I Shall Not Want (23 page)

The Old Gentleman's end was very near by now. By some sort of tribal magic everyone seemed to know of it, and the trains from Cardiff and Newport and Swansea swarmed with hopeful and expectant relations all making their way to London to be in time for the final parting.

It was one thing, however, to get as far as Paddington Station and quite another to penetrate into the sick-room itself: the relatives agreed afterwards that it was the last six yards of the two-hundred-mile journey which were the most difficult. For Nurse Foxell kept them at bay. Polite and pink-and-white and smiling, she admitted them one at a time for a space of a few minutes or turned them away altogether on the pretext that the patient was sleeping. Even those who got inside did not profit very much. They found the Old Gentleman wrapped in a sort of morphine cocoon. They spoke to him and he didn't answer. They fondled his hand and it slid limply back onto the bedclothes. They said good-bye, and he did not seem to notice that they had left him.

Nurse Foxell herself appeared quite unperturbed by such behaviour on Mr. Morgan's part. She told them frankly that she was giving him as much of the drug as the doctor would allow, and added that you couldn't want to make a man suffer just so that you could talk to him. There was a note of rebuke as she said it; she spoke as one who does not encourage idle sight-seers in a death chamber.

After the relatives had gone, Nurse Foxell allowed Mr. Morgan to see his lawyer. He had been asking for him before, but she had said that it would only lead to bickerings
if he came while the house was full of people. She said that he could see the lawyer first and then if it didn't tire him too much he could see the Minister again to-morrow.

The lawyer was with Mr. Morgan for nearly an hour and Nurse Foxell was there all the time—she had to be for Mr. Morgan was in great pain. There was a whole new will drawn up by the time he left and Mr. Morgan in a voice broken with pain and anxiety, pleaded that it should be signed on the spot. In the end Mr. Hackbridge and Mr. Lyman, from the counting-house, were sent for to witness the signature: Nurse Foxell herself could not sign as she was now a beneficiary.

Then, when the lawyer had gone away again, Nurse Foxell gave the Old Gentleman the sort of dose of morphia he craved for. He floated off on a blissful and anaesthetic cloud into a world in which there were no lawyers and no pain and no Nurse Foxells.

It was, however, the last piece of floating that he was to do for nearly forty-eight hours. For Nurse Foxell suddenly cut the morphia right out and gave him aspirin instead. The aspirin was no better than useless; the bayonets of pain went through its thin armour without stopping. Mr. Morgan writhed under it. He begged for morphia. He wept. But Nurse Foxell was adamant.

She said that if she went on giving him the stuff, people would think that she was simply trying to murder him for his money.

ii

The end when it came was sudden and dramatic. It was a Sunday evening and the relatives were gathered round again in the front sitting-room. There were seven of them, five anxious Welshmen and two of their womenfolk: they had come as a deputation determined to see the Old Gentleman and put their point of view. They were ready to use persuasion—or force, if necessary; and nothing that Nurse Foxell could do was going to prevent them.

But to their surprise Nurse Foxell was sweet and very pleasant; she invited them in and even found chairs for them all. When they said that they wanted to see Mr. Morgan she placed no obstacle in the way. She merely went into the room first to tidy up—they could hear the poor Old Gentleman's groans as soon as the door was opened—and, as she came out again, she placed the morphia bottle, which he had not seen for the last two days, on the table beside him.

It was the relative from Llantyglos who was the first to go in. And it was therefore he who was the first to see the tragedy. Nurse Foxell herself did not see it at all. She had stayed behind and was quietly embroidering by the fire in the other room. It was the terrible cry of “Nurse, he's got the poison bottle,” that roused her. Throwing down her needlework in a heap on the floor she ran in to try and save the Old Gentleman. But it was too late. The bottle clutched in his stiff, white hand was pressed tight to his lips: it was empty. Two fluid ounces were inside him and his eyes stared at the ceiling with the look of innocent astonishment of a child who at last has got what it has wanted. Nurse Foxell snatched the bottle away of course, and telephoned at once for a doctor. But she warned them that there was very little hope: in the ecstasy of his relief, the Old Gentleman had drunk enough to put a regiment to sleep.

