persuade him that work was a sound diet; and now she was afraid that the example had miscarried and that her associations with the stage were doing him a mischief. To work in the Galaxy was one thing, to loaf in it another, and he, who had no work to do there, was in it a good deal.
If Rupert was developing anything, it was listlessness. He had an animal content in Mary, and was allowing a honeymoon to become a routine. Perhaps because she was a certainty and because the war had sated him with hazards, he could not bear to be away from her. She had suggested Cambridge and, though it was flat, was ready to go there with him. He went and looked at Cambridge, found it overcrowded and returned to London. Through the summer he played some cricket, in minor M. C. C. matches, and did not find his form. He thought of golf for the winter, found that the good clubs had long waiting lists, and, though friends offered to rush him in, refused to have strings pulled for him.
Privately, he had self-criticism and tried to stifle it. There was a miasma of disillusionment everywhere; there was the Peace that was mislaid by French pawnbrokers instead of being made by gentlemen; there was the impulse to forget the war on the part of the civilian population who now seemed so brutally in possession; there was the treatment of disbanded soldiery which, this time, was to have belied history, and didn’t. He strained to believe the current dicta of the minority mind and to find in them excuse for his lethargy.
He was, no doubt, tired; but whatever subtle infections of the soul might be distressing him, materially at any rate he was immune from the common aggravation of high prices. He made that explicitly one of his excuses. It wasn’t fair that he, who had all the money he needed, should take a job from a man who needed money. “There’s unpaid work,” thought Mary, but she did not say it. She thought he must sooner or later see it for himself.
He did see it and tried to blink at it. He was of the Hepplestalls, of a race who weren’t acclimatized to leisure, who found happiness in setting their teeth in work. He was born with a conscience and couldn’t damp it down. He was aware, at the back of behind, that it was hurting him to turn a deaf ear to the call of Staithley. He had done worse things than Staithley implied in the necessity of war, and there was also a necessity of peace. He felt nobly moral to let such sentiments find lodgment in his mind.
His father’s diffident comparison of the Hepplestalls with the Samurai came back to him. Yes, one ought to serve, but it wasn’t necessary to go to Staithley to be a Samurai. One could be a Samurai in London. He, decisively, was forced to be a Samurai in London because he had married Mary Arden and to wrench her from her vocation, to take her away from London, was unthinkable.
There was no hurry to set about discovering the place of a Samurai in modern London. Like everybody else he had, with superlative reason, promised himself a good time after the war, and if the good time had its unforeseen drawbacks, that was no ground for refusing to enjoy all the good there was. Mary was not the whole of the good time, but she was its center. He supposed he couldn’t—certainly he couldn’t; there were other things in life than a wife—concentrate indefinitely on Mary, but this world of the theater to which she belonged was so jolly, so strange to him, so unaccountably enthralling. He became expert in its politics and its gossip. He was obsessed by it through her who had never been obsessed. He was duped, as she had never been since Hugh Darley applied his corrective to her childish errors, by the terribly false perspective of the theater. He saw the theater, indeed, in terms of Mary; several times a week he sat through her scenes in a stall at the Galaxy, and when she scoffed at the idiotic pride he took in gleaning inside information, in knowing what so and so was going to do before the announcement appeared in the papers, and at being privileged to go to some dress-rehearsals, it was, he thought, only because she was used to it all while he came freshly to it. He might even find that a Samurai was needed in the theater. Would Mary like him to put up a play for her? He thought her reply hardly fair to the excellence of his intentions. But if she refused, incisively, to let him be a Samurai of the theater, she was troubled to see him continue his education of an initiate.
He was self-persuaded that his fussy loafing had importance, when it was, at most, a turbid retort to conscience. He was feeling his way, he was learning the ropes, he was meditating his plans, and there was no lack of flattering council offered to the husband of Mary Arden who was, besides, rich.=
````Big fleas have little fleas ````Upon their backs to bite ’em. ````These fleas have other fleas ````And so, ad infinitum.=
Morally, he was the little flea on Mary’s back, and he was collecting parasites on his own. Then William’s letter came, offering a clean cut from Staithley and an annihilating reply to his conscience.
He didn’t need Gertrude’s letter to show him exactly what William’s and William’s enclosure meant. He read clearly between the lines that William wobbled. “He’s on the fence,” he thought, “he doesn’t need a push to shove him over,—he needs a touch.” Then Rupert and William, acting together, must face a hostile Board of conservative Hepplestalls, and a nasty encounter he expected it to be. They wouldn’t spare words about his father’s son.
