There was silence again.
“Are you proposing to halve your own salary, might I ask?” Mr. Lyman enquired.
He was leaning forward in his seat as he said it, his eyes, behind their thick glasses, thrusting forward at his chairman.
The smile returned for a moment to John Marco’s face.
He paused and defiantly poured himself out a drink under their very noses.
“I am,” he said.
“And in the eyes of the shareholders,” he went on, “it would be better for your future if you were to make your sacrifice ungrudgingly as Mr. Hackbridge and Mr. Skewin are doing. I had hoped you would second my proposal. Otherwise we may find ourselves without you.” He paused again and sat back in his chair. “That is all, gentlemen,” he said.
He did not add that all the previous night while these others who were now around him had been sleeping, he had been awake—very much awake in fact. He had been calculating carefully and exactly how many times his halved salary would come back to him as commission out of the profits which these murderous economies would bring.
But dismissing people—simply writing them off the firm’s books as not wanted—is not so easy as it appears on paper. There are always some difficult ones who will not accept the pink slip in the weekly pay envelope, awkward natures, apparently bent on making trouble. The worst of these, some twenty or so, demanded interviews with John Marco; and he refused them. It was Mr. Hackbridge who had to see them all. And during the week of the cutting-down, he returned every night to his home in Hammersmith, with his soul loaded down with tears and petitions and confidences and recriminations and ugly scenes. He was not a young man any longer: he was fifty-nine. And the strain of it all had told on him. “He’s wearing me down, and when I’m no good any more, he’ll get rid of me,” he kept on saying to himself. “I don’t trust him.” And on the Wednesday night when he woke with palpitations after a particularly unpleasant encounter with a man of his own age who protested that there was nothing for him but the workhouse, he lay there with the bed-clothes pulled up to his chin, and his heart fluttering about inside him like a dying bird, and cried out so loudly that Mrs. Hackbridge woke too and sat up with her hair all tangled and her cotton nightgown sliding untidily off one shoulder.
“He didn’t ought to expect it of me. He’s not a man, he’s a wolf. Cutting me down to three-ten a week again: it’s a bloody crime.”
This cry in the night by a man who for the moment thought himself to be dying was the first that Mrs. Hack-bridge had heard of the alarming turn of things . . .
But next morning Mr. Hackbridge was back on duty again and they were all in John Marco’s room once more. It was John Marco who was talking. And there was a kind of unnatural jocularity about him, a false heartiness that he seemed to be forcing out of himself. He was sitting in his chair with his cigar set jauntily in his mouth and his hands clasped together across his waistcoat.
“Well,” he said, “can we now start doing some business again? Have we cleared out all the waste?”
Mr. Hackbridge pulled nervously at his tie.
“There are one or two special cases I’d like you to consider, sir,” he said.
But John Marco waved him aside.
“I don’t want to hear them,” he said.
“There’s real hardship,” Mr. Hackbridge went on.
His own recent reduction had made him suddenly very sensitive to the sufferings of others; the fact that his heart was going back on him and that in nine months’ time he would be sixty kept rising up in his mind.
But John Marco apparently suffered no such misgivings.
“Of course there’s hardship,” he said. “There’s bound to be hardship. You can’t dismiss people without it.”
He reached out his hand towards Mr. Hackbridge.
“Give me the salaries list,” he said. “I want to look over it.”
The three men were watching him closely as he took it. It was one of those moments when he seemed somehow to be removed and different from the rest of them; removed and different even from Mr. Lyman, who, too, seemed to suffer no misgivings about the dismissals. As John Marco sat there motionless, the smoke of his cigar rising above him in blue spirals, staring down at the ruled sheets in front of him where every other name was struck through in red he seemed not like a fellow human being at all but like some robust heathen idol gloating over the day’s sacrifices.
Then he looked up, and there was a smooth, ingratiating smile upon his face.
“This is more like it,” he said. “This must be right: it comes to exactly what I wanted it.”
