The Rise of Henry Morcar (25 page)

Accordingly he accompanied the party to the entertainment, meaning to excuse himself presently on the ground of his long journey on the morrow. Such being his plan, he did not attend much to what was happening on the platform, but schooled himself to sit through a few items. Almost at once, however, he found himself listening to a song:

Through the long days and years
,

What will my loved one be
,

Parted from me?

Through the long days and years
.

Always as then she was
,

Loveliest, brightest, best
,

Blessing and blest
.

Always as then she was
.

Never on earth again

Shall I before her stand
,

Touch lip or hand
.

Never on earth again
.

But while my darling lives
,

Peaceful I journey on
,

Not quite alone
.

Not while my darling lives
,

While my darling lives
.

The words kindled his passion; he could no longer endure inaction. He rose and made his excuses. As the concert promised to be long and probably mediocre, Harington thought his departure natural enough, and Morcar returned alone to the house.

He entered very quietly, and treading lightly in his crêpesoled seaside shoes, found Christina in the kitchen and stood in the doorway watching her without her knowledge. She was arranging great sprays of blue anchusa in a honey-coloured vase. She hummed a little to herself; Morcar found it touching to see
her thus calmly happy, ministering to the joy of others, alone. A movement betrayed him. Christina turned. A warm colour flooded her lovely face. She turned quickly to the flowers again.

“What are you doing here, Harry?” she said in her courteous social tone. “Where are the rest?”

“They're at the hall—I came to see you,” said Morcar. He added: “My darling,” and drew her strongly into his arms.

For a moment she lay there passive, her head on his shoulder, her hand on his breast. It seemed as if she rested against his strength, at peace and happy, and Morcar rejoiced, for he knew himself loved. He kissed her tenderly, caressing with his hand her slender white throat.

“No, no!” murmured Christina. She raised her head and strove to draw away. “Harry, we can't do this.”

“Yes, we can.”

“But the children!”

“They won't know.”

“Have you no scruples?” murmured Christina. “No feeling that it is wrong?”

“None!” said Morcar strongly.

“We shouldn't,” murmured Christina, weeping. “Harry, we shouldn't.”

Morcar kissed her with passion. “My darling, I love you,” he said.

“And I love you, Harry,” whispered Christina.

Morcar put back her rich curls and murmured his plea into her ear.

“No, no!” said Christina, starting. “No, Harry!”

“Yes, Chrissie, yes,” said Morcar.

Later, when she lay in his arms, he told her about the blue frock.

“I knew you were mine when you wore it; I loved you then, my lovely girl,” he said.

Christina traced the line of his thick fair eyebrows with one finger. “Then I loved you first, Harry,” she said. “I loved you before I wore your blue frock.”

“When?”

“When I first saw you.”

“Thank you, my darling,” said Morcar. “Thank you.”

He spoke with ardour; for Christina had thus healed him of the wounds dealt him by Winnie, who had never, it seemed, given him love. He did not then perceive that he was revenging himself on Winnie by compelling Christina to the course for which he had repudiated his wife.

Morcar felt lonely now when he was away from Christina. He loved her, and she was the only person in the world with whom he could be completely himself. Besides this true and loving pleasure in their love, which was real and lasting, he rejoiced also that he was now as other men, with a woman of his own; nor did it displease him, since it was in the fashion of the times, that she was a mistress and not a wife. Christina wrote to him sometimes in her graceful and individual but careless hand, but he could not safely reply to her on Harington's account—nor would he in any case have known how to express himself in writing. He needed to see her, to hear her voice, to touch, to hold. Accordingly he looked forward to his visits to London as a boy looks forward to play after school, and became daring and skilful in arranging secret meetings. But he had no intention or inclination to allow his work to suffer from his play, and never went to town unless his work took him there. He would have regarded any such indulgence as silly, unmanly, excessive.

