The Balliols (7 page)

Mr. Beccles did not rise from his chair.

“Good morning, Miss Balliol, good morning. I hope I have not taken you away from anything too pressing. The better the day, the better the deed, you know.” And he chuckled heartily, as though he had said something rather clever. Stella had always wondered whether his frequent and usually inapposite use of proverbs was a nervous habit or a facet in his façade of open and not over-intelligent geniality.

“I trust that all the young ladies under your care are behaving.”

“I trust so, Mr. Beccles.”

“I trust so, too. I rely on you there; completely. Nobody understands a woman like a woman. I always accept your judgment, implicitly, implicitly.” His smile broadened; the pencil within his
short fingers revolved in a series of steady jerks. I wish he'd come to the point, thought Stella.

“Now, let me see, what was it I was going to ask you? Ah, of course, the prospectus of that Collectors' Handbook of Roman Pottery. Now, I'm right, aren't I, in thinking that those prospectuses have gone out?”

“Yes, they went out last week.”

“Can you remember the exact day?”

Stella always brought her schedule book to her interviews with Mr. Beccles. But this was an entry that she had no need to verify. She remembered particularly the rush to get those prospectuses off by the last post on Thursday evening, before the Easter holiday began.

“Thursday evening?” he said. “As I thought. There is no post on Good Friday. But on the Saturday there is. Those prospectuses, therefore, should have been delivered at their respective destinations by the first post on Saturday.”

“I imagine so.”

“I, too, had imagined that. And as I was spending the Easter holiday with a friend whose name is, I know, on our list of amateurs of pottery, I was curious to see what effect that prospectus would have on him. He would not know that I was in part responsible for the book. He would not be familiar with the various subsidiary branches of our company. I should get, that is to say, an impartial view of his attitude towards our circulars. Such a view would be interesting, don't you feel?”

He paused, with a benignant beam. She agreed that it would be extremely interesting.

“Exactly. One needs disinterested criticism. If one might put it so. I can assure you, Miss Balliol, that I came down to breakfast hungrier for the post than for my egg and bacon. How will he treat this prospectus, I asked myself. Will he fling it into the wastepaper-basket unread? Will he glance through it carelessly, then throw it down? Will he study it carefully, knit his brows, say ‘I'd like a good modern book on Roman pottery, but somehow this doesn't seem quite the book I want'? Or would he, after a few moments, declare that this is the very book he's been waiting for for months?”

He paused dramatically. “You see the importance of this, Miss Balliol?”

“Certainly.”

“If he flings the circular away, unread, I say to myself, ‘People don't read circulars. We waste money on them.' If he flings it
away after a casual glance I think ‘Yes, he looks at circulars, but this didn't hold his attention. We don't get up our circulars attractively.' If, after reflection, he puts it away, I think ‘Perhaps it's the book's fault. Perhaps our editorial staff's at fault.' But if on the other hand he decides to buy the book well then, I know our editorial staff, our copyrighters, our publicity experts are justified. Of each one of them I say
Palmam qui meruit ferat
.”

His face shone with the excitement that such a discovery would be expected to waken in a loyal and enthusiastic employee.

“That is what I looked for; but what, what, Miss Balliol, do you think I found?”

He paused dramatically.

“What did I find, Miss Balliol? The very last thing that I had thought to find. There was no prospectus of our book on Roman pottery on my friend's breakfast table.”

Another pause. He was preparing for his pounce. But his face could not have borne an expression of more benevolent bewilderment.

With that expression unchanged, he pounced.

“Miss Balliol,” he snapped, “I want the name of the girl who was responsible for sending that prospectus to Mr. Guy Porterling, Osse Court, Osshamptom.”

It did not take Stella three minutes to find out who was responsible for the undelivered prospectus. The alphabetical arrangement of the card-indexes made it a simple matter. She glanced down two parallel columns, checked two entries, then walked between the rows of huddled figures and touched on the shoulder a young, recently joined member of the staff.

“Miss Webster, may I speak to you in my room a moment?”