The smile, however, had vanished as instantly as it had come. There was a name that had caught his eye, caught it, and held it there.
“There’s one mistake,” he said. “I don’t want you to cut Mrs. Petter’s salary. Leave it just as it was.”
Mr. Lyman leaned forward.
“Don’t you think it may cause disaffection if one person is specially singled out?” he asked.
“They won’t know about it,” John Marco replied. “Mrs. Petter won’t talk. She’s not a fool. Besides, I wish it.”
There was a finality about his voice that dissuaded the others from questioning him further. And John Marco was already engrossed in those sheets of names and salaries again; he was scanning the columns anxiously for one other name which he could not remember. And as he ran his finger down them, he saw not names and figures any longer but a bedroom with dawn breaking into it and the figure of a girl lying sleeping with her hair spread around her head like a soft dark fan. “I’ll keep my word to her,” he was saying inside his mind. “Nothing shall prevent that.”
And when his eye alighted on the name that he had been searching for his face lit up again.
“There’s one other that I don’t wish you to reduce,” he said. “You may keep this salary as it is.”
He marked the name with a cross and handed the paper back to Mr. Hackbridge. Then he surveyed his brother directors with a kind of half smile upon his face.
“Has anyone got any remarks to make?” he asked.
He was looking full at Mr. Lyman as he spoke.
But Mr. Lyman was silent. It was Mr. Skewin who answered.
“There’s just one thing I wondered,” Mr. Skewin began in his pleading, flattened voice that echoed defeat in every syllable. “It’s my nephew. I wonder if you could make an exception there.”
“Why should I?” John Marco asked.
“He’s a very reliable young man,” Mr. Skewin assured him. “Very reliable indeed.”
Mr. Skewin had removed the list from Mr. Hackbridge’s hand and set his finger against the name of his nephew.
“That’s him,” he said proudly.
John Marco took the paper impatiently. Then he re-creased it and handed it back again.
“He may be very reliable, Mr. Skewin,” he said. “But he’s also very expensive. I’m afraid that I cannot allow the company to spend over sixty pounds a year on a man simply because he’s a nephew of one of the directors.”
He sat back and lit his cigar again. The meeting of the directors was over.
Chapter XLI
Because of the way in which he had cut his own salary, dividing it clean through the middle in a gesture which was to be admired by the shareholders, and because of the way in which Louise was finding it difficult to keep inside the allowance that they had agreed on, John Marco discovered himself to be acutely short of money as this awkward, unfriendly year proceeded.
It was not the kind of sudden poverty, in which maids are given notice, unnecessary rooms are closed up and frantic economies are effected downstairs in the kitchen. On the contrary, it was the much more dangerous kind in which everything goes on exactly as before and champagne is still drunk at dinner-parties and there are lilies in the drawing-room as before, and each month brings in its own little cascade of old, unreceipted bills.
By June, John Marco recognised that he would have to do
something about it. He had thought at first that the bank, when he put it to them, would be ready to accommodate him a little further. But the manager had been hesitant and difficult. He made it clear that for his part John Marco was welcome to the entire reserves of the company; but he drew a picture of the inspectors of the bank as a race of men dedicated to hounding down branch managers who showed any tendency to be open-handed. In short he refused; and John Marco with nearly three thousand pounds worth of debts on his shoulders had simply to smile back at him and say something about supposing that he would have to sell some securities or lodge a few bonds. Then, setting his top hat a little sideways upon his head and toying with the flower in his buttonhole, he had walked grandly out past the cash-counters to his black and yellow carriage that was waiting outside. But there were, of course, no bonds or securities. They had all gone on that fine house of his; and now that was mortgaged, too. It was so thoroughly mortgaged in fact that there was not another penny to be squeezed out of it.