His work at present needed the greatest possible skill and attention, for the economic situation was going from bad to worse. The British manufacturers, condemned by England's return to the gold standard in 1925 to lose overseas either their profit or their market, after trying for some years to walk the razor-edge between the two fell on to one side or the other and began to draw on their capital to prevent them from falling to the bottom of the abyss. One by one they found their assets dwindling, incurred overdrafts and saw all they owned wrenched piece by piece from their hands into the banks' safes to provide “security.” They cut down expenses and discharged workpeople; the purchasing power of the community diminished, the home market shrank; they incurred further overdrafts and discharged more workpeople and the market shrank still more. In 1929 a Labour government came into power, which Morcar, who had languidly voted Liberal out of habit, saw as an embodiment of high taxes, high wages, lower profits and a general disregard of the manufacturers' overseas problems. A great many other manufacturers felt the same; enterprise or initiative was at a discount, they decided, caution and economy were required. They cut down expenses and discharged workpeople; the purchasing power of the community diminished and the market shrank as before. Looms fell silent, queues at Labour Exchanges lengthened; bankers who had seemed good fellows all their lives now suddenly appeared harsh tyrants; a look of worry began to line every West Riding face.

Morcar, however, continued to prosper. He had no large hereditary mills, no long-standing commitments, no incompetent but deserving old retainers impossible to dislodge, to drag him down. No too-numerous shareholders' dividends, no bunch of expensive family households, no Excess Profits Tax still unpaid from the War, drained his profits; no huge inherited mansion built in the days before McKinley, no costly hobby of horse or plane or yacht, ate their way like moths into his substance. He was spending more in one way than ever before in his life, for in everything to do with the Haringtons he wished to be generous, lavish; but his personal expenditure in Annotsfield was particularly small, for now that he had Christina he felt satisfied and did not need to seek the drug of incessant pleasures. On the positive side, his machinery was up-to-date, his premises were small though neat—indeed they were rather too small, and certainly too widely scattered, Morcar told himself restively at times. His product was a speciality, new, adapted to the needs of the age, commanding a wide popularity in home and overseas markets. It was not now entirely his own, of course, for several other merchants and manufacturers in several countries, including England, had had the same idea as Mr. Butterworth and Morcar. But in his case it was continually refreshed by his own original talent which, Morcar felt with a modest confidence (never mentioned to anyone save Christina but the core of his life) very few designers anywhere could really excel. Accordingly, he prospered—not without anxious moments but steadily—while frowns of worry deepened on other manufacturers' brows.

Then in the autumn the American stock market fell, with a crash that shook the world. American banks closed, American merchants failed. Morcar suffered a loss which made him wince, but others suffered losses which made them stagger. Merchants who exported largely suffered heavily; for the first time Morcar saw a look of care on Mr. Butterworth's plump pink face. A fresh wave of economic depression spread all over the world in widening circles, like ripples when a stone has been thrown into a pond. Next year Morcar added the name of Hawley-Smoot to his detested Dingley and McKinley, for in an attempt to retrieve the economic débâcle, the United States imposed a heavy tariff on imported manufactured goods. European states retaliated, and tariffs spread across the world like weeds—weeds which, in the rippling economic pond, prevented free motion, entangled the limbs of trade. A kind of hush spread over the West Riding; there was much feverish activity, but little open talk; men watched each other in silence to detect the first sign of faltering. It began to be rumoured that even the great firm
of Armitage, even Oldroyds', were rocking. Morcar, by the keenest, most unflagging, most expert attention to every detail of manufacture and finance, by continual thought and intensive labour over his designs, by unremitting pursuit of trade, by ruthless cutting of costs, continued to prosper. His textile acquaintances began to ask him with a peevish air how it was done, and to murmur that he was a hard man to come up against, a hard man to bargain with.