But that was a small price to pay for freedom; Rupert and William had the whip hand and the rest of the Hepplestalls could howl, they could—they would; he could hear them—shriek “Treachery” and “Blasphemy” at him, but it was only a case of keeping a stiff upper lip through an unpleasant quarter of an hour, and he was quit of the Service for ever. There would no longer be a Service.
That was a tremendous thought, breath-catching like—oh, like half a hundred things which had happened to him in France. Yes, that was the true perspective. The war had played the deuce with tradition, it had finished bigger things than the service of the Hepplestalls. They would have to see, these Hepplestalls, that he was a man of the new era, a realist, not to be bamboozled by their antique sentimentalities. If they wanted still to serve, it could be arranged, as part of the conditions of the purchase, that they should serve the incoming owner. He was disobliging nobody.
He looked up to find Mary studying his face. “Sorry, old thing,” he said, “but these are rather important. Letters from Staithley.”
“Staithley!”
“Yes. I expect you’d forgotten there is such a place. I haven’t spoken of it, but Staithley has been in my mind a good deal lately. I’ve found myself wondering if I was altogether right in giving it the go-by. I’ve wondered if I quite played the game.” It didn’t hurt to say these things now that the means to abolish the Service were in his hands; he could admit aloud to Mary what he hadn’t cared, before, to admit to himself. And he was too interested in his point of view to note the quick thankfulness in Mary’s face, and her joy at his confession. Complacently he went on, “That’s putting it too strongly, but... ancestors. It’s absurd, but I’ve been in the street and I’ve had the idea that one of those musty old fellows who are hung up on the walls in Hepplestall’s office was following me about, going to trip me up or knock me on the head or something. I’ve looked over my shoulder. I’ve jumped into a taxi. Nerves, of course, and you’d have thought my nerves were tough enough at this time of day. I’m telling you this so that you’ll rejoice with me in these letters. They’re the answer to it all. There’s no question about playing the game when the game’s no longer there to play.”
He gave her the letters. She hadn’t known how much she had continued to be hopeful of the Staithley idea, not for herself, not for a Bradshaw who might live in Staithley Hall, but for him; and his admission that Staithley had been in his mind was evidence that he knew occultly the root cause of his derangement. These letters, he told her, were the answer to it all, and they could be nothing but the call to Staithley, an ultimatum which he meant to obey, of which he had the charming grace to admit that he was glad. Indeed, indeed, she would rejoice with him. He was going to Staithley, to work, to be cured by work and the tonic air of the moors of the poison London had dropped into his system.
“This will finish off that old bogey,” he exulted and she exulted with him as she bent her eyes to read the letters. She read and saw with what disastrous optimism she had misunderstood. And he stood there aglow with happiness, expectant of her congratulations when this was not the beginning of new life but the death of hope! “Well?” he asked. “Well?”
“It does seem to depend on you,” she hedged.
“Uncle William would if he dared, eh? He’s as good as asking me to dare for him, and I’ll dare all right. I’ll wire that I’ll see him to-morrow afternoon. That’s soon enough. I’ll go by car. It’s a beastly railway journey.”
“Aren’t you deciding very quickly, Rupert?”
“I thought for a solid five minutes before I handed the letters across to you.” He was most indignant at her imputation of hastiness.
“I was watching you. Five minutes! Not long to give to the consideration of a death sentence.”
“A—what?”
“Staithley. Staithley Mills without the Hepplestalls!”
“Oh, they’ll survive it. This tiling’s a gift from God, and I’m not going to turn my back on the deity. It’s bad manners. Candidly, I’m surprised at you, Mary. You might be thinking there’s something to argue about. You might be sentimental for the Hepplestalls.”
“No,” she said. “For a Hepplestall. For you. Rupert, I’ll leave the stage to-morrow if you will go and do your work at Staithley.”
“Good Lord! Besides, aren’t you rather forgetting? Aren’t you forgetting you’re a Bradshaw?”
“It is quite safe to forget that. I’m Mary Arden. Nobody knows me. It’s too long since I was anything but that.”
“Oh, it wouldn’t do. Too risky altogether. Oh, never. Staithley’s the one place that’s absolutely barred.”
“Rupert, you’re making me responsible. You’re using me as your excuse.”