John Marco now spent whole evenings pacing up and down his study not thinking of the business but of himself; half London seemed to be his creditor and the money would have to come from somewhere. “I’ve got to play for time,” he kept repeating to himself. “I’ve got to play for time.” And then with a sudden lightening of the load that was on him he remembered the costly furniture which Louise had chosen, the suites and pieces which the dealers had purred over and had seemed reluctant to part with; and he decided that he would raise money on these too. He would make them, as it were, lend him temporarily some of the gold that he had invested in them.
This mortgage, however, was more difficult to arrange than the one on the house had been. He did not go to his solicitors this time, but paid visits himself to shady little firms of auctioneers in back streets. The details were complicated by the fact that Louise was to know nothing of it, just as she knew nothing about the mortgage on the house. This meant that the inventory had to be taken when she was away from home. And one fine Saturday, as she sat beside John Marco in the carriage and was driven down to Richmond, the little man whom John Marco had sent for was going from room to room, sizing up the furniture, casting his eyes over the silver, fingering the fabric of the curtains. It was all over by the time Louise returned—the maids did not mention the visit; John Marco had forbidden it—and a week later the papers were signed and John Marco was richer by eight hundred pounds.
It was not a great deal of money; but, on the other hand, John Marco told himself it had not got a great time to last. The golden year that was before the company had only another six months to run and then the mortgages and the debts would vanish like dew in the sunlight. As soon as the miraculous economy inside the store had been vouchsafed to the shareholders and there was a dividend again, he would be a rich man once more and able to sit again at a fireside that was really his. In the meantime, it gave him a kind of subtle pleasure, a feeling of victory over Mr. Lyman and the others, to let them see him still enjoying the fullness of life while they themselves were eking out and paring.
But perhaps because he was working too hard, because he was cheating himself out of sleep and drinking heavily because his body needed it, those stray moments of panic kept returning to him. He would be sitting late in his study after Louise had gone to bed and would remember suddenly that the house around him and even the chair that he was sitting on were no longer his: that he had thrown his dice into the future and must wait to see how they would fall.
At those moments he would reach out more urgently than ever for the decanter that was always beside him, and take a deep drink and sit back and tell himself that everything would be all right, and that only time was needed.
But the sense of strain was with him all the time, the consciousness of having to wait for those six months to consume themselves. He became too restless to remain indoors, and sometimes in the evenings he would make vague, transparent excuses to Louise and wander off through the streets by himself, trying to solve the riddles that his mind was full of. Louise did not attempt to stop him. There were generally enough people in the house to amuse her, and the rooms would be full of laughter and the sound of talk while the host who might have been there in the midst of it all was walking in the night by himself, sometimes pausing at a corner because one way meant no more than another in his present mood; sometimes repeating out loud little sentences that came into his head and would not be banished; always telling himself that it is the courageous gambler who wins the largest stakes.
It was on one of these melancholy perambulations that he found himself in Chapel Walk again. The small, squat houses stretched in front of him in shabby double-row and, at the end, the Tabernacle loomed vast and black like a Roman ruin. The street oppressed him, it was too full of memories, and he began to walk faster. As he passed the house where he had been brought up he looked away from it: it seemed somehow by the alchemy of time to have been transmuted into something that was too happy even to be gazed upon, this inferior little villa with the stairs leading straight off the living room. He set his head lower and hurried on. But as he drew near to the Tabernacle itself his curiosity overcame him. It was nearly ten years now since he had been inside it, and a sudden longing to see those sweeping ranks of pews again, to hurt himself deliberately by looking once more on something that was part, so big a part, of his boyhood, took possession of him. Glancing over his shoulder to see if he were observed he began to mount the familiar flight of steps beneath the teeming notice boards. “GOD REJOICETH OVER THE LOST LAMB,” one of the placards proclaimed above him.
It was as he pushed open the green baize door inside that he heard the organ and realised that there was some kind of service going on. He became cautious and slid into one of the back benches behind a pillar. But the congregation was on its knees praying and his entrance seemed to have excited no comment from anyone; he was one more unnoticed soul among hundreds.