One afternoon in the spring of 1931 Morcar, in high spirits, was on his way to Annotsfield station to catch a London train when it occurred to him that his supply of ready money, though most would have judged it sufficiently ample, was perhaps not enough to have about him when he was near the Haringtons, to whom he was giving dinner late that night. “The bank—I've time,” he told his chauffeur, who wrenched the wheel round and made the car leap across the square. Morcar sprang out and ran up the bank's marble steps. On the top step he encountered Mr. Butterworth.

“Hullo, Butterworth—sorry I haven't a minute—just off to town!” cried Morcar breezily, laying his hand on the merchant's arm as he passed by. “I've some Thistledowns coming along to you this afternoon,” he added over his shoulder.

“Hullo, Harry,” said the merchant gruffly, without pausing.

“Fifty, please,” said Morcar to the cashier, rapidly filling up a cheque. While he wrote he made a lightning calculation. “Butterworth looks glum—his hair's grown very white—ill perhaps.
Or perhaps something is wrong with his business,”
thought Morcar, signing his name. “Yes, that's it; he's just come from a gruelling interview with the bank manager. He's probably just going down—the bank has a first debenture already, I shouldn't wonder.” If anything went wrong with Butterworth, Morcar would not get paid—or at any rate not fully paid: “Sixpence in the pound perhaps, damn it!” thought Morcar—for the cloths he had sold the merchant recently and already delivered. “No use throwing good money after bad,” thought Morcar swiftly. He made up his mind, snatched up the notes from the counter, ran out of the building and without pausing hurried across the road to Annotsfield Post Office. He telephoned Daisy Mills, glancing impatiently at his watch, and asked for his foreman.

“Nathan,” he said: “That last lot of Thistledowns for Mr. Butterworth—have they gone yet?”

“They're just being loaded on t'lorries now,” said Nathan in a tone of mingled grievance and virtue—virtue that the pieces were on their way, grievance that Morcar had thought it necessary to doubt his efficiency by enquiring about them.

“Take 'em off, will you?” said Morcar.

“Eh?”

“Take 'em off—there's a hitch about the finish—I'll explain when I get back.”

“The finish?” began Nathan, vexed and expostulatory. “There's nowt wrong wi't'finish, Mr. Morcar.”

“That's what you think,” snapped Morcar. In imagination he could see Nathan as he was looking now, his serious fresh-coloured Yorkshire face agape, his quiff of ginger hair positively bristling, with indignant non-comprehension; the picture irritated him.

“Well, you passed 'em yourself,” Nathan snapped back.

“Don't let them go,” said Morcar in a tone of command. “I want to find them at Daisy when I get back from London, do you hear?”

“I hear,” said Nathan angrily. “But I make no sense of it. You've been fussing about getting those pieces off all t'week.”

“Don't let them go to Butterworth's,” commanded Morcar.

He rang off; his chauffeur was almost dancing on the kerb outside with anxiety lest he should miss his train. But Morcar was not afraid, for he felt it was one of his lucky days; by his chance encounter with the merchant and his swift telephone call he had saved himself, he felt pretty sure, the loss of a quite considerable sum of money. That he had also helped Butterworth on his road to failure, by depriving him of some stock which, easily and rapidly disposable, would have brought him some ready money at a comparatively early date, Morcar knew at the bottom of his mind but did not stop to consider.

It was the most completely selfish act, the lowest point, the nadir, of his career.

“Butterworth's down,” heard Morcar at the Club.

“It'll push plenty of others over as well, I shouldn't wonder. How about you, Harry?”

“Not too bad,” said Morcar.

“It'll about finish Oldroyds', I reckon. He owed them a packet.”

“Armitages won't like it either.”

“Oldroyds' are rocky already.”

“They've been going the wrong way a long time.”

“That doesn't surprise me,” said Morcar. “What Francis Old-royd knows about textiles wouldn't cover a sixpenny piece.”

He had occasion to repeat this at intervals during the next couple of months, for the rumours about Oldroyds' difficulties grew stronger every day.

“It'll be a pity if they have to go down, though, after all these years,” said opinion at the Club.