I Shall Not Want (48 page)

“Money,” she said. “That's why I came.”

The words seemed to spring out of her. The ultimatum which she had just delivered had evidently been crushed down inside her for years. She stopped playing with the crucifix and clasped her hands together so that the knuckles showed hard and white.

“What money?” he asked.

He was eyeing her narrowly now, his head cocked onto one side.

“God's money,” she answered. “I ought to have given it up to Mr. Tuke for the Lord. Not to you for Mammon.”

“It's too late to think of that now,” he replied. “The bargain's closed.”

“Not in God's eyes, it isn't. My voices tell me so.”

“And what do your voices tell you to do about it?” he asked.

“Get it back from you,” she replied. “Get back God's money and give it to the Tabernacle.”

At the mention of God her whole body seemed to have become transformed; it filled. Her eyes were glowing under the veil; they shone. And she had parted her hands as if she were gripping something tangible; the money seemed to be in them already.

“Why don't you give your own money?” he asked. “Your uncle left you plenty.”

“I have given it,” she answered. “All of it.”

He turned away from her.

“I owe you nothing,” he said.

He had got up and begun to walk about. She kept her eyes fixed on him, following him round the room as he moved.

“What about the money you stole?” she asked.

He turned abruptly.

“You knew about that when you married me.”

“Yes, I sinned too,” she said. “That's why I've come here to-night so that we can both be saved.”

He made no answer and she went on, speaking rapidly, the words blurring into a long, tangled skein of speech.

“No one can live with my load of sin on their shoulders,” she said. “It's the weight of the wickedness that breaks the soul. My voices tell me to get rid of it. I'm going to Mr. Tuke's to-night, and I've come to take you with me. When we leave him our souls will be white again. They'll be like snow. We shall have confessed.”

John Marco looked at her incredulously.

“Confessed?” he demanded.

“Yes,” she went on. “We must tell him everything. We must lay our sins upon him. Go to him as a repentant thief and cast yourself on the mercy of the Lord.” She paused. “My sin is greater because it was carnal. I shall be called to the judgment seat clad in scarlet.”

John Marco raised his hand and stopped her.

“Mr. Tuke won't listen to your confession,” he said. “He knows you're out of your senses.”

“I shall give him proof,” she answered. “I shall show him the letter my uncle left me. I shall expose you.”

“Then you mean to break your word to me?”

She bowed her head.

“It was a bargain sealed in wickedness,” she replied. “My voices tell me to break it.”

John Marco went over to the fireplace and stood looking down into the flames. He stood for some time with his back towards her without speaking.

“You came here to ask for money,” he said at last. “Don't you think that Mr. Tuke might rather have his money than a confession?”

Hesther drew in a deep breath.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “They'll allow that—the voices.”

“How much do you want?” he asked bluntly.

“You shall bring your offerings of the cattle, even of the herd, and of the flock,” Hesther replied. “We must give the Lord all we have.”

“Tell me how much you want,” he repeated.

“Mr. Tuke needs a thousand pounds,” she said. “He's started a fund: it's to build a new Sunday School. It shall be your money that builds it.”

John Marco opened the drawer of his desk and took out his cheque book.

“I'll give you a hundred pounds,” he said.

Hesther shook her head.

“Your riches will die with you,” she said. “You can't deny the Lord. Mr. Tuke needs a thousand pounds, and he must have it.”

John Marco threw down his pen.

“Mr. Tuke must make do with less,” he said.

Hesther did not remove her eyes from his face.

“It's a thousand pounds that I promised,” she told him.

“Promised?”

“I told him that I'd bring it to-night. Mr. Tuke said it would be an answer to his prayer.”

“And am I to answer Mr. Tuke's prayers for him?” John Marco asked.

Hesther dropped her eyes and regarded her hands that were folded in her lap.

“You wouldn't want all those shareholders to know you were a thief, would you?” she asked quietly. “It was a lot of money you were asking for this afternoon.”

John Marco got up and began walking about the room again. His head was bent forward and he was staring at the floor in front of him. He seemed almost to have forgotten Hesther. And Hesther was sitting bolt upright, her arms folded and her eyes fixed in front of her.

When he spoke, she started.

“Have you still got that letter?” he asked.

She nodded.

“I've got it here: it doesn't go out of my keeping,” she answered. “I carry it about with me.”

John Marco paused.

“I'll buy it from you,” he told her.

“For a thousand pounds?”

He passed his tongue across his lips.

“For a thousand pounds,” he replied.

Hesther opened her bag and drew out a long envelope. Then she seemed to hesitate: she closed the bag again and sat there, the envelope in her hand, her eyes closed as if she were praying. John Marco was leaning forward in his chair regarding her.

Suddenly she opened her eyes again and removed the paper from the envelope.

“The voices tell me you can have it,” she said.

The paper that she was holding before him was crumpled and cobwebby with age: it seemed ready to dissolve into fragments. The words written on it looked blurred and indecipherable as he tried to disentangle them. Amid the yellow creases he could faintly see the spidery outlines of figures and Mr. Trackett's own signature.

He put out his hand to take hold of the paper. But she pulled it away from him.

“Give me the money first,” she said.

When she had gone he turned in his chair and bending forward held one end of the paper over the fire behind him as if it were a spill. The paper kindled and flared. He held it until his fingers were burning, and then dropped the remains into the open grate.

There was now only a little ash and a trace of smoke to show for the cause of all this havoc of the years.

ii

They were sitting facing each other across the plain deal of Mr. Tuke's table top, and Hesther was smiling at him. She was fastening up her handbag again.

“It's what I promised you,” she said. “I've kept faith in the Lord.”

Mr. Tuke sat back and folded his hands.

“With prayer everything can be accomplished,” he said. “God works in the most surprising way. He chooses the least likely vessels.”