“Damn it, Mary, do you want us to live in Staithley?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m sorry. We can’t. I do you the justice to tell you I’ve never found you a capricious woman before. But it’s plain that this is one of the times when a man has to put his foot down on... on sentimentality and all that sort of thing.”
“Your conscience was troubling you, Rupert.”
“It was, I’ve admitted it. And this letter is my quittance. It washes conscience out. It closes the account.”
“No. You’re still troubled.”
“I’ll be hanged! Do you keep my conscience?”
“I want us to go to Staithley, Rupert.”
“This time, I can’t give you what you want, Mary. I’m going to Staithley alone, for the purpose of cutting Staithley out of my life for ever. I’m sorry about your attitude. I’m completely fogged by it, but I’m not going to talk about it any more. This is the nearest we’ve ever come to quarreling and we’ll get no nearer. I’ll go along for the car now.”
“Just one moment first, though. You say you’re putting your foot down. I have a foot as well as you.”
“I adore your foot, Mary. If I were a sculptor—”
“Seriously, Rupert, I’m going to fight this. You’re doing wrong, you know you’re doing wrong—”
“Fight?” he said. “My dear Mary, perhaps you own half of Hepplestall’s shares? Now I’d an idea it was I.”
“Yes, it is you. It’s the man I love, and I won’t see you do this rotten thing and raise no hand to stop you.”
“There are two things that I deny. It isn’t rotten and you can’t stop me. So, won’t you just admit that you’re a woman and that you’re out of your depth? Let’s kiss and be friends.”
“When we’ve just declared war?” she smiled.
“Oh, that’s rubbish. You’ve no munitions, my dear.”
“I’ve love,” she said, “and love will find me weapons. Perhaps love won’t be particular what weapons it finds, either. If love finds poison-gas, you won’t forget there’s love behind the gas, will you? I want you to understand. You offered me something. You offered to put Mary Arden in a theater of her own. Well, it’s the dream of every actress and God knows it’s good enough for Mary Arden. To be in management, and in management where there’s lots of money to do exactly as I want!”
“And more money when this sale’s gone through,” he said eagerly.
“Yes,” she said, “it’s fine for Mary. It’s more than good enough for her. But it isn’t good enough for Mary’s Rupert. Don’t you see it? You must, you must. To be running an entertainment factory, when you might be running Hepplestall’s?”
“You know, you’re looking at the theater through the wrong end of the telescope, and at Hepplestall’s through the right. You haven’t a notion of the wonderful things I’d planned to do for you in the theater. You’ve never let me speak of them. And it isn’t running Hepplestall’s either. Not for a long time. If I just went up there and walked into the office as head of Hepplestall’s, there might be some sense in what you say, but I don’t do that. I go into the mills and spin and do all sorts of footling jobs for years. Years, I tell you,” he shouted and then it occurred to him that he was arguing and had said he would not argue. “The simple fact is that you don’t know what you’re talking about and that I do. We’ll let it rest at that, except that I’m now going for the car.”
“And except,” said Mary, “that I am fighting.”
“You darling,” he said contemptuously, and went out.
Advocacy has its perils for the advocate. In the heat of argument, she had felt confident of her weapon and now she doubted if it were a weapon or hers to use. In promising Rupert a fight she had Tom Bradshaw in mind; it had seemed to her that Labor had only to lift its voice in order to obtain anything it demanded, and wasn’t Tom member for Staithley? But now that Rupert had gone and she was able coolly to examine the weapon she proposed to enlist, she couldn’t imagine why she ever thought it would fight in her cause. Why should she, after so many years, have thought of Tom at all? He had nothing to thank her for; that much was certain, but she had instinctively thought of him as her true ally in her struggle for the soul of Rupert Hepplestall. So, though she saw no reason in it, she would carry out her intention, she would send for Tom Bradshaw. If he was nothing else, he was a Staithley man, and he was something else. He was a Bradshaw. So was she. That was reason enough to send for him.
Time was against her and she didn’t know how to set about finding his address, but the paper informed her—she didn’t as a rule take stock of the fact—that the House was sitting. A phrase caught her eye. “Labor members absented themselves from the debate.” Suppose he were absent to-day? She could only try. She wrote—
Dear Mr. Bradshaw:
I am writing in ease I do not find you at the House. I want to see you urgently. You may possibly have noticed that Sir Rupert Hepplestall married Mary Arden of the Galaxy Theatre. I enclose tickets for both this afternoon and to-night. I must see you, please. If I am on the stage when you come, have a look at me, but come round behind the moment I am off. They will bring you to me at once. Failing that, telephone me here. It is really important.
