The Rise of Henry Morcar (5 page)

“I could see they were just what I wanted,” chuckled Mr. Shaw triumphantly: “So I out with my scissors and cut a strip off the lot.”

“And didn't he object?” enquired Mr. Morcar in a very dry tone.

“Nay, he was in the inner office,” explained Mr. Shaw, laughing. “What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve at. I'm having 'em all made up now, in cheaper yarn of course—they were just what I was looking for.”

Could this story possibly mean what it appeared to do, wondered Harry, aghast. Mr. Shaw appeared to be saying that in the outer office of the warehouse of some great manufacturing firm—Armitages', perhaps, or Oldroyds'; yes, he had said Oldroyds'—he
had perceived some fine patterns which were just the kind of thing a customer of his own had wished to buy. He had cut a strip from the pattern and was having them copied in cheaper stuff—thus stealing the designs. How or why anybody had been such a fool as to give John William Shaw access to a place where a rival's next season's patterns were lying about, Harry could not understand, and he had missed the part of the story which described this interesting detail. He leaned forward and cried out:

“But how did you get into the Oldroyds' warehouse, Mr. Shaw?”

“Harry, fetch me some more tobacco,” said his father quickly. “There's a packet in the bookcase drawer. I'm waiting,” he added on a sharper note, as Harry did not immediately move. “Run along.”

Everyone seemed to be gazing so sternly at Harry that he was confused; he blushed, uncurled his ankles from the sofa legs and ran quickly from the room.

It was some minutes before he returned, for in the place indicated he found a packet of tobacco of another kind than that habitually smoked by his father and ransacked the drawer before resigning himself to credit that this was the one meant. When he eventually completed the errand, none of the Shaw children was in the room, the two sets of parents were sitting alone and talking town politics. His father's pipe lay on the table at his elbow. Harry put the tobacco beside it and tiptoed out to look for Charlie. The house seemed quiet, so he went out to the back field, where some of the younger Shaws, who were playing at rounders, told him that their brother was in the Den. Cheered, he went towards it rapidly and pressed down the latch, shouting his friend's name. To his surprise, the door did not yield; he pushed it resolutely, it gave and he found himself face to face with Winnie in a tearing rage.

“You can't come in,” she said abruptly. Her bright cheeks were mottled with anger, her round chin trembled. She made to shut him out.

“I don't mind Harry,” came in a muffled version of Charlie's light pleasant voice.

Winnie threw back the door angrily and stepped aside. Charlie was standing with his back to the door with his hands in his pockets and his head bent down. His whole attitude expressed a deep wretchedness.

“What's wrong?” enquired Harry in alarm. He squeezed round his friend to look into his face and found his worst fears confirmed, for Charlie showed unmistakable signs of having shed tears. “What's up, Charlie?” he said in his gruffest tones.

“I shall never forgive him,” said Winnie. Her tone was low and vicious. She flounced from the shed, slamming the door.

Harry cleared his throat. “But what
is
wrong?” he said.

“The same as it usually is,” said Charlie bitterly. “You heard him about those patterns. It's so … He does things … He isn't
honest,”
he broke out with a sob. He gulped and sniffed and got his voice under control, then said with infinite sadness: “My trouble is always Father.”

A warm love and sorrow filled Morcar's heart. He wanted to console, to assure his friend of his understanding, his sympathy, his eternal loyalty; but none of those things could get themselves said. And indeed if they were said, they would deepen Charlie's trouble by revealing how deeply troubling Morcar thought it. There in the hot musty bicycle-house, surrounded by watering-cans and tins of paint, old cricket gloves and wickets, some sunflower seeds which the children were growing on flannel, a pair of gardening shears and a rake in one corner which fell over as he moved, starting off a sleepy bluebottle to buzz once more up the pane, there in the garden shed he was faced, felt Morcar, by one of the great moments of his life. What could he say? All he could do was to put himself on Charlie's level by confiding the deepest trouble that he himself owned.

“Mine's money,” he blurted.

Charlie turned, astonished, and Morcar was astonished too. Until he spoke he had no idea that he was worried about the Morcars' financial position, but now he knew he had been anxious about it for years. McKinley. Dingley. The closed weaving-shed, never yet reopened. The Sycamores instead of Hurstfield. A pink printed form with
Annotsfield Borough Council
on top and sums of money written in below, to which was gummed a red slip saying FINAL NOTICE. Mr. Shaw's jeering jokes, and his mother's vexation about his accepting the Shaws' sandwiches.