Miss Webster was one of those pale-haired girls who only look pretty when they are well. After the sunshine and open air of the Easter holiday she was vivid, flushed, brightened. Within a week, as likely as not, she would have grown pale and peaked: no glow in her eyes, no colour in her face. She was the kind of girl who ought never to live in cities.

“You remember that rush we had on Thursday evening to get off those Pottery prospectuses?”

“Yes.”

“You did the ‘P's,' didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“You couldn't, I know, be expected to remember the hundred envelopes that you addressed. But if you look in your index you will find the name Porterling. He never received a prospectus.”

As Stella explained how this fact had been discovered, a sulky look came into Miss Webster's face. For a moment it seemed as though she were going to make some denial, some truculent defence. Then she looked up at Stella. Their eyes met. Her defiance dropped. A look came into her face that seemed to say, “Oh, very well then. I can't fight with you. You're not the kind one makes excuses to.” She waited till Stella had finished, then said simply:

“I was feeling like death on Thursday. You know how it is every now and then. I didn't know what I was doing. I don't suppose that was the only mistake I made. Is old Beccles sick?”

“Yes.”

“What's he going to do about it?”

“I don't know. I'll try and put it right.”

“That's decent of you.”

Stella found Beccles as bland as she had expected.

“Well, and have you found the little miscreant?”

“It was Miss Webster.”

“Ah!” His forehead puckered in a frown and his eyes closed as he recreated the picture of Miss Webster. “Yes, I remember. A slight, pale girl. She hasn't been with us long.”

“Three months.”

“Has her work otherwise been satisfactory?”

“Completely.”

“Um, I see.…” He leant back in his chair, the pencil held before his eyes as though he were focussing some object in the foreground. His smile and manner were urbane, lit by the furtive knowledge that he had it in his power to hurt.

“It's no use my pretending that I don't take a serious view of this,” he said. “You may say it's a small thing. But there's no smoke without fire. If we find a mistake is made on the one point that we can check, we must assume that there are mistakes on the many points we cannot check. We cannot afford mistakes, Miss Balliol.”

As she had walked down the corridor to Beccles' office, Stella had prepared the conventionally sympathetic defence. Miss Webster was an extremely good worker. She had had an extremely bad headache on Thursday evening. She should have left the office. She had only remained because of the necessity of getting off the prospectuses for Easter. The mistake was one that in the circumstances should be overlooked.

That was how she had planned to plead. But Beccles' malicious smugness antagonized her. She was not going to advance that
woman's plea to a man who would go home with a sneer on his lips and remark how impossible women were in offices, how they made mistakes that a man would be sacked at once for, and expected to be forgiven, when they advanced the woman's excuse of a sick headache. A man like Beccles would only sneer, would not realize how valid an excuse that was; how there were days when no woman was fit to work; when she went to her office, her head splitting, everything out of mental focus.

She adopted a different defence.

“We have proof that the mistake has been made,” she said; “but none that Miss Webster made it. It was the Thursday before Good Friday. The posts were heavy. If we knew that two or three mistakes had been made in envelopes addressed by Miss Webster then we should be fairly sure that the fault was hers. But there is only this one letter. There is no reason to be certain that the mistake was made by her rather than anybody else.”

“By whom else could it have been made?”

“By the office boy who takes the letters to the post office.”

“That is most unlikely, since these letters are collected outside each room in one large mail bag.”

“The mistake might have been made in the post office.”

“The post office does not make mistakes.”

“Yet I remember your saying in your speech at the last annual meeting that one of the reasons why socialism would never succeed in this country was the proof which government departments had given of their inferiority, in matters of detail, to concerns that are directed by private enterprise. The post office is State-run.”

He smiled as she produced this argument; chuckling as though he had enjoyed a good joke thoroughly.

“Very cleverly argued. Caught at my own game. The pitcher that goes too often to the water. Explain, though, to Miss Webster that the fewer of these mistakes we have, the better.”

