Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Walter looked at him with a tender sympathy that extended to include the other two boys. “I used to think so, too,” he said. “But we are each of us only a small part of God’s great plan. Your mother’s part is to offer the gentle hand of a fortunate sister to one in an opposite condition. She is to be as a lighthouse in a storm-tossed sea. Our part is more humdrum—I speak only in this particular matter of sexual regulation. We are here to keep the wheels of the world in motion. Our world. The world as we find it here and now. Not some imagined New Jerusalem—for which, of course, we all must nonetheless strive.

  “And our world, it is a sad fact, contains a million surplus women. Simple as that. What are they to do? The natural state of a woman is to tend a man’s needs and to keep before him and the world an example of the highest and purest—as your mother does. Ah…and yours, too,” he said to Boy and Caspar after a moment’s thought. “But if there are a million more women than men—what then? They cannot all take vows or till the fields or be governesses or sew and dust and launder—which are the only natural and respectable occupations for unmarried females. Frankly, I think that working in a factory or coal mine or shop is every bit as unsexing to a female as walking the streets.”

  The boys nodded as if they had always been of the same opinion.

  “So,” Walter said. “We are left with one of two conclusions. Either God put a million surplus women on these islands by accident, a slip of the Directing Angel’s pen, or He meant it as part of some greater purpose. And when you look at the strength of the lower nature He has endowed us men with, when you consider the at-times-ungovernable force of our passions, I think that purpose is not far to seek.”

  Nick and Caspar, converts before Walter had spoken his first word to them, nodded sagely; but Boy looked dubious still.

  Walter turned and spoke earnestly to him alone. “It’s a way of keeping the pure women pure while we sully only the already sullied, don’t you see! Man-above-the-waist may look for his inspiration to one kind of woman. But the struggle is hard and it can take a great toll of a strong nature. So man-below-the-waist may seek his relief from another kind of woman. Just consider the alternative, Young John. Suppose we had to look for whore, wife, and mother in the same vessel! Would it not be grotesque! How could you and your wife go into Society, greet your guests, engage in amiable conversation, correct your servants, if every time you looked at her or felt her touch it conjured up the memory of such a romp as we have all today enjoyed?”

  Caspar chuckled maliciously. “He didn’t!” He leaned his head toward Boy.

  But Walter looked sympathetic. “He will one day,” he said. “He’s probably got more true feeling than both you two young reprobates put together.” He turned back to Boy. “No, but you see what I’m driving at? Men encompass and express the highest and the lowest in human nature. Women must be either one or the other. That is the way things are.”

  Boy nodded unhappily. He could see exactly what Uncle Walter meant. He could feel the conviction and force of the argument. He only wished he could think how Brockman would reply. He knew there had to be an alternative different from the one Uncle Walter had just posed, but his own mind was blank of it.

  “Mind you,” Walter said, issuing one final warning to all of them, “don’t let me mislead you into thinking that the pure woman is above bodily passion. It is not so. Such a passion is there, buried deep in their natures, often unsuspected by the girl herself until it is tragically revealed in circumstances that drive her instantly from the company of the pure to the herd of the contaminated. And it is hidden for a good purpose—so that she may cultivate her finer nature quite unhindered by those urges that plague you and me from time to time. But it is merely hidden, not absent. It is there for a husband to awaken at the proper moments in married life—to provide that little honey to sweeten the bitter pill of childbearing. If a man—or a youth—should accidentally awaken it at any other time, why then he faces the supreme test of his manliness, to protect the gentle bud and see it does not flower too soon. For believe me, once it is awakened in a woman, this passion—perhaps from its long dormancy—can grow quite ungovernable, even in the purest. The man who stoops to take advantage of that fact is surely the vilest of creatures. I hope…I know that none of you would ever dream of such a thing? That a decent girl would be as safe with you as if she were behind the stoutest convent walls? And though she implored you to take away the burden of her innocence, and though you shivered with yearning to do it, you would yet remember why men are made strong and women weak?”

  They all nodded fervent agreement, feeling very high and noble.

