He found that Edie had waited up for him. She did not go to the door to meet him, but sat sternly by the fire in the little sitting room. She knew that she looked her best in firelight and a comfortable and fussy negligee, with a teakettle on the hearth for atmosphere; she also wished to mark her disapproval by not getting up to meet her husband. It was an artificial disapproval. She found it difficult to believe that men could spend four hours over a simple meal without some feminine entertainment, and, having a romantic picture of Toby Manning, credited him with an indefinite legion of young and lovely acquaintances; on the other hand, she was even surer of her husband than he was of himself.
“Now don’t make a noise, Bert,” she said as he tiptoed into the room, “or you’ll wake Tommy.”
It was her invariable remark on the rare occasions—and those Hanson & Crane’s staff dinners—when Bert had come home slightly tight. As a matter of fact he had always been owlishly silent, but that made no difference.
“I’m sober all right, Edie,” he answered. “We’ve just been talking.”
“S’ssh! What’s he going to do? Who does all the money belong to?”
Albert kissed her. She clung to him swiftly and surprisingly, then pushed him away as curiosity mastered affection.
“Go on with you! And all smelling of drink too!”
He grinned at her and sat down. He loved his wife when she was excited. It was a pity that she hadn’t many chances to be excited.
“Don’t sit there smiling at me, Albert Whitehead!” she whispered fiercely. “Did he offer you a job?”
“Well, Edie, he did and he didn’t as you might say.”
“There you go! You should have said right out that you want another job. Now what will he think? He did and he didn’t! Why didn’t you make him did?”
“I mean, it wasn’t quite a job,” he replied. “But I’m accepting it all right.”
“Without asking me?”
“Well, you just said—”
“Never mind what I said! You tell me about it!” she hissed with the ferociousness of a kitten.
“I don’t know but what I oughtn’t to have said no,” Albert meditated, feeling guilty before his household gods and the whispers that evoked the unseen presence of Tommy. “But all I know is that they won’t let us down.”
“Who’s they?” asked Edie in a frantic whisper considerably louder than her speaking voice.
“Manning and Bendrihem and lots of others. Look here, Edie, what would you say if I was going into the Church?”
“I’d say you were potty,” answered his wife firmly. “You’ve never been to Church since I knew you, Bert, except for our wedding and on Christmas Day. Not but what you wouldn’t make a better parson than most,” she added cautiously.
She had a vision of Albert as the vicar of a Somerset village and herself as the vicar’s wife. It was preposterous, but it pleased her.
“It’s a sort of Church,” he said. “You know the monk who preaches on Sunday afternoons at Marble Arch?”
“Him with bare feet and the bald head?”
“Yes. Well, I’m going to be a monk like that. Only not dressed special.”
“But you can’t do that!” exclaimed Edie, in her horror quite forgetting to whisper. “Monks aren’t married. Didn’t you know?”
“Our kind can be married or not, just as they like. It’s not religious. It’s just a band of men and women who will have everything in common.”
“Will they give speeches at Marble Arch too?”
“Well, they might. Or they might stand for Parliament, if they want to. You see, we won’t be poor, Edie. And when we’ve got a roof over our heads and all we want and a schoolmaster for the kids, there’ll still be plenty left over. But it’s not only for English. There will be all sorts of foreigners. Gosh, Edie, I don’t know where a thing like that mightn’t finish up!”
“But what do they want?”
“To be left in peace. And to see that other people are left in peace. To tell people that if they don’t want to make money, they’re right. And to tell people that have made a lot of money that they can buy what they bloody well please with it, but they can’t buy power because they’re not fit to have it. If they were, they wouldn’t have given a damn about making money in the first place. Look at all them dictators, Edie! Why are those men trusted? Because they aren’t capitalists and never have been, and everybody knows that they aren’t out to feather their own nests. Well, we’ll give ’em leaders just as simple as the dictators, but without their cock-eyed ideas. That’s what we’re after. And in all nations, Edie. We aren’t parsons, nor lords, nor communists. But we’ve got a bit of all three. Now do you understand?”
“I can’t say I do, Bert. It seems to me that you want to make all the world like a good country squire. And it’s not possible. There’s too much education about.”
“You’ve hit the nail on the head there, old girl! But it’s not the education that’s to blame. It’s what people want it for—just so that they can do the other fellow down.”
“Tommy will get his chance, you think?”
“Tommy’ll get his chance all right. And so will we, Edie!”
“Well, you’d best come to bed, Bert, and think it over in the morning,” said his wife firmly, getting up.
She had done her best to listen and advise. Honour was satisfied, and she could let herself go. Apart from all the queer ideas, the fact remained that a friend, as friends should, as she would herself, had let her deserving husband into a good thing, and opened heavenly prospects of far more adventure than ever might be found on the streets of Croydon. She gave him a comradely hug, putting her slippered feet on his and dancing on them as she did when she was very excited.
“Bert, I do believe our ship has come home!” she whispered.
Albert saw that the back door was locked, put out the lights and followed his wife upstairs. His undressing was usually a slow process, for he compelled himself to use his right hand as freely as his left; but that night he did not worry with such minor discipline. He was at peace.