Even Mr. Skewin and Mr. Hackbridge who had now grown used to seeing money spent on John Marco's lavish scale of things were secretly a little appalled by the way the new capital was devoured. Five thousand pounds of it was consumed in a single reckless gesture: John Marco built a roof garden.

The Board, when the idea was first proposed to them, had voted unanimously against it; but in doing so they were going against their chairman. To John Marco, a roof garden, had suddenly become the first essential of the business; and those who opposed it, opposed him. A roof garden was something which no other store possessed, and he was, therefore, determined that John Marco Ltd. should have it. So the architect was called in to strengthen the roof and the builder's men were about the place once more; and high above the roof tops of Bayswater the contraption of trellis walls and concrete arches and fancy sun-dials and flower boxes was erected.

There was also the acquisition of Louise; she was a special discovery of John Marco's. He had found her in the dress salon of a rival store over in Kensington, and had coveted her. There was an elegance and distinction about her that he felt was needed. But of course she was expensive: she put a good price on herself, and demanded a contract. John Marco gave it to her over lunch one day. And as he watched her sign it—she removed a little silver fountain pen from her silk hand-bag to do so—he found himself admiring her. She was undeniably a pretty woman; and she obviously knew her way about in the world. She was the sort of person who would reward him every time he looked at her.

But reflected over at the end of the year, the roof garden and the new fashion supervisor in the dress salon were no more than adventures—costly ones, admittedly—on the side. There was the installation of the extra lifts; the re-stocking of the principal departments on a scale that was more Oxford Street than Tredegar Terrace; and there were the two electric delivery vans.

Considered objectively these vans were gaunt and ungainly; they were slow; they were hesitating; they were awkward. A horse, on any showing, would have been better. But electric vans were modern: they were a declaration to other and possibly rival shopkeepers that science and John Marco Ltd. were abreast of time.

And there was no denying that John Marco's methods were successful. The shop continued to be crowded; and every day the ledgers of the company grew fuller and fatter, swollen with the endless columns of figures that the Counting House was ceaselessly totting up.

John Marco himself seemed to have become something settled and established like the business; he looked older nowadays, and the wear had begun to show across the grain. Amid his close black hair there was now enough grey, and white even, for it to be apparent; and from the corner of his eyes a little network of lines had begun to spring. No one now seeing him for the first time would possibly think of him any longer as a young man.

He had, too, grown more unapproachable; he was now simply a solitary, uncontradictable figure who ruled everything. Except for Mr. Hackbridge, he barely spoke to anyone, and the words which he did speak to him, were not by any means what in the ordinary way would pass for conversation.

“There's a price ticket fallen off the figure in the corner window,” he would remark in his hard clipped voice. “We pay a dresser to look after that kind of thing. And I saw two of the assistants chattering among themselves;
I've said before that they should stand apart and not talk except when they're actually serving. The new cambric's very poor quality: tell Mr. Waring to announce it out of stock to any of our regular customers. And while you're in that department ask why they're not pushing that nainsook harder: remember that we've got twenty-five dozen rolls of it.”

And so it would go on, with Mr. Hackbridge making notes on his shiny cuffs of the points that John Marco was blurting out at him.

Often at the end of a day Mr. Hackbridge would sit at his own hearthside, exhausted, sweating, wondering how many of the points he had completely forgotten. The strain of these last few years had told on him more heavily even than on his employer; and he used to receive John Marco's summons to go into the room wondering how long it would be before he would collapse, simply collapse, in an ugly, ungainly heap, on the managing director's carpet, under the unnatural pressure of it all.

The hearthside at which John Marco himself sat in the evenings was no longer the modest one in Windsor Terrace. He now lived in a gaunt, towering mansion in Hyde Park Square with a staff of three to look after him and a coach house behind for his carriage. The carriage was a new possession; the lamps and the harness still had their prime glitter. But there was more than glitter alone to the turnout; there was its colour. A broad primrose line—primrose like the paper bags of the firm, and the uniform of the page boys, and the two electric delivery vans—ran right round the middle of it. When John Marco got into it in the mornings, and the horse was whipped up, there was two hundred pounds of advertisement stepping through the streets.

John Marco's solicitor through whom he had bought the house had suggested, tactfully and discreetly, that the place was extravagant for a bachelor establishment. He had tried to persuade him into a new block of fashionable flats in which he had an interest. But John Marco had
declined to discuss it and had merely said that he must have room, plenty of it. He had hinted vaguely at dinnerparties and entertaining. And so the place had become his; and his drawing-room, with the long mirrors let into the walls, would comfortably have contained not only the blood-red drawing-room in Clarence Gardens from which he had fled, but also the whole of old Mrs. Marco's shabby villa in Chapel Walk as well.

There was more than one single lady in the neighbourhood, as well as a few married ones besides, who knew John Marco by sight—he was a familiar figure by now: someone to be recognised and pointed out—who tortured themselves to think of this single gentleman with the dark, Italian-looking eyes, shutting himself up every night in the loneliness of this big womanless house.

ii

It was one evening just as he was preparing to return to Hyde Park Square that he was told that one of his assistants wanted to speak to him. The request was clearly unusual: it was Mr. Hackbridge who attended to the staff, and for all John Marco knew about them individually the whole place might have been run by ghosts. But this time Mr. Hackbridge was not sufficient: the demand was to see John Marco personally.

“Very well,” John Marco replied at last. “I'll give her a couple of minutes.”

“It's not one of the young ladies,” Mr. Hackbridge explained. “It's one of the men.”

“What does he want?” John Marco asked.

“He wouldn't tell me,” Mr. Hackbridge explained apologetically. “He said it was private.”

“Very well,” John Marco answered. “Bring him in. You may as well stop yourself.”