  “We may safely pour fresh pitch on that which is already glutted with tar. But we shall not place one microscopic speck on that which is unsullied white.” Walter leaned back in his chair. “Is not the world marvellously ordered!” he said. “I give thanks for it to our Creator daily! By the way, Nicholas—come to me when you feel like a tumble. If you spend yourself out of your own money, it could lead to inquiries, eh? Once or twice a month should do you, I would think.”

  ***

  “I say!” Caspar enthused when he and Boy were back home and alone together. “What a stupendous pater Uncle Walter is. D’you think we could ask the guvnor for a fem allowance?” He giggled at the thought.

  “Our father is not like that,” Boy said crossly. “Running off to those filthy women all the time.”

  “Just because you funked it!”

  “I did not funk it.”

  “All men are like that. Look at the streets! D’you think there’s just one tiny band of rich sex fiends goes around employing all those tens of thousands of surplus women?”

  “Chief isn’t like that. Nor is our father.”

  Caspar sneered at the mention of Brockman. “Chief is a professional celibate. I’ll bet when he wants more offspring he posts his seed to his wife, all wrapped up in a discarded sermon. And you don’t know anything about that side of the guvnor.”

  “Nor do you.”

  “Thank you—that’s my point. If we hadn’t bumped into Uncle Walter today, we’d never have suspected him, either.”

  “And I didn’t funk it. I was just too disgusted. I still am disgusted. I can’t think why anything so disgusting is allowed in the world. I’ll bet pure girls don’t look like that down there!” He ran off before his anger could humiliate him to tears.

  Caspar watched him go, suddenly feeling a great pity for this poor, tormented brother of his.

  Chapter 18

  They made the journey to Quaker Farm in Connemara for at least part of every summer. This summer of 1859 was to be the longest holiday they had ever spent there and they were all looking forward to it. Connemara had all the wild freedom of the dales without the constriction of school routine. (True, Mr. Morier-Watson was coming with them this time, and, on the principle of always eating a little plain brown bread with your jelly and butter, he was to give them an hour’s schooling each day—but that was merely to provide him with an occupation and to save him from the bouts of paralytic drinking that had engulfed him on previous holidays.)

  Either from London or York, the journey to Ireland was one to fill the Stevenson youngsters with pride. From London the rails led to Holyhead over the mighty Britannia Bridge, which had been a Stevenson contract back in 1850. From York they went over and through the Pennine mountains to Liverpool by another piece of Stevenson engineering: Summit Tunnel on the Manchester & Leeds. Less impressive than the bridge, it was nevertheless of much greater importance to the family, for it was the contract that had enabled John and Nora to lift themselves from poverty to riches.

  It had meaning for the Thornton children, too. Their father had been the company’s chief engineer on the tunnel, his first independent contract; its successful completion—without disaster, on time, and inside the contracted price—had been the first of his surprisingly few steps to the very
top of the profession.

  Whenever Stevensons or Thorntons were aboard, the engineer was under orders to drive very slowly over the section between Todmorden and Littleborough, which had been John’s and Walter’s obsession for more than a year of their lives.

  This time there were seventeen of them. Apart from Nora, Arabella and Walter, who were to spend only ten days in Connemara, the directors’ coach seemed given over to a school outing. The Stevensons ranged from Winifred, now eighteen, through John, Caspar, Clement, Abigail, Hester, and Mather, to Rosalind, now seven. On the Thornton side Nick, soon to be nineteen, led Thomas, Albert, Laetitia, Araminta, and Corinna, now ten (or, as she insisted, ten and a half ). The four servants occupied an entire second-class carriage. The baggage filled two wagons. Their expedition comprised more than half the train.

  Not one of the children had ever walked any of the ground over which the train now dawdled, but its features were as familiar to them as their own gardens.

  “There’s Pex Hill, and your house, Mama!” Corinna said.

  “Two Gables,” Nick said. “That’s where I was born.” In his eyes it gave the house something of the quality of a shrine. “Look, Winnie, I was born up there.”