He awoke joyful, as if his mood of the previous night had been carried forward rather than interrupted by sleep. He lay dozing, trying to recall other such mornings in his life. There had been many in childhood, when he would lie in bed listening to the song of the birds, each note distinct in the silence of the dawn as separate drops of water falling into the basin of a fountain, and waiting for the swift trot of the milkman’s pony and the plop of his own and the next-door letter-boxes as the morning post was dropped through the slits; all the sounds that brought to his warm bed the romance of a world in which he had passed some seven thrilling years. Since childhood there had been only one such morning. It was not the morning of his marriage; that, though exciting, had been marred by the normal male reaction of terror at so irrevocable a step. It was not the dawn when the doctor had left the house, pronouncing Edie and her son out of all ordinary danger; that, though joyful, had been dulled by his own weariness. It was—and he admitted it to himself with amazement—the morning when he had awoken to join up. There had been the same sense of fulfilment.
Albert cooked his eggs, kissed his wife and son, and caught the 8.35 to town. His office greeted him with the usual chorus of good-mornings. Even now that he was a full-fledged export manager, used to his clerks and responsible for them, he received their morning and evening salutations with delighted surprise at the note of liking they put into them.
The day’s correspondence opened and distributed, he went down to Seafair with a letter from the São Paulo agent complaining that the eyelids of his last consignment of dolls had been affected by the tropical humidity and refused to open and shut. Seafair was in a naughty mood. His blunt head struck back and forth over the papers on his desk. If, he said, Mr Manning declared the agent to be honest and the works chemist could explain intelligen
tly what had happened, then Mr Whitehead could give the damned liar a rebate. What with rebates and rain and exchange control and freight rates at 87/6 a ton, it was impossible to do business with Brazil anyway.
Irresistibly he reminded Whitehead of his small son when Tommy had stayed up too late and played too enthusiastically. Albert knew quite well what was wrong with his managing director. It was not the São Paulo agent; it was the profit of the Bond Street shop, which had been just 2 per cent net for the last half year. This was a slight on Hanson & Crane’s loveliest and most expensive toys. Old Seafair felt as if he himself had made them, and had the craftsman’s bitter disappointment at discovering that the public refused to pay a fair price for his output. The managing director was in his very worst temper on the occasions when he had to sacrifice quality to price. Step by step, each one bitterly resented and long refused, he was being compelled to do it.
He slammed the accounts under his export manager’s nose.
“What do you think of that, Mr Whitehead?”
Albert glanced down the sheet.
“I should say the rent was too high, sir,” he answered.
“Nonsense! Put it down to advertisement—and dignified advertisement at that! Which is best? To write a lot of damned lies in a cheap magazine, or have half the tarts in the West End meeting their boys at Hanson & Crane’s corner? You can’t teach me anything about advertisement, Mr Whitehead—I knew it all before you young cubs were born!”
Albert knew better than to tell his director that the outstanding quality of Hanson & Crane’s manufactures was also an advertisement; nevertheless he was at once treated as if he had said so. Mr Seafair had already blown up his secretary for the same thought, though she in fact had not thought it at all. As he frequently remarked, she was not paid to think.
“We have to move with the times, Mr Whitehead. It’s no good your telling me that quality counts. We’ll always give better quality than any other firm in the trade. But we are not in business for our health. You understand that!”
“Yes, sir, the export—”
“The export is a luxury, Mr Whitehead. If Hanson & Crane had to live on the profits of the export, you’d soon find yourself out of a job. Rebates! Bah! And that reminds me—what about Mr Manning? And don’t you tell me any nonsense! I know you two are as thick as thieves. Is he serious?”
“I’m afraid he is.”
“You’re sure of that, eh?”
“Yes, sir. He’d have told you yesterday if you hadn’t been busy.”
“I didn’t think we should enjoy his coöperation very long,” grunted Seafair. “Too damned superior for the toy business. That’s the trouble!”
“You let him understand that the job was not a permanent one,” Whitehead reminded him.
“Well, what if I did? What if I did? He has no right to walk out on us like that. Do you know if he has anything else in mind?”
“Yes, sir,” Albert replied with calm mischief. “He is going into a monastery.”
“A what?”
“A monastery.”
“Don’t you play the fool with me, Mr Whitehead!”
“I’m not, sir.”
“But what the devil? Manning in a monastery! It hardly suits what the agents say of him. They complain they don’t get any sleep when he’s in their town. He’s fond of his comforts, our Mr Manning. And the bottle too, I understand. And of the girls, I expect, Mr Whitehead, eh?”
Seafair spoke with relish. He had enjoyed himself on his own foreign trips, and he chuckled inwardly when an occasional good-humoured account of Manning’s prowess was brought to him by a visiting agent. He had grown quite fond of his entertaining overseas representative, and it was a shock to him that he had apparently got a dose of religion.
“I don’t know, sir,” Albert answered. “I think he is. But I understand that the monastery will have all reasonable comforts, and women will be allowed.”
Seafair sat severely up in his chair, and glared at his export manager.
