The Balliols

by Alec Waugh

  “Does anyone second that?”

  “I do.”

  “Does anyone oppose it?”

  The three submerged members of the staff whispered together. They were so used to the routine of proposing and seconding motions, that they did not know how to behave in this unexpected situation. They looked for guidance towards the general director, received none, fell to whispering again. Finally one of them arose.

  “Well, I think I’ll oppose that. I don’t think somehow that our old Chief’s son is being treated rightly.”

  “Does anyone second that?”

  “I do.”

  Victor looked steadily along the line of expectant shareholders.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “I am not going to declare this issue open to debate. Too many heated words have passed already this afternoon. I will take, however, a vote. But I must warn you, gentlemen, that no motion passed or rejected at this meeting can be taken as final. The board are within their power to demand a general poll. They may not accept this meeting as representative of the general body of shareholders. They may decide to give the shareholders as a body the right to override the decisions of this meeting. However, as I said, I will put this matter to the vote.”

  Prentice was rejected by a considerable majority. A few minutes later Jenks’ election to the board was carried without even the formality of an opposition. Victor declared the meeting at an end.

  “The motions have been duly noted, gentlemen. The board will consider them. We will give you in due course our decision whether we are, or are not, ready to accept them.”

  A meeting of the board always followed the dispersal of the shareholders. There was silence as the five directors and the secretary stood grouped round the fireless grate while the caretaker and a couple of office boys rearranged the room. It was in silence that they took their places at the table. Victor at its head, the secretary on his left hand, Balliol on his right, Smollett next to him, Hugh and Prentice opposite. There was a pause, each waiting to see who would be the first to speak. Hugh rose to his feet.

  Thought Balliol: “He’s going to apologize. That’s very fitting.”

  Not at all. There was the same wild look in Hugh’s eyes, the same mottled flush on his cheeks, the same aggressive manner, the same belligerent, thickened voice.

  “Before we do anything else, I want to ask Mr. Smollett a question. I want to ask him whether he was aware that this assault was to be made on us to-day.”

  Victor interrupted him.

  “I don’t think that is a point that concerns us as a board.”

  “It is a point that concerns me as a member of the board, in my capacity as a member of this board. I want to put that question to Mr. Smollett.”

  Smollett looked straight at Hugh, then turned to Victor. His face was very white, with the dappling of its pimples in pink protuberance.

  “I am quite ready to answer that question. I did know that these particular criticisms would be made, and that the re-election of Mr. Prentice would be opposed.”

  “Then I would ask Mr. Smollett why he did not inform the board of this.”

  “I do not consider it part of my duty as a director to keep the board informed of every rumour that may reach me outside this office.”

  “I do not call this a rumour. I would like to ask Mr. Smollett whether the chief speakers this afternoon were his friends.”

  “Acquaintances.”

  “I should like to ask Mr. Smollett whether it was on his advice that they became shareholders in this company.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, gentlemen, I have this to say to you. In my opinion Mr. Smollett, on his own evidence, is convicted of the most treacherous behaviour. He has engineered this attack this afternoon. He encouraged his friends to take shares. He directed their tactics. It was at his instigation that they opposed the re-election of Mr. Prentice and proposed the election of his own friend, Jenks. He has engineered this behind his colleagues’ backs. A man capable of such disloyalty, such treachery, is not fit to associate on equal terms with a board that is composed of gentlemen.”

  It was the last word, the word “gentlemen”, that flooded with a sea of scarlet the glistening pink peaks on Smollett’s forehead. He rose to his feet. He drew a long, slow breath through lips that were drawn tightly. He was desperately anxious to control his voice. There was a definite pause while he recovered his composure.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “I never expected to be addressed in that manner, in this room. For the seventeen years that I have worked for this firm, I have put the firm’s interests before my own. The chief speakers this afternoon were acquaintances of mine. I encouraged them to buy shares because I believed in the firm’s future. I told them why I believed that. When the firm ceased to pay dividends, they were naturally angry; they blamed me. I knew that they would complain this afternoon. Originally they proposed to demand that the firm should be offered for sale; so that they might recover some of the money they had invested. I discouraged them from that. I told them that the firm was sound; that they must have patience. They asked me why, if the firm was sound, they were not getting dividends. They asked me whether the system on which the firm was run after the war was as effective as the system on which it was run before the war. I was doubtful of that; I told them so. They asked me whether I considered Jenks would be a good man on the board. I said yes. I plotted nothing. I schemed nothing. My conscience is quite clear.”