Yours sincerely,
Mary Hepplestall.
She meant to have written that Mary Arden was Mary Ellen Bradshaw, but she couldn’t resist, even in her anxiety, springing that surprise upon him when he heard her speaking the tongue of Staithley on the stage. He might know already, he might have seen the piece. She wasn’t unsophisticated enough to suppose that Labor members were any more austere in their recreations than other people, but Tom wasn’t likely to frequent musical comedy. He liked music.
She went to the theater for the tickets, enclosed them with her letter and took it to the House of Commons, where she was assured that Tom would certainly receive it during the day. That was comforting as far as it went, and what went further was that both policemen of whom she enquired in the precincts of the House addressed her as “Miss Arden.” There are people who do not gain confidence by finding themselves known to the police. Mary was helped just then to be reminded that she was famous.
She had conquered London; surely she could conquer Rupert Hepplestall.
Reading her letter, Tom couldn’t imagine what need she had of him in that galley, but the Coalition could coalesce without his opposition for an hour or two that afternoon, and he might as well go and see what was perturbing her play-acting Ladyship.
He followed instructions, went to the front of the house and asked Rossiter’s impressive attendant if Miss Arden was at that moment on the stage. “Mr. Bradshaw, Sir?” He was, and a surprised and flattered Mr. Bradshaw by the time the Galaxy staff had ushered him to his stall with the superlative deference shown to those about whom they had special instructions. He was not royalty, and he was not received by Mr. Rossiter, but he was Miss Arden’s guest and the technique of his welcome was based accurately on that of Hubert Rossiter receiving royalty.
As a Labor Member he ought, properly, to have scowled at flunkeydom; he ought to have bristled at the full house, at the sight of so many people idle in the afternoon; and he did neither of these reasonable things. He was in the Galaxy, and, besides, he was looking at the stage and on a bit of authentic Lancashire on the stage. “Yon wench is the reet stuff,” he thought, slipping mentally back into the vernacular. “By gum, she is.” She was remarkably the right stuff; if his ear went for anything, she was Staithley stuff. That must be why she seemed familiar to him as if he had met her, or somebody very like her. But he decided that he hadn’t met her; he had only met typical Lancashire women, and this was the sublimation of the type. She finished her scene and left the stage. An attendant was murmuring softly to him. Would he go round and see Miss Arden now?
Tom pulled himself together. A queer place, the theater, making a man forget so completely that he was there on business. It dawned upon him that this Lancashire witch he had gazed at with such absorbed appreciation was Mary Arden, Lady Hepplestall. “If she wants anything of me that’s mine to give, it’s hers for the asking,” he thought, as he followed his guide, still chuckling intimately at the racy flavor of her; no bad compliment to an actress who was thinking that day of anything but acting.
She awaited him in her room unchanged, in the clogs and shawl of the first act, which were not very different, except in cleanliness, from the clothes Mrs. Butterworth had burned.
“Well, Mr. Bradshaw,” she greeted him, “and who am I?”
“Who are you? Why, Lady Hepplestall.”
“You’ve seen me from the front, haven’t you? And you didn’t know me? I’m safer than I thought I was. Will it help you if I mention Walter Pate?”
It didn’t; he saw nothing in this splendid woman to take him back to the starveling waif whom Pate and he adopted or to the crude, if physically more developed, girl he had seen on one or two later occasions at Staithley. Mary relished his bewilderment: if Rupert made seriously the point against going to Staithley that she was Bradshaw, here was apt confirmation of her reply that nobody would know her. Tom Bradshaw saw her in clogs and shawl and did not know her. She hummed a bar or two of “Lead Kindly Light.”
“Mary Ellen!” he cried. “Yes, I ought to have seen it. But Lady Hepplestall to Mary Ellen Bradshaw. It’s a long way to look.”
“And you don’t much care to look? Not at that thankless girl who bolted.”
But she was Lady Hepplestall and she was the artist, yes, by God, the artist, who had gripped him magically five minutes ago. He could not see her as a Bradshaw. “You’ve traveled far since then,” he said ungrudgingly. “I’m proud I was in at the start.”