Nurse Foxell was right. The doctor could do simply nothing. By the time he arrived, Mr. Morgan was already halfway over the precipice into space; he was slipping visibly while they stood there. And it was evidently not to be the kind of end in which the patient rallies for a moment and says a few clear words before he departs. With every minute that passed the Old Gentleman was sinking deeper and still deeper. His breathing had become spasmodic and absent-minded; so spasmodic, indeed, that they never quite knew when the finish really came. It was simply that they all stood waiting for the next of those hoarse, creaking breaths—and it did not come. And by then, of
course, Mr. Morgan had already taken the final plunge and was at last careering headlong through the oceans of space.

The effect on the relatives as soon as the truth was known was tremendous. They were Welsh. And they were not unnaturally keyed up. Burying their heads in their hands and pulling out brilliantly coloured handkerchiefs, they sobbed and moaned over the departed. One of the relatives, the sour, crabbed little man from Llantyglos, was the most strangely overcome of all: he unbuttoned his waistcoat and loosened his front collar stud and howled. All other grief in the room was inaudible by comparison.

Nurse Foxell and the doctor were indeed the only two who showed any command over their emotions, and even the doctor was moved. It was really Nurse Foxell alone who came through the ordeal with flying colours; the relatives admitted that much. In the midst of the turmoil she did not give a thought to her own good name and how it would be affected by her carelessness in having left the bottle somewhere the sufferer could get it. All that she thought about was the Old Gentleman's reputation. With tears in her eyes—the tears made her china-blue eyes brighter and more appealing than ever—she besought the doctor not to let it be known that Mr. Morgan had died by his own hand.

She could bear anything but that, she said.

iii

The relatives, of course, had all been home again for months by the time the Will was proved. And perhaps it was just as well. There had been considerable revision in that last version the lawyer had drawn up. Two codicils now changed the whole complexion of it. Under the first, the sum of five hundred pounds had been left to the Old People's Homes, Rhondda, where Mr. Morgan had been brought up as a boy. That in itself was nothing; the legend of Mr. Morgan's wealth was able to take the sum of five hundred pounds in its stride. It was the second codicil that counted. Under this, the residue of all of which Mr.
Morgan died possessed passed into the stainless hands of Susan Augusta Foxell, spinster.

The residue included, of course, the business. And Nurse Foxell, without wasting a moment, packed up her bag and put the house of Morgan and Roberts onto the market.

The effect in the shop of Mr. Morgan's death (and the news leaked out at once that it was suicide) was deplorable. It left everyone temperamental and unsettled. As much as a fortnight after the memorable and awful day when the handsome oak coffin had been carried down those winding flights of stairs, and black upright boards had been nailed over the windows, mistakes in simple addition were still being made by the cashiers and wrong lengths of expensive materials were unaccountably measured and cut off.

The sale of the shop, however, did not promise to be easy. The auditors judged the price at six thousand pounds, and wanted to put the property on the market at that figure. But Miss Foxell (she had dropped the “Nurse” altogether now and was offended and rather surprised when anyone called her by it) insisted on seven thousand pounds. She said that seven thousand pounds was the sum the Old Gentleman had mentioned to her and it would make him turn over in his grave to think of his beautiful shop going for a mere six thousand. For her part, she made it clear, she merely wanted the whole thing settled as soon as possible so that she could go away somewhere and forget all the pain and heartbreak that was attached to it.

During the time the negotiations were proceeding Miss Foxell—sedately, but nevertheless elegantly dressed in black—lodged in a small private hotel in Lancaster Gate. She had the good taste not to hang around the shop; but, as days passed into weeks and weeks became a month, she developed a habit of sending over to ask Mr. Hack-bridge to drop into the hotel on his way home. She wanted to know how many customers they had served that day,
whether the trade had shown any sign of falling off since Mr. Morgan's passing, and whether any new buyers had come to look over the premises.

In point of fact, Mr. Hackbridge was not anxious to see the shop sold. So long as things dragged on as they were, he was secure enough in his private room with the frost-glass door and his two hundred a year. Once a new proprietor came along he did not know what the future might hold.