  He paused. He was standing on his dignity; but he was not without dignity. Yes, you’ve a good case for yourself, thought Balliol. You haven’t answered the main criticism—why you didn’t warn the board that this attack was coming. But you’ve answered so much of Hugh’s criticism that you won’t realize that you’ve left that one point unanswered; nor, probably, will the others. You’ve done no more than what ninety-nine men in a hundred would have done in your position. You can acquit yourself in your own mind. That’s about as much as any of us can expect to do. But I must say I’d be glad to know where all this is leading.

  He was to know in a second.

  “I have been subjected to an accusation,” Smollett was continuing, “that no gentleman can overlook. I have no alternative but to resign my directorship and my post as manager.”

  Stooping forward he gathered up his papers, pushed back his chair and walked in silence from the room.

  In most quarrels there is a point where the anger that caused the quarrel subsides abruptly. A man and a woman are arguing face to face, hating one another. A blow is struck, and the hatred that inspired the blow is dead for ever. There is a horror-struck recovery of sense; the thought “What have I done? How could I have done it? How can I make amends?” Such a moment came to Hugh as the door closed behind Smollett. The anger that had been simmering all day, that swelling to self-expression in the meeting, had come to a final head, collapsed like a lanced abscess. “What have I been doing? What was it all about? What happens next?”

  The exhilaration to which hours of drinking had contributed, subsided, leaving him limp, weak, apathetic. He sat forward, his head on his hands, scarcely listening to the low-toned discussion of the day’s events between Victor and his father. “Of course we can’t allow him to resign.” “He’s indispensable to us.” “Shall I lunch him or will you?” “We’ll get him round all right.” “We’ll be able to fix the poll.” “We’ll have to consider bringing Jenks on.” “Next year, not this.” “We must save our faces.” “Let the shareholders know who’s master.” The low-toned buzz of conversation was punctuated by an occasional futile academic interruption from Prentice. Once Hugh lifted his head to look at him. No wonder he had got Smollett’s goat. So trim and donnish. To think that they should have bothered to quarrel about him.

  “So I think,” Victor was saying, “that we’ll leave the matter there. There is nothing more to be done about it now.” Prentice and Balliol were agreeing. Balliol was rising to his feet. “Well, I’m glad that’s over. Now we can ring fo
r tea.” But Hugh did not want to wait for that. He wanted to get away, out of this room, into the clean air. He walked over to his father. He placed his hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, father. I was a damned fool.” His father smiled, with detached indulgence. “Don’t worry. We’ll put things straight.”

  But they would take a lot of putting straight. He knew that all right. As likely as not they never would be really straight again. What was that thing he had learnt at school, as rep? “Never glad confident morning again.” Hell, but I’m a fool. As he ran down the office stairs he nearly collided with a tall, portly figure.

  “Sorry, sir,” it was a familiar voice.

  It was the first time that Hugh had laughed that day.

  “Walker, you’re getting fat.”

  “Easy living, sir. I’m needing another spell in those there trenches.”

  Hugh cast a quick glance over him. Yes, he was getting fat; in a prosperous, healthy kind of way.

  “You don’t look as though you were letting things worry you particularly.”

  “No, sir. I can’t say as I do, or ever have. They talk about bad times and good, but I’ve always managed to get my fun all right.”

  Which he would, thought Hugh. Whatever happened to the rest of the world, Walker would come up smiling. Well, it was good to see someone that the sun smiled on. It was a long time since it had smiled on him. Black thoughts besieged him as he walked towards the mews where his car, a very weather-worn two-seater Morris, was temporarily garaged.