“I'm sorry. But you're lucky if that's all,” Charlie said bitterly. “I didn't know. But I own I thought it was a bit funny at the time, your father selling Hurst Bank Wood in such a hurry.”

There was a silence. Morcar felt the blood rushing to his face at this blunt confirmation of his unconscious fear. He had known neither that his father owned the land nor that he had sold it, but a hurried sale was only too clear an indication of the state of Morcar affairs. Charlie was looking at him with pity in his eyes.

“He's sold our part of the Sycamores, too,” said Charlie softly. “To Father. Your father owned them both, you know.”

Morcar could not speak.

“Well, never mind,” said Charlie warmly, catching his arm. “Let's take out our bikes.”

From that moment the boys were true, deep, lifelong friends, who concealed nothing from each other.

And yet the sale of Hurst Bank Wood and half the Sycamores was not the worst thing Morcar learned that day, for if the gradual relinquishment of the property Alderman Morcar had carefully collected indicated a failing prosperity, the change in Councillor Morcar's tobacco indicated a failing health. His pipe, his unfailing friend for so many years, no longer tasted sweet to him. Having no idea at first that the change lay in himself, he sought to remedy it by sampling a fresh brand. For a few days this seemed to satisfy, then an expression of distaste crept over his face as he smoked, he leaned forward abruptly and knocked out the still burning dottle from the pipe.

“I think I'll go back to my Owl Cut, Clara,” he said.

“I never thought you'd fancy anything else,” said Mrs. Morcar in a wise wifely tone.

But a few days later the Owl Cut was again out of favour. A few days after that its position was once more retrieved, and Harry, obscurely relieved, prepared to dismiss the matter from his mind. Somehow it had worried him; no doubt it was only part of the general undecipherable mystery of grown-up behaviour, but the obvious distress it caused his father worried him. Why, his father had looked positively haggard as he knocked out his pipe! It was a pleasure to see him now leaning back in his chair and smoking comfortably. Even as he watched, however, the boy saw a faint look of perplexity creep over his father's face. His heart sank, a core of uneasiness formed in his mind. Sure enough, next day his father came home with tobacco in a different wrapping. The boy watched apprehensively as he unfolded the tinfoil—his father was always neat and careful in his movements—and shredded the tobacco into his pouch.

“Yes, this is milder,” he announced with satisfaction.

But a few days later he was again smoking Owl Cut.

This matter of the tobacco, apparently so trifling and even silly, really so significant, dragged on for the next three months till it became a protracted nightmare. A whole collection of half-consumed packets gathered in the bookcase drawer; every time Mr. Morcar opened the drawer he began an irritable lament which lasted dreary minutes. Over and over again he explained to his wife, to his son, to Mr. Shaw, to his fellow Councillors, to his cashier and foreman, to anyone who would listen, that he
had smoked Owl Cut for seventeen years and now he could not abide it.

“I must be growing old, Clara,” he joked. “That's what it is.”

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Morcar firmly.

Mr. Morcar wrote a letter to the manufacturers complaining that they had let down the quality of their product; they replied in affable terms, denying the charge and sending a selection of all their brands for “such a valued customer” to sample. Mr. Morcar was greatly pleased; an almost childish look of happiness illumined his face as he examined the packets and explained to his son the meaning of the various symbols they bore. He took them next door and displayed them to Mr. Shaw, who was not a pipe-smoker. He wrote a polite note to the manufacturers, promising to let them know his preference when he had smoked a pipeful of each brand; but it was a week before he sampled them. Mrs. Morcar and Harry watched him anxiously. He took a pull or two, held the pipe away from him and looked at it. The moment that followed seemed an eternity. At last he replaced the pipe in his mouth.

“Not bad,” he said.

Harry gave a long sigh; Mrs. Morcar with a shake rearranged the embroidery on her knee. Presently Mr. Shaw came in, smoking one of his customary cigars.

“Well, how's the tobacco, Fred?” he enquired.

“I don't care for it much,” replied Mr. Morcar distastefully.

Mr. Shaw gave him a sharp glance. “Tell you what, Fred,” he suggested: “I think your digestion's out of order. You should see your doctor and get a bottle to put it right. What do you think, Mrs. Morcar, eh?”