“Does the man think he’s still abroad? What beastly immorality!”
“Don’t do anything rash,” Edie had said when he kissed her good-bye. Well, but it wasn’t rash. It might as well be done now as later. Albert took the plunge. Disagreeable, lovable old blighter, he had better know.
“It’s not immoral, sir. I am taking my wife to it.”
“Taking your wife to it?”
“Yes. I shall be leaving Hanson & Crane at the end of next month. We are going to live in the monastery.”
“But this is absurd, Mr Whitehead! I refuse to let you go!”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to, sir.”
“Now look here!” said Seafair sternly. “Manning can do what he likes. He’s a good fellow and a good businessman. But he has lived too much abroad. He’s not respectable. I’m surprised at your taking his nonsense seriously, and I’m surprised at your wife allowing it. I’ve only met Mrs Whitehead once or twice, but she struck me as a very sensible woman. You’re a husband and a father, Mr Whitehead, and you have no right to throw up a promising future for folly of this kind. In another twenty years, my boy, you might be on the board of this company.”
Seafair spoke with genuine kindness. Hanson & Crane Ltd. was his life, and he saw no irony in offering as the crown of a hard-working career a seat upon its board. Nor did Albert, having spent sixteen years in the service of the firm, see anything odd in working for them another twenty. He was appreciative but not to be moved.
“I shall be very sorry to leave you all,” he said truthfully.
“You will be! You will be, Mr Whitehead! You’re thirty-six, I believe, and you can’t afford to indulge whims. Just imagine what will happen when Manning’s monkey-house collapses and you have to look for a job. It would count against you. God knows I’m not narrow-minded, but neither I nor any other director in the City of London would employ a man who had been living in some sort of colony of cranks.”
“We aren’t cranks, sir.”
“You are cranks. If a man wants religion—and I don’t say it’s not a good thing, Mr Whitehead—there’s the Church of England or half a dozen excellent chapels. Manning must be off his head.”
“We are not particularly religious.”
“We? We? Who the devil are you people anyway?”
“You don’t know any of them, sir,” answered Albert, deliberately testing him, “except Mr Bendrihem.”
“Bendrihem? Is he in it?”
Seafair paused, while his mind struggled to adopt a picture of the monastery entirely different from that at which it had first leapt.
“Bendrihem?” he went on. “Then there’s money in it! You wouldn’t catch a Jew going into a monastery. Is it a kind of business?”
“In no way, sir,” said Whitehead firmly. “Simon Bendrihem is making over all his money to the order. He will get no interest.”
“You’re playing with me, Mr Whitehead, and I won’t have that! It sounds to me as if Bendrihem, Manning and you had something up your sleeves. Just think it over—I can always raise a little capital for a good thing.”
* “Thanks brother leaving to-day with Salvinis for London steamer Sapphire: Manuel.”
XII
THE THIRD HOUR
Manuel Vargas looked out over the stern of the Sapphire as she crept up the Albert Dock into the dreary recesses of London. It was nearly nine o’clock. The black sheets of water were pitted by a black rain that hissed past the glaring lights upon the wharf. The streets, glimpsed where the dock fence was lower than the poop of the Sapphire or seen in vista when she passed a swing bridge and a solitary tram, were covered by a shining skin of soot and dampness in which sordid buildings, efficiently outlined by artificial light, were most exactly mirrored. It was a melancholy and alien civilisation which impressed on him his own poverty and that of the Salvinis. They had no
thing. Nothing. Not enough to pay a cheap hotel for more than one night. Under the sun of America poverty had been an inconvenience, but not a horror. One could adjust oneself to it. There seemed to be no possibility of adjusting oneself to this. The blackness and the rain swamped him with a sudden flush of memories of all the worst he had ever known of London—the fog, the smell of stale whisky in the public bars, the mile-long featureless canals of two-storeyed houses running between one factory and another. He had never been poor in London; therefore his imagination took him through scenes of misery far more demoralising than anything which really existed in 1935 or even in 1914.
Of all the mad impulses that had propelled him through his life, this was the maddest. It had seemed entirely reasonable when he had received a cable at Rio to tell him that £108,336 had been banked in his name. It now seemed preposterous to count on anything of the sort having happened. He tried to recall Manning’s face, to conjure up a clear image of him against the sheets of drizzle. He could not. La gran puta! He, Manuel Vargas, had entrusted himself to a man whose face he could not even remember; and worse than that, he had entrusted the Salvinis. To deposit Paolo and Impe and their children in this nightmare without a chance of escape from it—that was what he had done for the sake of a gesture.
They looked very unhappy. Paolo, standing squarely with the two boys, one on each side of him, stared at the dock that crept past. Impe shivered at the door of the saloon, clutching round her a useless black satin coat with a little cheap fur at the collar. The two youngest children slept on the settee wrapped in blankets, unconscious as young saplings in winter that they were being ruthlessly transplanted by El Camarero, filibuster, failure, and so selfish—Manuel in his depression told himself the truth—that since he would not raise a family himself he must have one by proxy.
“It is not always like this, Paolo,” he said.
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