  Winifred raised her eyes from her book, Carlyle’s Frederick the Great, which she had been ostentatiously reading ever since Leeds, and stared solemnly at the house for a few seconds, smiled at Nick, and returned to her book.

  Boy watched their interaction nervously. He did not suspect either of them of being soft on the other, but he feared that Nick was out to fish in those waters so directly forbidden him by his father.

  The three adults shared a private amusement. They knew that Nick had, in fact, been born in a wood about four miles farther west of Two Gables. Arabella, thinking Nick was not due for at least a month, had been tempted out on a picnic by weeks of hot, enervating sun. Walter and Nora alone knew that the birth had occurred on the very gravestone in a long-deserted cemetery where he and she had completed their brief transaction (he for lust, she for a sovereign) a year earlier. It was the grave of one Nicholas Everett, who “departed this life in the yeare of grace 1672” and whose name Walter had (rather ghoulishly, Nora always thought) given to the son Arabella had borne him there.

  “It’s not Pex Hill,” Caspar said. “It’s called Pigs Hill.”

  This, too, was a standing joke between the two families. Both names were found on the maps but the Thorntons insisted on Pex, the Stevensons on Pigs.

  “Pex Hill!” Letty cried.

  Clement stood up and walked a cramped circle, holding his nose. “Can’t you sbell it?” he said. “Bigs Hill!”

  “Clement, dear, that’s not nice!” Nora said, but her words were lost in a happy, insulting-defensive chorus of Pexes and Pigses and a forest of dismissive hand waves and finger-clamped noses.

  “Rough Stones!” Thomas shouted, pointing to John’s and Nora’s former house, right above the entrance to Summit Tunnel itself. “Your pigsty!” he taunted the Stevenson children.

  But it was the Thornton misfortune that Pex-Pigs Hill remained in view for two miles, while Rough Stones was whisked out of sight only a second or so after it came in view. There was no equality of time for Thornton revenge; the next part of the ritual demanded that they should count each dee-dah of the carriage wheels upon the rails; and the cry “One…two…three…” began only moments after Thomas’s shout. It rose to a crescendo at about the hundred mark and tailed off, breathless and exhausted, to one-thirty-one—or, as some of them claimed, one-thirty-two—for there was a butting of rails exactly at the tunnel mouth.

  The grown-ups listened to these childish diversions and pondered all those things they could never convey to their children about what these five miles of England had once meant in their lives. For Nora, whose relationship with John had grown steadily more formal these last five years, this part of the journey had become especially poignant. Here was where she had met the man she had thought would fill her life. There, as the train burst out into the sunlight from the western mouth of the tunnel, was the very place where he had prayed always to remember her as she was then, barefoot and happy…where he had hoped she would “never lose the sunshine in thy spirit”…here he had asked her to wed him.

  And now he had lost the sunshine on her. Theirs might as well be the coolest of arranged marriages, for all that it was forged in the heat of a love that had felt big enough to burst them. All those hopes, promises, intentions—nothing was left to her but their debris: a few million pounds, hundreds of interests, four big houses and several lodges throughout Europe, John’s seat in the House of Lords, her own leadership of one of London’s more interesting social circles, engineering monuments in every continent, a place in history—and, of course, eight wonderful, unruly, different, loving children.

  Debris? Was that ingratitude? she wondered. Was it asking too much to have hoped that the heart of it all, the love she and John had once shared, would beat forever? More to the point, if some little creature with supernatural powers suddenly appeared to her and offered to restore that love in exchange for all those material trappings, would she close the bargain? She was honest enough not to know the answer. The “trappings” were a formidable compensation.

  In her mind’s eye (for she could not look directly at it with Walter there in the carriage) she watched Gorsey Hill and the abandoned cemetery drift by. Her bodily eye fell on Nick, so like his father before Walter had grown his beard. And, perhaps because of his name, she seemed to see again the exact seventeenth-century curlicues that formed the legend: “Here lyes interred the mortal remains of Nicholas Everett” on the overgrown gravestone up there, in the firmly and deliberately unseen wood to her left. She saw the way the sunlight dappled it, felt again the heat of that August afternoon, heard the relentless buzz of the flies, remembered how Walter had taken off his jacket and rolled it as a cushion for her head…these were all things she had forgotten, or had not once bothered to recall, over the twenty years that had intervened. That was kind of Walter; she had even thought so at the time. She was wearing a threadbare blue dress she had stolen off a drunken girl lying in a stupor on some waste ground down in Manchester. She had the dress still somewhere.