Mrs. Morcar seemed to have some difficulty in speaking. “I've been telling him so,” she said at last in an airy tone.

A doctor! Was his father really ill enough to need a doctor? Harry looked at Mr. Shaw, whose sallow eyelids were lowered, then tried to see his father as his neighbour saw him. He perceived with a pang that his father's mild brown eyes were unnaturally large and burning, the skin tight-drawn across his forehead, his cheeks sunken and pale. He had lost weight too; his waistcoat across which he wore Alderman Morcar's famous watch-chain hung loose so that the chain drooped and sagged. His hands looked wrinkled, fleshless. Harry got up suddenly and leaving his homework unfinished went into the house next door. He found the Shaws and a couple of Winnie's admirers all playing a round card game of a noisy kind in which they had coaxed Mrs. Shaw to take part, so he had no opportunity to speak to Charlie privately. But he had no need; from Charlie's welcoming glance
and smile, from Winnie's mild greeting, very unlike her usual pert reception, from the way Mrs. Shaw made room for him beside her, he knew that they had all guessed his trouble.

Next day when he came home from school he met his mother in the hall carrying an empty glass and a spoon on a small tray. She looked flushed and troubled.

“The doctor's sent your father to bed for a few days,” she said. “For a rest. It's his heart. He's been rather worried about business lately.”

His father never smoked again. All through that winter his pipe hung, empty and cold, in the oak rack beside the hearth. This picture mingled in Morcar's mind with the wet streaky haunches of a dark brown horse beneath the gaslight from a street-lamp, bands of leather harness and reins dangling through the air—the hansom in which his father went hopefully out to Town Council meetings or returned from them exhausted. How many times that winter Harry at his mother's bidding ran along through the cold driving West Riding rain to the cab proprietor at the end of Hurst Road, to fetch a hansom for his father! How many times, at night, he heard the horses' hoofs clop-clopping down the road and halting at the Sycamores' gate. Harry paused in his homework, his mother raised her head and waited for footsteps to come up the path; none came; then they knew that his father was too tired to dismount without help. Harry ran out and unbuttoned the apron and pulled the shiny black leather away, while his father, unconscious of his own delay, fumbled with thin nerveless fingers in his pocket for coins and made slow jokes with the cabman. Then the hansom became a standing order, morning and midday and night, to take his father to and from the mill. Then it came at morning and noon only; in the afternoon his father rested at home.

In the New Year came the picture of his mother in a large white cooking apron with her sleeves rolled up, carefully placing little squares of newspaper between the dessert plates in the china cupboard. It seemed they must leave the Sycamores and go to a smaller house, since his father was giving up the mill. Mrs. Shaw came in to condole, panting a little, her large bulk spread over the drawing-room settee.

“I'm afraid this is a bad blow for you, Mrs. Morcar love,” she said.

“It will be better so,” replied Mrs. Morcar proudly: “Fred will have more time to give to his Council work.”

Winnie came in and helped to pack.

“Winnie's been a real good help,” announced Mrs. Morcar at tea-time. “She has indeed.”

Her tone implied that this was something of a surprise to her, and indeed for some reason, Harry could not then fathom what, there was always an antagonism between his mother and Winnie.

They moved to a house in Hurst Road, a house which Morcar could not, would not, remember. He excused himself for this because they lived there less than six months, but the real reason for his rejection of its image was that he never had a happy moment there. It was wretched to be so far away from Charlie, for it meant that he seemed always to reach the Sycamores at the wrong moment. When one lived next door, one took soundings, so to speak, one tried the temperature of the water with one's toe before entering and withdrew if the water seemed chill and the moment inopportune. But living a quarter of a mile away made setting out for the Shaws' quite an important step, not easy to retract; one could not hang about in somebody else's back garden and wait for Mr. Shaw's temper to cool or Mrs. Shaw's baking to finish; moreover, Harry had a feeling he was not as welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Shaw as he had been in days of old. Charlie, of course, was always the same, and Winnie's acid was mingled with sweetness quite as before, indeed if anything it was a trifle sweeter. But a shade of vexation passed over Mr. Shaw's sallow face nowadays whenever he saw Morcar, and Mrs. Shaw asked: “How's your father?” rather as though she regarded Mr. Morcar's illness as his own fault, due entirely to his own perversity, as if he could cure himself and cease being a trouble to everyone, if he would only make the effort.