“I wrote to you,” she said, “because I wanted help. I don’t know why it came to me that you were the one person who could help and even when I wrote I saw no reason in it. No reason at all. Instinct, perhaps. We’re both Bradshaws, and he’s a Hepplestall, but I’m not pretending that I care about this thing except as it concerns my husband. I do think it concerns a lot of other people, but I don’t care for them. I don’t care if it’s good or bad for them, and this is just a matter between my husband and myself. You see how little reason I have to suppose that you’ll do anything.”
“The way you’re putting it is that I’m to interfere between man and wife. That’s a mug’s game. But you can go on. I’m here to hear.”
“If I knew that mine was just a war marriage, I think I’d kill myself. It isn’t yet, but he’s in danger, and he can be saved. It’ll save him if he’ll go to Staithley and take up his work.”
“Hasn’t he yet?”
“No: he’s killing time in London.”
He looked at her, wondering if he could accuse her of playing the Syren. If Mary Ellen piped, a man would dance to her tune and small blame to him either; but he couldn’t assume that she was holding Rupert in London when it was she who saw salvation for him in Staithley. If he had to take a side, he took hers so far as to say, “A work-shy Hepplestall is something new.”
“You’re thinking that it’s my fault,” she said. “You’re thinking of me that first time you met Mary Ellen. You’re thinking of her ‘’A ’ate th’ ’Epplestalls.’”
“I did think of it,” he admitted. “Then I thought again. He ought to be in Staithley.”
“And he’s on his way there now to sell Hepplestall’s.”
“What!” said Tom, rising to his feet, with his hand tugging at his collar as a flush, almost apoplectic, discolored his neck. “What! Sell Hepplestall’s!”
She told him of the letters. “And you thought it was no business of mine?” he said. “You saw no reason in sending for me? Instinct, eh! Well, thank God for instinct then. Sell Hepplestall’s! By God, they won’t. Who to? To a damned syndicate, that offers through a London accountant? Londoners! outsiders! Know-nothing grab-alls that have the same idea of Trades Unions as they have of Ireland. There’s been too much of this selling of Lancashire to pirates, and happen Labor’s been dull about it, and all. But Hepplestall’s. I didn’t think they’d go for Hepplestall’s. That’s big business, if you like; that’s swallowing the camel but they’re not to do it, Mary, and if you want to know who’ll stop them, I will.” He was racing up and down her room, not like a caged tiger which only paces, but like an angry man who tries to move his legs in time with rushing thought. “Ugh! you don’t know what you’ve done, letting this cat out of the bag. I’ll be careful for your sake, but I tell you I’m tempted to be careless. Would you like to know what they called me in the Times the other day? An Elder Statesman of the Labor Party. That means I’ve gone to sleep, with toothless jaws that couldn’t bite a millionaire if I caught his hand in my pocket. It means I’m a harmless fossil and you can bet your young life the bright lads of the advanced movement that think Tom Bradshaw lives by selling passes are on to that damned phrase. If I go down to Staithley and call the young crowd together and tell them this, I could blossom into an idol of the lads. They’re ready for any lead, but it ’ud let hell loose in Lancashire and I’ll not do it if I can find another way. I’ll be an elder statesman, but if the Hepplestalls don’t like my British statesmanship, by God, I’ll give ’em Russian. I’ll show them there’s to be an end of this buying and selling Labor like cattle.”
Mary sat overwhelmed by the spate she had provoked; she hadn’t dreamed that she would so strangely touch him on the raw, and he, too, sat, shaken, hiding his face in his hands on her dressing-table. Presently he looked up, and she saw that the storm had passed. “I’m an old fool,” he said, “ranting like a boy. But I’m upset. I didn’t think it of the Hepplestalls. This lad of yours... what would Sir Philip have thought of him?”
She was fighting Rupert, and Tom Bradshaw was the ally she had called to help her, but she was stung to seek defense for him. “Sir Philip did not go through the war, as Rupert did,” she said. “All that’s the matter with Rupert is that he is still—still rather demobilized.”
“Post-war,” groaned Tom. “I know. It’s the word for everything that’s deteriorated: but Hepplestall’s shan’t go post-war.”
She spoke of William, and, “Aye,” he agreed. “I know William. William’s weak—for a Hepplestall. Well, it’s those two then. Your spark and William. I think I can do it. Mary. They meet to-morrow, eh? Well, it won’t be the duet they think it will. It will be a trio and I’ll be singing to a tune of my own.”
“If,” said Mary, “it isn’t a quartette. I’m coming with you. It’ll make my understudy grateful, anyhow.”