  She remembered her nakedness from the waist down and how cool it felt when Walter had thrown the dress up, making a slight turbulence in the air about her. And at once—not then, but now—she was hammered by the most intense carnal longing. Not for Thornton! Certainly not for him—she could look straight at him and feel nothing of that sort. And not for his partial re-creation in young Nick, either. No, it was a hunger for…for what?

  And there she was—full circle. It was a hunger for John—not just the giant body of him, for that he gave her still. It was a hunger for all that he now withheld. It was a hunger for the pledge he had made her, here, twenty years before.

  Arabella’s lilac-gloved fingers rested lightly on her knee. “It was so long ago,” she said gently.

  Nora looked up in bewilderment. Arabella shed a clean, scented handkerchief from her handbag and passed it to Nora—who suddenly realized she had tears in her eyes. She took the handkerchief and smiled around the carriage, feeling stupid. But of all the children only Abigail seemed to have noticed; she was watching her mother in a kind of eager consternation, as if she both hoped and feared something dramatic was about to happen. Nora soon quenched her expectations. She dabbed her eyes and laughed for Arabella’s benefit. “Yes, isn’t it!” she said.

  She dared not look at Walter. If Walter were an actor and had a part in a play that ran a year, he would still be feeling his way into it when the final curtain rang down.

  ***

  For Caspar the ship crossing from Liverpool to Kingstown was the highlight of this journey. Perhaps because it had to withstand the eternal pitching and tossing and yawing and rolling of a voyage, the joinery to be found on ships was always of such amazing
craftsmanship. Even simple oak or mahogany panels had a special robustness, and the rails were so massive and so firmly anchored on their stanchions. The duckboards were perfect grilles of lap-jointed three-quarter oak, and there was a piece of ornamental carving in the saloon, a trophy of fruit and flowers carved in limewood, of which Grinling Gibbons himself might have been proud. Surrounded by such craftsmanship, he felt safe and at home.

  He stood in the very bows of the ship as she slipped down the Mersey; you could tell by the crispness of the bubbles at the ship’s throat when the water turned from a tidal mixture to the full salt of the Irish Sea. But this river was not just the start of a little seapath to Ireland; it was a world highway. That excited him. There was everything here, from steamers and great clippers down to tiny coastal luggers. He tried to guess their cargoes—cotton from America; and grain and beef; hardwoods from Africa and South America, tea and spices and silk from the Orient; and soon, according to rumour, frozen meat from Australia and Argentina. You could smell the world from here in mid-river.

  He had first seen the port as a giant model at the Crystal Palace Exhibition eight years ago. So now, although he had never been beyond the streets that fronted the harbour, he felt he knew it all—every warehouse, alley, and court. He could imagine all those cargoes vanishing into that labyrinth to be counted, broken from bulk, gloated over by fortunate merchants (or cursed by those who had bought into a glut), and consigned to the four corners of the kingdom. That excited him, too.

  Over the past few years he had veered back and forth between his parents’ wishes that he should go into the army and his own growing—and by now absolute—conviction that he should do that most dreadful thing, especially for an Honourable: go into trade. There had been a third force tugging at him, too: Mr. Greaves. Under Greaves’s guidance, he had discovered more than a small talent for mathematics. True, he was still weak at sums—that lunatic world where people bought and sold apples in blissful disregard of the market price, or dug pieces of land in the least competent sequence, or frittered away their lives in filling and emptying leaky bathtubs in which no one ever sat or soaped himself long enough to think of calling in the plumber. But once he had left that world behind and began to deal in pure number and function and relationship, he made enormous strides.