  A night of heavy drinking has mental aftermaths very closely allied to the dark pessimism with which the future confronts you during a sleepless night between three and five. Just as drink itself cheats you into a roseate optimism, so will its hang-over lower you into a well of gloom. As Hugh drove his car northward to the Hampstead heights, he saw his present and his future with the steady clarity of despair. The day’s double failure faced him. The Chief had been right. He wasn’t good for anything. He wasn’t even fit to sit upon a board. He’d no self-control. He’d drunk himself out of sense. It would take months to repair the damage he had done in a short afternoon. That’s all that he was able to do now: damage. He wasn’t doing any good to anyone. He was a nuisance; in the way; Hotsam and jetsam. He’d been a fool not to marry that woman; realize the one asset he had, his passport. He’d a right to sell it. He’d earned it, hadn’t he? If it hadn’t been for fellows like himself there’d be no passports; nothing worth selling, anyhow. If another chance like that came his way he’d take it. He’d know what he was worth now; or rather, what he wasn’t worth. He’d thought he amounted to something then. He knew better now. And it wasn’t as though he’d reached the bottom yet. That was a long way off. Though at the pace that he was going, he ought to be there soon. 1917 and now. If he’d got as far as this in seven years, where would he be in seventeen? I’m a failure. I’d better realize it; make no pretence; despise myself, but recognize myself; look myself in the glass.

  So he told himself, as his car climbed Fitzjohn’s Avenue, climbed Heath Street, turning to the right towards the White Stone Pond. He drove thoughtlessly, or rather without thought, mechanically; with care but without forethought; unprepared for an emergency. So that he hadn’t recognized till it was right on him the long, red, racing Lanchester driven by one of those drivers who boast that they go through traffic at forty and never have an accident; who have a foot jammed on the accelerator, a wrist pressed on the horn; who avoid accidents because they give other drivers warning that a crazy selfishness is on its way. And Hugh was not on the look out. In an automatic way with his own hand outstretched, he had taken a small Austin’s signal and was going past it. He was quarter way past when the screech of a Klaxon came from behind a lorry. At the same instant there would be four cars abreast on a road wide enough for three. He had not time to stop; he was not fast enough to clear the Austin. He had a second in which to think. If I swing to the right, in front of the lorry and the Lanchester, I pile myself on the pavement. The pavement’s empty. I might manage it. Just. It’s the one chance. I must. He swung over the steering wheel. The car responded. The front wheels hit the kerb. He heard a scream. A child had run forward from its nurse, was running straight towards the pavement to the point that his car would hit. On the side of the pavement was a row of railings, beyond them a steep decline running down to the old pond. I’ve got to get across before she does. He stamped on the accelerator. As the car shot forward he tugged at the steering wheel. I’ve missed the child. His front wheel hit the railings. There was a jerk. The car shuddered, then to his astonishment went forward. He was through the railings. The windscreen splintered against his face. The green of the heath was suddenly above his head. I’ve somersaulted. God! There was a crash. Before his eyes the dazzle of a million lights; then darkness. In his ears the thunder of a million gongs; then silence.

  IX

  The bodies that lie under white crosses in northern France are not the only casualties of war. As I stood, five days later, beside Hugh Balliol’s grave, remembering the boy who had offered me sixpence at that first children’s party to turn out the light; the young man who had come down to Fernhurst for the M.C.C. in the summer of 1914 in the confidence and pride of health, success and youth; the officer who had walked down the North End Road on a July morning on his way to the Somme battlefields, I could not help feeling that Hugh’s real life had ended on those battlefields, every bit as much as those who lie there still. He returned with a broken health that had in its turn broken everything in him except a certain defiant courage. All that followed that long morning had been anti-climax. The curtain should have fallen then. Of the group of relatives and friends collected in the Hampstead cemetery there was not one whose memories did not return to the Hugh that they had known before and through the war.

  In a circle they stood round the grave, while the first grains of earth were scattered on the coffin, while the solemn, immemorial sentences were spoken; their thoughts in part upon a chapter that was closed, in part upon the chapters that were waiting to be written; thinking of themselves and their own lives as much as of Hugh and his life: or rather reconstructing their own lives in the light of Hugh’s, recognizing how Hugh’s life had explained their own lives to them.

  On Stella’s face there was a look of ironic speculation. Black suited her. It had the effect of a uniform. She looked very handsome, standing erect and straight, the grey hair showing under the rim of the small cloche hat. To her, too, had come the thought that it was by a war grave that they were standing; and to that thought had come the questioning corollary “To what end?”