He looked around him and noticed that in places the plaster was peeling from the walls and that the organ needed regilding. The only other people beside him in the pew were an elderly man and a thin, depressed-looking woman. He did not know them; and he remembered that Mary had said that the faces were different now and that the whole place seemed altered.
But there was one thing that remained: constant and unchangeable: the voice of Mr. Tuke. He could hear it raised above everything, leading the devout like a trumpet. “O God of mercy and infinite pity,” it was saying, “spare thou the wicked who repent. Grant that through Thy Son the evil may be washed clean again. Give them strength in their hearts to confess their sins. Let them declare their evils and be saved.”
Then the praying ceased and the congregation got back onto their wooden seats again. John Marco could see Mr. Tuke by now. He had marched onto the front of the platform, ready to lead them in a hymn. His right arm was already beginning to beat time with the organ.
Sweep on avenging sword
Whose chastisement is death.
Subdue with steely breath
The traitors to the Lord.
The whole congregation all began singing, but John Marco did not listen. There had been a time when he had joined in these warlike hymns himself, but those days had gone; the words of terror had no meaning for him now.
He did not listen again until Mr. Tuke mounted the pulpit to deliver his short, evening address. It was not a sermon (the hour was too late for that) and Mr. Tuke kept all his talents hidden. He appealed gently, hopelessly, it seemed, for more forgiveness and an unhardening of hearts. It was simple, like the tired, forlorn advice of an old man. And John Marco realised suddenly that Mr. Tuke was an old man, that he was no longer young himself, and that the Tabernacle was older than either of them. And then somehow Mr. Tuke’s words became lost to him and he remembered only a young man, someone crushed but not yet utterly broken, who had thrown a kiss from the gallery down to a bride who had been passing underneath.
Mr. Tuke descended the steps of the pulpit again and sto
od ready to conduct the last hymn that closed everything. The organ threw out a quavering reminiscent chord and John Marco found the words astonishingly flowing back into his mind. They were naïve, foolish lines, but they came charged with childhood and the memory of things. They weren’t ordinary words at all, they were scenes from the past, his past, that had escaped somehow into the present and were being sung by other people.
The prayers that I learnt at my fond mother’s knee,
Their echoes still linger, they still comfort me.
The things that she taught me, the words that she said,
Are a cloak in the tempest, a tent o’er my head.
He looked at Mr. Tuke’s face as he stood there in front of them all, singing. The expression of the priest militant had now vanished; his eyes were closed and he had folded his hands on his stomach. His whole face seemed to have slipped into a gentle, unconcerned repose not far removed from sleep.
Another verse of the hymn was just beginning:
As a child I was sinless and happy and free
Till life’s snares and perils encompassèd me.
But John Marco had slipped out of the pew and was making quietly for the door. In a moment, while the last verse was proceeding, Mr. Tuke would be walking down from the aisle, still singing, ready to shake hands with his flock as they filed out through the porch. That was something that John Marco could not wait for; he was gone before Mr. Tuke had even moved.
And as he went on down the street, reluctant still to go back to the house where Louise’s friends would be seated about in the drawing-room and everything would be so gay and bright and noisy he found himself almost envying Mr. Tuke his crumbling Tabernacle and the silly, sleepy hymns that people still sang there.
But there were other occasions, dark sinister ones that did not bear looking back on, when these evening wanderings did not always end in so seemly, so innocent a fashion. When he had drunk too much already before he left the house, he would often drink more as soon as he was outside, pushing open one gilt-and-frosted saloon door after another. And a moment would come on these evenings when suddenly the fire in the liquor would be released inside him and he would laugh at all his stupid fears and feel the earth beneath his feet again and grow reckless. At such times he became his own victim, drifting helplessly into company that sober men would have shunned, mixing easily and on common terms with the night-time population that frequent the streets.
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