And in the shop, business by now was going on pretty much as usual. In a way, indeed, there was something rather uncanny about it. Mr. Morgan was gone: the central pivot of the place had been removed, but the wheel continued to revolve just the same. Even the disturbance of Mr. Morgan's mysterious death at last subsided. The girls no longer got into little groups and whispered about it in the corners. Instead, they stood meekly behind the counter like black silk statuary and served out their ribbons and bits of stuff and fancy handkerchiefs as naturally as if at any moment the Old Gentleman himself, pink and white and smiling, might have been standing half way up the broad, curving staircase, looking down on them.

But it was John Marco who liked to stand there nowadays; stand there so that he could see the whole shop spread out at his feet like a city. Mr. Morgan had often chosen that spot for his meditations: he had stood there on and off for nearly thirty years, a small complacent God brooding over profitable retail tradings that were going on beneath him. But there was one important point of difference; one sharp dividing line in their two natures. Mr. Morgan had seen the shop as it was and been satisfied; John Marco's eyes were fixed on something that had not yet been born. When he looked, the plain wooden chairs which stood in twos beside the counter had disappeared and in their place were delicate gilt affairs with legs like spiders' and dainty wicker seats. The counters themselves were longer—nearly twice as long in fact. They stretched in an imposing line, broken only by the passage-ways to the other departments,
right down to the handsome swivel doors which, every time anyone passed through them, glittered ferociously with shining plate-glass and polished brass-work. Even the space above the counters was different. It was now crossed and recrossed by a system of aerial wires along which little funicular carriages went racing with their loads of silver and small change. In fact, at those moments when John Marco stood there, he did not belong to the present at all; he had miraculously turned his back on nineteen-hundred and was peering into the heart of the impossible future of nineteen-ten.

And as a shopwalker with no counter now between him and the world he was able to indulge in his vision. In a new frock coat and glossier shoes he could afford himself this wider view. There were moments, indeed, when it seemed as though he owned the shop already; as though the counters had grown longer and the goods displayed on them more splendid. It was only the shambling, puffy figure of Mr. Hackbridge who destroyed the picture: he would go marching through the shop exacting from everyone the last morsel of respect which belongs to the chief man, and to the chief man alone, and the illusion would be shattered.

Not that Mr. Hackbridge had it all his own way: there were his worries. Miss Foxell had grown almost hysterical when she found that offers to buy her property were not forthcoming. In the dim lounge of the hotel in Lancaster Gate she would grip Mr. Hackbridge's hand which was damper than ever nowadays and beg him to find her a buyer. She said that she was simply living for the day when she could slip quietly away and go back to Cromer where she belonged. In the meantime she felt compelled to remain where she was, even though she was paying out good money all the time, just to be sure that the lawyers weren't swindling her.

But the lawyers, no matter how much they might have been ready to rob her, were not able to lay their hands on a penny with which to do so. Inside the trade, the rumours
of Mr. Morgan's suicide were still circulating, and an atmosphere of doubt had got around. It was said in some quarters that Mr. Morgan had taken his life because the bank was pressing him; and gradually the flourishing retail house of Morgan and Roberts came to be regarded as a dubious property, a snare for the unwary investor. At last, even the agents became concerned. They suggested cutting the price to five thousand, then to four thousand and seven-fifty and finally to forty-five hundred. With every cut to which she agreed Miss Foxell passed through a fresh nervous crisis of hysteria. She began to suspect a conspiracy of some kind and said quite openly that she was sure that the agents were in league with the buyers.

Mr. Hackbridge sweated and protested. With his knee up against hers as they sat side by side on the sofa of the hotel he assured her that he spent every minute of his life in searching for buyers; and he almost believed it. But, in fact, with every day that passed without a single enquiry he felt more secure and contented; he now foresaw an endless idyllic existence ahead of him in which he would be able to slip out of his office at all hours of the day for little refreshers without having to glance nervously over his shoulder to see if he were observed; a future in which for ever he would be able to rest his feet which had grown tired from so much standing.