  To what purpose had Hugh and Hugh’s generation saved the country? So that their brothers should live, thoughtlessly, selfishly, irresponsibly? It was a question that she had often asked herself in relation to her own fight, the women’s equivalent for the war. As the men of Hugh’s generation had fought their man’s war for liberty, against barbarism, so in their different if lesser way had the women of her generation fought for woman’s liberty, against the legal survivals of a barbaric age. There were times when she asked herself to what purpose they had waged that fight. So that women like Miss Draft, who strictly speaking were not women at all, could find an ampler scope for their sex antagonism? So that futile, addle-brained young women could claim a right to live irresponsible lives, tumbling from one love affair to another, one shoddy expedient to another; boasting of a freedom that they had not earned and for which they could find no sensible employment? She had surrendered to that fight her chance of happiness. Lucy had risked her life for it. There were times when she wondered whether women were any the better off for it, in the same way that she wondered whether the world were any the better off for the sacrifice it had asked and been so freely, so prodigally given: the gift of a generation.

  At her side her brother stood; an impressive, distinguished figure, leaning on his gold-mounted cane, the slope of his shoulders appropriate to the occasion. Stella took a steady, sidelong look at
him. What thoughts were passing below that calm still mask? She knew what his friends were saying: “How terrible for his poor father. The eldest son, the heir, the house he’d built for him, the business he’d built up for him; a life’s work gone. It’s worse for his father than for anyone.” But it wasn’t worse for him; his sister knew that all right. He wasn’t vulnerable in that way. He had lived through his mind, not through his heart. He had been kind, generous, even-tempered, wise. But the most personal tragedy became impersonal to him. He had only cared for two people in his life; Lucy and his father; and for them half-heartedly. He had never known how to attract real affection to himself; he’d never known how to give. His wife had been a stranger, he had wanted her as a man wanted a woman; but there had been no harmony, no mutual absorption of two separate entities. He hadn’t the capacity of living personally; which I had, she thought, I could have lived personally. It was against my instinct to live as I have lived. That’s the difference between us. He was offered personal happiness, and did not recognize it. It’s me they’ll think of as a cold, hard woman, without affections, a livelier Miss Draft. But I’m not. It was all there, the capacity to give. Only.… She shrugged her shoulders. That was all long ago. She’d made something of her life. She’d make more of it before she was done.

  At her side with impassive countenance Balliol listened to the familiar words; his thoughts unravelling the thread of ironic circumstance by which Hugh’s death was linked with events in which Hugh had played no part. For he connected Hugh’s death with the quarrels at the board meeting. The evidence at the inquest had been obscure. It had been in the interest of three people to conceal the facts. The two or three onlookers who had given evidence were unreliable as witnesses. But on this point Balliol was in his own mind convinced, that Hugh was too good a driver to have been involved in a smash of that kind had he not been pre-occupied with other worries. Had there been no quarrel at the meeting, Hugh would not be lying in that coffin now. And there would have been no quarrel if.… But the source of that river was a distant one. There would have been no quarrel if Smollett had never come into the firm. And Smollett would never have come into the firm, unless at a board meeting long ago he had been prepared to concede a point to Prentice in return for a concession to himself. Unless he had wanted Roy Rickman out of the country, he would have opposed Smollett’s appointment. How much dated back to Rickman. Hugh’s death; the purchase of Ilex; Helen’s birth. Jane had met Rickman on the evening of that April day when he and she had passed by a mound and a pile of scaffolding. She would never have thought of making a home in Hampstead unless she had met Rickman five hours later; unless discontent with her married lot, the outcome of that meeting, had focused itself upon a need for change. She had not dared to think, “I have lived with the same man for fifteen years. I am tired of him.” She had thought instead, “I’ve lived in the same house for fifteen years. I’m tired of it.” How much dated back to that day? If they had never taken that walk, if his golf partner had not scratched his game, if she had never met Roy Rickman, if one went back further still, if they had never set themselves the task of finding a husband for his sister.… Who could estimate the repercussions of any act? You tossed a pebble into a pond, the ripple drowned a butterfly sunning itself fifty feet away. Who could tell what cycle of events might not even at this moment be beginning?