Stella found Miss Webster waiting with an anxious expression on her face. Poor kid, I suppose this really matters to her. “It's all right,” she said. “But another time, when you're feeling like that, let me know. I'm a woman. I understand these things.”

The drawn face from which the anxiety was swiftly banished had a look of trust, gratitude and reliance. “They do need me, these girls. They do feel that I'm their friend.”

Stella was allowed three-quarters of an hour for her lunch. It was a barren meal, taken either at a Lyons', an A.B.C. or at Eustace
Miles's. It cost her between eightpence and a shilling, and consisted of tea or coffee, a poached egg on toast, stewed figs or baked apple. Her sole variety was supplied by the company she chose for it. As far as possible she contrived to escape for that three-quarters of an hour from the office atmosphere.

Her companion this morning was a tall, angular woman in the middle forties, whose sharp fleshless features and thin bony frame seemed to have been devised by nature to satirize the feminine fashion of the hour. The high whale-boned neck, with the sleeves fitting flatly in the shoulders, made her look like an encased mummie; while the high-crowned hat, precariously sustained by vast pins on a high perch of puffed and padded hair achieved a startingly Jack-in-the-box effect.

Stella had known her for five years without discovering her Christian name. She signed her name as a man would, with initials, A. E. Draft. She was an active member of the Women's Suffrage Movement.

She entered the A.B.C., looked round for Stella, detected her in a single glance, strode across the room with the brush-braid of her skirt dusting her shoes, planked down a pile of books and papers, and leaning across the table announced in a sharp, clear voice, as though she had come to talk and not to eat, that she had just come from an extremely important committee meeting.

“Trouble's brewing. There are two parties. There are those who believe you can get what you want by quiet perseverance, who think the Mud March the most daring step ever undertaken by a woman. There are the others, the Pankhurst, Pethick Lawrence faction, who say that the Mud March is a first step; that since women have been outlawed by law they must behave as outlaws. Before the year's through, there will be trouble. You watch.”

Her eyes gleamed balefully. She was the kind of woman that men had in mind when they said that the women who wanted votes were not really women.

A waitress came clattering up. “Orders, please.”

Miss Draft snapped out her order as though she were a post office girl decoding a telegram. “Pot of tea. Poached egg twice. Mashed potatoes. Meringue. Roll, Butter, Honey.”

“Within a year,” she went on, “we shall have to decide whether we are in the vanguard or just camp followers. There'll be a clear-cut issue.… War, ruthless war, militant methods. You see how it will be. We shall be laughed at in the streets, in the Press, by our friends, our families, by our employers, by most other women; by all
those women who rely on men, who have to keep in with men, who can't afford to offend their fathers, their husbands, their employers.”

Which was how most women found themselves, Stella thought. Just as most men had dependants, whose interests they could not ignore, so were most women under obligations of some kind to some man. It was only the very few who could behave as if they were alone; which was what Mrs. Shirley had meant when she had described Suffragettes as a minority.

“We shall have to sacrifice ourselves,” said Miss Draft. “The Cause demands it. Nothing but the Cause has any claim on us.”

Which is all right for you, thought Stella. You've independent means. But how would I stand, dependent on my job, that I daren't lose, or a husband that I must consider?

The waitress arrived with the dishes piled wide upon her tray. Though Miss Draft appeared to ignore and to despise food, she had ordered three times as much to eat as Stella had; and though she continued to talk as though the successive mouthfuls were no more than the punctuation marks of conversation, she swept up the last yellow fleck of egg with the soft centre of her roll, and continued to re-fill the teapot with hot water till its dark-brown faded to a drizzled ochre.

“There is only one woman who can lead us,” she asserted. “The woman who will lead us anywhere.”

Which was what Stella herself believed. The time for parleying was at an end. It was no good sending deputations to astute politicians, who understood every move of party tactics, who knew how to appear to promise without actual self-commitment. The time had come for drastic measures. Campbell Bannerman had exhorted them to exercise “the virtue of patience”; he had also told them to go on pestering. It was time to take him at his word.